by Doug Stanton
“Oh, shit,” he said. And then he sadly tossed them away.
Back on Leyte, the port director’s office noted once again that the Indianapolis had failed to arrive. Once again, she was dutifully marked as overdue. The thinking in the office was that she would reach the harbor the next day, Thursday, August 2.
On the island of Tinian, B-29s were taking off continually, loaded with thousands of pounds of bombs. During the raids, a new plane lifted off every few seconds. The sky over Japan was raining bombs.
In an air-conditioned bunker on Tinian, a team of weapons specialists had gathered, and among them was Captain James Nolan. He and the other experts were huddled in the specially built bunker to assemble the pieces of Little Boy. Around this same time, the flight crews of the 509th Composite Group, led by Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbets, were practicing secret dummy bombing runs over Japan. Tibbets would eventually drop Little Boy from his B-29 Enola Gay on Hiroshima.
Nobody thought to miss McVay and his boys.
PART THREE
RESCUE
CHAPTER NINE
Dead Drift
Captain McVay was like a father to our group. He kept us calm.
He kept saying, “We are going to be rescued.” And we just
figured, “Well, somebody’s gonna find us one of these days!”
—JOHN SPINELLI, seaman second-class, USS Indianapolis
DAYS FOUR AND FIVE
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2-FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1945
Something had gone wrong with the sock again. Lieutenant Chuck Gwinn wondered if he should land the bomber and fix it before getting airborne again. Or should he push ahead on his patrol sector, hoping for the best as he navigated by the seat of his pants, by dead reckoning? Gwinn decided to land. Better safe than sorry.
He banked the bomber back over the jungle scrub of Peleliu and brought the big plane down. A rancher’s son from San Martin, California, Gwinn was in his third year of service in the navy. With him this morning was a crew of four naval aviators: copilot Lieutenant Warren Colwell; chief radioman William Hartman, and two bombardiers, Herbert Hickman and Joseph Johnson. Gwinn, twenty-four, had logged over 1,000 flight hours as a navy test pilot. Normally, he and his crew flew a plane affectionately called the Miss Deal; this morning, they were out of luck—the Miss Deal was undergoing repairs. Instead they were flying a plane with the inelegant moniker PV-1 49-538, call-named Gambler 17.
No problem. This flight was supposed to be routine. Piece of cake.
The plane, like the Miss Deal, was a Lockheed Ventura PV-1 bomber, with a split rear tail, two engines, and a range of 950 miles. On board, she carried two forward-firing .50 caliber machine guns and six .30 caliber guns on flex mounts; her bomb bay could hold 2,500 pounds of bombs. Her job was searching out and bombing Japanese submarines, but Gwinn, the lowest-ranked pilot in his unit, had yet to be tested. Although he had patrolled miles and miles of the Pacific between Peleliu Island and the Japanese homeland, he and his flyboys still had not seen any action. Nothing.
Life on Peleliu was hell on earth. The island was a no-man’s -land, 500 miles from the coast of the Philippines, and 500 miles north of New Guinea. Daily temperatures reached 120 degrees, and stayed there. The humidity was drenching. The island, scene of one of the last major battles before the U.S. Marines’ decisive victories at Iwo Jima and then Okinawa, had come at a great cost: about 10,000 marine casualties. But the entire garrison of 10,500 entrenched Japanese soldiers had been wiped out. A bloodbath.
On the morning of August 2, this hotly contested piece of real estate was home to the Peleliu unit of the search and reconnaissance command, which fell under the supervision of Vice Admiral George Murray, commander of Marianas naval operations back in Guam. This was the same command from which the Indy had sailed six days earlier, the command that had given McVay his sailing orders. Reporting to Vice Admiral Murray was Captain Oliver Naquin, the surface operations officer who had neglected to tell McVay about Japanese subs along the Peddie route, part of which Gwinn would soon be patrolling.
At this morning’s flight briefing, Gwinn had learned that he might see American convoys passing in his patrol sector, which ran north from Peleliu for 500 miles. Other than that, the coast should be clear. He was to keep his eyes peeled for enemy subs cruising, and to sink any he spotted with a dive-bombing run. His other task was to test out a new antenna used in loran navigation, an innovation that had made the bombing of Japan an easier task. The long whip antenna was attached to the rear flank of the plane and steadied with the weighted sock, which kept it from slipping around. The problem was, the sock wouldn’t stay on.
By 9 A.M., Gwinn had a new one secured, and forty-five minutes after his original departure, he taxied down the runway and roared the bomber north, over the Philippine Sea.
At about the same time, 700 miles to the west of Gwinn, on the island of Leyte, Lieutenant William A. Green received a report of the nonarrival of the USS Indianapolis from the naval operating base. Green’s job in the Tolosa office of the Philippine Sea Frontier was to monitor incoming dispatches regarding shipping traffic, and in the case of emergency, take up the matter with his superior, Captain Alfred Granum, the operations officer who maintained the office’s plotting board, and who had registered the Indianapolis as “arrived” in Leyte two days earlier.
This was the second nonarrival report Green had received; a similar report had come in on Wednesday. Now he requested permission from the Plotting Section to remove the ship entirely from the plotting board in Tolosa. Once more, it was simply assumed that the Indy had been diverted to other action.
Gwinn leveled the PV-1 off at 3,000 feet, the prescribed altitude for patrol and recon. The sea below him blinked like shattered stained glass. Scanning the horizon, he saw nothing.
And then, the new sock on the whip antenna fell off. This time, Gwinn kept flying. He would make do, although his radioman informed him that long-range communications would be rendered inoperative. Dead reckoning was a tricky navigational procedure way out here, and Gwinn didn’t want to run out of fuel; he would be forced to ditch. And there were sharks in these waters.
The antenna was whipping back and forth against the aluminum side of the bomber. At 11 A.M., Gwinn decided to try and fix it by jerry-rigging some kind of new weight. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing; he was making this up as he went along. Bombardier Joe Johnson stood aft, looking out a window, trying to figure out what they could do to keep the antenna from beating the plane up any further. Inching out of his pilot’s seat in the cramped cockpit, Gwinn made his way down the narrow passage of the plane toward the rear, ready to give Johnson a hand. Through the window in the PV-1’s floor, he gazed at the endless miles of blue sea.
And then he spotted something. It looked like an oil slick, and it probably meant one thing: there was a Japanese submarine nearby, perhaps disabled by an earlier attack. If an American ship had been downed, Gwinn reasoned, he would have read about it in a report.
He knelt down on the cold floor of the plane, the engines thundering in his ears. Could it be true? Would they see action? He jumped up and headed back to the cockpit. It sure as hell looked like the slick of a leaking sub. Gwinn was ecstatic.
He changed the course of the plane and followed the slick to the north, beginning preparations for a bombing run. The bomb bay doors opened and he ordered the bombs, snug in racks and hanging ready to be “pickled,” or dropped. He next ordered the depth charges readied. The charges looked like fifty-five-gallon drums and were loaded with the explosive Torpex. They could be preset to detonate at different depths and then dropped out the bomb bay doors.
At 11:20, Gwinn lowered the PV-1 and started cruising at 200 miles per hour up the oil slick. Over the intercom, he told his bombardier to get ready. After flying about five miles, cruising at 900 feet, he spotted something in the water.
But what the hell was it? Gwinn was confused. As it came into focus, he realized it was a group of figures, and they seeme
d to be waving—it looked like they were slapping at the water, as if trying to attract attention. Enemy? Friendly? He had to think fast.
He yelled over the intercom to abort the bombing run and banked for another pass.
Gwinn took the plane down to 300 feet and roared up the slick. He quickly counted about thirty heads. He took a dead reckoning fix because the loran antenna was inoperable—he needed some kind of navigational point to report what he was finding.
A patrol plane, Gwinn’s PV-1 was loaded with emergency life rafts, beakers of water, life vests, and other lifesaving gear. As the plane passed low, Gwinn’s crew dropped a raft, vests, and a sonobuoy out the rear side hatch. Aiming the falling equipment was tricky—he feared hitting the floating bodies. The blackened shapes were now waving frantically as he passed over. He couldn’t see their faces clearly—it looked like they were covered with … oil? As he flew, he saw others who were clinging to life rafts.
The sonobuoy was a one-way floating microphone used in anti-submarine warfare. Gwinn hoped that whoever it was he’d spotted would swim over to it and yell out a name, an identity—anything. So far, no sound was coming back.
In an instant, his mission had flipped from search and destroy to search and rescue. At 11:25, he radioed a message to the search and reconnaissance headquarters on Peleliu; it read: SIGHTED 30 SURVIVORS 011-30 NORTH 133-30 EAST—the numbers indicating the latitude and longitude of the sighting.
This was the first report of the USS Indianapolis disaster.
But who were these people in the water? The idea that they were U.S. boys seemed out of the question; Gwinn was certain that he would have been briefed if an American ship had been sunk. He counted close to seventy more heads, and then after another minute, spotted at least fifty more. The numbers indicated that these weren’t survivors from a sub, which carried crews of 100 or less. These boys had to have come from a major ship.
Gwinn wagged his wings—I see you—and skimmed low overhead, now looking down at bodies so closely crowded around the rafts that it was hard to estimate their number. He could make out lone swimmers only if they kicked the water and raised a splash. When they stopped kicking, they melted into the blue of the sea, as if swallowed by it. The pilot, whose vision was somewhat occluded, could ultimately make out four loosely scattered groups: the first contained about thirty people and was approximately six miles from the second group of about forty; the third group, two miles from the second, looked like about fifty-five to seventy-five people. There was also, Gwinn now saw, a fourth group, which numbered around twenty-five to thirty-five.
Gwinn, in fact, had just spotted parts of both Dr. Haynes’s group of swimmers and the large raft group under the command of Ensign Harlan Twible, who was still towing the unconscious officer Richard Redmayne by his life vest straps. Over the course of the night, both groups had been slowly breaking up into scattered clusters. Gwinn just missed Captain McVay and his small band of nine men and four rafts. Nor did he see McCoy and his gang of four. These two groups had drifted about eight miles ahead of the Haynes and Twible groups.
In the last fourteen hours, McCoy had drifted some twenty-three miles, for an astonishing total of about one hundred and five miles since the sinking three days earlier. McVay had drifted another sixteen miles in the same period for a total of one hundred and three. Haynes and Twible had each covered about seventeen miles and drifted roughly ninety-seven and eighty-seven miles, respectively, in all. As Gwinn circled, they continued their swift momentum, driven by the current and the wind.
Dr. Haynes had drifted into another world, far from the realization of what was happening. When he looked up to find life vests tumbling out of the sky, it seemed to him the heavens were raining gear. When he saw them crash about 100 feet away, he felt too weak to swim to them. But, with painfully slow strokes, his neck bleeding as his own waterlogged vest chafed against it, he somehow managed to cover the distance. He grabbed a few vests, hugged them tight, and then steeled himself for the return trip to his boys.
Minute by minute, he felt his mind clearing as the glinting plane circled. He counted about 100 boys left in his scattered group, which had numbered at least 400 three days earlier. At this point, because of the failing vests, eachboy was sunk up to his chin, treading furiously just to keep his nose above the water. Even as the PV-1 circled overhead, some boys gave up and drowned.
Bob Gause waved his hat as if it were a signal flag. Never much of a churchgoer, he’d nonetheless spent the last twenty-four hours praying with all his heart, praying harder than he ever imagined possible. It seemed it had paid off. All around him, boys started singing out of tune, while others became so excited they started flapping their arms, often drowning themselves in the process.
Jack Cassidy, covered with saltwater ulcers, was wearing three life vests but he was still sinking into the heaving sea. His eyes were so matted with fuel oil that he had to pry them open with bleeding fingers to look up and see the plane, and the dye bombs that were now being released from its belly.
As the orange dye spread around them and marked the boys’ positions, some of them began to sing even louder, shouting that the plane was an angel. They truly believed saviors were visiting from heaven.24 Haynes, however, noticed with alarm that, in the commotion, his dwindling group was continuing to drift apart. Operating on nothing but a vapor of adrenaline, he tore open the pockets of the new life vests, looking for the precious cans of water he guessed would be stored there. But every one of the cans had exploded on impact when they hit the ocean. The survivors, Haynes knew, might live only a few more hours without water. He watched anxiously as some of the boys made their way to the rubber life raft that the plane had dropped. Soon the raft was crammed with as many as twenty men, with another twenty or so clinging desperately to the lifelines.
Meanwhile, Gwinn was trying to get a loran fix, which would offer a more accurate position than the dead reckoning fix had given. He struggled to the back of the plane, grabbed hold of the antenna wire, and reeled it in. Then he fitted it with a piece of rubber hose, hoping that its weight would be enough to prevent the antenna from tearing loose.
The radioman announced that he had, in fact, just gotten a reading. Now Gwinn had a position to report. He was in business. He then sent a second message. More urgent than the first he had sent an hour and twenty minutes earlier, it read: SEND RESCUE SHIP 11-54 N 133-47 E 150 SURVIVORS IN LIFEBOAT AND JACKETS.
With this new message, the otherwise normal day back at the Peleliu search and recon command suddenly unraveled. The chaos quickly spread throughout the Philippine Sea Frontier, and finally to the Marianas command in Guam.
The search and recon unit had already responded to the first message, thanks to the quick thinking of one of its officers, Lieutenant Commander George Atteberry, Gwinn’s superior officer. At 12:05 P. M ., when Atteberry had received Gwinn’s message, he thought his pilot had stumbled upon the survivors of a plane wreck. He knew he had to act quickly. Worried for Gwinn’s safety, Atteberry quickly calculated that the pilot had enough fuel for another four hours of flight before he would be forced to turn around and head back to Peleliu. Atteberry wanted to make sure, therefore, that the survivors we recovered by some kind of air support after Gwinn’s departure.
And so he decisively took matters into his own hands. From his Quonset hut office he called across the island to the duty station handling the dispatch and command of a squadron of amphibious planes called PBY-5As, or Catalinas. These planes were designed with floats to land on water, and their crews specialized in locating survivors of ship and air disasters. Atteberry informed the duty officer that he wanted a Catalina to leave immediately in order to relieve Gwinn by 3:30 P.M. But the duty officer wanted official confirmation of the spotting of survivors. Unfortunately, there was none; no commanding officers above Atteberry’s rank of lieutenant commander knew about the accident yet. Events had unfolded so quickly that Atteberry had not had time to transmit a message to Vice Admiral Murray,
commander of the Marianas, in Guam, whose jurisdiction included the area in which the survivors were drifting.
Frustrated, Atteberry hung up and decided to drive over to the duty station and hash it out in person. Once there, however, he realized that the duty officer would never be able to get a Catalina rescue plane up in time to meet Gwinn’s turnaround time. He quickly drove back to his office and ordered up a Ventura bomber from his own squadron. The plane was fueled, and Atteberry and a crew of four lifted off the island.
The time was 12:44.
A minute later, Gwinn’s second, more urgent message requesting that a rescue ship be dispatched to his search area arrived at Atteberry’s command on Peleliu. Because he was in the air, Atteberry did not intercept this transmission, but he would be arriving at the rescue scene in an hour and a half in any case.
Two important people did receive it, however, and it immediately swung the effort into hyperdrive. One of the largest sea rescues in the history of the U. S. Navy was under way.25
First to receive the message was the surface operations officer for the Philippine Sea Frontier, Captain Alfred Granum. He was surprised to hear news of so many downed soldiers or sailors. He had no idea to what command they belonged—he had no knowledge of any ship under the Philippine Sea Frontier jurisdiction that was overdue. It was his superior officer, Commodore Norman Gillette, the acting commander of the Philippine Sea Frontier, who three days earlier had received notice of an SOS from the Indy and then had ostensibly recalled the tugboats dispatched to the sinking site.
Curious, and more than a little concerned, Granum called down to Lieutenant Stewart Gibson, the port director operations officer at Tacloban. (Gibson, two days earlier, acting per the navy directive 10CL-45, had ignored the Indy’s nonarrival in Leyte.) Granum then contacted Lieutenant William A. Green, the officer in the Philippine Sea Frontier command at Tolosa, who that morning had requested permission from Granum’s office to remove the Indy from the Tolosa plotting board. Granum instructed Green to leave it exactly where it stood on the board; they had received reports that there were men in the water.