by Lynn Vincent
In the end, it was never a suicider, a bomb, or a torpedo that actually sank a ship. It was water. The interior of a warship is a honeycomb of watertight compartments segmenting the space inside her skin. Corridors called “passageways” run fore and aft and also, at intervals, traverse the vessel across the beam. These are interrupted by walls called “bulkheads,” into which watertight doors are built.
Each watertight door or “hatch” is equipped with a handle, or “dog.” When the door is shut and the handle turned tight, or “dogged down,” it renders the door watertight. Ladders connect one deck with another, and each point of connection is equipped with a “scuttle,” a small hatchway that can also be dogged down and made watertight. Compartments off passageways—such as machinery spaces, berthing, offices, chow hall, and the like—also have doors equipped with watertight seals.
Offensive weapons could only make holes in a warship. Fluid tons of seawater would then rush in to equalize pressure. When the weight of the water exceeded the ship’s buoyancy, down she went.
Miraculously, Franklin would not go down. Casualty reports from the crippled carrier streamed in to the flag staff aboard Indianapolis. The total number of men killed would reach 724, with another 265 wounded. With a thirteen-degree list and three feet down by the stern, the ship was taken under tow by USS Pittsburgh. Soon, though, she was able to cast off her tow and proceed under her own steam, having endured one of the worst fires any warship ever survived.
* * *
I. Though in overall command of the Pacific Fleet, Spruance alternated at-sea command with Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. Under Spruance the fleet designation was 5th Fleet and under Halsey, 3rd Fleet. The two admirals took it in turns, with one at sea and the other ashore planning the next operation. Indianapolis was Spruance’s flagship. Halsey’s were the battleships New Jersey and Missouri.
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MARCH 31, 1945
Imperial Japanese Navy Special Attack Unit
Kanoya Airfield
Kyushu, Japan
VICE ADMIRAL MATOME UGAKI stood on Kanoya airfield on Kyushu, watching as aircrews climbed into twenty-four Ginga bombers. The day was momentous. After establishing the Special Attack Unit, the “kamikaze,” as the last line of defense against the American invaders, this mission would be the unit’s first major test. It was a far cry from where Ugaki had been two weeks before, huddled in an air raid shelter on this same field as a great tide of enemy planes blistered his flight-line with bombs and bullets. He had not been afraid—just annoyed by all the damned noise.
Now he would strike back. Before him on the airfield stood the crews of five Kawanishi flying boats and four land-based bombers that would lead the formation, contributing advance patrols and weather reconnaissance.
Already, Ugaki’s search planes were keeping tabs on an enemy battle group, including its flagship, Indianapolis, now fifty miles southeast of Okinawa. The group had begun bombardment of the island, preparing to seize the last stepping-stone en route to the homeland invasion, and General Mitsuru Ushijima was charged with its defense. Most Okinawans lived on the island’s southern half, along green ridges thickly terraced with rice paddies and fields of sugarcane. Ushijima’s garrisons had enlarged and reinforced a natural network of caves, and also dug into a chain of slit trenches and bunkers concentrated around the southern capital of Naha. Ugaki was determined to come to Ushijima’s aid.
It had been a little over a month since Admiral Ugaki, who was fifty-five, took over Japan’s Special Attack Unit. On February 10, he was enjoying a bottle of sake when he received a telephone call summoning him before the emperor. Two days later, His Majesty received the admiral in audience at Fukiage Imperial Garden in Tokyo—albeit in an air raid shelter due to the menacing presence of an enemy plane. The forty-three-year-old emperor was a slight, bespectacled man. In his shy way, he honored Ugaki with kind words and personally assigned him to lead the kamikaze. It was a mission Ugaki understood as key to the fate of his nation.
By the spring of 1944, Ugaki had found himself shocked at the turnabout in the war. Territory after territory lost. The ominous attrition of matériel and men. Meanwhile, Allied forces were reaching peak strength, and Ugaki felt time was running out. His beloved commander, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had predicted this result. In August 1941, the admiral, who had studied briefly at Harvard and had many American friends, ascended to commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet. He appointed Ugaki his chief of staff. As Japan contemplated war on America, Yamamoto warned that since the Empire could not win, it should not provoke this Western leviathan. But once ordered to fight, Yamamoto, a brilliant strategist, put the full force of his intellect behind the effort. Having spent two years in Washington, D.C., as a naval attaché, he knew the American Navy well and once called it “a dagger pointed at our throat.” To counter that threat, Yamamoto engineered the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
But the admiral would not live out the war. In April 1943, U.S. intelligence received detailed information about his flight plans. Yamamoto would be aboard one of two planes departing Rabaul, New Guinea, on the morning of April 18. Ugaki would be on the other. At 7:30 a.m., a flight of sixteen American P-38 Lightning fighters intercepted the Japanese planes and shot both down. Yamamoto was killed, a small vengeance for Pearl Harbor. Ugaki, wounded but alive, vowed vengeance for his commander and friend.
Now, as commander of the Special Attack Unit, Ugaki had ramped up both special attack recruitment and training. American pilots had already decimated Japanese airpower. Now many of the Empire’s pilots were fresh from flight school, some still in their teens. Ugaki’s recruits were presented with the kamikaze concept, given forms to sign, and offered a choice: They could sign their names either next to the word “eager” or next to the words “very eager.” Some signed out of bravado, but others felt forced, some by peer pressure and some by ancient national traditions such as honor and love of country and family.
Some who had signed now found themselves standing before Ugaki about to make their final flight. The young men about to die had spent their last days quietly. They read and reread letters from loved ones and spent hours gazing at treasured photographs. They wrote letters home. Many tucked locks of their hair into the envelopes. Finally, they boxed up their personal belongings to be shipped to their families when they did not return.
Ugaki’s executive officer, Rear Admiral Toshiyuki Yokoi, thought the whole enterprise an enormous waste. When Imperial General Headquarters issued the unprecedented order that all armed forces should resort to suicide attack, Yokoi considered it nothing less than a national death sentence. He had studied the recent string of Japanese defeats and was working to improve land-based patrol methods, eliminate enemy surprise, and build up force protection at Japanese ground installations. To him and many other commanders, the suicide strategy proved that the High Command, panicked by a string of defeats, had abandoned cool military judgment and collapsed into wild gambling.
Doctrinally, Yokoi had never believed in the soundness of suicide tactics. First, there was the physics of the matter: A striking plane could not achieve sufficient velocity to pierce the decks of America’s capital ships, the largest and most important in the enemy fleet. Second, there was no way to measure success, since dead pilots could not report. Finally, the expenditure of life and matériel ran precisely opposite the goals of an operations staff, which is to maximize damage at the least possible cost.
But other senior officers agreed with Ugaki, whose thoughts had run wild seeking ways to save the Empire. Some kamikaze leaders said openly that they could afford to sacrifice two thousand men—that if just 30 percent of their pilots hit Allied targets, it would be enough. For Ugaki’s part, this calculus was not as cold as it seemed. He felt deep gratitude to the pilots who sacrificed themselves, and confided this to his most trusted confidant, his journal: “It is not because I am unfeeling that I can send our young men to die with a smile . . . ,” he wr
ote. “I had made up my mind to follow the example of those young boys some day.”
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MARCH 31, 1945
USS Indianapolis
Okinawa, Japan
ON MARCH 31, THE morning before Easter, Seaman Second Class L. D. Cox sauntered down Indy’s second-deck passageway toward breakfast. Cox, a nineteen-year-old with a round, open face and a gap-toothed smile, was nearing the mess hall when he ran into another sailor.
Cox stuck out his hand and introduced himself. The sailor grinned and gave Cox’s hand an exuberant shake. “Pole!” he said. “Pole’s my name!”
Cox’s eyes went wide. “Not the great Basil P. Pole from Hugo, Oklahoma?”
“Yessir, that’s me!” Pole said. Then he laughed and laughed, just as he did every day when he and Cox performed this same ritual. Cox laughed, too, shoulders bouncing as he continued down the passageway. He got a kick out of Basil P. Pole, but he was pretty sure that old boy’s elevator only went about halfway up.
Nearing the mess hall, Cox could already smell what was for breakfast: beans. He sighed. He wished right now he had some of his mama’s biscuits and gravy instead. On the other hand, he wouldn’t trade what he’d seen out here during the war. At Iwo Jima, he’d stood at the rail and watched the Marines stomp ashore. They’d been so close that if he’d looked through binoculars he felt he could have seen them fighting hand-to-hand. And when that flag went up on Mount Suribachi and the horns blew and the bells clanged, tears winked into Cox’s eyes and the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.
Now they’d been bombarding Okinawa for a week. The percussion of the big guns hammered with such intensity that many crew members developed a ringing in their ears that would last the rest of their lives. It seemed to Cox on some days that a hundred hostile planes swarmed overhead. Air and sea fused in a hash of smoke, blast upon blast, ships’ gunners firing up, pilots firing down, opposing rounds slashing black Xs in the sky. Cox had seen enemy planes get nicked, their tails erupting in flame like trick birthday candles before they zoomed down to explode against the hard plate of the sea. Some had their control surfaces shot off and entered slow flat spins, pinwheeling down almost lazily to hit the water with barely a splash. Sometimes, surface gunners simply shredded planes in midair.
The persistent stench of cordite infused the crews’ uniforms, their skin, even their hair. The only respite came when the ship turned to a heading with a strong wind abeam so that the smoke of the guns could be carried overboard.
Cox thought it funny that he’d signed up for all this just to meet girls.
He’d graduated from high school only three years earlier—at thirty students, his graduating class in Comanche, Texas, was famously large—and attended two semesters at John Tarleton Agricultural College. But when he turned seventeen, Cox realized he was a prime candidate for the draft, so he thought he’d better just go on and volunteer. On the road between his family’s livestock farm and the college, every second telephone pole was plastered with a flyer that said, “Join the Navy, see the world!” Those flyers alternated with ones that said, “A girl in every port!”
That sounded good to Cox, and one midnight in 1943, he hopped an old train passing through Comanche and rode it to Dallas, where he raised his right hand. Another train slid him west to boot camp in San Diego, then it was on to Indianapolis, where he arrived at about the same time as Captain McVay.
The first time he laid eyes on Indy, Cox just stood and gawked. She was colossal. Sleek. Magnificent. He could hardly wait to get aboard. When he did, a chief petty officer assigned Cox to deck division and here he still was, six months later, doing the dirty work. Chipping paint, lugging stores, sweating in the mess hall scrubbing pans the size of the pig troughs back home. Now, he stepped one-two over the knee knocker—a watertight doorway with an oval-shaped, man-sized cutout to pass through—and entered the mess hall. He lifted his chin in greeting to three sailors, Lyle Umenhoffer, Verlin Fortin, and Troy Nunley, all hunched over their plates. Sure enough, breakfast was beans.
• • •
On the bridge, McVay ordered Indy released from formation and maneuvered to take station in column astern Salt Lake City, another heavy cruiser. During the weeklong bombardment leading up to D-Day, Indy and the fleet had fired more than five thousand tons of ammunition on targets at Okinawa. Now, underwater demolition teams reconnoitered the beach approaches while Mitscher’s carrier planes sanitized the island’s sandy skirts, laying lines of rocket fire.
McVay was the second generation of his family to fight at sea. His father, Charles B. McVay, Jr., fleeted up in an entirely different Navy, when U.S. warships proceeded mainly under sail, carried livestock as food stores, and during drills, repelled enemy “boarders” with pikes and cutlasses. The elder McVay fought first in the Spanish-American War, then commanded the armored cruiser Saratoga during World War I, along with a pair of battleships, New Jersey and Oklahoma. He then served as commandant of Washington Naval Yard, chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, and commander in chief, U.S. Asiatic Fleet. McVay Junior was seventy-six now and, in his retirement, had assumed the role of hanging judge. He delivered a steady stream of sharp-tongued verdicts on the younger McVay’s Navy performance and demanded that he cover himself with glory befitting an admiral’s son.
McVay felt the pressure, but he was charting his own course in a Navy modernized under President Theodore Roosevelt. An academy man like his father, McVay III was commissioned in 1920 and rose quickly to prestigious postings, including commanding officer of USS Luzon, the flagship of the Yangtze Patrol in China. An officer on the rise, he had proved himself a utility player, serving as naval aide to the high command in the Philippines, as skipper of an oiler, and as executive officer of the light cruiser Cleveland. There, in action in the Solomon Islands, he earned a Silver Star for gallantry. Before taking command of Indianapolis, McVay served as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Staff under the Combined Chiefs of Staff of U.S. and British forces, a group privy to most of the war’s deepest secrets.
As a leader of men, McVay’s manner was somewhat less formal than his father’s. He made it a regular practice to visit his enlisted men in their work spaces and ask them how things were going. Not in an inappropriately familiar way, but one that communicated his concern. The sailors’ feedback worked itself out in practical ways. When McVay learned that the morale and welfare folks were showing movies only for officers, he ordered movies to be shown for enlisted men, too. Once, he went down and had a meal in the enlisted mess. After he finished, he stopped in at the galley and told the cooks to start serving better food. He felt it was important for his sailors to know that they were as critical to the life and mission of the ship as his officers, and that he, their skipper, was looking out for them.
Now Indianapolis steamed ahead to a position eleven miles off an Okinawa beach called Zanpa, still astern Salt Lake City, about a thousand yards behind. There were no other ships in the formation.
• • •
In fire control aft, Cleatus Lebow held his cards close to his chest and fanned them out to take a peek. Liking what he saw, Lebow, a fire controlman third class, glanced up at his regular poker buddies—Murphy, Gaither, and Smitty. All four men were seated around a four-by-six steel box that held spare 20 mm gun sights. Someone had covered the box with a wool blanket.
Paul Murphy, also a fire controlman third, was the dealer this hand. Dark-haired, with an open, all-American smile, Murphy, of Chillicothe, Missouri, was one of those happy-all-the-time folks who’d never met a stranger. He reported to Indy just a few months after Lebow. Both men were twenty years old and had become good friends. Now, Lebow studied Murphy’s poker face, but the eyes weren’t giving anything away.
“I’m in for a nickel,” Lebow said in his heavy Texas drawl.
The other fellows hooted. It was a fairly rich bet, since there was a fifteen-cent per game maximum—money enough to buy three Cokes. Murphy and Smitty matched Lebo
w’s nickel, but Gaither folded. Lebow usually won these games and thought old Gaither probably didn’t want to give him any more of his money.
Lebow checked his cards. He slipped two from his hand and slid them facedown across the wool blanket to Murphy, who flipped him two more. Smitty took a couple of cards, and Murphy dealt himself one.
Lebow had been aboard since January 1944. With eight brothers and sisters, he was from a big, churchgoing family—which meant if church was open, the Lebows were going. Still, Lebow was no pacifist. As a gunnery range-finder aboard Indianapolis for most of the ship’s battles, he had personally helped treat Japanese defenders to the latest fad in the Pacific: the “Spruance haircut.” That meant total destruction, everything in sight laid low and burning.
Wagers circled the table again. “Call,” Murphy said, and pitched in another nickel.
One by one, Lebow ticked his cards down on the gun-sight box, followed by Smitty, who revealed his all at once. Murphy slapped his cards faceup on top of Lebow’s, his laughter bubbling like a soda fountain. “Read ’em and weep, boys! Read ’em and weep!”
• • •
Mike Quihuis glanced at the oddball cast on Adolfo Celaya’s hand. “Hey, Celaya, you still layin’ off the rednecks?”
“Nah,” Celaya said. “I ain’t scared.”
Celaya and Quihuis were walking down the port side, the skies for the moment quiet.
In 1944, with so many of his friends going off to fight the war, Celaya had decided to join the Navy. Since he was only seventeen, his father had to sign for him. After he reported to Indianapolis, Celeya made friends with Santos Pena and Mike Quihuis, who was also of Mexican descent. There were only a couple dozen Hispanics on the ship, a tiny minority in a crew of about twelve hundred.
In Arizona, being Mexican hadn’t been a big deal. In fact, it was a Mexican kid who had given Celaya his nickname, “Harpo.” The kid said Celaya’s puffy hair looked like Harpo Marx’s, and Celaya had decided to embrace it. But in the Navy, Harpo’s brown skin was a problem. From boot camp on, it seemed to Harpo that Navy recruiters had stacked the ranks with corn-fed rednecks from the middle and southern states. They called him “Pancho” and “wetback” and wanted to know when he was going to crawl back into that hole in Mexico he’d crawled out of. The rednecks didn’t care that Celaya’s family had been in America for four generations.