USS Indianapolis

In the early morning hours of Monday, July 16, 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, flagship of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and recently overhauled following a kamikaze attack off Okinawa, departed San Francisco for a top secret high speed run--first to Pearl Harbor for refueling, then across the Pacific to Tinian Island, in the Marianas. Aboard were 1,196 officers, enlisted men, two "passengers" dressed as Army officers and the reason for such a voyage: a metal canister called the "bucket" that lay secured inside the cabin usually occupied by Fifth Fleet commander Admiral Raymond Spruance and a large wooden crate called the "cannon" placed inside the ship's aircraft hangar under guard by members of the ship's Marine detachment.

Rumor as to the cargo's nature abounded. Gold? A new Limousine for General MacArthur? Even the Indy's skipper got in on the act. Captain Charles Butler McVay III, a 1919 Annapolis graduate longing to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious father (a former commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet) believed that the cargo may have something to do with "bacteriological warfare."

In the end McVay was just as wrong as everyone else aboard. Inside the bucket was a core of Uranium 235 and in the cannon; the intricate triggering mechanism for "Little Boy", the Atomic Bomb that was destined to be dropped on Hiroshima in a few weeks time.

On July 26, after sailing 5,300 miles, the Indianapolis arrived off Tinian. The bucket and cannon were lowered to a barge and within hours, the Indy sailed onto Guam for replenishment and for new orders. Those orders were to join Rear Admiral L.D. McCormick's Task Group 95.7 in Leyte Gulf for refresher training, before being assigned to Vice Admrial Jesse B. Oldendorf's Task Force 95, then operating further north near Okinawa. However, through a blunder by McCormick's radio staff on his flagship (the USS Idaho), the message that routed the Indianapolis to Leyte was incorrectly decoded, and since it was marked "restricted", consequently did not garner a second glance (If it was marked "secret" it would have definitely warranted a repeat). Furthermore Oldendorf's staff did not receive the message at all, he had no way of knowing that the Indianapolis was supposed to join his task force, nor did McCormick know when the Indy was supposed to arrive in Leyte.

More blunders came when Captain McVay, during his ship's brief stop in Guam, requested an anti-submarine escort for the Indianapolis yet was turned down on that grounds that it was not needed on the Guam to Leyte route (a backwater by 1945). This was obviously not the case, for reports of submarine activity were making the rounds including one decoded report from a Japanese submarine that had sunk a destroyer escort with Kaiten human torpedoes on July 24 between Okinawa and Leyte, as well as another report intercepted from the submarine I-58, a submarine part of a four boat hunting group that was now patrolling the very route the Indianapolis was going to sail through.

Just before midnight on July 29, 1945, the surfaced I-58 caught sight of the Indianapolis steaming through choppy seas and visibility ranging from moderate to poor. The I-58's skipper Lt. Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto ordered the sub to submerge and positioned his boat to attack with conventional torpedoes instead of the Kaitens arrayed along his deck.

As part of his routing orders, the choice of whether or not to sail a zigzag course (to throw off a submarine's firing solution) was left to McVay's discretion. He ordered zigzagging stopped between 7:30 and 8 PM July 29, taking into account the overcast skies and the almost nonexistent visibility that resulted from it. Hashimoto saw his chance and took it. He ordered a six torpedo spread fired at the target which he believed was "a battleship of the Idaho class." Two of those torpedoes (Hashimoto claimed three) struck the starboard side of the Indianapolis, the first blasting forty feet of the cruiser's bow off, the second exploding near the bridge, causing uncontrollable fires, killing and wounding many below or on deck, and snuffing out all electrical power to the forward end of the ship.

In the twelve minutes that followed, the USS Indianapolis, still steaming on under power from her undamaged after engine room, plunged bow first to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, over two miles below. Approximately 300-400 of her crew went down with her. the remaining crew--estimated between 800 or even 900--escaped and now found themselves floating in the dark waters in life jackets, rafts, debris and a noxious trail of oil that had leaked from ruptured fuel tanks.

Although they expected rescue to be close at hand, what many of these sailors and marines did not know was that through faulty communication on the part of naval authorities in both the Marianas and the Philippines, as well as a poorly drafted communique (10CL-45) stating that "Arrival reports shall not be made for combatant ships", the ignoring of both a radio report Hashimoto made about his attack (perceived as a hoax to draw rescue ships into an ambush), and a SOS sent out from one of the Indianapolis's undamaged radio rooms (this was often disputed until only recently), four days and five nights of horror awaited the Indy's survivors. It was a horror that claimed many men through many different ways: wounds, drowning, exhaustion, dementia, a fatal thirst quenching drink of salt water and, most well known of all: sharks.

On August 2, the survivors were discovered by pure accidental luck on the part of Lt. (Junior Grade) Wilbur Gwinn, flying a Lockheed PV-1 Ventura on a routine anti-submarine patrol from Peleliu. Gwinn radioed the position of these "swimmers" (he did not know yet who had spotted at that time). Another aircraft, a PBY Catalina piloted by Lt. R. Adrian Marks was dispatched from Peleliu to assist. Marks and his crew made an open water landing and began hauling one oil covered swimmer after another from the sea, until the plane's interior and wing surfaces were covered with 56 men. It was there that one of the survivors told Marks of the Indianapolis.

Word of the discovery spread quickly, and soon a flotilla of ships responded, among them the destroyers Madison and Ralph Talbot; the Destroyer Escorts Cecil J. Doyle and Dufilho; and the fast transports Bassett, Register, and Ringness (the latter ship picked up Captain McVay) boats and landing craft from these ships were soon plucking men from the water and treating them for their injuries and illnesses. Tragically, the days the Indy's crew had spent in the water had whittled down their numbers significantly. By the afternoon of August 3, some 321 men had been rescued from the Pacific. Four would later die while being nursed back to health. Thus out of the 1,196 who sailed out of San Francisco aboard the Indianapolis on July 16, only 317 of the cruiser's complement remained alive. The ship's searched the ocean a few more days but found only lifejackets, some empty rafts, oil, and scores of decomposed bodies. "About half of the bodies," according to the skipper of one destroyer, "were shark-bitten. Some to such a degree that they more nearly resembled skeletons."

The end of the war did not see the end of the Indianapolis story. In December, 1945, Captain Charles McVay was summoned to Washington to face a general court martial, the only U.S. Navy captain to be given this dubious honor. The charges were: Count one: "Culpable in-efficiency in the performance of his duty" (failing to zigzag), and, count two: "Negligently endangering lives of others" (failing to make the "abandon ship" call in time) Although the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, believed a letter of reprimand would suffice, but Nimitz's superior Admiral. Ernest J. King and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal saw otherwise. In a decision that stunned the general public, Mochitsura Hashimoto was called in to testify on behalf of the prosecution. On December 19, the verdict was handed down: McVay was found guilty of count one but found not guilty of count two. He lost 100 points on the navy's promotions list, ensuring that he would never reach the rank his father had once held. Although he was re-instated, McVay was never the same after the court martial. After a posting to New Orleans and a "tombstone promotion" to Rear-Admiral, Charles McVay retired in 1949, He settled down in Litchfield Connecticut, but was dogged constantly by hate mail from relatives of some of his dead crew, as well as nightmares of his ordeal at sea. The fact that his wife, who had stayed with him throughout the court-martial, died from cancer in the 1960's also caused him much grief. On November 6, 1968, all the nightmares and torment ended when an elderly McVay stepped outside his home and shot himself in the head with his navy service revolver.

Decades later, in October, 2000, thanks in large part to living survivors of the Indianapolis as well as the efforts of then 12-year-old Florida native Hunter Scott, the United States Congress passed a resolution exonerating Captain McVay for all wrongdoing in regards to the USS Indianapolis tragedy, although the court-martial still stands on his record to this day.

Despite efforts in 2000, the last resting place of the USS Indianapolis has yet to be discovered.

She was the last U.S. warship to be lost through enemy action in the Second World War, and owing largely to the circumstances surrounding her loss, despite the role she played in helping to bring about the end of the war in the Pacific, the Indianapolis is by far the most infamous.