by Doug Stanton
“Now hear this, now hear this! Work party lay to, clean and sweep all decks and ladders!”
Then the fun began. But to get the boys to work, Kuryla had to catch them first. The old salts on board were the best at avoiding duties with their games of hide-and-seek. Kuryla knew exactly where to look; preferred hiding places included bulkhead corners or the turrets of the ship’s 8-inch guns.
“Come on, sailor, grab a broom and get to work!” Kuryla said when he managed to squeeze the bums out of hiding. “Now don’t give me any guff,” he’d roar. Kuryla, a building contractor’s son from Chicago, was just nineteen, but his experience and attitude more than compensated for his youth. As he rounded up the boys, the work division brought the deck to life with hoses, mops, and swabs, scrubbing dirt and salt from all painted surfaces. The navy was fanatical about cleanliness, and there was a lot of ground to cover. In all, it would take a man ten minutes at a dog-walking pace to travel the entire 610 feet of the deck, all of which was painted gray, including the two heavy, seven-foot-long anchors set high in the bow like the eyes of a curious gargoyle.
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. As was the tradition, all the sailors wore handmade knives in scabbards at their sides. They were dressed in dungarees, denim shirts, and black boots called boondockers, their white pillbox hats rolled over their foreheads.
The crew swept and hosed the deck forward from the fantail, past the rear 8-inch gun turret. Some skirted to the rail, past the 5-inch and 40 mm and 20 mm gun decks hanging high overhead from the ship’s framework like steel lily pads. Under Kuryla’s watchful eyes, others moved past the number-two smokestack and the two airplane hangars surrounding it, to the quarterdeck. It was one of the Indy’s social hubs, like the fantail and mess halls belowdecks.
Beyond the quarterdeck was officers’ country, with its four levels in ascending order: communications platform, signal bridge, navigation bridge, and fire control station. Captain McVay usually resided in command on the navigation bridge. His realm overlooked the bow, where two more turrets of 8-inch guns sat, their nearly forty-foot barrels poking out to sea. Underneath the four bridges were the officers’ sleeping quarters and wardroom; nearby stood the code room and radio shack 1, also known as Radio Central, which received incoming messages from Honolulu twenty-four hours a day. Here, seated around a half-moon-shaped desk spanning the ten-foot room, men sat at keyboards, listening through headphones while typing minute-by-minute incoming messages from commands spread across the Pacific. The nimble accuracy of these men was so valuable that they were exempted from operating the guns.
Behind the number-two smokestack stood emergency radio shack 2, its transmitters warmed up and ready in case Radio Central was knocked out of commission.
Below the main deck, there were two more main levels, airless hells lit by hundreds of bulbs nestled in wire cages. Directly below the fantail was the brig, where Private McCoy, when he wasn’t standing duty at the secret crate, guarded prisoners. There were currently two fellows in the brig, cooks who had gotten drunk on liberty and gone AWOL in San Francisco, a rather frequent occurrence.
From the fantail, it was about a three-minute walk to the middle of the ship, where, on the lower levels, the majority of the 1,114 enlisted men bunked in some 25 compartments arranged in rows like combs in a vast, steamy hive. The compartments consisted of narrow passageways just big enough for two men to pass each other brushing shoulders. Bunks rose from floor to ceiling on both sides and were chained against the wall when not in use. A boy assigned a top bunk practically had to throw himself six feet into the air and somehow manage to move sideways at the same time, inserting himself in the slot that was his home. Lying on his pillow, the overhead, or ceiling, was only twelve inches from his nose. He usually fell asleep staring at a picture of a Vargas girl torn from the latest Argosy magazine.
The mess halls—there were two main ones for the enlisted crew—were a thirty-second walk from the sleeping compartments. The largest one was forty by sixty feet and loud as a gymnasium. Next door was the gedunk stand, and next to that was the post office, where mail went after its delivery by passing ships or by airdrop from planes. Letters from home were, unfortunately, often months old. Ed Brown, while shelling the island of Saipan, received his invitation to his high school graduation six months late. He wrote back, “Thanks, but I won’t be able to make it.”
Past the post office, heading toward the bow, were the ship’s dentist office, a library stocked with detective novels and aging National Geographic magazines, and a photo lab for developing battle reconnaissance photos taken by the observation planes. Least favorite for the ship’s sometimes recalcitrant cleaners was the bathroom, or head, a charmless spot with twenty-foot-long troughs flowing with seawater along each wall. On top of some were communal wooden benches with holes cut out for sitting. (Senior officers had private toilets and showers.)
Below the crew’s head were the engine rooms, and, like the radio shacks, these were separated—one located fore and the other aft—by boiler rooms. The division was a safeguard; if one of the areas was blown up, there would be a reserve.
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.
Positioned strategically around the deck were stacks of life rafts, four high. Two wooden lifeboats rested in stanchions near the stern, and hanging on the bulkheads were twenty-four floater nets. There was enough lifesaving equipment to handle over 1,500 men. Clearly, for the men aboard, though, the quickest and easiest way off the ship in case of emergency was with an inflatable life belt or a life vest; these were stored in hanging bags tacked along the bulkhead running the length of the ship, and each man kept one within easy reach on a hook next to his bunk.
In case of attack, the favored contingency plan was rescue from nearby escorting vessels, such as the destroyers that had generally accompanied the Indy on her previous three years of battle duty. This afternoon, however, she traveled alone, as she was well over 6,000 miles behind front lines.
Captain McVay was tense but composed as he stood watch on the bridge. Already, the day had brought a bit of excitement, the kind of circumstance that he had to try to avoid to get the ship to Tinian on schedule. Within several hours of clearing the Golden Gate, the Indianapolis had run into rough seas, with swells of fifteen feet. The ride had been a bone-jarring ballet of dips and vaults. The ship’s eight White-Forster boilers were driving four sets of Parsons turbines (each engine block measured about ten feet long and five feet high), and the ship, which weighed as much as a ten-story office building, was pushing 107,000 horsepower. But it was not fast enough for McVay. He rang the engineer for more speed, and the Indy jumped to twenty-eight knots. Her four massive propellers, each one spanning fifteen feet, began striping the indigo sea with a wake as wide as an eight-lane highway.
By sunset, she had made 350 miles, excellent time.
But McVay couldn’t relax. The captain’s head was filled with potential problems. For starters, there was the obvious concern of maintaining the secrecy of his mission, and all that this involved. Until reaching Tinian, his ship would be traveling under radio silence, which could only be broken in the event of trouble. Because the Indy was traveling so fast, McVay had to keep a close eye on fuel consumption, rendering the voyage a racy balancing act between speed and conservation.
Although McVay was encouraged by the time he was making, his executive officer had now informed him that the water condensers were still malfunctioning. All hands, McVay announced, were ordered to shower with salt water. Every ounce of freshwater was needed to pour into the boilers.
Still, McVay tried to be h
is usual self, a man who liked to describe his ship as a “happy ship,” and whose easygoing nature was extraordinary for a naval captain. Most commanders, enlisted men joked, were either big SOBs or little SOBs. McVay, however, was neither. He was known for his egalitarian spirit and for his graciousness. Sometimes, while anchored in a harbor, he instigated skeet-shooting sessions off the Indy’s fantail. Out of nowhere, his voice would sound over the PA: “Anyone interested in fishing, join me at the bow.” When new crew members came aboard, he made an effort to greet them by name, saying, “Welcome, sailor. We’re going to have a happy cruise.”
But the stakes of this tour were high. If he succeeded in this voyage, delivering the cargo safely and quickly, it was possible that Charles McVay, completing the arc of a thus far stellar career, would make admiral. It was possible that he might actually surpass the accomplishments of his family.
McVay’s grandfather, the first Charles McVay, president of the Pittsburgh Trust Company, had financially supported the Naval Academy during its lean years after the Civil War. McVay’s celebrated father, Admiral Charles McVay, Jr., had commanded the Asiatic Fleet during World War I. He was a stern taskmaster, who had retired in 1932 to Washington, D.C., after an illustrious forty-two-year naval career. An 1890 graduate of the Naval Academy, he had taken the school’s motto—“God, Country, and Regiment”—to heart. He had drilled these values, in turn, into his son.
And the son had been a good student. Charles Butler McVay III had graduated as an ensign in 1919. He was fluent in French and had completed a Naval War College correspondence course in international law. He served with distinction in several navy commands, working aboard twelve ships in the Atlantic and Pacific. In 1943, he was awarded a Silver Star while acting as executive officer aboard the cruiser Cleveland in the Battle of the Solomon Islands. After this, he was appointed chairman of the Joint Intelligence Staff in the Office of Vice Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C. His assignment to the Indianapolis in November 1944 was his first as a captain.
In many ways, McVay was a study in contradictions. Although at times he was quite outgoing, there was sometimes a shyness about him, which people would mistake for arrogance. The captain’s temper could flare on occasion, but he rarely held a grudge. McVay was cut from the cloth of a schooled navy tradition yet remained simpatico with his enlisted crew, many of whom had quit high school to join the navy. With his broad smile and chiseled features, women found him irresistible; men were drawn to his sense of jocular bravado. He was known to love a good bourbon once the ship’s engines had been shut down. But never before.
On the second day out from San Francisco, McVay ordered General Quarters, or GQ, otherwise known as battle stations. When the announcement was signaled over the PA, every man was expected to jump up from the toilet or from sleep and run to his station. This morning the crew responded admirably, beginning without delay to fire the guns in a live-ammunition drill.
The Indy was capable of shooting more than 500 rounds of 5-inch gun ammunition in under six minutes. If all nine barrels on the ship’s three 8-inch gun turrets were fired simultaneously, the recoil could turn the Indy on its side. The concussion from a single weapon had once ripped the shirt off the back of a crew member who was standing too close. It had taken a week for his hearing to return.
The Indy carried four different kinds of guns. The big 8-inchers were capable of lobbing 250-pound shells eighteen miles, while the 5-inchers shot barrages of armor piercing shells and could take out Japanese pillboxes (gun emplacements) eight miles from shore. The 40 mm and the 20 mm deck guns were used for the close-in work of shooting at attacking Japanese planes.
The guns could be operated by tracking devices called fire-control directors located on stanchions rising high above the deck. They could also be maneuvered with eye and hand—“local control”—using a crew of as many as twenty. This included “loaders”, “levelers” and “trainers,” who moved the guns left and right and up and down by spinning large steel wheels; and “fuse-setters,” who prepared the shells—some with proximity fuses—for firing. It was a team sport.
Usually, during normal battle training, a plane was ordered to fly past the ship at a designated distance towing a sleeve, a 150-foot streamer resembling a windsock, which trailed behind on 500 yards of wire. After estimating the distance of the plane and its speed, the crews were able to sight their guns. Gun crews often aimed for the towing wire, slightly ahead of the sleeve, and often succeeded in breaking it. This was a way to halt the ordeal until a new wire was rigged. The crews usually claimed they’d just aimed badly, but got chewed out by the officers anyway. The victors—the crew with the most direct fire—did, however, win trips to the gedunk stand.
Today’s practice, which did not involve the sleeve but was a simpler shooting exercise, had a guest judge. Major Furman had torn himself away from the uranium canister long enough to officiate. Furman, who had studied gunnery at Princeton before the war, had a fairly good understanding of the process. But his colleague Captain Nolan, a radiologist by training, was having a harder time passing himself off as an army officer. When asked the size of the guns he’d shot in the army, Nolan held up his hand, as if measuring the size of a fish, and replied, “Oh, about like this.” He seemed to have little grasp of the power of the guns that surrounded him.
His less-than-experienced eye didn’t matter much this morning. The shooting was uniformly mediocre. One ensign, one of the green hands, missed every assigned range and distance.
McVay, hardly reassured, was reminded yet again of just how much work there was to do. Later that day, his tension turned to anger when a fire broke out belowdecks. His mood didn’t improve when he discovered that the blaze had been caused by some of the extra crew members, who had carelessly stacked suitcases against a smokestack.
The following day, the seas were calm. McVay’s outlook improved when he was able to push the Indy’s engines close to their limits, to an average speed of twenty-nine knots. The roar beneath decks in the engine rooms was like a tornado’s. The ship quaked with the violence of its spinning propellers.
In the years following her peacetime commissioning in 1932, it seemed that the ship that Charles Butler McVay now worried over and prayed for would never see any war action. But her fate, along with many of the lives now on board, changed on December 7, 1941.
Japan, which began its all-out war against China in 1937, was expanding its colonial empire in search of needed oil deposits and metals. When President Roosevelt stopped the export of U.S. resources in 1941, Japan had a choice. Its leaders could agree to American demands that it cease expansion into the Dutch West Indies and the Philippines. Or they could declare war.
The Indy was delivering supplies and troops to Johnston Island, several hundred miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, when Japanese pilots bombed the Pacific Fleet on that terrible Sunday. An urgent bulletin was beamed to the Indy; WE ARE AT WAR WITH JAPAN—THIS is OFFICIAL. In response, the ship threw everything that was flammable—including FDR’s stateroom furniture—overboard and steamed deep into the Pacific on an unsuccessful search-and-destroy mission directed at retreating Japanese forces. She then turned her attention to bombarding Japanese troops beached in the Aleutian Islands. This was followed by duty in the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea. For her valorous service she was awarded her first battle star, one of ten she would collect in the next four years, a laudable achievement of service.
By 1942, however, as the Japanese attempted to fight their way island-to-island from Asia to Hawaii, the commander in chief of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had told his superiors that after Pearl Harbor it would have six months to “run wild” over American forces. 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.
By 1943, the Allied plan for defeating the Japanese had evolved into two distinct approaches: naval commander in chief Admiral Chester Nimitz (with Spruance under his command) would sail with his forces west from Pearl Harbor and meet General Douglas MacArthur’s army marching toward the invasion of the Japanese-held Philippines.
Later that year, Admiral Spruance declared the Indy his flagship, the command center for the enormous resources of the Fifth Fleet. Spruance liked the Indy’s speed, and he liked her age. He reasoned that if his presence was needed in an emerging hot zone, she could be withdrawn from battle without disrupting the battle plan.
Over the course of the next two years, the Indy saw vicious fighting. At Tarawa, in November 1943, her crew spent long hourspulling the dead bodies of American troops aboard with boat hooks but suffered no casualties of their own. During the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the Indy, as the Fifth Fleet’s flagship, played a major role; in all, U.S. forces “splashed”—or downed—410 Japanese planes during this battle.)
The Indy continued to be a very lucky ship, emerging as one of the navy’s most proficient fighting machines. She evaded submarine attack (with help from accompanying destroyers), enemy battleship bombardment, and onshore fire. (She was once hit by a shore-launched shell but it failed to explode.) By the time Captain McVay took command in November 1944, the USS Indianapolis had earned eight battle stars. McVay took the ship to even greater heights of valor, as the war reached a feverish, homicidal pitch.
In contrast to the war in Europe, where even the Nazis observed cease-fires and flags of truce, the Pacific campaign had taken on a surreal quality. Japanese soldiers disemboweled themselves at the sight of approaching marines rather than be captured. This sense of desperation only increased as the U.S. invasion of the Japanese islands of Kyushu and its close neighbor, Honshu (where the capital of Tokyo is located), neared.