In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

by Doug Stanton

Few people in Litchfield understood why he had killed himself; little was known of his life before he moved to the tiny, insular community. By turns private and gregarious, modest yet proud, he was an enigma, a mysteriously stoic man. What few in his adopted town knew was that Captain McVay was a survivor of the worst naval disaster at sea in U.S. history.

He rarely discussed with anyone the nightmarish events of the early morning of July 30, 1945, when his ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, immediately killing nearly 300 men, and sending as many as 900 others into the black, churning embrace of the vast Philippine Sea, some 350 miles from nearest landfall.

Four days later, when the navy finally learned of the sinking, only 321 of these sailors were still among the living; four of the survivors died shortly after their rescue in military hospitals in the South Pacific. In a story rich with ironies, it turned out that the Indianapolis was the first ship the Japane...

Of the original 317 men who survived the ordeal, 124 are still living as of this writing, and every two years they meet in Indianapolis, the namesake city of their doomed ship, to revisit the sinking and the memory of Captain McVay.

McVay had a lot on his mind, much of it worrisome. Since May, the Indy had been docked at Mare Island, where it had been undergoing extensive repairs that were expected to take at least four months. Then suddenly everything had been accelerated. Three days ago, on July 12, McVay had received mysterious orders from naval command to immediately ready his crew for a secret mission.

McVay next gave the order to sail, and minutes later, the Indy backed from the pier at Mare Island and cruised past Alcatraz Island into the wide, placid water of San Francisco Bay. Soon, the sun having risen high and the morning’s fog burned off, she was snug to the wharf at Hunters Point, standing motionless against her mammoth eight-inch mooring lines sprung from bow and stern.

At her top speed of 32.75 knots, few ships, enemy or friendly, could keep up with the USS Indianapolis.

One thousand miles to the east, on an expanse of scrubby desert in New Mexico, a tremendous flash filled the morning sky. It was an explosion of improbable magnitude, vaporizing the 100-foot tower from which it emanated. The searing blast turned the desert sand beneath it into glass. In high school textbooks, this moment would come to be known as the Trinity test; it was the first explosion of a nuclear device in the history of the world. The men aboard the Indianapolis knew nothing of this explosion. But shortly after the ship paused, a marine delivered a message by motor launch. It was presented to Dr. Haynes, who, as a senior medical officer of Admiral Spruance’s flagship staff, was authorized to open

INDIANAPOLIS UNDER ORDERS OF COMMANDER IN CHIEF AND MUST NOT BE DIVERTED FROM ITS MISSION FOR ANY REASON.

“Gentlemen, our mission is secret. I cannot tell you the mission, but every hour we save will shorten the war by that much.”

Lashed to the port hangar deck, the large, wooden box rode easily as the Indy’s nose swung for the Golden Gate Bridge. The box was made of plywood and one-by-fours and resembled a heavily constructed packing crate; the screws were all countersunk and sealed carefully with red wax to prevent tampering.

Behind McCoy, inside the wooden crate, sat the integral components of the atom bomb known as “Little Boy.” In the canister welded to the flag lieutenant’s cabin was the carefully packed uranium-235, totaling half the fissible amount available in the United States at the time, its value estimated at $300 million. In twenty-one days, the bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima.

The contents of the crate were known to only a handful of people: President Truman and Winston Churchill; Robert Oppenheimer and his closest colleagues at the Manhattan Project; and Captain James Nolan and Major Robert Furman, who were now aboard the Indy.

Now, as the Indy began steaming for the open ocean, Truman was with Churchill in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. He was about to deliver the Potsdam Declaration to Japan: surrender, or be annihilated.

But the Trinity test had succeeded, and, by 8:30 A.M. on July 16, 1945, Captain Charles Butler McVay had cleared the San Francisco harbor and was sailing to war.

“Men, this is a speed run to the island of Tinian, where we are to deliver the cargo. We can’t lose time. All hands be sharp. That is all.”

Anyone watching the crew work could have gotten a glimpse of America: there were boys who hailed from Texas ranches, Greek neighborhoods in Chicago, sprawling cities, and remote villages no one had ever heard of.

They were dressed in dungarees, denim shirts, and black boots called boondockers, their white pillbox hats rolled over their foreheads.

Topside, rising from the deck were two 100-foot observation towers called “sky aft” and “sky forward”; they were connected by phone to the bridge, which was manned with “telephone talkers.” Their job was to keep communications open with McVay throughout the various gun stations.

The Indy was capable of shooting more than 500 rounds of 5-inch gun ammunition in under six minutes.

After the U.S. victory in June at the battle of Midway, which made a hero out of spry, fifty-five-year-old Admiral Raymond Spruance—to whom the Indy’s fate would soon be tied—the prediction seemed to be coming true. America’s worst defeat came two months later at the battle of Savo island in the Solomons east of New Guinea. Japanese forces sank four cruisers (one Australian) and one destroyer, killing 1,270 men.

McCoy wasn’t the only one disappointed when he heard McVay announce that there would be no liberty. Instead, the captain off-loaded his passengers, refueled the ship, and five hours later turned back to sea, to Tinian. The island still lay 3,300 miles ahead, deep in the West Pacific. There was no time to rest.

In general, this leg of the voyage had been efficient but uneventful. Seven days after leaving Pearl Harbor, on July 26, Charles Butler McVay and the crew of the Indy rode into Tinian at flank—or full—speed, the ship’s gargantuan propellers spinning in a molten whir.

As the ship dropped anchor, a flotilla of boats bore down on them in greeting. The Indy had made it.

Whenever I was traveling alone, I always had the feeling, “Suppose we go down and we can’t get a message off? What will happen then?” —CHARLES BUTLER MCVAY, captain, USS Indianapolis

McVay’s orders were simple: from Tinian, he was to proceed to Guam, a 120-mile cruise to the south, where he would report to the naval base for his further routing orders,

Guam was a bustling island of nearly 500,000 troops. Japanese forces had captured the island in December 1941, and the United States had retaken it two and a half years later after three weeks of bloody fighting. During the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, transport ships carrying thousands of troops had left this harbor day and night for a week, bound for the beachheads more than 1,200 miles to the north.

Sworn into office three months earlier after the sudden death of Roosevelt, President Truman had only recently been apprised of the project involving Little Boy and Fat Man. (Fat Man had been lightheartedly named in honor of Winston Churchill, a proponent of the Manhattan Project, and Little Boy’s original nickname was “Thin Man,” in honor of Roosevelt.

It was changed to “Little Boy” when the design of its “barrel” was shortened.)

At 12:05 A.M. all hell broke loose. The first torpedo hit the forward starboard, or right, side and blew an estimated sixty-five feet of the bow skyward. It was simply obliterated. Men were thrown fifteen feet in the air. Those who weren’t blown in two landed on their feet, stunned, their ears ringing.

The second explosion occurred closer to midship and was even more massive.

The second torpedo had pierced the four-inch steel armor below the bridge, slightly aft of officers’ country.

It was 12:06 A.M.—just a minute after the torpedoing. The ship had been cut nearly in half. All compartments and crew forward of

I jumped and I swam. I looked back and the ship stood right on end, and there must have been 300 sailors standin’ on the fantail, and it just went under. And they drifted off like a bunch of flies. —ROBERT GAUSE, quartermaster first-class, USS Indianapolis

McCoy knew something very bad had happened, but because there was no smoke, fire, or loss of electricity in the brig, it was hard to figure out what exactly was going on. He was completely unaware of the terror unfolding in the forward area of the ship.

The explosion had blown open the hatch to the powder magazine for the 8-inch guns on the main deck. (An elevator in the magazine was used to lift shells and powder up to the turret.)

Shortly after midnight on July 30, a radioman in the officer of the day’s Quonset hut, where Allen was standing guard duty, announced that he had just received a distress message from the Indy that listed her coordinates.

Finally, a third message was received aboard a landing craft in the Leyte harbor. A sailor named Russell Hetz was on watch when the ship’s radio room received an SOS dispatch from a ship claiming to be the USS Indianapolis, and then, eight and a half minutes later, Hetz’s ship received a duplicate message. The radio crew tried contacting the Indy but couldn’t get a response.

The Japanese forces, hoping to confuse U.S. intelligence and draw out search vessels, had made a habit of broadcasting bogus distress signals. Earlier in the war, such a message might have been investigated, but tonight it was written off as a potentially deadly move in the war game.

It would later be estimated that 300 men died immediately during the torpedoing and subsequent explosions. Close to 900 made it off the ship.

In her final seconds, she reached a terminal velocity of as much as thirty-six feet per second, or about twenty-five miles per hour, just slightly slower than her best flank speed during the run from Hunters Point. She was falling in three and a half miles of water, some of the deepest on the planet, and it took nearly five minutes for her to reach the bottom, a place so remote and dark and cold that in the history of the world no light had ever shone there. As she slammed into the ocean floor in a giant cloud of silt, her steel hull broke into two pieces and gradually rocked to a halt. It had taken only twelve minutes for the USS Indianapolis to vanish.

By dusk on Monday, hundreds of sharks had encircled them. There were makos, tigers, white-tips, and blues. Rising at the speed of a man at a gentle run, the sharks ascended from the depths of the dark sea to the paler glow of approaching night overhead, toward a sky empty of stars. As the heat of the day tempered into relative cool, the boys, lying in their rafts, hanging from floating nets, and bobbing in life vests, began to feel things bumping from below—nudges and kicks that they mistook for the touch of their comrades treading water. They nodded off and slept, if their wounds allowed them to rest. They woke often, with a start, staring into the dark, wondering, Who’s there?

McCoy looked over his raft’s edge and saw them prowling in frenzied schools. Like figures trapped in glass, the huge, gray fish were spiraling to the surface. Jesus, he thought, sitting up, this is getting serious.

In all likelihood, the sharks now gathered around the boys had been following the Indy for days. It is the habit of sharks to track oceangoing vessels and feed on refuse regularly tossed overboard. The Indy, made of steel, emitted low-grade electrical currents that may have stimulated and attracted the predators.

Until this point, it seemed, the restless fish had been feeding mostly on the dead, tearing at the bodies as they fell to the ocean floor. Or they had concentrated on lone, straying swimmers. But now the sharks were starting to home in on the large groups that had amassed during the past thirty-six hours. Those sailors who were naked or not fully clothed were at greatest risk of attack. The fish keyed in on color contrasts, such as that between a pale body and a blue sea.

Sharks are some of the oldest predators on the planet, dating bac...

No evidence has ever been found that sharks prefer humans to their regular diet of fish. Nor has it been scientifically established that they attack wounded or bleeding people more readily than the unwounded. Biologists are not even sure why sharks attack humans, although they do believe that people emit irregular low-level frequencies and odors that resemble those of wounded fish. They are opportunistic eaters (especially the rapacious tiger shark) and have also been known to eat turtles, seagulls, and tin cans. Even submarines have been attacked, and fiber-optic cables on the ocean bed have been bitten and ruined. Other objects found in shark stomachs include a suit of armor, a barrel of nails, a roll of tar paper, coal, raincoats, shoes, plastic bags, goats, sheep, lizards, snakes, chicken, reindeer, and monkeys.

This pattern of attacks in low-light conditions, particularly at twilight and in the dawn hours, soon established itself as the rhythm of the men’s days: the sharks would attack in the morning, then cruise through the wounded and the dying all day, feeding again at night on the living.

As soon as the sun set, as it did with guillotine-like speed this close to the equator, the boys started shivering uncontrollably. This was the body’s way of generating heat, but it quadrupled the rate of oxygen consumed. Hypothermia depresses the central nervous system as the body slows to conserve energy, and at a core temperature of 93 degrees (nearly 5 degrees below normal), speech becomes difficult, apathy develops, and amnesia typically sets in. At around 85 degrees, the kidneys stop filtering the body’s waste—urination stops—and hypoxia, or poisoning, commences. Breathing becomes labored, the heart beats raggedly, and consciousness dims. The afflicted fall into an inattentive stupor.

By Tuesday at dawn, Dr. Haynes estimated the core body temperatures of the Indy’s boys were probably hovering right around 92 degrees. Later, after the shark attack, as the sun rose and baked them, their temperatures began to rise a degree or two, perhaps as many as five. In essence, the boys had fallen into a pattern of abrupt energy drain and renewal. But increasingly, they were building a deficit that eventually even the heat of day wouldn’t be able to erase. With their body temperatures dipping low, the boys were wobbling off into the land of fatal judgment.