by Doug Stanton
At 11:39 P.M., six of the I-58’s torpedoes were ordered loaded and ready to fire. One pilot seated himself in a kaiten, while another was ordered to stand by.
Hashimoto crept ahead at a quiet three knots.
He couldn’t believe his luck.
On board the Indy, the boys were playing craps and poker, reading paperback novels, making coffee, sleeping, and writing letters home. Father Conway, meeting with a sailor in his makeshift confessional in the ship’s library, ordered the boy to write his mother. “I got a letter from her, and she said you weren’t writing,” he admonished. “You’re gonna write her right now. We’ll mail it from Leyte.” The usually gentle priest, who liked spending time with enlisted men more than officers, handed the boy paper and pencil. The kid complied and bent to his missive as the ship rocked through the steaming tropical night.
The boys confided in Father Conway. During the battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, most of them had been scared out of their wits, suffering from stomach ailments and bad cases of nerves. As the kamikazes dove at the ships, the boys cried out from their battle stations for the kind priest. He had moved from gun mount to gun mount, reassuring each sailor. Most of the time, the boys wanted on-the-spot absolution for their sins. “Jeez, Father,” they’d say. “My last liberty didn’t go too well, if you know what I mean. And I think I gotta couple things to get off my chest.”
“Yes, son. Go ahead.” And then, as the firing guns rocked the ship, the sailor would confess his sins of drinking or fornication or stealing.
Conway, thirty-seven, was relentless and fearless in his duty. Once, while saying mass, battle stations had been called suddenly, and the astute father shouted out, “Bless us all, boys! And give ’em hell!” The boys loved him for this. He was a priest, it was true, but he was a priest with grit. He wasn’t what the boys called “namby pamby.” The guy had real backbone.
Down in the sleeping compartment that contained the brig, Private McCoy was guarding two prisoners. He had come on duty early; it had been too hot to sleep in his own compartment, where the other marines were bunked. The space was solid steel, painted gray, and it had felt like a tomb. Rather than lie there in the heat, McCoy had thought, What the hell—he’d do the poor sailor doing guard in the brig a favor and relieve him early. McCoy had gone to one of the mess halls, where he poured a cup of coffee, and then continued on to the brig. The coffee was so hot it made his eyes sting. But he needed something to stay awake.
The narrow compartment stank of sweaty men and dirty socks and occupied the last eighteen feet of the fantail, with bunks stacked four high on opposing walls. At the forward end stood a ladder that led topside, the only way in and out of the place. To the left of the ladder were the two jail cells.
McCoy stepped quietly across the metal deck, careful not to wake the boys, mainly the ship’s green hands, who had to sleep here. This place was even hotter and stickier than his own compartment. McCoy tried to look on the bright side, as his mother had often told him to do; he figured that at least the misery of heat would keep him awake during the four boring hours of his guard duty.
McCoy watched the sailors he was supposed to keep an eye on turn restlessly in their bunks. He felt sorry for the two cooks he’d guarded since the ship’s departure from San Francisco. They were serving a two-week sentence, ostensibly living on a diet of bread and water. But their buddies from the kitchen were always bringing them sandwiches and pie. McCoy generally looked the other way. He didn’t think he had to be a hardhead. These were pretty good fellows: they’d just had too much to drink. In McCoy’s mind, the only bad guys were the Japanese.
Swish ping, swish ping, came the relentless pounding of the sea against the hull. McCoy hoped to hell he made it out of this war alive. He had another two years in his hitch to go. Around his neck he wore a string of rosary beads given to him by his mom.
He shone the light on the cooks, checking to make sure they hadn’t hung themselves out of boredom. One stirred.
“Hey, marine,” he said. “Could you turn that vent this way?” The air vent snaked through the ship from the deck, providing scant, but precious, relief.
“No problem, sailor,” said McCoy, turning the swivel toward the prisoner. He could feel a faint blast himself as he leaned up against a bunk. On the other side of the bulkhead he could hear the steady thrum of the ship’s propellers. He and the boys in the brig were at the waterline, baking in a damn floating oven.
When he got off duty at 4 A.M., he would have two hours to call his own. He planned to chuck down more coffee to stay awake for dawn calisthenics. At 8 A.M., he’d be back down in the brig, on duty again.
In the forward part of the ship, Dr. Lewis Haynes stood in a doorway to the wardroom, watching a lively game of bridge. Haynes was exhausted. He’d given 1,000 cholera inoculations to the crew that day in preparation for the coming invasion. There was no telling what diseases the wounded prisoners coming off the beach might bring to the ship.
Haynes knew some of the boys were nervous about the future. They talked to him about lots of things. Mostly, they chatted about problems at home with girl friends or fiancées. A boy could be wrecked by a “green banana” from his sweetheart telling him she was seeing another guy. And aboard ship, there was no way to get rid of the hurt. Or the longing.
One of the card players looked up to ask if Haynes wanted to be dealt in. Haynes thought a moment, then responded: “Naw, you men go ahead. I’m a damn lousy card player.” Then he turned away and continued down the passageway to his cabin.
Next door to Haynes was the ship’s dentist, Dr. Earl Henry, who was already asleep. Back in his native Tennessee, Henry was renowned for his bird portraits. Haynes had bought several of the paintings and had them shipped back to his wife. At the Friday night talent shows that Father Conway organized, Dr. Henry did bird calls in between skits where the boys performed in drag or sang barbershop quartet tunes.
Haynes drew the curtain to his berth, stripped, and pulled on white cotton pajama pants. Tomorrow would be a busy day. He would be up at reveille to inspect the mess halls and the crew’s living quarters with the captain. Then he’d attend to the sick crew, half of whom weren’t really sick; they only wanted to be excused from deck duty. When Haynes found a boy who was goldbricking, he’d bark, “Don’t give me that shit!” and send him back to work. Still, he couldn’t help but smile at the ingenuity of some of the boys’ imagined stomachaches and muscle sprains.
Earlier in the voyage, Haynes had performed an emergency appendectomy on a stout young sailor named Harold Schechterle, who definitely was not a goldbricker. With just a local anesthetic, the procedure had gone beautifully. When it was over, Lew had jokingly told the boy, “Okay, Schechterle, you’re all set. Now get your ass back on duty.”
The kid had leapt off the table, new stitches and all, and was about to run through the door. Haynes was horrified. “Schechterle! I was just kidding! Now you take it easy, son. You’re going to heal up fine.”
Alone in his berth, recalling the incident, Haynes laughed to himself. Then, his day finally done, he slid beneath the sheets and fell asleep almost instantly.
In sky aft, Ensign Harlan Twible, twenty-three, just two weeks out of the Naval Academy, stood in the elevated metal crow’s nest eighty feet off the main deck, watching the night sky. Heavy clouds scudded across the moon. It was what the boys called a “peekaboo night”; right now Twible couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
Twible was standing watch with Leland Clinton. The two had gotten friendly during the past two weeks. Clinton was a farmer’s son from the Midwest; Twible’s parents were Irish mill workers from Massachusetts. Getting into the academy had been a dream come true for Twible. As an ensign, he was at the bottom of the officer ratings, but he was determined to work his way up.
Using a telephone, he could communicate with the bridge. If he spotted a plane or torpedo, he could quickly ring the news through, and the general alarm for battle stations would be
called. But now he saw nothing but a confused sea, with long, deep swells rolling across the ocean from the northeast. Since July 27, a typhoon had been moving southwest from Okinawa, and it was gathering strength.
About twenty men were stationed around the ship in similar positions of vigilance, each overlooking a separate quadrant of the ship’s horizon. There were four officers on duty on the bridge. The officer of the deck, Lieutenant John Orr, was in charge of communication with Captain McVay if any changes were needed in the ship’s maneuvers. McVay was especially reliant on Lieutenant Orr’s command, and as OOD, Orr was eager to continue proving himself to the captain. He had also been battle hardened, having survived a torpedoing while serving aboard a destroyer in Ormoc Bay off Leyte.
The supervisor of the night’s watch, thirty-seven-year-old Lieutenant Commander K. C. Moore, was charged with keeping an overall eye on both Orr and the operation of the bridge and engine rooms. Moore checked the night watches and lookouts about the ship and found all of them alert.
Three miles away and closing in on the Indy, Lieutenant Commander Hashimoto studied the blurred outline of the ship through the periscope. Hashimoto racked his brain trying to accurately identify the vessel. It was crucial. Lying open on a table near the periscope was a book of U.S. warship silhouettes that provided intelligence necessary to correctly identify battleships, carriers, and cruisers. The book also presented important information about each ship’s speed and capabilities.
Hashimoto knew the ship wasn’t friendly, because he’d been kept apprised of Japanese naval movement through coded dispatches. It had to be enemy, but what kind? He studied the approaching shape through the periscope. Destroyer? Battleship? Why was it headed straight at him? He wondered if it was a destroyer hunting him.
He ordered his sub on a new course heading to port, or to his left. Through the periscope, the bridge and superstructure of the ship became more clearly visible as a triangle shape. Now the ID could be made. Hashimoto surmised that this target was of the battleship class. He announced this as the sub’s sonar man tuned in to the sound of the approaching ship’s engine revolutions. Hashimoto counted the revolutions for one minute, calculating the target’s speed
It was twenty knots.11 He next swung his sub into position to meet the Indy broadside for the kill shot. From this vantage, he could see that his target, illuminated by the sliver of moon peeking through the clouds, was indeed a large warship. She was huge.
As the attack procedure progressed, the four kaiten pilots became more and more adamant that one of them be launched. But in the excitement of the sudden rush to identify the ship, Hashimoto had actually forgotten about them. He now told the pilots that because of the conditions, with the target closing in, it would be nearly impossible to miss the kill; their lives would be wasted unnecessarily if he used them.
Then, with his eye pressed to the rubber cup of the periscope, Hashimoto gave the order to fire. It was 12:04 A.M.
The first torpedo shot from a forward tube of the sub and quickly accelerated to a cruising speed of forty-eight knots, or about as fast as a racing greyhound. It traveled at a depth of thirteen feet, leaving behind a swirling wake.
The torpedo carried 1,210 pounds of explosives and was configured with a preset firing range of 1,640 yards, a little under a mile. This was enough firepower to take out an entire city block. Hashimoto fired six of these, and they left the ship at three-second intervals, in a widening fan of white lines.
It took less than a minute for two of the torpedoes to intercept the Indianapolis.
At 12:05 A.M. all hell broke loose.
The first torpedo hit the forward starboard, or right, side and blew an estimated sixty-five feet of the bow skyward. It was simply obliterated. Men were thrown fifteen feet in the air. Those who weren’t blown in two landed on their feet, stunned, their ears ringing.
The second explosion occurred closer to midship and was even more massive.12
The sea itself seemed to be burning. The first torpedo had smashed one gas tank containing 3,500 gallons of high-octane aviation fuel, igniting a burning river that reduced the bulkheads and doors to red-hot slabs of steel. The fuel incinerated everything in its path. The number-one smokestack, acting as a chimney for the inferno raging below, belched a volcanic streamer of fire that shot several hundred feet into the air, littering the ship with sparks and cinders.
The second torpedo had pierced the four-inch steel armor below the bridge, slightly aft of officers’ country. Also hit were the Indy’s boiler rooms, which provided steam to the ship’s forward engine room, called engine room 1, and the powder magazine for the 8-inch guns. Both torpedoes had smashed into the starboard side of the ship, actually lifting the ship off the water and whipping it to the left, onto a new course slightly to the south. The Indianapolis paused like a large beast struck between the ribs, then settled back in the water, plowing ahead at seventeen knots. With her bow gone, she began scooping up seawater by the ton.
It was 12:06 A.M.—just a minute after the torpedoing. The ship had been cut nearly in half. All compartments and crew forward of the number-one smokestack were struggling for life. Those areas aft of the stack, including the quarterdeck, the hangar deck, radio shack 2, and engine room 2, as well as compartments belowdecks such as the gedunk stand, the post office, and the mess halls, initially were relatively untouched by the explosions. Within minutes, though, this situation changed. Soon the armory, library, log room, and marine compartment were in flames, the mess halls choked with smoke and dust. The ship began to slightly list, or tilt, to her starboard side. She had only minutes left afloat, and those aboard her had seconds to decide their fate.
All communications and electrical power in the forward part of the ship were dead, and it was impossible to talk with any crew in the engine rooms. It was a critical moment: it was imperative to shut the engines down to halt her forward movement and the flood of water she was taking on as she steamed ahead.
Down in engine room 1, near the number-one smokestack and the point of impact, sparks flew from the ventilation ducts and showered the compartment. Machinist’s mate William Nightingale, on midnight watch, stumbled among the turbine engines as they choked and died. The lights went out, and the room filled with smoke. The emergency generators, needed to provide auxiliary power, sputtered and then quit. Nightingale, with the aid of a flashlight, watched the boilers’ steam pressure drop as thick black fuel oil and seawater started pouring through the hatch.
He now realized just how horribly the ship had been damaged. Two of the engines controlled the “outboard” propellers (located one each on the far port and starboard sides). When this engine went down, the propellers had stopped turning. If the ship had been torpedoed, as Nightingale sensed it had been, it seemed important to keep her moving, away from the oncoming sub. But there was nothing he could do here, and he hurried from the compartment, heading aft to engine room 2.
Chief engineer Richard Redmayne, Nightingale’s superior officer, had been in the officers’ head, standing at the toilet, when the explosion shook the compartment. The torpedo hit less than thirty feet away, and Redmayne smelled smoke and heard flames licking the starboard passageway on the other side of the door. Steeling himself, he ran out through the blazing gauntlet and stumbled, badly burned, through fallen debris and billowing smoke to engine room 2, located behind the number-two smokestack, about 300 feet from the bow. There he found everything in working order.
All the generators around him were operating and supplying power. From midships back, the ship generally had power and lights, supplied by the auxiliary diesel generators that had started flickering automatically. Redmayne tried to use the telegraph and found it dead. He wanted desperately to contact the bridge for a report and further orders. But that was impossible. He tried pumping fuel oil to the port-side tanks to halt the ship’s list, but this did nothing to solve the problem.
The stunned and terrified man didn’t have the slightest idea of the bedlam in
engine room 1. He wasn’t even sure what had caused the explosions. Reading his gauges, he discovered that the vacuum power was dropping in the engine that controlled one of the “inboard” propellers (located one each on the ship’s port and starboard sides, and flanked by the “outboard” propellers), but that the other was still turning. Redmayne believed the ship mustn’t stop if she’d been torpedoed. Since he couldn’t consult with Captain McVay or the damage control officer, he had to make a judgment call. He ordered the remaining propeller fired up to 160 rpms.
Up in his battle cabin, Captain McVay had been lifted straight off his bed and slammed to the floor. Rising, he stumbled through clouds of white smoke, his throat scorched from the acrid odor of the burning ship. Immediately, he kicked into battle mode and began collecting himself within a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts. Had they been hit by a kamikaze? Run into a floating mine? Were they under attack? The ship’s tremorous vibrations reminded the experienced captain of the kamikaze attack off Okinawa.
McVay quickly ruled out mines because he remembered they were too far out to sea for the Japanese to have strewn the water with the deadly floating spheres. He thought he detected a whipping sensation, as if the ship were shaking from side to side. He reasoned that the shaking of the deck and bulkheads was too violent for a single kamikaze plane to have caused.
The only rational explanation was that they’d been torpedoed. McVay had never encountered this precise kind of disaster before, but he knew his duties. He had three pressing jobs: assess the damage, take care of it, and engage the enemy—if indeed they were in battle. Most dreaded of all was the possibility that he would have to give the call to abandon ship if the damage was beyond control. But for now, his first concern was to get off distress messages detailing the ship’s condition and position. He stumbled nude and barefoot from his cabin to the bridge.