A group of fellows had a piece of a raft that had come up and it was damaged from the second torpedo, I guess. The whole front of the raft was all blown off. If you look at that poster you can see the raft [points at detail of poster]. That is the only thing that was out there; they didn’t have a bottom to it. There was already a bunch of guys that were holding onto what was left of it. I got there and Gene didn’t want to go. He said, “No, they will pick us up tomorrow.” I said, “It may not be tomorrow.” And it wasn’t.
Anyhow, I got there and (I had swallowed a lot of oil and was sick) one of the guys got hold of me and helped me get my life jacket tied on and helped me get through my vomiting and all. Then we started, and we wound up with seventeen of us all together.
There was no bottom in the raft, it was just a ring, a balsam ring; you had to have a life jacket otherwise you would drown. Most of us were hanging on the outside and then when daylight came the sharks came. We had sharks everywhere. The first couple of days there was probably a hundred sharks around us all the time. A couple of guys got hit by sharks and got taken down. We did everything wrong. We kicked our feet and tried to get them up out of the water and we climbed on top of one another because we knew (sharks) would come underneath you and come up after you. Even where the raft was damaged, blown apart (the rope netting that was inside the raft) they would come up and would swim with their head into the raft. I kicked seven of them in my days, kicking their nose out of that raft. I never had any training on sharks, I was just told you had to try to keep away from them. If you got hit by one of them you were pretty well going to die, because it would attract a lot more sharks. I found out that if you hit them in the eye, kicked them in the eye ball, it really hurt them and they would leave you alone. You could see thirty, forty, fifty feet down into the water and you see the thrash back and forth after you hit them. They just couldn’t stand that, and they left you alone; the sharks that you kicked in the eye, they didn’t come back. The other ones would come back, but not those.
Anyway, we went through the time and the days went on. I kept trying to encourage everybody that within forty-eight hours they would be picking us up out of the water. I kept telling a lot of the guys that were wanting to give up (guys started giving up quick) I would tell them, “You can’t die, you got to stay alive, you’ve got a family at home, hang in there.” I said, “I don’t have a family, I just have a wonderful mother and a bunch of sisters and my father and I want to stay alive for them if I can. Some of you guys got families.” So we tried to help one another and as the days went on and nobody showed up we realized we were not going to be picked up out of the water. We were going to eventually die and I didn’t want to end up in the belly of some shark and neither did the other guys.
Some of the men were delirious and were hallucinating. “A lot of them had [that] bad. They were seeing things and they were hallucinating. It was easier to die than it was to stay alive; to stay alive you had to work at it, but to die all you had to do was quit, just give up. We kept trying to encourage the guys. They wanted the easy way out, they had all [the suffering] they wanted. We kept a lot of them alive.
How many hours had passed in this cataclysmic world? One of the men thought, Could this be a version of hell—suffering, pain, torture to an unreal degree. Did we all die when the boat went down and now this was hell? The world was upside down and this was the penury and pain he’d learned from the nuns as a boy at St. Margaret’s Catholic School. When he prayed on the rosary, this was the hell he envisioned—never ending, the forevermore of suffering. Could it, would it end? If he dove into the water, the sharks would kill him. If he stayed in the raft, the sun would bake his skin, and he had nothing to eat or drink so that would kill him, too. He had another thought: If this was hell, how could he die—again. Maybe the sharks wouldn’t eat him but only chew on him, he wouldn’t die but be in constant pain. Better to stay in the raft. Although the man across the raft was giving him looks, angry looks—he could spring forward at any moment and begin the unending torment, the same as the sharks. Mayhem, delirium, brutality, violence—he did not want to die at the hands of a fellow American sailor. But the sharks. Maybe the sharks were the answer. This was purgatory and the sharks would provide an end to the suffering and salvation would be next.
What if I have to endure more suffering to reach salvation, and then the Kingdom of God will be mine.
He tried to remember his catechisms … but he could not. Saint Peter, Saint Bartholomew, Jesus on the Cross. That was suffering. My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?
He thought of Jesus on the cross and in Golgotha. He said an Our Father and rolled over the side of the raft, starting to swim and then splashing maniacally. End the torment, end the pain, end of the suffering. The man was lifted by a wave and as he slid into the trough, as if summoned by his will, he saw the shark rising toward him. He undid the kapok life jacket, which had rubbed his neck raw, and began to splash harder, flailing his arms on the oily surface and kicking below spasmodically, and was ripped underwater in a swirl of bubbles on then a cloud of blood. Salvation had found him, at last.
“Do you hear that,” a yeoman tried to shout to the oil-covered sailor across the raft from him. The weak man croaked, What? “A plane, an engine, there’s somebody coming,” the first man answered. As soon as he said it, his hopes deflated, remembering the other planes that had flown overhead and in spite of their thrashing and waving, had kept on flying. Once, a man swam out into the water and was about twenty yards from the raft, riding a wave, when he disappeared like he had never been there and was only an apparition. A shark took him. Still, the yeoman girded his hopes: “I hear an engine and it’s getting louder!” Indeed, he heard the Ventura under the command of Lieutenant Wilbur C. Gwinn. The date was August 2, 1945.
As he was peering through the gunner hatch at the plane’s tail section, while trying to fix a navigation antenna on the fuselage of the plane, Wilber Gwinn had spotted an oil slick on the water’s surface. He ordered his copilot to dive toward the slick. He rushed to the cockpit, and as they got closer he could discern black dots in the water—maybe Japanese soldiers, adrift after their sub went down? “There’re people down there,” he shouted, “gotta be Japanese!” The plane descended and he could now see splashes and arms waving. Indeed, people down there, in the middle of the Gulf of Philippines, floating and splashing in an oil slick. At a glance, he also could see shadowy forms outside the cluster of men, the black dots gathered in a tight school with ominous shadows on the outskirts; he happened to register a shadow rise up into one splotch of splashes and then there was calm. He immediately understood—it was a shark attack. The goddamn sharks are feasting! he thought, and a shiver went through him. Drowning or burning alive, he could imagine that in war, but not being a sitting duck for sharks underneath, human fodder floating helpless until a stupid, carnivorous creature decided you were food and made a meal of you, gnashing and slashing and tearing away your flesh and limbs. The horror of that—truly horrific, almost unimaginable and unspeakable. This flashed through his mind and he soared overhead. Poor bastards, whoever you are.
The rescue operation began. Gwinn made a water landing, and as another plane circled overhead, radioing directions, Gwinn kept his engines roaring and started to skim the surface, picking up survivors. The door was opened on The Playmate 2, and a soldier leaned out and pulled men toward the rope ladder, once grabbing a man’s shoulders to hoist him, only to have the lifeless body—half a body, the torso and legs gone—bob and roll away from his grasp. The sailor was half eaten! He would never forget the emptiness of the face, no pain, no surprise, just an empty stare. Jesus, he had no legs, half his body was gone!
“Half his body was gone,” he repeated aloud to himself.
Others in the water were whole, at least physiologically, though in aspect they seemed more like newborn birds, wizened and withered and shriveled and hairless (doctors later explained that prolonged salt water exposure caused hair
to fall out), trembling like hatchlings. Some sailors made a faint peeping or chirping, too, calling out in distress. More than their look, the peeping pissed off a flyer more than anything—why did they have to cry out like that? What the hell were they trying to say, anyway?
The rescuers learned this was the crew of the USS Indianapolis, one saved sailor told them that. They had gone down quickly after explosions happened, must’ve been a mine. Or a torpedo, the flyer inquired? Maybe, coulda been. I dunno, it happened so fast, all of a sudden we was going down. “I saw two of my friends disappear, right next to me, it was the sharks. We was one the side of a raft, we couldn’t get up into it, and we was just hanging on. And then they’s were gone. No screamin’, no fightin’, just gone.”
Louis Harold Erwin told the Veterans History Project:
The sad part about losing this ship and the crew is they did not start looking for us and we spent so long time in the water. If Leyte in the Philippines would have notified that the ship hadn’t arrived, then maybe they’d have started looking for it. We were very lucky that a bomber come over, piloted by Lieutenant Gwynn, Chuck Gwynn, and he accidentally just spotted the heads. He was flying low. He just accidentally spotted the heads out of the water down there, and he went back to—or sent someone back to look. His radio antenna was broke, and they happened to see these heads bobbing out of the water. And he made a run over us, and he was about to drop a bomb on us, and he looked and saw us waving and different things. So he spotted us and radioed back to Peleliu, which then that’s when the PBY come.
And so on the fourth day, why, [after] this plane spotted us, and this PBY piloted by Adrian Marks, Lieutenant Adrian Marks, when he picked us up, why, he—there was only 56 of us. They was just—the reason he landed in our little ol’ section there, he would see sharks attacking the men. So there was a few nets got off. The life rafts are very few and I never saw—or the group I was in, me myself never saw a life raft or a net while I was in there. We spent all of our time in a kapok life jacket. After about three days, where the people would drink that saltwater and go berserk, they’d just pull off their life jackets and go down, and you could paddle around and get you another life jacket for those kapoks will get water soaked, and they begin to give out on you. And the worst part about a kapok is when you’re in one and you’re in the water, why, your head’s back like this [indicating], and when a wave come, it just comes over and covers you. After about the second—first and second day, I just scooted mine off my shoulders and come back and sort of sit in it and brought my head up out of the water where I wouldn’t get all that stuff. And after they come—the ships started arriving the next morning—I was picked up around 5:00, 5:30 that afternoon. We spent—about 2:00 or 3:00 o’clock in the morning they started coming, when the ships started coming to rescue us, they took us off the wing of the plane and put us on a Cecil J. Doyle. Of course, there was all kinds of rescue ships there by then, and each one had different—picked up different groups.
Long after nightfall, every space inside the plane, and on its wings, was full—fifty-six men out of the sea, resting dry in the fuselage of the plane. Gwinn feared that the plane might not stay afloat; it didn’t help that the hallucinating sailors kept kicking holes in the sides of the plane. Sometimes, a few punches to the face made them stop, and then they would understand they’d been picked up in a plane and that this was real and that they’d survive. One man kept yelling: “Sharks’ll get ya, don’t keep swimming, they’ll eat you. You would do it, too, you would eat me because you have to keep living. I would eat you too, motherfrigger!”
Despite the rescue effort, the death didn’t end; the killing kept on. Not from the enemy, no, they had propelled armed torpedoes on a deadly course, and had now fled. Those being killed suffered from nature swimming below. They were being eaten, in wholes or in halves. Unimaginable that a thinking, feeling mind—Homo sapiens sapiens, which means he who knows that he knows—could have its parts eaten by an animal, devoured and digested. Those devoured whole were never seen again; they disappeared. The halves seemed the worst: alive and feeling their legs ripped away, bleeding out into the ocean, and then darkness. Some men willfully ending their lives, choosing to swim away from the survivors in the rafts, some delirious and imagining a distant island or a sunken refuge, swimming and diving and in fact offering themselves up to the sharks. With no water, hypothermia, hallucinations, saltwater sores, wounds from the torpedoing and burning debris, dehydration, delirium, loss of all hope—these deaths more euthanasia than suicide.
The PBY Catalina or flying boat Playmate 2 was full with survivors, but the other rescue ships dispatched and now arriving couldn’t stop the sharks from snatching down more sailors. The carnage continued. The splashing, the hollering … then the eerie quiet. Sometimes a torso popped back up on the surface, the kapok lifejacket lifting the remains. Now it was a matter of reclaiming the dog tags.
How many lives would be saved? A rescuer radioed: “This is all that’s left of the Indianapolis.”
A transport motored toward another raft now visible in the swells, airmen seeing a group in the spotlight, another wretched bunch huddled in a raft. A group of nine or ten. The Ringness proceeded and intercepted the group, pulling them aboard, the rescuing sailors deliberate and careful not to wrench or dislocate a shoulder when pulling a man to safety, so gaunt were their bodies, nearly lifeless. They learned that in this group was a man named McVay—Captain Charles Butler McVay, the commander of the Indianapolis. He pulled himself up the ladder and immediately collapsed, though he asked for no special care or attention. It was reported that Captain McVay wept fitfully, though remained under his own power, and was escorted to his own cabin, where he slept for hours.
Captain McVay later had a private talk with Captain Meyer of the Ringness about the events of the sinking. When the phrase “not zigzagging” came up, McVay at first asked that these exact words be expunged from any official record—but then reversed himself and agreed to let that descriptive language stand. These words—not zigzagging—would revisit him soon. Zigzagging, some cockamamie French or German word, McVay thought to himself, that should not define my destiny. Soon, that word—derived from zickzack, the meaning connoting leading in alternative directions—would become paramount in his life … and was there when he chose death.
One last group, nearing hopelessness as they scanned the barren surface on the fifth day adrift in the ocean, was located by the rescuers. Giles McCoy: “Then one of the rescue vessels came on the forth night. When he [the captain of the ship] was alive I told him (his name was Graham Claytor, he was the captain of the Cecil Doyle, which was a destroyer) … I told him many, many times when I had a chance to talk to him, ‘You not only saved my life, because that is what gave me encouragement, but you saved many other people’s lives by doing what you did.’ He did a very brave thing. When he came into the area he got the radio messages from the airplanes so he didn’t wait for somebody to tell him to break off and go rescue the survivors. He just took it on his own and when he got into the area he was afraid that he was going to run over some of the survivors and kill them. He decided to put his search lights into the water and to put one up into the sky [reflecting] off the clouds to give everybody hope.”
The ship came nearer and the rescuers tossed a line, but no one in the raft had the power to respond. A weight called a monkey’s fist was affixed to the end of the life line, and when it landed in the raft one man clutched it—Marine Giles McCoy. The rescuers couldn’t retrieve the raft with the line, so two jumped in the water without hesitating, until they saw the attendant sharks circling the raft. Two other sailors joined the first pair and made it to the raft, cutting free the heavy kapok lifejackets of the sailors and further liberating the desperate survivors. In the raft was Giles Gilbert “Doc” McCoy, a Marine sergeant who became Captain McVay’s driver while still in the Philippines and later the primary catalyst for the exoneration of McVay from his inevitable court martial. He ha
d promised God that if he was saved, he would no longer kill and he would become a doctor, and he did. In an interview, McCoy said about being in the raft: “To stay alive, you had to have a drive behind you, and to really want to be the last to die. It was easier to die than to stay alive … What drove me [was] my love for my mother. I didn’t want to disappoint her.” In another interview with the Veteran’s History Project, he said, “My mother had to sign for me because I was only 17 years old when I joined the Marine Corps. I’m very fortunate to have had a mother like her.”
He said about the sinking of the ship after the torpedoes hit: “I knew that I had to get away from the ship. So when I got to the keel, I just squatted down and slid on down into the water and started swimming away. And when I looked back, the ship was standing on her nose, and the propellers were still going around and men were still jumping off the fantail and many of them were hitting the propellers. And anybody after our experience that got off the ship and they were injured, they didn’t have a chance to live, they were gonna die…. I started swimming, and I don’t know how far I went down, I went down till my head felt like it was gonna blow open, and then I caught an air bubble, as some of the experts said, and I came back up in this air bubble back to the surface. And when I looked back, there was nothing left but a big old mountain of foam.” The Indianapolis, the home to more than 1,000 men, was gone.
The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay on August 6, at about 8:15 in the morning Japanese time. On the side of the bomb was scrawled, “This one is for the boys of the Indianapolis.” In a city of 250,000, it’s estimated that eventually more than 140,000 in Hiroshima died. As John Hersey wrote in his epic feature article in the entire August 31, 1946, issue of the New Yorker: “After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen directly on us.” Even though US President Harry Truman vowed that the Japanese could “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” the bomb wasn’t enough to end the war. Three days later, on August 9, the bomb known as Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, which killed between 60,000 and 80,000 people. After this epic carnage, Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Unspeakable Horror Page 4
