by Doug Stanton
In times of stress and battle, a captain aboard his ship is like a king, to which all stations must report the extent of damages along with their prognoses. When McVay walked onto the twenty-foot-wide bridge platform, he found it in chaos. The darkness was so thick that the men had to identify themselves by name. McVay knew he needed to establish order by determining the extent of the damage. He looked for his damage control officer, K. C. Moore, but couldn’t find him.
What McVay didn’t know was that the water mains used for fighting fire had been ruined. Damage control efforts had proved impotent against the spreading inferno. On the quarterdeck, crews lugged heavy hoses across what remained of the forward deck and screwed them into hydrants, only to throw the valves open and find they had no water pressure. Other crew members, under Moore’s direction, were operating a series of valves spaced throughout the ship that opened and closed certain compartments; these could be filled and emptied with sea ballast in an attempt to balance the ship’s list. So far, these measures, along with the dogging of the hatches of the blown area, were failing to halt the flooding or slow the increasing list of the Indianapolis.
On the bridge, McVay turned to the matter of getting off a distress signal. He ordered Commander John Janney below decks to radio shack 1. It was imperative that their latitude and longitude positions be broadcast repeatedly. Get the message out that we’ve been torpedoed, he told his trusted navigator, and that we need assistance, on the double. Janney raced from the bridge; McVay would never see him again.
McVay next yelled for his officer of the deck, Lieutenant Orr, and the young officer snapped to attention at his captain’s side. The twenty-two-year-old Annapolis graduate was deeply upset, knowing that as the Indy continued sailing, she was rapidly taking on water. He calmed himself enough to explain that because the electrical system was out, he couldn’t talk with the engine room. “I have tried to stop the engines,” he told McVay. “I don’t know whether the order has ever gotten through.”
McVay took the news in; this was the first report he’d heard of the ship’s condition, and he was still undecided about its severity. Judging from the slight list and the probability that the back half of the ship hadn’t suffered any damage at all, it seemed likely that the Indy could be saved.
McVay rushed back to his battle cabin, where he grabbed his khaki and captain’s hat, and returned to his command post, dressing as he awaited Janney. Shortly, Bob Gause entered the dark, smoke-filled bridge. (Gause’s bunk was midships, right over the powder magazine that had blown the ship apart. But he hadn’t been in his bunk; a bad case of boils had led him to sleep on a bare cot in the catapult tower that loomed over the quarterdeck, port side.) There he found McVay, with gunnery officer Stanley Lipski, leaning out over the storm railing. Lipski had been horribly burned; it was amazing that he was even alive. His hands had been cooked down to tendons; and his eyes were burned to two blackened holes. Somehow, feeling his way along the bulkhead and the lifeline skirting the ship, he had made his way by memory to the bridge.
McVay was glad to see Gause, whom he affectionately called “Conch” (Gause was from Florida). He had last seen the quartermaster at 9 P.M., when they exchanged the night order book. Now that seemed like years ago. McVay asked Gause if he had any idea what had happened to Commander Janney.
“Captain,” Gause said, “there is no radio shack 1. It’s all blown to hell.” McVay was surprised. The situation was sounding more disastrous by the minute.
The ship was crawling with men—there had to be at least 900—in various stages of order and entropy. All awaited the next order. A majority of the boys were still under the impression that this was an air battle. They thought maybe they’d been hit by a Betty—a Japanese plane that released armor-piercing bombs. Or maybe they’d been shelled by an enemy battleship. Who knew?
The Indy was now perched at a fifteen-degree list to the right, which gave the deck a slight uphill climb. With one propeller still turning, she was plowing ahead now at about twelve knots, or fourteen miles per hour, and the list was increasing by the minute. With her bow torn off, the front of the ship resembled a mangled snout rooting ahead through the sea, gulping water. The massive incoming tide was punching through auxiliary bulkheads, taking on a life of its own, roaring back through the ship toward the stern, seeking out all dry places.
Already roughly 100 men were dead—burned, blown up, or drowned. Most of those sleeping forward of the 8-inch guns on the bow had been vaporized. The bodies that remained were charred beyond recognition. The survivors stumbled back from the forward part of the ship onto a deck covered with an inch of blood, their skin smoking in the hot night. Crew members sleeping belowdecks in the final 115 feet from the forward turret to the bow also had died instantly. These boys had been trapped in passageways and quarters by walls of fire that advanced toward them and sucked the air from their lungs.
Lieutenant Commander K. C. Moore had been running through the ship, trying to secure the most badly breached compartments. The key was to stop the flooding before it pulled the ship underwater, but the damage control officer was having trouble finding any repair parties to aid him. As the water poured in, the boys who had managed to survive the explosions tried stealing up ladders to the deck. They found themselves turned back by fires raging above them. Others, racing through the narrow passageways toward the dogged hatches of the stern, were trapped by the accumulating water, flattened against the bulkheads as the ship continued its starboard lean, the nose pointing toward the ocean floor.
Damage control was of no use; the second torpedo had torn open a gaping hole forty feet in diameter in the broad side of the ship. Thousands of gallons of fuel oil were pouring out, trailing the ship like a liquid scarf. Desks, mattresses, books, papers, clothing, bodies, and pieces of bodies were sucked out through the hole as the contents of the ship were exchanged for the incoming breach of the sea.
Topside, those sailors forward of the bridge, nearest the bow, saw that the deck was mangled. They also noticed that the steel plating was split in places and that smoke and flames were pouring from these fissures. Boys standing or lying on the deck in various stages of pain and disbelief were being seared on the superheated steel. The night was filled with screams and explosions that faded over the water, traveling a mile—maybe two.
The Indy was alone, cut off, struggling to stay afloat.
McVay was still anxiously awaiting a report from radio shack 1. His hope was that if Radio Central was blown, emergency radio 2 could broadcast their location. McVay’s thoughts were interrupted by Moore, who busted onto the bridge. Out of breath, clearly upset, the damage control officer informed the captain that the ship’s forward compartments were flooding quickly. “We’re badly damaged, sir,” he announced. “Do you want to call for abandon ship?”
It was now around 12:11 A.M. and the ship had slowed to about nine knots, or ten miles per hour. Since the explosions, her forward momentum and her remaining power had managed to push her about one mile across the ocean.
For the life of him, McVay couldn’t figure out why their condition was going bad so quickly. But he had little time to react. He had two things on his mind: that the damage sustained by the kamikaze attack four months earlier off Okinawa had initially seemed far worse, and that to call abandon ship if the Indy was salvageable could lead to possible court martial. He simply couldn’t believe that the damage could be so severe, given the short time frame. It defied reason, and his experience. At Okinawa, the USS Franklin had been turned into a broiling inferno by the attack of a bomber, but it had managed to stay afloat. The crew had even been able to jump from her listing, burning decks onto a destroyer pulled up alongside. McVay had reason to believe that he could still save the Indy.
“Maybe we can hold her,” he told Moore. “Go back below and take one more look and report back to me immediately.” The man hurried belowdecks to check the situation again. It was the last McVay would see of him.
Almost immediatel
y, his executive officer, Commander Joseph Flynn, the ship’s second in command, arrived and briefed him on the ship’s worsening situation. The ship was now listing at a perilous angle. Below McVay and Flynn, the wounded boys who were strong enough tried to compensate for the deck’s list by walking hand over hand along the ship’s lifelines. Those too badly injured stumbled and crashed into bulkheads. Or kept rolling, cartwheeling into the sea.
The executive officer told McVay that the Indy was flooding fast. Then came the final blow: “We are definitely going down. I suggest that we abandon ship.”
McVay was stunned. However, he trusted Flynn’s report. Combined with his damage control officer’s earlier assessment, it convinced McVay that there was nothing else to be done.
“Okay, Red,” he announced. “Pass the word to abandon ship.”
Just eight minutes had passed since the torpedoes struck.
The Indy was indeed going down.
The ship was slowing, but not quickly enough, and she was still taking on water. With the bow gone, the remaining forward part of the ship, about 150 feet, was weakening, threatening to blow off under the force of the water rushing against it. The ship rumbled and groaned as it punched through the heavy, fifteen-foot swells. Belowdecks, the boys heard roars like thunder as machinery and equipment smashed into bulkheads and other compartments were breached by the powerful sea.
Normally, the announcement McVay was about to make would come over the ship’s PA, but the PA was gone, along with electricity to the power lines. Moving quickly to the bridge’s port wing, he cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled down to the several hundred boys gathered at the rail below, “Abandon ship!”
The order passed like a fever through the crew. In the confusion, the ship’s bugler thought that he was being commanded to actually leave the ship. So, instead of picking up his bugle, he dashed from the bridge and began making his way off the Indy.
Commander Lipski, meanwhile, had somehow endured the excruciating pain of his wounds and made his sightless way down several ladders to the quarterdeck to order the sailors gathered there to get off the ship. The boys were in line four deep at the port rail as the deck slowly raised and tilted higher and higher above the water. Since the first moment of impact, they had been congregating at the stern, instinctively fleeing the smoke, fire, and explosions at the bow. Some of the terrified boys had even taken it upon themselves earlier to abandon ship without any official confirmation of the order.13
Now they began jumping off one by one, then they began to go in droves, jumping in a wave that swept toward the stern of the ship. Although almost all had life preservers, some were too terrified to jump and stood frozen—they were pushed from behind and dropped out of the sight into the sea. Like a crowd trying to rush a gate, some 400 crew members crowded the rail at the port stern. A young lieutenant who hadn’t heard the order to abandon ship had been trying to hold the boys at bay, screaming, “Don’t jump yet!”
Now he gave up and was nearly crushed as the boys struggled to climb onto the rail and steady themselves. They stepped off into space and plummeted close to eighty feet, screaming as they dropped into the dark sea below.
The abandon ship procedure, at least as it is practiced in the pages of The Bluejackets’ Manual, is an orderly affair. But by and large, the survival training in boot camp had been lackluster (some of the boys hadn’t even learned to swim), and in the chaos and confusion—exacerbated by the loss of the PA system—approved procedures for leaving the Indy were forgotten or at best carried out in haphazard fashion. All of this was compounded by the fact that during the ship’s high-speed run to Tinian, the green hands on board hadn’t had much time to practice any of the abandon ship procedures.
In the theoretical process, life rafts and motor launches are dropped into the water. Then rope ladders and nets are lowered over the side of the ship, providing access to the life rafts, which are stowed with various lifesaving provisions. Survival gear in 1945 included mess utensils; first aid kits; flare guns called Very pistols, complete with illuminating rounds called star shells; signal flags; a metal signal reflecting mirror; and rifles and ammunition.
On the Indy, the two motor-launch whaleboats, stationed near the stern—each twenty-six feet long and intended to carry twenty-two men—had been undamaged by the torpedoing. Nearby, stacked like giant pieces of gray bread, were about seven of the thirty-five cork and canvas-covered rafts, each able to hold twenty-five men. (These were distributed in equal numbers around the ship, but those at the bow had been rendered useless.)
Each craft was supposed to be outfitted with bread sealed in watertight cans and potable water in wooden beakers, or kegs, in three-, five-, and eight-gallon denominations. Abandon ship provisions also allowed each sailor one pound of hard bread and 3.4 pounds of canned meat (Spam), as well as one whole gallon of water. Each whaleboat was also meant to be equipped with a boat chest containing a hatchet, a hammer, a screwdriver, pliers, sailmaker’s needles, lamp wicks, sail twine, a seven-inch fishing reel with line and assorted hooks and sinkers, lanterns, oil, and matches.
Of the thirty-five life rafts stacked on board, about twelve made it off the ship, and these carried few of the specified provisions. In the hubbub of the Indy’s quick departure from Hunters Point, some of the water kegs apparently had not been filled, and in many of those that had not been recently replenished, the existing water had turned foul in the wooden containers. Few boat chests had been loaded into the life rafts.
On the other hand, luck had been with the boys of the Indy two weeks earlier, back in Hunters Point, when the double order of life vests had been delivered. These 2,500 life vests—along with a large number of life belts—were everywhere, stored in bags fastened around the ship’s bulkheads, and in boxes strategically located at points of disembarkation. As the ship tilted beneath their feet, the boys clamored to reach them.
Captain McVay worried that the distress messages from radio shacks 1 and 2 hadn’t gotten off. In a sense, everything rode on these messages; the crew’s survival depended on getting help as quickly as possible. In a little less than thirty-six hours, when the ship didn’t arrive in Leyte, no doubt she would be reported missing, but McVay was concerned that many of the injured would not be able to survive the wait. He walked from the bridge to the ladder leading to the main deck and started down. He wanted to see for himself, up close, just what the hell had happened to his ship. The torpedoing still boggled him. Just as he reached the communications deck, the ship violently wrenched to sixty degrees. Below him, on the starboard side, he spied sailors preparing to jump overboard without life jackets.
“No, boys!” he yelled. “Don’t go over unless you have one of these!” He pointed frantically at his own jacket. It was too late—the boys were leaping anyway. Nearby, seaman Jack Cassidy, an eighteen-year-old bookie’s son from West Springfield, Massachusetts, looked up from the deck where he knelt, to see McVay silhouetted by flames erupting from the bow. Their eyes locked for a moment. McVay cried out, “God bless you!”
Within seconds, the Indy rolled to ninety degrees. McVay jumped to the forecastle deck and crawled up to the rail. He did some quick calculations in his head—it was clear the radio shack was unreachable and, in fact, was in imminent danger of flooding. The back portion of the ship, from the bridge to the stern, was crawling with men. McVay started walking aft.
This was a perilous journey, and he teetered along the shuddering rail of the overturned ship. Fifty feet of her red keel were visible, and her port rail was pointing at the sky. McVay was walking a balance beam into total darkness.
The boys still inside the ship—an estimated 100 or so—found themselves walking on the bulkheads or crushed by loose machinery and equipment set flying. The deck had suddenly disappeared from beneath them. Men trapped on the lower starboard rail tried desperately to climb the deck to the higher port side. They lifted themselves hand over hand using railings, ladders, and stray lines, much like men scaling a sheer
cliff face.
Throughout the ship, the boys had reacted in a variety of ways to the sinking. Some had rushed to their bunks and quickly finished letters home; one sailor paused in his berth to clip his toenails; another made a sandwich and quickly swallowed it whole, followed by a glass of water. On the signal bridge, a few sailors were hurriedly stuffing classified documents into a weighted bag and preparing to throw it over the side. The bag would sink and keep the intelligence out of the enemy’s hands. But as the ship’s tilt grew more pronounced, the boys gave up and simply stuck it under a desk and ran from the room. It was clear to them that soon nothing around them would still be floating.
Jack Cassidy was hacking frantically at the plaster cast on his leg with a knife. He’d wrenched it in gunnery practice during the journey from Pearl Harbor. With a final slice, the cast slid off, and he climbed up the deck to the high port side. Standing on the rail, Cassidy looked forward to the bow and saw dead bodies strewn about the bent metal plates. He leaped, flinging himself as far from the ship as he was able. Naked except for a thin pair of worn dungaree shorts, Cassidy clutched a rubber life belt that he hadn’t had time to blow up. He hit the water and began swimming. Then curiosity got the better of him; he turned and saw the ship flaring with explosions that moved through the forward sections in an eerie strobe effect.
At the hangar deck, Ed Brown stood ready to jump when a buddy he’d met up with at the Club Lido the night before sailing yelled, “Don’t jump, dammit—the fall will kill you!”