by Doug Stanton
And then, near dusk, he heard a noise. It was a plane. Not another one, he thought. Not another goddamned plane that won’t see us. But not only had it seen them, it was coming right at them; fifty feet off the water, a Catalina seaplane passed over so close that McCoy could even see the guy inside its clear bubble blister. He was yelling something and pointing down at them. The plane banked sharply and circled. Then, on its second pass, a dye bomb was tossed out the hatch. It sent a chartreuse plume spreading around their raft.
And then the plane flew away. McCoy knew they had been spotted, but were they actually going to be picked up? He trusted nothing, and no one. Still, he felt lighter, alive. He knew he was coming back from the dead, and it was a wonderful feeling.
Out of nowhere a ship appeared. One moment, the sea was empty, twilight crawling across it; the next, there stood the massive gray hull of what looked like a transport ship. A guy on deck spun a line overhead and tossed it far out. On the end of it was a monkey fist, a lead weight wrapped with twine. It was an excellent shot; the fist landed directly at McCoy’s side. He grabbed it and squeezed, crying out, “You found us! I can’t believe you found us!”
After an unsuccessful attempt to reel in the raft, two of the ship’s crew members jumped into the water and started swimming. They didn’t get far, though; once they spotted the sharks circling the raft, they turned around and scrambled up the net on the ship’s side. McCoy couldn’t believe it. These guys were going to let a few sharks scare them off? Shit. He’d seen sharks.
He watched in grateful amazement as two more jumped overboard without hesitation and stroked up to them, knives in their hands. As they began cutting at the vests’ straps and separating the five boys, McCoy, dazed, kept repeating, “I just can’t believe you found us! You found us! You found us!”
His crew of four were covered in oil and burned, their faces swollen beyond recognition. McCoy himself was severely dehydrated, and the outlines of his ribs and cheekbones were visible through his skin. His tongue, sunburned, protruded from his mouth. He shaded it like a man cupping a flame from the wind.
The two crewmen towed them to the waiting rescue ship, where a boatswain’s chair (resembling a child’s swing) was lowered down by crane and they were lifted aboard. All except McCoy. He insisted on climbing up the net ladder. When he reached the top, he was so weak he fell to the deck; kissing it, he burst into tears. He tried rising again but found he couldn’t. He was unable to stop crying.
He was carried by stretcher to a shower, where the Ringness crew began the long, painful bath. He was then led to a bunk in the crew’s quarters and fed water from a spoon for an hour. Never in his life had anything tasted so sweet. He lay there savoring the small sips. Finally he fell asleep, tumbling into a deep and soundless chasm of peace, where he lay for twenty hours.
McCoy and his raftmates were the last crew members of the USS Indianapolis to be rescued. They had spent about 112 hours—or more than four and a half days—adrift without food, water, or shelter from the sun.31 His group of five had drifted the farthest of any of the survivors, an astounding 124 miles. As they slept in their bunks aboard the USS Ringness, they resembled sunburned skeletons more than the young men they were.
By the following day, Saturday, August 4, the armada of rescue boats and planes had combed hundreds of square miles of ocean. During the afternoon, rescue crews received a good scare when the Dufilho reported solid underwater sonar contact with a Japanese submarine. The destroyer performed a depth charge attack, but it was without result, and the rescue effort was resumed. No other survivors were discovered, however, and by 5 P.M. the search seemed to be concluded.
In all, the Cecil J. Doyle collected 93 men, including the 56 men Marks had hauled aboard the Playmate 2. The high-speed transports USS Register and USS Ringness picked up a total of 51 survivors, among them Mike Kuryla, who’d been in one of the three rafts cut free from McCoy’s and set adrift. The USS Bassett posted a whopping 152, including the Twible rafters group. The destroyer escort USS Dufilho and the destroyer USS Ralph Talbot picked up 25 survivors between them.
The casualties were astounding, and the death toll rattled the battled-hardened crews of the rescue ships. Of the 1,196 crew members who had sailed from Guam, only 321 had survived the torpedoing and long ordeal at sea. Of the ship’s 81 officers, 67 had been lost, and 808 of the enlisted crew had perished.
In less than a week, four more would die in military hospitals, reducing the total number of survivors to 317. Of the nearly 900 men who died, it’s probable that 200 were victims of shark attack, an average of 50 men a day.32
Adrian Marks would be haunted by the sight of the sharks and the conditions of the rescue for the rest of his days. “I will never forget how dark were the early hours of that night,” he later remarked. “There was no moon and the starlight was obscured by clouds. And even though we were near the equator, the wind whipped up and it was cold. We had long since dispensed the last drop of water, and scores of badly injured men, stacked three deep in the fuselage and ranged far out on both wings, were softly crying with thirst and with pain.”
As for McCoy, he would always wonder about those boys who might’ve been left behind. “They were basically all done looking when they found us,” he would say. “I wonder how many were left out there and just watched those ships and planes finally disappear from sight.
“We couldn’t have lasted another day.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Aftermath
I went to church, and then I went to a gin mill.
I had some of the money [that guys had given me in the water]—
it was all brown and stained with salt. And I had a drink.
And then I came home on a train, and that was it.
I was home.
—MICHAEL KURYLA, coxswain, USS Indianapolis
AUGUST TO DECEMBER 1945
On Saturday, August 4, reconnaissance ships started the work of retrieving and identifying dead bodies.33 The normally routine logbooks of the four principal ships involved—the destroyer escorts French (DE 367) and Alvin C. Cockrell (DE 366), and the destroyers Helm (DD 388) and Aylwin (DD 355)—read like something from a horror movie. The Helm carried the following report for its August 4-5 patrol:
“All bodies were in extremely bad condition and had been dead for an estimated 4 or 5 days. Some had life jackets and life belts, most had nothing. Most of the bodies were completely naked, and the others had just shirts on. Bodies were horribly bloated and decomposed—recognition of faces would have been impossible. About half of the bodies were shark-bitten, some to such a degree that they more nearly resembled skeletons. From one to four sharks were attacking a body not more than fifty yards from the ship, and continued to do so until driven off by rifle fire.
“For the most part it was impossible to get finger prints from the bodies as the skin had come off the hands or the hands were lacerated by sharks. Skin was removed from the hands of bodies containing no identification, when possible, and the Medical Officer will dehydrate the skin and attempt to make legible prints.
“All personal effects [were] removed from the bodies for purposes of identification. After examination, all bodies were sunk, using two-inch line and a weight of three 5”/38 cal. projectiles. There were still more bodies in the area when darkness brought a close to the gruesome operations for the day. In all, twenty-eight bodies were examined and sunk.”
A total of about ninety-one bodies would be retrieved by the ships and buried at sea, with identification made whenever possible. Not until August 9, after searching hundreds of miles of ocean, would the last ship leave the area.
The unfolding disaster of the Indianapolis now turned inland, to Peleliu, where Captain McVay and the majority of the crew had been taken by their respective rescue ships for medical treatment.
As the USS Ringness had made its way through the night of August 3 across the Philippine Sea, Captain McVay, watching the lights on Peleliu draw near, must have s
ensed that he was turning to a new fight for survival, this time with the navy. Minutes before the ship docked, he had stood on the bridge and with a shaking voice told his rescuers, on behalf of all the Indianapolis crew, how grateful he was. Captain Meyer thought he had never seen such humility and compassion in an officer.
On Peleliu, a news blackout was ordered: no information about the sinking would leak from the island. Marine guards blocked access to the wooden hospital barracks where the boys were convalescing. No word would leak to the outside world that 1,196 U.S. sailors had been lost and forgotten at sea for nearly five days.
On Sunday, August 5, dressed in khaki and looking more like a man recovering from the flu than from a disaster at sea, McVay held a press conference. But everything he said—as well as any news stories written by correspondents on the island—was subject to the scrutiny of military censors. The United States was still officially at war, and regular wartime news protocols still very much applied. Whatever views and personal feelings McVay expressed at the conference would be held by censors for publication until after the war’s end.
“What would be the normal time before you would be reported overdue?” a reporter asked the captain.
“That is a question I would like to ask someone,” McVay shot back. “A ship that size practically runs on a train schedule. I should think by noon [on Tuesday], they would have started to call by radio to find out where we were, or if something was wrong. This is something I want to ask somebody myself—why didn’t this get out sooner?”
This was as close to a public condemnation of the navy as the captain would ever allow himself to make.
The following day, Monday, August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off from the airstrip at Tinian Island. At 8:15 A.M. the plane dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. A member of its assembly team had written on its side: “This one is for the Boys of the Indianapolis.” More than 118,000 Japanese of the city’s estimated population of 350,000 were killed by the world’s first atomic bomb. (A total of 140,000 would be dead as a result of its aftereffects by the end of the year.) Temperatures at the epicenter of the explosion exceeded 1 million degrees, and winds of up to 500 miles per hour were whipped up by the blast.
By Wednesday, August 8, McVay, Haynes, McCoy, and all the other survivors had been reunited at the Base 18 Hospital in Guam.34 Still under marine guard, they were not allowed to talk with any unauthorized personnel about their ordeal. McVay, who didn’t need direct medical attention and was billeted in a nearby Quonset hut that served as officers’ quarters, visited with the boys in the enlisted men’s hospital barracks. They were overjoyed to see him, profoundly glad that he had survived the ordeal. Their captain, looking fit and rested, betrayed no emotion about the trouble brewing.
Many of the boys recovered at a rapid rate and soon were playing basketball and baseball on the base. Others were not so lucky; the saltwater ulcers covering their broken arms and legs had eaten the muscle to the bone. One boy’s ears had been fried to the texture of corn flakes by the sun. Dr. Haynes would require a month of convalescence before walking again; his feet, burned by the flash fires of the torpedoing, were painfully tender, as were the third-degree burns on his hands and face. Private McCoy, nourished by a diet of ice water and raw eggs, his head shaved to remove his oil-matted hair, was undergoing a daily, painful treatment that involved a nurse cracking open the burned, dried skin on his face and peeling it away with tweezers to apply an antiseptic ointment. Fortunately, the nurse would peel off just one side of his face each day.
When Admiral Spruance paid a visit to the hospital, the boys lined up and he pinned Purple Hearts on their hospital pajamas. They hadn’t seen him since his departure from the Indy after the kamikaze attack at Okinawa on March 31, more than four months earlier. They were profoundly moved as he went from bed to bed shaking hands, offering congratulations. The admiral even stopped to play a few hands of Hearts with some of the boys. On Guam, the purpose of the Indy’s record-breaking voyage across the Pacific was finally revealed to the officers of the ship. Dr. Haynes was lying in his hospital bed when an army medical officer approached and asked if he could have a word. “I know who you are!” said Haynes, recognizing the man. He was James Nolan. Haynes had last seen him posing as an artillery officer aboard the Indy during the trip from San Francisco to Tinian. Nolan explained that he was actually an army medical officer specializing in radiation medicine. Then he informed Haynes that the Indy had carried the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Haynes said little; in fact, he found he had no reaction at all. Like many of the crew, he simply would be glad when the war was over.
On Thursday, August 9, a second atomic bomb, this one named Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki. The blast of Fat Man killed 40,000 Japanese and wounded another 60,000. On the following day, August 10, Japan sued for peace.
On August 9, Admiral Nimitz, from his office in Guam, had called for a court of inquiry concerning the sinking of the ship; Nimitz had asked that this proceeding start in less than a week.
With the whole of the Pacific command thrown full throttle into preparations for the invasion of Japan, Nimitz and the chief of naval operations, Admiral King, were eager to sort out the matter and return to the pressing business of war. The inquiry would investigate the cause of the disaster, the reason for the rescue delay, and determine what culpability, if any, existed among the players. This was pro forma in the aftermath of any possible violation of military law. But amazingly, one of the judges sitting at the inquiry would be Vice Admiral Murray, commander of the Marianas in Guam. It was under Murray’s command that Captain Oliver Naquin had given McVay the incomplete intelligence report concerning enemy submarine activity along the Peddie route.
At 8 P.M. on the evening of August 14, President Truman stepped into the Rose Garden and triumphantly declared the end of World War II into a bouquet of microphones. After nearly four years of fighting, it was finally over.
Some of the Indy’s boys sat up in bed and cheered at the news as it was announced over the hospital’s loudspeakers. It had been twelve days since the first men were rescued; the sinking was still a secret. No one, except U.S. military brass and some hospital workers on the islands of Samar and Peleliu, knew of the disaster. This was about to change.
Minutes before Truman’s announcement, the White House released this terse bulletin: “The USS Indianapolis has been lost in the Philippine Sea as the result of enemy action. The next of kin of casualties have been notified.”
Some families first learned the dreaded news as they were gathered around radios listening to Truman’s speech. McCoy’s mother was met at her home in St. Louis, Missouri, by a marine bearing word that her son was missing in action. (A number of the survivors’ families first received telegrams that their sons were MIA, and these mistakes were corrected by follow-up telegrams.) She told the marine, “No, sir, I know my son’s all right,” and then she slammed the door.
This was a terrible confirmation of an already profound suspicion. On the night of the Indy’s sinking, Mrs. McCoy had sat straight up in bed, convinced that something terrible was happening to her son. “Giles,” she said, shaking her husband awake. “Giles Jr. is in trouble, I know it.”35
In Fairfield, Connecticut, Dr. Haynes’s wife received a telegram that read: A REPORT JUST RECEIVED SHOWS YOUR HUSBAND HAS BEEN WOUNDED IN ACTION 30 JULY 1945. DIAGNOSIS: EXHAUSTION FROM OVER-EXPOSURE … . YOUR ANXIETY IS APPRECIATED. Shortly, she received a second telegram, this one from her husband, who was unhappily convalescing in a wheelchair on Guam. INJURY IS NOT SERIOUS, Haynes wrote. AM GETTING ALONG ALL RIGHT. ALL MY LOVE, LEW.
On August 15, military censorship of the war’s news was lifted, and the newspapers were subsequently filled with stories about the Indy. The New York Times called the sinking “one of the darkest pages of our naval history.” Newspapers across the country soon echoed the sentiment. The public was saddened and bewildered. How could such a calamity occur so close to the end of the war? they wondered.
&
nbsp; These news stories were soon buried, however, by larger headlines recounting America’s victory. On V-J Day, celebrations consumed the country; New York City was showered with ticker tape parades. Whether the navy’s timing of its announcement of the Indy’s sinking was by design or happenstance, the effect was the same: the public quickly forgot the disaster. But the families of the boys who died in the sinking started demanding explanations. The navy, as of yet, had few answers—but it was looking for them.
On August 13, the court of inquiry’s proceedings opened at the headquarters of the commander on Guam. McVay rode there with McCoy, who was now his personal driver. He had visited the young marine in the hospital and offered him the job because he was aware of McCoy’s loyal service as an “orderly,” or messenger, aboard the Indianapolis for Admiral Spruance.
As their jeep climbed up the steep CINCPAC hill, McVay asked McCoy how he’d fared in the water.
“Fine, sir. I got along just fine.”
“Well, we were damn lucky to survive.” He paused. “You know what? I think they’re going to put it to me.”
McCoy asked what he was suggesting.
McVay replied that he suspected that the navy was going to pin blame for the sinking on him, using his failure to zigzag as an excuse.
On August 20, after hearing the testimony of forty-three witnesses, the inquiry ended. The court had pored over the minutiae of the case, including the question of the incomplete intelligence reports McVay received at Guam before sailing. On the witness stand, Captain Oliver Naquin testified that he had felt the danger of an enemy sub attack was “practically negligible.” And the court believed him.