by Doug Stanton
Moments later, scanning the shore with his binoculars, McCoy followed the wooden crate and canister as they were transferred by another crane to a waiting flatbed truck. The cargo was quickly covered with a tarp, and the truck picked its way carefully over the jungle track toward a staging area called North Field.
Her cargo unloaded, the Indy could now return to her life as a regular fighting ship preparing for the seemingly distant invasion of Japan.
Tinian lay in what was now called the backwater of the war. Tokyo, on the Japanese island of Honshu, was 1,600 miles to the north. Everything north of an imaginary line drawn across the Philippine Sea between Tinian and Leyte, 1,500 miles west of Tinian, was considered the forward area, or war zone. Iwo Jima and Okinawa lay in this area, but they had been secured and were held by occupying U.S. troops; the sea around them, however, was still patrolled by Japanese submarines.
The transition from backwater to war zone was murky, and it was difficult to say exactly when a ship might sail from relative security into imminent danger. Japanese submarines did not pay attention to imaginary lines of safety.
As the unloading of the bomb was taking place, new orders for the Indy had arrived through the radios aboard ship and were decrypted by the code room. The source was the advance headquarters of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, otherwise known as CINCPAC, which fell under the direction of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. 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, or “road map,” to Leyte. After arriving in Leyte, he was to report by coded message to Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, commander of Task Force 95, announcing his arrival and readiness to rejoin the Pacific Fleet. Oldendorf, one of the war’s most decorated officers, who had gained fame at the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf, was aboard his cruiser, the Omaha, and patrolling the coast of Japan, 1,500 miles to the north of Leyte, in preparation for the invasion.
But before joining Oldendorf and his warships, the Indy would engage in seventeen days of drills and gunnery practice and General Quarters. McVay, now free of his extra passengers and duties, would finally be able to train his men.
In Leyte, McVay was to report to Rear Admiral Lynde McCormick, Oldendorf’s immediate subordinate officer, who was anchored there aboard the battleship Idaho. McCormick, an expert in logistics and a recipient of two gold stars and the Legion of Merit, would lead McVay and his crew in preparatory exercises.
Six hours after arriving at Tinian, the Indy pulled anchor, and a smiling McVay, pleased with his new plans, pointed the ship to sea, south for Guam.
As McVay sailed this night, however, the well-laid plan was already going awry.
Copies of the orders directing him to report to Oldendorf and then McCormick were radioed to eight different commands: Fleet Admiral Nimitz and Admiral Spruance, both on Guam; the port directors on Tinian and Guam; the commander of the Mariana Islands, Vice Admiral George Murray, who was also in charge of overall naval operations in Guam and Tinian; Rear Admiral McCormick; Vice Admiral Oldendorf; and CINCPAC at Pearl Harbor. This broadcast was standard procedure, intended to keep relevant parties abreast of events.
However, when a member of McCormick’s radio staff aboard the Idaho received the message, he decoded the name of the addressee incorrectly. Since the message appeared to be addressed not to McCormick but to another commander, the staff member stopped deciphering it altogether. He never decoded the body of the message, which described McVay’s arrival, and which had been marked “restricted,” meaning it was not a “classified” or high-priority communication.
As a result, Rear Admiral McCormick did not know to expect the arrival of the USS Indianapolis at Leyte.
The other addressees, including Oldendorf, received the information more or less as planned. But the message didn’t include the date of the Indy’s arrival. That would be communicated in a future dispatch.
En route to Guam, Captain McVay was able to run his crew through anti-aircraft drills, which went well. He then readied himself to report to the port director for his new routing orders. Nearing the island on July 27, the Indy paused at the mouth of Apra Harbor. The ship waited as a tugboat pulled back on long cables attached to an underwater net, meant to keep enemy subs from entering, strung across the harbor’s mouth. Another tug circled behind the Indy, dragging in her wake sonar gear to make certain no submarines were following the ship. Once inside the harbor, the tugs pulled the net closed and the Indy anchored. While fuel tankers and supply ships pulled alongside the Indy, a motor launch arrived and McVay was ferried to shore.
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.
Currently anchored in the harbor were twenty ships of various classes—cruisers, destroyers, and transports. Also dotting the green lagoon were vessels damaged during kamikaze attacks and waiting for repair in the island’s dry docks. One disabled ship had been commandeered as a floating barracks for troops.
Guam had about it a sunny, makeshift feel. At its palm-fringed beach, flyboys sat at wooden tables drinking large, green cans of beer, which had been cooled to icy perfection by flying them around in an airplane for three hours at freezing altitudes.
Testing his land legs, McVay requested a driver and a jeep—officers never drove themselves. Soon he was being whisked along a freshly paved road that hugged the shore, past thatch huts that housed the island’s few remaining natives. Continuing on, the captain breezed through the bombed remains of the island, which had been flattened during the U.S. invasion. The road climbed above the sea, and McVay’s jeep stopped atop what was called CINCPAC Hill, command center for the Pacific war theater.
CINCPAC headquarters was a two-story wooden building fronted by a flagpole and surrounded by flower beds. It overlooked the sea and harbor, and reclined against a hillside jungle. Circling the HQ were metal Quonset huts painted green; they housed the offices of Admiral Nimitz’s support staff.
At HQ, McVay met Nimitz’s assistant chief of staff, Commodore James Carter. Straight off, he asked if he and his ship could undertake gunnery training at Guam rather than wait for his scheduled session at Leyte. McVay was feeling the pressure of time; he wished to sharpen his crew immediately. Carter informed McVay that training was no longer offered at Guam, but that he could begin it at Leyte.
McVay was frustrated. At this rate, he remarked, his boys would probably receive their training off the coast of Tokyo, during the invasion. After the rather brief and unsatisfying meeting, he joined Admiral Spruance for lunch in the officers’ mess, in one of the Quonset huts. McVay had not seen Spruance since the kamikaze attack off Okinawa nearly four months earlier. Spruance had left the wounded ship promptly to continue overseeing the naval bombardment from the deck of the USS New Mexico, which had become his temporary flagship.
Spruance was relaxed about the war’s present state of affairs but reticent to talk details. He disclosed only that for the moment, the invasion plans were progressing smoothly. He and his staff were preparing for the year’s end assault on Kyushu, which they hoped would result in the surrender of Japan.7
Essentially, there were two battle plans being waged to win the war at this time. The first involved the deployment of an estimated 1 million American troops to the shores of Japan. The second, the top-secret Operation Centerboard, consisted of dropping the bomb, the exact outcome of which was uncertain.
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 M
anhattan 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.) General MacArthur, commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific theater, would only be informed by the first of August. Throughout its development, the Manhattan Project had been kept in the shadows of the larger invasion plans, which were given the code names Olympic and Coronet.
As they ate, the admiral noticed the captain’s concern about getting his men readied, and he attempted to reassure McVay. He told him that there was no need to hurry the training exercises at Leyte. Spruance added that he might send for the ship at some point during the sessions to pick up part of his flag staff in Manila, north of Leyte in the Philippines. He himself planned to come back aboard in the fall and then meet with Vice Admiral Oldendorf off the coast of Japan in preparation for the invasion.
After lunch, McVay was driven back down the hill to the port director’s office on Apra Harbor. The building, blazingly hot in the tropical sun, sat twenty feet from the water’s edge. Inside, the busy office was feebly cooled by electric fans hanging from the wall. It was filled with some fifteen enlisted men and officers answering telephones and struggling under a barrage of incoming routing orders and coded dispatches. The office was a clearinghouse for forwarded orders coming from CINCPAC HQ, where McVay had just had lunch, to the island’s naval base, which handled the actual implementation of the CINCPAC directives.
McVay exchanged pleasantries with one of the convoy routing officers under the command of Lieutenant Joseph Waldron. In the past ten months, the office had routed an estimated 5,000 ships, a heady pace under any circumstances. Routing orders, a ship’s road map, directed her along specific, approved ocean routes. McVay’s seemed simple enough. He told the officer that he wanted to arrive off Leyte in the dawn hours to practice anti-aircraft firing. (Low-light conditions would make it easier to see the tracer rounds and judge the accuracy of the gun crews’ shooting.)
McVay was told that if he left the next day, Saturday, July 28, he could arrive on the morning of Monday, July 30, assuming he maintained an average speed of 25 knots (about 29 mph). McVay considered it, but was concerned about the state of his ship’s engines after the punishing high-speed run from San Francisco. He didn’t want to push his luck. So the two men agreed that the ship should aim to arrive off Leyte on Tuesday morning. That was doable if she maintained a slower speed of 15.7 knots. McVay was agreeable to this pace, which was the SOA, or Standard Speed of Advance.
He was then instructed to follow what was known as the Peddie convoy route, which ran from Guam to Leyte. A journey of 1,300 miles, it had been used throughout the three and a half years of the Pacific campaign and was considered a routine transit.
McVay and the Indianapolis were about to sail from the Marianas Sea Frontier into the Philippine Sea Frontier, and it was like passing between two different worlds. A ship moved from one frontier to another by crossing the Chop, a boundary marked by the 130-degree line of longitude. Clear as this delineation was, there was a complicating factor: communications in this area were often confused by a political battle between Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, who were locked in a struggle to control the navy. MacArthur, in charge of the Seventh Fleet, wanted to unite it with the army. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, wanted to remain autonomous. In the end, Nimitz had been given control of the entire Pacific naval operation, but friction between the two military titans still existed. Information about a ship’s whereabouts, or other crucial facts, sometimes got lost in the fallout. This could mean trouble for the Indianapolis, which sometimes relied on the presence of carefully timed escorts to protect her from enemy submarines and spirit her out of danger.
The Indy had no sonar gear; detecting subs was not her job. The task of hunting enemy subs was left to destroyers, which bombed them with fifty-five-gallon drums of a highly explosive gel called Torpex. The depth charges, or “ash cans,” as they were called, generally did not blow up a sub—they usually weren’t accurate enough—but rather surrounded it in clouds of sonic concussions, which succeeded in shaking the sub until it sank.
When, in the course of the talk, McVay requested an escort for his crossing to Leyte, Lieutenant Waldron, the ranking convoy routing officer (who by this point had joined the meeting) picked up the phone. He placed a call to the office of Captain Oliver Naquin, surface operations officer. Waldron inquired of the officer on duty whether there was an escort leaving for Leyte, with whom the Indianapolis might tag along. Waldron was told that none was necessary, and that all battle-ready destroyers were already deployed in assisting the continuing B-29 raids on Japan, picking up downed pilots. They were also needed to escort transports delivering fresh troops to the forward area of Okinawa.
The Indy had traveled on her own before, and at this point in the war, naval command assumed that she could travel safely in the backwater unescorted.
When Waldron hung up and informed McVay that no escort was necessary, McVay accepted the news easily. He then asked about intelligence reports concerning enemy traffic along the Peddie route. He was told that such a report would be prepared. It would accompany his routing orders once they had been typed up. After agreeing that his navigator would retrieve both later that night, McVay left the office, confident that the Indy’s upcoming voyage would be smooth.
After McVay’s navigator returned to the port director’s office and picked up the routing orders and intelligence report, he came back to the ship, where McVay gathered the officers and told them, “We are going to Leyte to prepare for the invasion of Kyushu.” The island was Japan’s southernmost home island, located about 500 miles from Tokyo. This was a clear indication that the Indy would be in the thick of the action.
He also announced that they would be traveling without an escort. Dr. Haynes, like McVay, took the news in stride. “Here we go again,” one of the officers said. Haynes remembered the time, earlier in the war, when the Indy, with Admiral Spruance aboard, had sailed the 1,000 miles from Iwo Jima to Okinawa without an escort. The energetic Spruance was always commanding the ship on sudden orders to the next crisis.
When McVay next met with his navigator and executive officer Flynn they reviewed the ship’s orders. McVay learned that he was to follow a “zigzag” course during daylight hours, and at night, at his discretion, during periods of good visibility. Zigzagging was a defensive maneuver—the thinking being that if a moving target is hard to hit, an erratically moving target is even more elusive. In truth, the maneuver was of negligible value but was required by navy regulations.
The intelligence report seemed to contain nothing unusual. It stated that three submarines had been reported sighted in the Peddie area, two of them unconfirmed as actual enemy. Of these, one was a report of a “sound contact” only and the other was of an unidentified ship spotting a “possible” periscope. The remaining and most credible sighting was already nearly a week old. The Indy’s navigator had already received the information from what was called the Blue Summaries, intelligence dispatches sent out weekly by the fleet command at Pearl Harbor.
But neither the report prepared for Captain McVay nor the Blue Summaries included two crucial pieces of information.
Three days earlier, on July 24, as the Indy was sailing to Tinian, the USS Underhill, a destroyer escort, had been sunk by a Japanese kaiten—a manned torpedo suicide craft—while sailing from Okinawa to Leyte in a convoy of fifteen ships. One hundred and twelve men had died, and another 109 were rescued by the convoy. The kaiten had been released by a large Japanese patrol sub, and the Underhill, upon spotting it, had defensively (and, in retrospect, mistakenly) rammed it, causing the explosion.
McVay’s intelligence report also neglected to mention the fact that the Tamon group was known to be operating in waters around the Peddie route, the same path the Indy was about to sail to Leyte. Commodore James Carter, with whom McVay had met at CINCPAC headquarters, knew about the Und
erhill sinking and the Tamon submarines, but he did not mention either to McVay. He didn’t customarily discuss intelligence matters with captains. But he assumed that McVay would be apprised of the situation when he received his routing orders.
Captain McVay, however, was not apprised of the situation. This is because the existence of the Tamon submarines had been deduced by ULTRA, an extremely top-secret code-breaking program that had operated to brilliant effect throughout the war. The operation was composed of heavily guarded decoding headquarters at Pearl Harbor and Washington, D.C., where men sat at typing consoles, headphones clamped to their ears, transcribing Japanese radio messages. The Japanese sent their messages in a code created by a cipher machine American intelligence officers had nicknamed PURPLE; the Americans fed the intercepted communications into a decrypting machine of the same name. These machines used a series of “telephone stepping switches” in an incredibly complex decryption process involving thousands of computations to spit out decoded versions of the intercepted Japanese messages. These decoded messages were called MAGIC, and the men who operated the machines were known as Magicians.
ULTRA had been used during the Battle of Midway to pinpoint and annihilate Japanese naval forces. Several days after the battle, however, U.S. newspapers reported that American forces had learned the positions of the Japanese ships and troops, and the effect was disastrous. Within the week, the Japanese changed their encrypting system, completely beggaring the effectiveness of the ciphering machine and forcing the ULTRA program to recrack the new Japanese system of encryption. U.S. military command determined that the secrecy of ULTRA would thereafter be maintained at all costs. This included the decision to avoid sinking certain ships when the navy knew their precise whereabouts. The hope was to lull the Japanese navy into a sense of security.