In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

by Doug Stanton

And then, just as quickly as they began, the attacks stopped, the ghostly shapes dropping back into the gloom beneath. The sea was a bloody mess of bits of clothes and drowning men with arms and legs sheared off.

  This pattern of attacks in low-light conditions, particularly at twilight and in the dawn hours, soon established itself as the rhythm of the men’s days: the sharks would attack in the morning, then cruise through the wounded and the dying all day, feeding again at night on the living.

  By midmorning Tuesday, the boys were deeply bewildered and distraught. Their thinking now wasn’t so much about being rescued. They just wanted to survive the sharks.

  In the nearly thirty-six hours since the sinking, the Haynes group had drifted ahead of the middle of the pack by about one mile. Close behind, about four miles to the north, were McCoy and his group of four rafts. About four miles east, Captain McVay and his four rafts, one net, and nine men floated.22 Trailing McVay by about one mile was the largest group of rafters and survivors perched atop floater nets, led by Twible and Redmayne. All the while, the teardrop formation of survivors was widening and it now covered about twelve miles from its northern end to its southern boundary and thirteen miles from its eastern edge to its expanding western leading edge. The groups were drifting farther and farther apart.

  As the sharks rampaged through Haynes’s group, many of whom had blindfolded themselves as protection against the harsh storm of morning light and photophobia, the rough tails ripped abrasions in the boys’ dangling legs. Dehydrated, their raw skin leached of its protective oils by immersion, their bodies were turning rubbery. Ed Brown’s legs and arms bloomed with hideous bruises that arose at the slightest touch. The bleeding attracted smaller tropical fish that began to nip at the exposed pieces of flesh, while at the same time, barracudas began flashing about. It seemed to the boys that everything around them wanted them dead. Even the thick, humid air of the afternoon choked those suffering from the onset of pneumonia.

  Dr. Haynes paddled up to find one man—and soon there would be others—staring longingly into his trembling hands, at the winking jewel of water cupped within.

  The boy looked up. “Whaddya say, Doc? Just a little sip?”

  “No!” Haynes warned. “You can’t drink it!”

  “C’mon, it can’t hurt,” whispered the boy.

  “It’s certain death—do you understand?”

  The boy smiled, an inscrutable smirk, and it unnerved Haynes, but he stood his ground. Finally the boy poured the water out and swam away. Haynes, however, was horrified. He knew that if they began drinking the seawater, they’d start dying in droves.

  At this latitude, the Pacific was a steady 85 degrees, warm by most ocean standards. But it was still more than 10 degrees cooler than core body temperature, and since the sinking the boys had been turning hypothermic. This condition affected each survivor differently, depending on his percentage of body fat and the amount of clothing he was wearing (the more the better in terms of heat retention). But on average, the boys were losing about 1 degree Fahrenheit for every hour of exposure in the water during the nighttime hours, when the air temperature dropped to the mid-80s. During the nights, which felt brutally cold in comparison to the days’ nearly 100-degree heat, the boys’ body temperatures dropped as much as 10 degrees.

  As soon as the sun set, as it did with guillotine-like speed this close to the equator, the boys started shivering uncontrollably. This was the body’s way of generating heat, but it quadrupled the rate of oxygen consumed. Hypothermia depresses the central nervous system as the body slows to conserve energy, and at a core temperature of 93 degrees (nearly 5 degrees below normal), speech becomes difficult, apathy develops, and amnesia typically sets in. At around 85 degrees, the kidneys stop filtering the body’s waste—urination stops—and hypoxia, or poisoning, commences. Breathing becomes labored, the heart beats raggedly, and consciousness dims. The afflicted fall into an inattentive stupor.

  By Tuesday at dawn, Dr. Haynes estimated the core body temperatures of the Indy’s boys were probably hovering right around 92 degrees. Later, after the shark attack, as the sun rose and baked them, their temperatures began to rise a degree or two, perhaps as many as five. In essence, the boys had fallen into a pattern of abrupt energy drain and renewal. But increasingly, they were building a deficit that eventually even the heat of day wouldn’t be able to erase. With their body temperatures dipping low, the boys were wobbling off into the land of fatal judgment.

  Back on land, some three hundred miles across the Philippine Sea, the port director’s office on Leyte was a busy place this sunny Tuesday morning. In the harbor, warships from Nimitz’s and McArthur’s fleets were moored, awaiting food servicing and other resupply.

  Carved from jungle scrub by invading U.S. forces, the island’s installation was a grid of gravel roads, Quonset huts, and command posts.23 Military jeeps roared through scorching heat and dust, delivering progress reports of the invasion’s plans.

  On Leyte there were two central posts of command, one subordinate to the other. In the village of Tolosa stood the Philippine Sea Frontier, under the acting command of Commodore Norman Gillette (who had purportedly recalled the tugboats dispatched after the Indy’s SOS). Twelve miles down the island’s shore, in the village of Tacloban, was the Leyte Gulf Naval Operating Base, under the command of Commodore Jacob Jacobson. It was Jacobson who, in the post-midnight hours of July 30, was awakened in his hut by Clair Young bearing the news that the USS Indianapolis had just been sunk. Reporting to Jacobson were two officers, Lieutenant Commander Jules Sancho, the port director of the naval base, and Sancho’s operations officer, Lieutenant Stewart Gibson. Both Sancho and Gibson were new, inexperienced officers; it was their job to oversee the routes of incoming and outgoing shipping traffic into San Pedro Bay. The pace was hectic in the port director’s office—in the last month, Gibson had routed more than 1,500 ships, mostly merchant vessels in the business of supplying warships for the invasion of Japan.

  At Tolosa, Gillette was also new to his post, having taken the place of the previous commander thirty days earlier; his was a temporary command in a complex military operation. Reporting to him was an operations officer, Alfred Granum, who maintained what was called a plotting board. For the past few days, Granum had been using it for the massive job of rerouting ships from typhoon-struck areas in the north, near Okinawa.

  This morning, sometime after 11 A.M., the Indy’s scheduled ETA, Granum moved the ship’s marker into the “arrived” slot on the board. He assumed her voyage had been uneventful; at least he had heard nothing to the contrary. Combatant vessels were always assumed to have arrived at their destinations, unless contradictory news was announced.

  On this same day, 1,300 miles away on Guam in the Marianas Sea Frontier headquarters, the HQ from which the Indy had sailed, a similar marker for the ship was removed from a plotting board in that office. Now both commands, the one at the Indy’s point of departure, the other at her port of call, were certain she had completed her voyage. The minutes began piling into hours, and no one noticed that the ship had not docked in the harbor.

  No one, that is, except Lieutenant Gibson.

  This was because the naval base at Tacloban made its own list, the Leyte Gulf Ships Present List, which noted new arrivals in the harbor. This information was gathered by a boat moored in San Pedro Bay whose job it was to identify each ship as it entered the harbor. But the Indianapolis was not among the seventeen ships listed as having shown up on Tuesday.

  Lieutenant Gibson saw this list, and at that point, he might have done two things: he might have informed his superior officer, Lieutenant Commander Sancho, or Captain Granum at the Philippine Sea Frontier, that the Indy had not arrived. But Gibson did neither. Instead, he marked the Indy as “overdue” and placed her on an “Expected Arrivals and Departures” list for Wednesday, August 1. Gibson did this because combatant ships like the Indianapolis were not under the jurisdiction of port directors such as Sancho, but of high
er commands. He assumed the Indianapolis had been diverted by new orders to another destination.

  As to why he didn’t run this assumption by Sancho or Granum, the answer lies in a seemingly benign naval directive called 10CL-45. Initiated by chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest King six months earlier, in order to reduce daily mountains of shipping dispatches as well as in hopes of tightening security around the movements of ships, the directive instructed that henceforth the “arrival of combatant ships shall not be reported.”

  What was implied—but not intended—was that the nonarrival of combatants would also remain unreported. And this was how Lieutenant Gibson had interpreted the directive when it was discovered the USS Indianapolis hadn’t arrived that morning.

  Out at sea, Vice Admiral Oldendorf, commander of Task Force 95, to whom the Indy was to eventually report, also had no reason to be concerned. Oldendorf knew the Indy was due to report to him, but assumed details about her ETA were forthcoming.

  Likewise, Rear Admiral McCormick, to whom the Indy was to report that day in preparation for joining Oldendorf, was unfazed. Steaming on his battleship Idaho from Leyte to the nearby island of Samar, McCormick assumed the Indianapolis had simply changed her course. He knew that combatant ships—and especially a flagship like the Indianapolis, which was at the beck and call of Admiral Spruance—were regularly diverted from their original orders.

  It would have been a two-hour plane trip from one of Leyte’s airstrips—or a day’s cruise by rescue boat from her harbor—to reach the boys, but no one was leaving.

  By late afternoon, life for the boys had mutated from horrific to unbearable.

  Those with broken arms and legs and backs had gone into shock and died; others had succumbed to massive bleeding or head wounds that suspended them in a netherworld. Still others simply drowned because they were too exhausted to keep swimming.

  They’d been afloat now without food, water, shelter, or sleep for over forty hours. Of the 1,196 crew members who’d set sail from Guam three days earlier, probably no more than 600 were still alive. In the previous twenty-four hours alone, at least 200 had likely slipped beneath the waves or been victims of shark attack.

  Since the sinking, each boy had been floating through the hours asking himself the same hard question: Will I live, or do I quit? And, as Tuesday unfolded, some of the starved, bleeding, and delirious men began to form their answers. For those who gave up, death now seemed a matter of destiny. They started committing suicide.

  Those still lucid enough looked on in disbelief as their former shipmates calmly untied their life vests, took a single stroke forward, and sank without a word. Others suddenly turned from the group and started swimming, waiting for a shark to hit, and then looked up in terrified satisfaction when it did. Others simply fell face-forward and refused to rise. A boy would swim over to his buddy, lift his head by the hair from the water, and begin screaming for him to come to his senses. Often, he refused, and continued to quietly drown himself.

  McCoy woke with a start to find one less boy in his cluster of rafts. The original head count of seventeen had by now dwindled to about twelve. Ed Payne and Willis Gray hovered in and out of consciousness, while Felton Outland and Bob Brundige remained alert. The beating of the rafts together in the swells had enlarged the hole in the floor of McCoy’s, and the exposed balsa, its canvas ripped away, was shredding. There was talk of cutting the rafts loose to put an end to the constant collisions, but the idea frightened the boys, who found comfort in one another’s presence. McCoy didn’t know what to do.

  Things were becoming increasingly surreal. Nearby, in Mike Kuryla’s raft, one sailor in the group had opened his wallet, given away the few dollars inside, and said, “I’ll see you, good buddies.” Kuryla had picked up the bills and yelled out, “I’m going to spend this and have a drink on you guys.” But the desperate boy ignored his weary attempt at humor and swam away. He was never seen again.

  McCoy, drained and hollow-eyed, couldn’t take his eyes off the life vest belonging to the boy who’d slipped away from the group during the night. The empty vest spooked McCoy. All its straps were still tightly tied—it looked like some trick that Houdini might’ve played. Then McCoy peered into the water and got another shock: the boy was floating below him, spread-eagled, about fifteen feet below the surface. He lay motionless until a current caught him; then it was as if he were flying in the depths. Jesus, McCoy thought, Mother of God. He started saying the rosary over and over. McCoy had never been overly religious; his mom was the spiritual one in the family. But now he began the process of what he’d later call his purification; he started asking God to forgive him for his sins. He was resolved to live but he was getting ready to die.

  Meanwhile, some of the other boys were reaching a similar point of acceptance. Even though they were scattered widely and separated by miles of water, it was as if they could sense one another’s determination, as if tapping into a collective dream of survival.

  In Dr. Haynes’s group, Stanley Lipski had somehow managed to hang on until late the previous night. “Lew, I’m dying.” Lipski had finally whispered in Haynes’s ear. “Please tell my wife I love her. Tell her I want her to marry again.” Haynes had felt a shocking sense of relief. He cradled his moaning friend in his arms, staring into the sightless black scabs that had been his eyes, and said good-bye.

  Around him, marine captain Parke moved from man to man, giving his life vest to a boy without one, slapping those who looked to be thinking of drowning themselves. The hard-charging marine was spending an enormous amount of time looking for replacement vests, both for others and for himself. Dr. Haynes was worried about him, and about Father Conway—the priest also never stopped swimming among the boys, hearing their confessions and administering last rites.

  As he floated in his life vest, Ed Brown cursed himself for making such an effort to get back to the Indy on the morning she sailed from Hunters Point. If only he had lingered a little longer with the girl he had met the night before … . If only he had missed the gangway … . Around him, he could hear the other boys mumbling to themselves. He watched one put his head down, drift to sleep, and drown. Another sailor paddled up to Brown and croaked, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going.”

  Brown hated the fact that they were giving up. He might die, but he would not choose to give up. His father had told him that no one should ever quit.

  Captain McVay was no quitter, but his spirits were threatening to wilt and slip past despair. The realization had sunk in that his absence from this morning’s 6 A.M. meeting with the tractor planes hadn’t triggered a rescue effort. Still, considering the adequate rations, he attempted to remain optimistic about their survival. “Something’s happened,” he told the boys. “I don’t know what, but they’re going to miss us sooner or later.” He tried fishing for the bonito and mackerel he saw schooling below the raft, but after an enormous shark ripped at his fishing lines and stole his baited hooks, he gave up in disgust. He surveyed what was left of his weary and nauseated crew, perched precariously on the rafts’ rails and staring at the burning sky. They were still looking for planes, for any signs of rescue.

  “Don’t give up, men!” McVay told them constantly. His mind was beginning to cloud with misgivings about his life to come if he ever stepped back ashore. For the boys, rescue would be the end of the ordeal. For him, if it came, it would only be the start of another hell—one that would be his alone to bear. He tried to match the strength of the boys, who were bleeding and suffering without bitterness or complaint. And yet at the same time, he watched them with an increasing sense of guilt, wondering if they held him responsible for what had happened.

  At nightfall, he gathered the group together and recited the Lord’s Prayer as the rafts headed into another silent, freezing night, their third since the sinking.

  Haynes was desolate, drifting into uncharted territories of pain. Like marine captain Parke and Father Conway, he had been paddling for nearly two full days,
trying to do his best to encourage the boys and sustain their dwindling hopes. By day’s end, though, Father Conway was in terrible shape, and Captain Parke was beginning to show signs of total collapse.

  Haynes himself was slipping in and out of consciousness, experiencing alternating moments of clarity and confusion. You have patients to take care of, he kept reminding himself. He thought of home, of his wife and sons 10,000 miles away. What would they do if he died? The question made survival seem even more essential. But when he snapped back to reality, he slumped deeper into misery and disbelief.

  Overhead, more planes—bombers and transports—passed without pause, and Haynes prayed. He prayed that in a few hours they would be discovered, steeling himself against any other thoughts, any other possibilities.

  By nightfall, the situation at sea took one more precipitous turn. The dehydrated boys, their tongues swelling, their throats squeezing shut, and their minds unhinging—began drinking salt water. After hours of resisting the temptation, they drank furtively at first, as if ashamed. Then they began to gorge themselves, murmuring in pleasure as they sipped through bleeding lips from the cool mirror of the sea.

  Dr. Haynes looked on in horror, his worst fear realized: soon these boys would all be dead. He swam among them, screaming and punching at their faces. But his pleas to stop were ignored. The boys lifted their dripping chins, regarded him coolly with glazed eyes, then lowered their jaws back to the waiting sea. Finally, the exasperated doctor realized he could do nothing but float and watch, and steel himself for the coming physiological apocalypse.

  As they drank, the boys were setting off a complex series of chemical reactions, all of them volatile. The sea contains twice the salinity that the human body can safely ingest, and as the boys drank, their cells were shrinking, expanding, and exploding as they sacrificed what’s called their “free water.” This was the cells’ attempt to lower the sodium deluging the bloodstream, and it was futile.