by Doug Stanton
It seemed doubtful that there was power enough to successfully transmit these pleas for help. In fact, he was working with a dead key. Radio shack 1, normally used to send messages, had borne the brunt of the second torpedo. The cables connecting the transmitters to the transmitting keys had been severed. Inside the shack, the heavy radio equipment rocked in its stanchions. One of the bulky transmitters tipped forward and crashed onto the deck.
Radio shack 2, located several hundred feet away, near the stern, under the number 2 smokestack, had remained up and running after the hit. All the lights were on, and the room was crowded with about fifteen radio crew members.
Radio technician Jack Miner—fresh from Yale University and nine months of rigorous training in radio and radar electronics, had only been aboard the Indy two weeks. Miner entered radio shack 2 shortly after the torpedoing to find his superior officer, chief radio electrician L. T. Woods, trying to improvise sending a signal on equipment that wasn’t normally meant for the job. Woods grabbed Miner by the shoulders and positioned him squarely in front of one of the transmitters. It was black, about as big as a refrigerator, and filled with hundreds of foot-long vacuum tubes. Woods ordered Miner to warm up this transmitter, then went to work on one nearby, which operated on another frequency.
Once Miner had warmed up his equipment, he watched as Woods found a solution to the problem. Sticking out from the front of Woods’s transmitter was a toggle resembling a light switch, and Woods knew that if he flipped it up and down, he could send a series of binary signals—on-off, on-off—similar to the keying of the telegraph pad. Because the switch didn’t automatically spring back once it had been pressed down, Woods had to flip it in a staccato series of clicks.
Miner was amazed by Woods’s calmness. He watched the red, hair-thin needle in the meter monitor jump with each flip of the toggle switch. This meant that power was circling through the transmitter and traveling from the cables to the antennae. Woods keyed for about two minutes, clicking out the SOS and the ship’s coordinates.
The crew was so intent on the work that they completely lost track of the ship’s increasingly starboard list. When Miner broke himself away from the red-needle trance, he realized that the radio shack was heeled on its side at a steep angle. He and Woods kept falling downward into the machinery. Miner knew that if the room tipped any more, the two of them would be doing pushups against the bulkhead. Woods finally yelled, “Okay, abandon ship!”
Miner stepped out of the room to find the port rail pointing up at the sky. Shit, he thought, he was on the ship’s low side; he remembered from boot camp that he had to get off the ship from the higher rail. Leaving from the low side meant risking having the Indy fall on top of him if he didn’t swim away fast enough, and it made him more vulnerable to the suction’s tendrils the ship would create as it sank. As a sailor crabwalked past him heading for the port rail, Miner grabbed his legs and cried out, “Let me pull up where you are!” But the panicked sailor kicked at Miner’s hands and knocked him free. He went tumbling down the deck and sailed over the top of the lifelines, which were just inches from the water.
Suddenly he was surrounded by darkness, as if the ship had rolled over on top of him. He thrust his hands up and yelled, “No!” He’d surfaced with his head in a metal mop bucket. Miner couldn’t believe it. He almost had to laugh: The whole Pacific Ocean, and I come up in a bucket! He chucked it aside. And then he began swimming, hard. He was confident that a distress message had left the ship, and he told himself that rescue had to be on its way.
In fact, in a radio shack on the island of Leyte, 650 miles to the west, the message had gotten through. It was received by a sailor named Clair B. Young, on security duty near the sleeping quarters of one Commodore Jacob Jacobson, the ranking officer of the Leyte naval operating base at Tacloban.
Sometime after midnight, a messenger arrived at the post with a dispatch. Young read the message by flashlight and quickly realized that it needed to be brought to the commodore’s immediate attention. The message announced that the USS Indianapolis had been torpedoed, and gave her co-ordinate positions. Young hurried inside Jacobson’s hut, which was perched on a hill overlooking Leyte Harbor.
Jacobson was asleep under an umbrella of mosquito netting. Young turned his flashlight on the commodore’s face and announced, “I have a radio message for you, sir.” Jacobson roused himself and, rising on one elbow, read the message by the flashlight’s beam.
“Do you have a reply, sir?” Young finally asked.
“No reply at this time,” the man said. “If any further messages are received, notify me at once.” He sent Young away. Confused, the sailor returned to his post. No effort was made either to confirm or to deny the SOS’s legitimacy.15
A second message was also received at Leyte, according to a sailor named Donald Allen. Allen was serving as a jeep driver for the acting commander of the Philippine Sea Frontier, Commodore Norman Gillette. From his office in Tolosa, twelve miles south of Tacloban, Gillette oversaw all naval operations on the island.
Shortly after midnight on July 30, a radioman in the officer of the day’s Quonset hut, where Allen was standing guard duty, announced that he had just received a distress message from the Indy that listed her coordinates. In response, an officer on duty then dispatched two fast, oceangoing navy tugs from the Leyte harbor, bound for the site of the sinking.
At the time, Commodore Gillette himself was playing bridge on the nearby island of Samar, north of Leyte, with a group of officers. According to Allen, later that night, upon hearing that the tugs had been dispatched without his authority, Gillette recalled them to the harbor, even though they had completed about seven hours of the twenty-one-hour cruise. No further investigation was made to determine if indeed a ship was sinking.
Finally, a third message was received aboard a landing craft in the Leyte harbor. A sailor named Russell Hetz was on watch when the ship’s radio room received an SOS dispatch from a ship claiming to be the USS Indianapolis, and then, eight and a half minutes later, Hetz’s ship received a duplicate message. The radio crew tried contacting the Indy but couldn’t get a response. Hetz’s vessel forwarded the message “thru chanels [sic]” (presumably to the Leyte naval operating base), but it was ignored.16
The prevailing protocol within naval command was that messages that couldn’t be confirmed by a reply were to be disregarded as pranks. Such responses were more or less pro forma at this point in the war. The Japanese forces, hoping to confuse U.S. intelligence and draw out search vessels, had made a habit of broadcasting bogus distress signals. Earlier in the war, such a message might have been investigated, but tonight it was written off as a potentially deadly move in the war game.
Shortly after the distress calls were sent, Captain McVay found himself alone, leaning against a bulkhead near the port rail. He debated the merits of going down with the ship and considered the immense guilt that he would feel if he were one of the few to survive. He also dreaded the drilling he knew he’d face from naval command once he was back on shore. A captain’s primary responsibility is his ship’s well-being. McVay understood that, ultimately, he was to blame for the screaming and moaning he heard rising in the night. Yet the sinking had been so quick that he still couldn’t understand it. All the normal response systems had collapsed almost immediately. It was all like a nightmare he couldn’t wake from.
He climbed onto the rail and stood perched above the Pacific. Well, he thought, this is the end of me. Without warning, he was brushed off the ship by a tall wave moving along the submerging rails. Looking up from the water, he could see a propeller overhead, and it looked as if the ship might fall on top of him. And then he started swimming through the hot, spilled oil, feeling it burn the back of his neck. He heard a swishing sound, and when he turned, his ship was gone.
It would later be estimated that 300 men died immediately during the torpedoing and subsequent explosions. Close to 900 made it off the ship.
The boys surro
unded the sinking ship in dog-paddling throngs as the Indy shook with more explosions and belched fire from her split deck. Since the torpedoes hit, she had plowed ahead for nearly two miles, the forward part of the ship increasingly submerged, and now, in this final moment, she had slowed to about three knots, or three and a half miles per hour. The boys watched with horrified fascination as the ship finally stood straight on end and paused, trembling—the stern pointed directly at the sky—then began to sink, slowly at first, then picking up speed, drawn suddenly into the deep by the nose. Within fifteen seconds, the entire bulk of the ship disappeared. All that remained was a wide swath of debris, about half the length of a football field, boiling with foam. The foam itself hissed, like an immense swarm of bees.
There were no birds in the sky, no wind; only the lapping of the noxious stew of seawater and fuel oil against kapok life vests. There were no stars; just the occasional flash of a crescent moon, like a needle of bone threading its way through a flying curtain of cloud. At times, the exhausted boys floated in complete darkness, unable to discern any horizon at all, the sea rising and falling in heavy swells. At other moments, the boys were lit by a ghostly silver light. The living prayed out loud while the dying screamed.
Beneath the boys, beneath their kicking feet, the ship was falling as if in slow motion, its bow aimed at the bottom of the sea. A porthole or two still glowed from within, the last flickering remnants of the numerous fires raging through her compartments. At some point, the pressure became more than the ship could bear, and the Indy began self-destructing under her own weight. Air chambers, bulkheads, gas tanks, and boilers—anything that hadn’t exploded—now belched, releasing more gas and debris into the diving ship’s slipstream.
Completely submerged, the ship let loose one last tremendous explosion, a resounding whumpfff, and the shock waves jellied the warm, black water.
In her final seconds, she reached a terminal velocity of as much as thirty-six feet per second, or about twenty-five miles per hour, just slightly slower than her best flank speed during the run from Hunters Point. She was falling in three and a half miles of water, some of the deepest on the planet, and it took nearly five minutes for her to reach the bottom, a place so remote and dark and cold that in the history of the world no light had ever shone there. As she slammed into the ocean floor in a giant cloud of silt, her steel hull broke into two pieces and gradually rocked to a halt.
It had taken only twelve minutes for the USS Indianapolis to vanish.
McCoy could feel this last explosion reverberating in his bones, his gut. He was swimming harder than he’d ever swum in his life, trying desperately to flee the ship as she plummeted to the bottom of the sea.
As he swam, he felt something reach out and grab his left leg and tug off his shoe. And then it jerked him backward in his swimming stroke, pulling him underwater, dragging him down deep. The last thing he remembered before blacking out was the rush of water past his face and the sensation that his eyes were ready to pop under the increasing pressure.
When he snapped back to consciousness, he found himself shooting to the surface at great speed, like a man in an express elevator. He was not in an elevator, though. He was in an air bubble, a huge one, and its dry jaws were clamped around the lower half of his body, leaving his head and shoulders sticking out as he rocketed upward.
He erupted with such force that he rose three feet out of the water. With a splash, he fell back into a black world of screaming men. All around him, the sea was littered with crates of potatoes, ammunition cans, stray life vests, and dead bodies.
He looked around and knew he had one decision to make: Am I gonna live, or will I die?
CHAPTER SIX
Hope Afloat
What did I think about when I was in the water?
I fantasized about meeting my parents at a dim roadside bar
in the north woods of Wisconsin to share the story over a few
very cold beers. I bargained with God. As the days dragged on, I
thought less and less while I dreamed more and more.
—JACK MINER, radio technician second-class, USS Indianapolis
DAY ONE
MONDAY, JULY 30, 1945
As they floated through the inky murk of the night, even the most lucid of the Indy’s survivors found themselves in an extreme state of disorientation. Without the ship as a point of reference, they had little idea of where they were headed, or how far they had traveled, or how many of their crewmates had made it off alive.
In fact, they were floating now in a slightly southwesterly course, headed in the general direction of Borneo rather than toward their sunken ship’s intended destination of Leyte, which lay 650 miles ahead nearly due west. Behind them, another 650 miles to the east, was Guam, their previous port of call. They were drifting through the dead middle of a no-man’s-land, a pocket of ocean that spanned some 10,000 square miles.
And they were spread along a roughly three-mile-long line that was lengthening—and widening—by the minute. During the first several hours, the majority of the men had collected in several groups, all scattering in different directions. Each was separated by about a mile of an oily, pitching sea. Initially, no group knew for certain that any other existed, but as time passed, the scared boys would find themselves separated from one cluster and then united with another. Gradually, commands of sorts were evolving.
Dr. Haynes, Captain Parke, and Father Conway found themselves in charge of the largest group of survivors, which consisted solely of boys in life vests and some in inflatable life belts; Haynes would come to think of them as his “swimmers.” Along with Parke and Conway, he set about collecting the boys, shouting orders that all sailors within earshot should swim to him. Ed Brown and Bob Gause, hearing the doctor’s high-pitched cry, moved toward the sound. Gause was in serious pain, having jumped forty feet from the stern of the ship before she went down, only to hit the massive steel rudder. He didn’t think he’d broken any bones, but he could barely swim.
Many of the boys were bleeding, vomiting, and overcome with diarrhea. Quite a few had broken legs and arms; some had fractured backs and skulls. Those too seriously damaged by the explosions had already drowned. Haynes, wearing only his cotton pajama pants and life vest, paddled through the wailing crowd, trying to help. Haynes knew that the boys, when in good health, could live for maybe thirty days without food and perhaps seven without water. But the severely weakened and wounded among them, he guessed, had only hours—some, if lucky, maybe a day or two—before they would be dead. Rescue had to come soon.
About half of the 900 survivors had gotten off the ship with either a life vest or an inflatable life belt. These latter proved worthless as the fuel oil ate into the seams and they started to leak. The boys wearing them began to sink and, if they were too weak to swim, to drown. Those without belts or life vests dog-paddled frantically about, keeping lookouts: whenever a boy died, he was flocked by several others eager to take his vest.
Conway and Haynes spent the bleak early morning hours swimming back and forth among these terrified crew members, sometimes dragging loners back to the growing mass using an awkward, modified sidestroke. At one point, Parke spotted what looked like a blinking red light. He froze. “Nobody signal back!” he shouted in a hoarse whisper. The marine worried that the light was from the sub that had sunk them. If it found them, they were dead men. They’d be machine-gunned for sure. Then the red light faded. Had it even been real? the boys wondered.
The second-largest group was led by ensign Harlan Twible and chief engineer Richard Redmayne. It numbered about 325 men, most of whom had jumped from the Indy after the Haynes group but before McVay and McCoy; unlike the swimmers, the Twible-Redmayne group had left the ship from the flooded rails of the starboard side, which was awash with precious lifesaving equipment. Most of these boys had been lucky enough to grab hold of something: among them, they had five floater nets, four rafts, and a smattering of random supplies. These included some ma
lted milk tablets (meant to slake thirst), biscuits in watertight tins, and a few wooden beakers of potable water. Four of the five floater nets were piled with the wounded, while the fifth was commandeered as a rest station for the healthy. Each net held about fifty men, none very comfortably (this was twice the recommended number). Every shifting body upset the balance of the whole, causing the boys to knock heads and slip under the waves bucking beneath them. It was miserable.
Captain McVay found himself paddling alone through the dark, and it unnerved him. He didn’t want to believe that he’d been the only man to survive the sinking, and yet, above the slap and slosh of the waves in his face, he heard no shouts; none of his boys drifted out of the gloom to meet him. At this same time, about a mile away, Private McCoy, clutching a life vest he hadn’t had time to put on, was bobbing on the oily tide and vomiting like crazy. He, too, didn’t know where the hell he was.
All the groups were traveling in a prevailing westerly equatorial current that was pushing ahead at a steady ninetenths of a knot—or about one mile an hour. The northeast trade winds were also blowing westerly at an average of 3 knots, or 3.5 miles an hour. The rate of drift was such that the boys would average about twenty-four miles per day. This put the nearest body of land, an island called Mindanao, about three weeks ahead of them.
However, the factor that truly determined each group’s direction and speed of travel was something called the Leeway Effect. This phenomenon involves the relationship between exposed body surface, ocean current, and wind. For instance, if a survivor had more of his body submerged in the water than exposed to the wind, the current acted upon him to a greater degree than the trade winds. This meant that those strapped and sunk up to their chests in life vests were typically more affected by the current, while those sitting high in rafts were more forcefully pushed and tugged about by the breezes.