by Doug Stanton
The second crucial person to receive Gwinn’s second message was Vice Admiral Murray on Guam. Less than fifteen minutes later, he sent a dispatch to the command on the western Carolines—the island chain to which Peleliu belonged—that read: ORDER 2 DESTROYERS AT BEST SPEED … RESCUE 150 SURVIVORS IN LIFEBOATS. Murray, under whose jurisdiction the chilling prospect of rescue rested, was taking no chances. He had heeded Gwinn’s message and done what the lone pilot had requested Two ships would soon be rushing to the boys in the water.
As the rescue effort heated up on Guam, a navy PBM-5, an amphibious transport plane, was flying patrol from Saipan to Samar when, through a break in the cloud cover, the crew noticed a brilliant flash, as if re flected off a large bronze mirror. Looking down, they saw a large oil slick glinting below them. Radar reported another plane in the area, which they determined was friendly It was, in fact, Gwinn and his crew.
The PBM-5 emerged from the clouds, and the crew began dropping all of their survival gear, including their own life jackets and rafts. They reported large and small groups with sharks all around the perimeter. When they had nothing left to drop, they regained altitude and radioed Saipan and Leyte requesting permission to put down and pick up survivors. The request was denied.
Lieutenant Commander George Atteberry, in his Ventura bomber, call-named Gambler Leader, arrived at the wreckage site at 2:15 P.M., quickly joining Gwinn, who was glad for the company. He led Atteberry on a half-hour tour of the area, about a twenty-mile-wide stretch of ocean. Now they had to wait for a ship to pick up the boys, trying to reassure them in the meantime by continuing to circle overhead. By this point, Gwinn was definitely running out of fuel; Atteberry was forced to send him back to Peleliu. Gwinn, who had spent an emotional four hours circling the frantic boys in the water, was shaky and worried as he headed back to his base.
Atteberry had patrolled the area alone for a half hour when, to his surprise, the call numbers of another plane came over the radio. The plane belonged to Lieutenant Adrian Marks, a tall, slim, twenty-eight-year-old lawyer from Indiana who had been a navy flier and instructor for three years. Marks was part of the Catalina squadron that Atteberry had tried to raise two hours earlier back in Peleliu. Marks had been hunkered down in a sweltering Quonset hut, trying to decipher what appeared to be a garbled radio message. It read, in part: “Am circling life rafts.” It was from Gwinn, and upon reading it, Marks had jumped into action. He thought maybe a carrier pilot had been forced to ditch in the open sea.
Marks went immediately to the Catalinas’ HQ. He had just missed Atteberry but found out that he had been looking for a plane. Marks knew that the standby plane was already out on a mission. If he left, there would be no planes available to be dispatched in case of an emergency. He weighed the decision, decided this was an emergency, and fueled up his plane, the Playmate 2. He and his crew of nine aviators, including one copilot, two radiomen, and two bombardiers, loaded the mammoth plane with life rafts, parachute flares, dye markers, and shipwreck kits containing water and rations. Bigger than Atteberry’s Ventura bomber, the PBY-5A Catalina, known as a “Dumbo,” was a two-engine, high-wing plane built for hunting subs and landing in smooth water to pick up downed pilots. Landing in the rolling open ocean would be dicey, to say the least.
At 12:42, Marks had taken off from Peleliu, following the coordinates Gwinn had radioed from the wreckage sight. During the three-hour, 280-mile flight, a call came over his radio from one of the ships, a destroyer escort named the USS Cecil J. Doyle on patrol north of the Palau Islands. Its captain, Graham Claytor, asked after Marks’s mission. Upon discovering that Claytor had received no dispatch about the men in the ocean, Marks gave him the news.
As luck would have it, Claytor, about 200 miles from the Indy’s crew, decided to turn his ship around. He began steaming south at twenty-two and a half knots. Claytor did this without first radioing his command at Peleliu or asking for orders, a strict violation of his duties as a captain. He was, however, a confident man, with a distinguished record A lawyer in civilian life, he had been president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis before entering the navy in 1942. He was a man used to thinking for himself. At 2:35 P.M., he made contact with Atteberry. He informed him that he would be traveling at the best possible speed, but put his ETA at no earlier than sometime after midnight.
Meanwhile, CINCPAC, the naval command in Manila, began radioing all ships: BREAK RADIO SILENCE X REPORT YOUR POSITION. The purpose of this dispatch was to determine which ships were at large in the Philippine Sea. As the responses began flooding into HQ, the Indy’s was noticeably absent.
Then, in the midafternoon, the Philippine Sea Frontier, under Commodore Gillette’s command, finally got into the act. Having discovered that there were not just one but three ships overdue at Leyte, it sent this feeler out over the airwaves to the Marianas command at Guam: INDIANAPOLIS (CA 35) HAS NOT ARRIVED LEYTE X ADVISE.
Guam responded: INDIANAPOLIS (CA 35) DEPARTED GUAM 2300Z 27 JULY IN ACCORDANCE OUR 280032Z OF JULY XXX.26
This was unwelcome news for the Frontier. Captain Granum, the operations officer, aware that the Indy had been scheduled to meet Admiral McCormick at Leyte for gunnery practice, sent an urgent cable: HAS THE INDIANAPOLIS REPORTED TO YOU?
Rear Admiral McCormick had just returned to his anchorage in San Pedro Bay after finishing the training tour off the Leyte coast—maneuvers in which the Indy should have participated. When asked by Granum if the Indy had reported to him, McCormick cabled back a chilling one-word reply: NEGATIVE.
Lieutenant Adrian Marks reached the scene of the survivors at 3:20 P.M., and what he found astounded him. Lieutenant Atteberry informed Marks that there were a great many people scattered over a wide area. He said not to drop any lifesaving equipment until he had made a full tour, which Marks quickly did. Both pilots then decided (as had Gwinn earlier) to steer away from the people clinging to rafts and to concentrate on those held up solely by vests. Thirty minutes after he arrived, Marks began bombing the boys with his provisions.
At about the same time, the destroyers Ralph Talbot (DD 390) and Madison (DD 425) received orders to cut short their patrols near the island of Ulithi and head directly to the rescue site. Their ETA: twelve hours from the present; sometime early Friday morning.
Marks knew the situation was dire. From his recon altitude of a mere 25 feet, he had a clear view to the deep green sea and the hundreds of sharks circling the men. Night, which he knew was the sharks’ normal feeding period, was approaching.27 One of Marks’s crewmen watched as a shark attacked one of the men and dragged him under. As Marks himself witnessed more attacks, his anxiety grew. It looked to him as if the survivors were so weak they couldn’t even begin to fight back.
Speed was clearly of the essence. Marks skipped the usual communication protocol, sending an uncoded message back to Peleliu: BETWEEN 100 AND 200 SURVIVORS AT POSITION REPORTED X NEED ALL SURVIVAL EQUIPMENT AVAILABLE WHILE DAYLIGHT HOLDS X SURVIVORS MANY WITHOUT RAFTS … .
In the same message, Marks announced a bold decision: WILL ATTEMPT OPEN SEA LANDING. He had never tried to land in the open sea before; all previous attempts by members of his squadron had ended in disaster. In fact, his squadron was now under standing orders that prohibited making them.
A few minutes later, he yelled into his crew’s headsets, checking to make sure they agreed with his decision to attempt a landing. They gave him the thumbs-up. The team was going in. He cut the throttle, dramatically lifting the nose of the lumbering Catalina and setting her down in a power stall. Hitting the top of one wave, the Playmate 2 was knocked back skyward fifteen feet. Then it came down even harder. At any moment, the plane could blow apart. On the third huge blow she settled down like a hen over an egg, her seams and rivets popping and seawater streaming in. Marks’s crew shoved cotton and pencils into the holes in the metal skin of the plane. The radio compartment, located midplane, was taking on water, and the radioman began bailing
immediately, starting a pace that would keep all the crew busy at a rate of ten to twelve buckets an hour. The propellers were still spinning, and it was essential that they didn’t dig into the sea, or they would flip the plane.
Marks’s copilot, Ensign Irving Lefkovitz, moved to the side hatch and began preparing for rescue. Marks himself had no idea where to steer the plane; the whole craft pitched up and down as if on a carnival ride surrounded by rising and falling walls of water. Circling above, Atteberry became Marks’s eyes in the fading twilight. The race was on to collect as many of the survivors as possible before total darkness consumed them all.
Marks had landed among the group led by Dr. Haynes. Their numbers had dwindled from the previous day’s 110 to about 95, the group having lost at least 5 more boys this afternoon. All of them were yelling at the plane, beckoning the pilot to come closer. Marks gunned the twin engines throbbing atop the high wings and powered the Dumbo through the seas, searching out those near death. It was tricky. The normal taxiing speed of the Playmate 2 was thirty-five miles per hour, too fast to pick up any men. Marks hit upon a solution: as he gunned the motors, another crew member raised and lowered the landing gear, using them as brakes. It worked.
Earlier in the day, upon learning of Gwinn’s position coordinates, Captain Granum, back in Tolosa, had kicked the rescue effort into high gear. He had confirmed the Indy’s departure from Guam and concluded that the latitude and longitude reading corresponded to ones she had probably passed over on her trip to Leyte. That she was almost certainly the missing ship in question was becoming clearer by the minute. With the approval of Commodore Gillette, Granum issued urgent orders dispatching several patrol vessels and planes to the rescue area. He was now coordinating the rescue operation with the efforts of the Peleliu search and recon command, from which Gwinn, Atteberry, and Marks had flown.
At the same time, the commander of the nearby western Carolines, under the jurisdiction of Vice Admiral Murray on Guam, ordered all ships and planes in the vicinity to come to the rescuers’ aid.
Shortly before Marks landed in the late afternoon, two B-17 Flying Fortresses from the Third Emergency Rescue Squadron of the Army Air Forces in Peleliu had arrived at the rescue site. The crew aboard these long-rangebombers, who had heard Gwinn’s earlier messages, unloaded seventeen life rafts, two twenty-six-foot wooden lifeboats, numerous life vests, and three dozen five-man rubber life rafts to clusters of boys in Haynes’s group.
Around 7:15 P.M. another PBY, the Playmate 1, also landed. This plane was piloted by Lieutenant Richard Alcorn of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He set down two miles north of Marks and immediately began cruising through the surf, passing dead bodies and floating debris, the ship’s detritus that had been borne along with the boys. To aid his search in the dusk, Alcorn turned on his plane’s light. Mistaking it for survival flares, other planes arriving on-scene began dropping supplies on him. Despite the mishap, Alcorn was actually able to pick up one survivor before he realized that he could do no good in the dark; he had landed too far afield from most of the survivors anyway.28 Alcorn quickly realized, however, that he could be of use by operating his plane’s lights as beacons to guide circling aircraft and rescue ships to the scene. He would spend a total of more than fifty-one hours in the area, returning to Peleliu only to refuel.
Haynes, exasperated that his boys were still dying with rescue so imminent, knew he had to do something. After Marks had dropped his rafts, Haynes paddled over to one of them, but found himself too weak to pull the toggle that would self-inflate the craft. In the end, it had taken three boys to release the cord. They elected Haynes to be the first to board the safe, dry refuge, an honor he at first refused, but they were insistent. After agreeing, he had to remove his bulky life vest, a torturous process. Free from the thing for the first time in nearly four days, his shoulders rubbed raw and bleeding, he was hoisted up by the boys and flopped over the rail. Immediately, he started looking for water on board—he had to find water. But he found none.
He managed to help lift ten more boys into the raft, and a remaining twenty had to hang on to the lifelines around it. Soon, however, the afternoon heat grew unbearable and the boys in the raft jumped back into the cooler sea. Their core body temperatures were now dipping below eighty-five degrees, at which point most major motor functions stumble and cease. That they were functioning at all was a miracle, but looking at them, Haynes thought they all looked like cadavers. The condition of the men was so acute, he knew that they couldn’t wait much longer for water.
His suffering now seemed natural. He felt close to God, as if he were about to be lifted up, pinched between two massive, invisible fingers reaching down from the sky. With great mental strain, he tried to operate a desalinating pump stored in the raft but found he had trouble even reading the directions. Yet he didn’t give up. For several long hours he pumped what he thought was potable water, only to discover that each batch was poisoned with the tang of the sea. He cursed his increasing stupidity until, in a fit of despair that had been steadily building, he pitched the pump overboard. For the first time since the sinking, he fell to pieces.
He started weeping. He wept angrily over his failure to find water for his boys, over his inability to keep so many from dying. He felt ashamed that he couldn’t do more for them, but he knew he was doing the best he could. And that was all he could ask of himself anymore.
Circling overhead, Lieutenant Commander Atteberry began directing Marks toward microgroups of hard-struggling survivors. The two planes were in constant radio contact as Marks taxied the plane through the swells. Often all he could see were walls of water and then a glimpse of the next wave.
The Playmate 2’s side hatch was open, and a Jacob’s ladder (a series of steps strung on rope) hung from its lip. A crewman stood on the rungs as Marks handled the plane.
“Okay, Dumbo, come right,” radioed Atteberry. “Steady as you go … left, a little bit.”
“Okay, we see him!” Marks radioed back. Fearing he might run over a survivor, Marks cut the engines. The crewman on the ladder reached down and grabbed hold of a boy who was floating face down, gripping his arms and yanking. What he pulled from the sea nauseated him: it was only the upper half of a body. They repeated the taxing process; often, when the crewmen grabbed hold of the swimmer, they found the boy was too weak to hang on.
Adrian Marks was asking who these men were. He pulled aboard one boy, a petty officer, who told him they were from the Indianapolis.
Marks now had the information that for the past five hours had eluded the command back in Peleliu and Guam. But he was too busy to code a message communicating the ship’s identity to the outside world. He aimed the plane toward the next cluster of men. The world could wait for the news; he had work to do.
As Marks’s plane floated past, picking up survivors, Haynes decided to make a try for it. Dr. Haynes didn’t really swim as much as claw his way over the water about sixty feet. By the time he reached the rope ladder hanging from Marks’s hatch, he was nearly dead.
But he didn’t get on the plane. Looking up through blurry eyes, he called out for a beaker of water and a life vest. He pulled the vest on, loosely tying it. Then, pushing the beaker ahead of him as he paddled, he finally made it back to the raft. After downing a small cup, he poured out an allotment and then pointed to a boy. “This is for him,” he croaked, his throat parched, before handing the glass down the line of waiting hands. When the glass came back, Haynes refilled it. And repeated the process, choosing a new boy to drink. The sight of the water trembling in the glass was excruciating for Haynes; it was all he could do to prevent himself from gulping it all down himself. And by the looks of the sunken, vacant eyes of the rest of the boys, he knew that they were all exercising incredible restraint. As he continued serving them, he felt a blooming sense of pride—not one of these sailors was cheating by drinking out of turn. Haynes would forever marvel over this moment.
Lifting the boys aboard the Playmate 2, Marks
discovered that many had swollen, broken legs and arms; boarding was a hideously painful process. At times, as Marks and his crew gave a heave-ho, the flesh of the latest retrieval remained in their hands. The seawater had eaten away all the body hair from some, who came aboard whimpering, pale, and smooth-skinned as newts. Marks and his crew were horrified.
Soon Marks had picked up some thirty boys and watched as they were carefully arranged on the deck of the Catalina. They thrashed uncontrollably in their delirium, kicking holes in the fuselage. Within a matter of a few hours, the entire water supply would be exhausted. Each boy was forced to wait several minutes between refilling his cup in order not to upset his shrunken stomach. After two drinks, which totaled just one cup of water, the boys fell into a deep sleep, broken only by requests for more fluid.
Ed Brown and Bob Gause were hauled aboard, sandwiched between several dozen other boys. Brown had spent the day floating and staring at the oblivion of the sky, hypnotized by what he saw there. It was a Western Union telegram that stretched from horizon to horizon, and it read: DEAR MRS. BROWN, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON IS MISSING IN ACTION. Now he lay on the plane’s deck, overjoyed, even as his rescuers stepped and walked over him.
In his exhaustion, Bob Gause was sitting in several inches of water, remarking that it must really be raining like hell for the inside of the plane to be this wet.