USS Indianapolis
The summer of 1945
The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis begins in San Francisco. The summer of 1945 was a hot one. The war in Europe was officially over, and the word was that the Japanese would soon surrender. America’s military power had been the defining factor, and the young, prideful sailors boarding the heavy cruiser were anxious to see some action before the end.
The mission of the Indianapolis
The mission was top secret and made for widespread rumors amongst the raw and recently trained recruits. The rumors stretched the bounds of fantasy and reality, all having the same ending, with the ship returning safely. That was not to be.
The USS Indianapolis
The USS Indianapolis was the last major American warship sunk during WWII. Returning from completing the mission that ultimately ended the war with Japan, the Indianapolis was torpedoed and sank in less than 12 minutes. It was midnight on July 30, 1945, just six days before the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The loss of 883 sailors was the worst naval disaster in American history. The story about the flagship of the 5th Fleet lovingly referred to as Indy, is fraught with tragedies at every intersection.
Indianapolis departing port
On July 15, 1945, the ship left the naval yard in San Francisco. It was a beautiful day with a slight breeze as the ship passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. Indy was visibly overloaded; typically, she had a crew of 807, but on this trip, 1196 men were onboard. Quarters were tight, and there was little room on deck to perform the battle drills once out to sea.
Youth reigned on the U.S.S. Indianapolis
The crew of the Indianapolis were 250 brand-new recruits from boot camp. Seaman Bob Grause, from Tarpon Springs, Florida, wanted to see his wife again before the Indy left port in San Francisco. He had been so busy working as a quartermaster that he had not had time to tell her that the ship was leaving. Despite the Captain canceling all leave, Grause managed to slip off the boat for a few hours and could barely get back onboard when the ship pulled away from the dock.
Stories of USS Indianapolis crew
Seaman Ed Brown of South Dakota also wanted off the boat for the night but decided it was not worth the risk. He had joined the Navy and left for boot camp the day he played his last high school basketball game. Luckily, they both survived the disaster, and Grause went on to run a prosperous lumber business. Brown was a successful car salesman.
Orders for the USS Indianapolis
The destination of the 610-foot heavy cruiser was the Tiniam Island in the Philippines. Captain McVay’s orders were in a sealed envelope and locked in the ship’s safe. He had been told to open the orders once out to sea. “Gentlemen, our mission is secret, and I cannot tell you the mission, but every hour we save will shorten the war by that much,” he reportedly said. The Captain ordered the crew to increase the ship’s speed and traveled for the remainder of the mission under radio silence.
Those onboard the USS Indianapolis
The crew wondered when they would see their families and sweethearts again. Many wondered why the ship was going at maximum speed. As the Indy got into open water, it reached 28 knots and held that, and by the end of the day, the ship had covered 350 miles. There was quite a chatter amongst the crew about the large wooden crate fastened to the port hangar deck.
Little boy on the USS Indianapolis
The screws holding the box tight to the deck were counter-sink, and wax was poured over the screws discouraging anyone from tampering with it. An armed guard stood watch with orders to shoot if anyone was foolish enough to get too close. The box was so big that a 30′ by 30′ area was cordoned off with red tape. Inside the box were the parts needed to assemble the first atomic bomb called “Little Boy.”
dropped on Hiroshima by the plane the Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. Courtesy U.S. Navy, Public Domain.
The atomic bomb on the Indianapolis
A short distance away, a black canister was welded to the flag lieutenant’s cabin. Inside the canister was death in the form of uranium-235. It represented half the useable uranium in America; the grim reality was it was enough to ultimately kill nearly 100,000 people in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Rumors on the USS Indianapolis
Of course, no one onboard the Indy could imagine in their wildest dreams the contents or the blackish mushroom-shaped clouds that would soon hang over Hiroshima. It was all innocent that morning on the Indy. There was plenty of good humor and bantering about the box’s contents – “filled with gold bullion or maybe Rita Hayworth’s underwear.”
Indianapolis docked at the Tinian island
After traveling 3300 miles, the Indy docked at Tinian Island on July 26. The crate and canister were quickly removed and taken to a remote place for assembly. The Enola Gay was waiting nearby in a secluded hangar.
The ground crew of the B-29 “Enola Gay” which atom-bombed Hiroshima, Japan. Col. Paul W. Tibbets, the pilot is the center. Marianas Islands. Courtesy, U.S. Navy, Public Domain.
Captain of the Indianapolis
McVay had followed his orders carefully and with speed, so fast that the ship had come close to breaking speed records for a vessel her size. The Captain’s concerns about running low on fuel or having an inexperienced crew vanished once the wooden box and canister were removed from the ship. McVay was still worried about enemy submarines and not having an escort. He was ordered to depart immediately for the Philippines.
Indianapolis was back at sea
The Indy was back at sea within a few hours of docking and refueling. It would be a tremendous understatement to suggest that the USS Indianapolis had bad luck on its return journey. The mistakes, miscommunications, misinformation, and being in the wrong place put the ship on a collision course with doomsday.
Indianapolis headed towards the Philippines
McKay’s orders routed the USS Indianapolis through the shipping lanes in the Leyte Sea to the Philippines. He was advised on two occasions, possibly more, that this area of the South Pacific was at low risk for Japanese submarine activity. That was encouraging, but McKay played it safe by requesting a destroyer escort. The request was denied, and McKay was again reassured that there was little enemy activity to be concerned with.
If the Indy did run into trouble, his supervisors advised that McVay should, at his discretion, use the standard procedure of zig-zagging his ship. What McKay did not know was that a sub had attacked and sank a Navy ship in those waters just four days before.
Fatal error about the journey of the Indianapolis
What happened next is considered by many to be the most fatal error ever made by the United States Navy. The Indy cabled a message to the U.S. Navy’s Philippine port with travel orders, including coordinates and an expected arrival date. The message, however, was incorrectly decoded, and, to make matters worse, the base did not bother to ask for another re-transmission.
Trusting the report
McKay, fully trusting the official reports and satisfied that his coordinates and travel information had been received, proceeded on the three-day trip to the Philippines. On the second day, the visibility became poor, and McVay ordered a speed reduction and a zig-zagging stop.
Japanese submarine pursuing the Indianapolis
As the Indy quietly began passing through the Leyte Sea, two miles away, Mochitsura Hashimoto also thought about the poor visibility. Hashimoto was the Captain of a Japanese submarine, one of the elite Temont submarine fleets. There were only four subs in this group, and they had all been outfitted with the most advanced radar and torpedoes.
Japanese submarine captains
Only the best captains were picked to skipper these subs, except Hashimoto, who had never proven his ability. Hashimoto was worried about his military reputation. He felt the war was nearly over, and he had not earned the distinction of sinking an enemy ship. His reputation would be lost.
Indianapolis – the moon peeked out
Finally, the moon peeked out from the night’s blackness for a second, and Hashimoto saw a dark spot moving through the water. He gave the order to launch two torpedoes at the moving object. Suddenly, the quiet of the night was interrupted. Onboard the Indy, the 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. crew had just taken their stations, and the rest were asleep. It was midnight on July 30, 1945.
Attack of the Indianapolis
Both torpedoes struck the starboard bow, blowing it completely off. All communications had been destroyed, making shutting down the four massive Parsons turbine engines impossible. The ship continued to move forward – – taking on enormous amounts of water. Fire was raging below, and men were screaming, desperately clinging to one another and trying to escape the inferno. Despite the abject horror, others patiently put life jackets on the wounded, and those on deck waited in silence at their stations for orders.
Listing of the Indianapolis
Within minutes, the warship began listing, and the Captain had no choice but to order the ship to be abandoned. Before half past midnight, the Indy had disappeared beneath the blackness of the sea. Survivors clung to a few lifeboats, life jackets, and one another.
Billy Cantrell, crew member of the Indianapolis
Billy Cantrell, John Cadwallader, and Chaplain Thomas Conway were some of the crew who perished. Eighteen-year-old Cantrell lived with his parents in his hometown of Dallas, Texas. Before joining the Navy, he worked as a bicycle messenger for Western Union. Decades after the disaster, Cantrell’s cousin said that Billy’s parents were never the same after their son’s death.
John Cadwallader, crew member of the Indianapolis
John Cadwallader, married and the father of two children under four, left home on July 4, 1945, to join the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and never saw his family again. However, his family still remembers him. Recently, Cadwallader’s now grown children, John and his sister Donna Hyland, honored their father at the USS Indianapolis Memorial in Indiana.
Rev. Thomas Conway, chaplain of the Indianapolis
Father Thomas Conway slept in his berth when the first torpedo struck. After three days, however, Father Conway succumbed to exhaustion and disappeared beneath the blackness of the Philippine Sea.
After the torpedo struck the Indianapolis
In the beginning, 900 men floated in the water. Sadly, the torpedoes directly killed the others or trapped them, causing them to drown as the ship sank to the bottom of the sea. Fire erupted beneath the deck, injuring many in the water. Many heroes, such as Captain McVay, Chaplain Conway, and others, were swimming around, helping and encouraging the wounded and the scared.
As hours turned into days, many of the survivors began to die, either from their wounds, exposure, exhaustion, or from shark attacks. “For each person as they died, they took their life jackets off and let them go. We then said the Lord’s Prayer.
To this day, “I can’t say the Lord’s Prayer without crying,” recalled 85-year-old Dr. Lewis Haynes, the ship’s doctor.
Was the USS Indianapolis forgotten?
The flagship of the Fleet had been forgotten. After three days, the survivors were clinging on to miracles. Only half of the original survivors were still alive and spread about 20 to 25 miles from each other in the sea. The rescuers found the survivors of Indy on the fourth day — and, by accident.
A Navy pilot looking for Japanese submarines spotted a 20-mile oil slick. It is unlikely that the remaining crew would have lasted another day. Out of the original 1196, then reduced to 900 after the torpedoes hit, only 316 survived the tragedy.
Indianapolis – the despair and the dying
Some said they survived because they had closed their minds off from thinking about dying. Others hoped that the Navy would finally discover their ship was missing. They were all inspired by acts of heroism and countless displays of courage. The tragic story of the USS Indianapolis sounds like a fictional tale in that everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Other concerns of the USS Indianapolis:
The USS Indianapolis was overloaded and had an unusually high number of inexperienced crew members.
Captain McVay received advice at least twice that there was little risk of enemy submarine activity. The Captain even requested a destroyer escort, but officials denied his request.
After removing its cargo, officials immediately ordered the Indy to leave the Tinian Islands. The ship had just finished traveling 3,500 miles in ten days. A couple of days of rest was customary. That rest may have saved the Indy from its ultimate fate.
The U.S. Navy made a fatal decoding error in the Philippine port.
Visibililty
There were visibility issues on the night of July 30, 1945, and because of that, McVay suspended zig-zagging operations.
Captain Hashimoto, however, had not sunk an enemy ship in his military career. Despite the visibility problems, he successfully torpedoed the Indy.
Navy planes had flown over the site for days and never noticed the survivors or the 20 miles of oil slick. The Japanese surrender overshadowed the story of the worst disaster in US Naval history, which ended up buried in the back pages of newspapers.
Authorities court-martialed Captain McVay for failing to zigzag in hostile waters. Many people felt that the actions against McVay were unjust. Eventually, they restored McVay to duty. He retired from the Navy in 1949 and took his own life in 1968. After his death, they exonerated McVay of any wrongdoing.
Closing comments
The tragedy of the USS Indianapolis is deepened when considering that the war was only days from being over. Consequently, if someone had sunk the ship before its historic rendezvous with the Enola Gay, the components of the bomb would have rested on the bottom of the sea. Accordingly, Hiroshima would not have happened. Indeed, history would have certainly been altered.
Resources:
In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S. Indianapolis, by Doug Stanton
Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, by Dan Kurzman
Ordeal By Sea: The Tragedy of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, by Thomas Helm
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