Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  Barely more than a week after Truman learned the full extent of the Manhattan Project, its alter ego, Alsos, was drawing to a close. On May 1, Alsos agents detained Kurt Diebner near Munich, then picked up Furman’s top target, Werner Heisenberg, two days later. With that, Alsos closed shop. There was no German bomb. And after nearly two years of bouncing all over Europe, Furman was overdue for a vacation.

  Groves authorized him to take leave, and Furman packed himself off to a stateside beach resort. He tried to relax, to unwind in the somnolent sun, but found his respite constantly punctured as he waited on edge for word from Washington. Even as the sun warmed his skin, he knew the Manhattan offices were now focused on one thing: making final arrangements to move its first fruits, the world’s inaugural atomic weapon.

  Sure enough, on July 8 Furman got the word: His leave was canceled. Groves ordered him back to D.C., posthaste. His mission: to shepherd the bomb to its launch point, the island of Tinian in the northern Marianas. Once back in the capital, he didn’t even have time to unpack.

  Furman zipped his memo off the typewriter carriage and left the Manhattan offices to see to the storage of his belongings. He thought about Groves’s brief on the bomb transport mission. There would be two planes flying the package from New Mexico to California. “If anything happens, we won’t be looking for you,” Groves had told him. “We’ll be looking for the shipment. You’re only the expediter. The purpose of having two planes is so that if one crashes, we’ll know where it happened.” Groves also told Furman that the cargo was “priceless.” The only way it could be replaced would be by building a new bomb—which would require time that troops preparing to invade Japan could not afford.

  Other than these ominous warnings, Groves remained vague about the details of the operation, which made Furman wary. Some people involved with the project wondered whether, once unleashed, this untried leviathan called fission might ignite the atmosphere itself. That was, of course, an unknown. But the effects of radioactivity were very well known, and Furman was not looking forward to spending time in close company with the package.

  That evening, he drove to the airport and boarded an Army transport plane whose engines were already thrumming. He had barely taken his seat when the plane taxied into position on the runway, lurched forward in a takeoff roll, and left the earth. Furman peered out the window beside his seat and watched the city beneath him vanish.

  • • •

  A continent later, the rising sun slid red from behind a high sandy mountain, illuminating a runway that reclined across lonely desert flats. The plane swooped down and returned its wheels to earth. Furman picked up a car and met Oppenheimer in the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Oppie suggested they chat in the privacy of his sedan. The two men sat in the parking lot of the La Fonda Hotel, a historic inn built in the pueblo style. The hotel was said to be haunted by the ghost of a judge who was shot to death in the lobby in 1867.

  Furman noticed that the scientist appeared unruffled. Much of the Los Alamos scientific staff was already migrating to the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range to witness the first atomic test. Oppie was on his way there, too. The test was the culmination of years of pioneering research, untold reams of mathematical calculations, and serendipitous eureka moments. And although Furman had helped clear the way for this test, he would not be able to witness the historic moment, a test Oppie himself had dubbed “Trinity.” Instead, Furman would be accompanying the core of the first operational bomb across the Pacific—a core containing some of the ore he had captured in Europe.

  In the La Fonda parking lot, Oppenheimer laid out the plan. At Los Alamos, Furman was to link up with Army Captain James Nolan, the project’s chief medical officer and a member of “Project Alberta,” a Manhattan Project division charged with the logistics of assembling and deploying a combat-ready bomb. Although Furman was charged with the completion of the movement to Tinian, Oppenheimer explained, the Los Alamos team deemed it necessary to send along a physician fully familiar with radiation’s effect on the human body. Nolan’s job would be to monitor the “package’s” radiation output—and to make sure that in any hysterical moment at sea, the Indianapolis captain, McVay, did not deem the package a threat to his men or vessel and chuck it overboard.

  Furman and Nolan were to proceed by armed convoy from Los Alamos to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they would find two planes waiting. Those aircraft would fly men and package to Hamilton Field, an airport near Mare Island. There, Furman and Nolan would secure the cargo, then meet with Admiral William Purnell, the Navy’s link to the Manhattan Project; Captain Deak Parsons, the weaponeer on the aircraft that had been tapped to carry the payload; and McVay.

  A finely tuned network of security officers would protect the cargo at all points along the journey. Indianapolis would be moored at Hunter’s Point shipyard, just across the bay from Mare Island, awaiting onload of the shipment. In their interactions with the ship’s crew, Furman and Nolan were to present themselves as Army artillery officers. The contents of the shipment were not to be revealed to anyone aboard Indianapolis, even McVay.

  The briefing complete, Furman headed for Los Alamos, and Oppenheimer pointed his car toward the Trinity test site. If the two men ever crossed paths again, it would likely be in a very different world.

  • • •

  At Los Alamos, Furman met Captain James Nolan, his assigned contact. Nolan was a radiologist recruited to the Manhattan Engineering District by a classmate who had been recruited by Oppenheimer himself. The two men were the first doctors on-site at Los Alamos, and Nolan had gone on to become the chief medical officer at the secret base, overseeing normal medical services. In early 1945, he resigned those duties to work exclusively for Oppenheimer on radiation and related safeguards.

  On July 13, a Manhattan Project security officer accompanied Furman to inspect the shipment. It was no bigger than two old-fashioned ice cream freezers—a pair of tallish buckets, each a bit narrower than a milk pail and made of shiny aluminum. The lids were bolted down, their tops fitted with eyebolts through which a pipe could be threaded when it was necessary to carry the containers any distance. Though small, the containers were deceptively dense since they held uranium, which was among the heaviest of natural elements.

  One container was a dummy that Furman would use for trials and safety drills. The second container held, in essence, one-half of the first combat-ready atomic bomb—the fissionable material, but with the casement, fusing, and firing mechanism removed. This meant that the contents were inert, in theory at least. Furman noticed that no one who knew what was in the buckets seemed too sure about that.

  After Furman looked over the shipment, the project security officer presented him with a piece of paper. Reading it, Furman found that it was a lengthy receipt that described the shipment in detail. At the bottom, he saw Oppenheimer’s signature. The security officer told Furman to sign the receipt, acknowledging that he had taken possession of the shipment. The procedure struck Furman as ludicrous: The Army had just issued him an atomic bomb the same way it would issue him a uniform or a pistol or a mattress.

  In addition to the ice cream buckets, Furman and Nolan were to take with them a large wooden crate. About the size of a Ford automobile, the box contained miscellaneous unclassified materials that were to go with the officers to Tinian. To divert attention from the package, the two officers agreed to make use of the crate. The trucks would bring it pierside, where it would be lifted aboard Indianapolis by crane, secured in the aircraft hangar, and immediately placed under Marine guard. It was an impressive-looking box, just the sort of thing to draw the crew’s attention. When the time came to load the uranium-235, Furman and Nolan would simply have it carried aboard with their luggage.

  16

  * * *

  JULY 15, 1945

  Naval Headquarters Building

  Mare Island, California

  ABOARD INDY, A BOATSWAIN’S mate sounded
two bells, and the 1MC crackled to life: “Indianapolis departing.” The simple, traditional announcement meant that the captain was leaving the ship.

  McVay strode off the quarterdeck, down the brow to the pier, and tucked himself into a waiting car. He was headed for a meeting with Vice Admiral William R. Purnell and Captain William “Deak” Parsons. Purnell worked directly for Fleet Admiral Ernest King. He had summoned McVay, and the captain had only an inkling of why.

  On July 12, McVay learned he would not be taking Indy down to San Diego to break in his new crew after all. Instead, he was to clear her decks and make her ready for a special mission. Immediately, he canceled all leave, and for three days the crew had been trickling back to the Navy yard, reeled in from points east by a string of urgent telegrams. Some, like ensigns Donald Blum and Donald Howison, had been up in Seattle, completing ammunition-handling courses at the naval training base. McVay recalled them, too.

  As these men streamed back to Mare Island, McVay took the rest out for sea trials aboard their freshly repaired ship. Two hundred fifty new men had reported to Indianapolis since May. For many, the sea trials conducted on July 14, a day veiled in a misty rain, was their very first time on the ocean.

  In addition, half of McVay’s complement of officers were new to the ship, many of them “ninety-day wonders”—commissioned through Officer Candidate School, but civilians just three months before. Vessel and crew performed the sea trial basics well, but McVay still pined for that refresher training and its no-nonsense drills. He was well aware that combat was not the time to learn how to fight your ship.

  • • •

  The man McVay was going to see, Vice Admiral William Purnell, had eyes the color of a Nordic lake. Like many in the tight-knit fraternity running the naval war, he was an academy grad, class of 1908. During World War I, Purnell, a native of Bowling Green, Missouri, quickly distinguished himself, commanding four different destroyers and earning the Navy Cross.

  But those days of glory turned dark in World War II. Purnell was serving as chief of staff of the Asiatic Fleet when the forty-vessel force was decimated by the Japanese at the dawn of the Pacific conflict. Now, though, the war had come full circle. With the ultrasecret meeting about to take place, Purnell was poised to help decimate Japan.

  The admiral had joined the effort to develop and deliver an atomic bomb in 1942. As the Navy representative on the Manhattan Project’s military policy committee, he provided liaison between the Navy and General Groves, as well as such stratospheric brass as Secretary Stimson. With Groves’s permission, Purnell tapped Deak Parsons to serve as director of the Manhattan Project’s ordnance team. Vigorous and trim at forty-three, Parsons had a reputation as an innovator who was known to buck rules laid down for rules’ sake. Within minutes of meeting him, Groves knew Parsons was just the man for the job.

  Earlier in the war, Parsons served at the Naval Proving Grounds in Dahlgren, Virginia, and at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland. From there, he had hoped to go to sea. Instead, he found himself driving cross-country to landlocked Los Alamos in a red convertible with his wife, two blonde daughters, and the family cocker spaniel. At the secret desert lab, scientists had devised two atomic bomb designs: an implosion type using plutonium, and a gun type using uranium. Parsons’s primary assignment was the assembly of the gun-type uranium bomb.

  He would actually complete that job inside the belly of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that would deliver the bomb to its target. Because B-29s had a proclivity for crashing on takeoff, and because the uranium bomb was so dangerous, Groves decided that the “gadget,” as they called it, must be assembled in the air.

  Truman, still contemplating the heavy toll exacted by the battle for Okinawa, allowed Groves’s plans to speed ahead. In the final calculus, the president had decided that as terrible as it was, the bomb might have the power to prevent an invasion that would surely be more terrible than the fight for that small, rocky island.

  Okinawa had cost America dearly: 36 ships sunk, 368 damaged, 763 aircraft lost, more than 12,000 soldiers, sailors, and Marines dead, drowned, or missing. More than 34,000 men were wounded, plus an additional 26,000 nonbattle casualties, primarily cases of combat fatigue, or “shell shock.” The cost to Japan was even higher: more than 100,000 Japanese fighters died, as well as up to 140,000 civilians—nearly half the island’s estimated prewar population.

  The death toll underscored Truman’s opinion that this enemy would never surrender—would risk total annihilation rather than admit defeat. Just before the official conclusion of the battle for Okinawa, Truman held a special briefing on the proposed invasion of mainland Japan, telling the Joint Chiefs that he wanted to prevent “another Okinawa.” Even Nimitz, who had favored a homeland invasion as late as April, changed his position amid soaring Okinawa losses. He now supported using the bomb. Intelligence reports of thousands of kamikaze planes and suicide boats being assembled for the defense of the Japanese home island of Kyushu reinforced his new position. At the Joint Chiefs briefing in mid-June, Truman concluded that he would allow invasion plans to continue. Concurrently, he was also becoming more inclined to use atomic weapons to end the war.

  As a result, Purnell and Parsons were making ready to transport the bomb even before they knew they would use it. Because General Groves felt air transport more inherently risky, the three men agreed to send the uranium-235 projectile for the bomb, dubbed Little Boy, by sea. The transport brain trust chose Indianapolis for the job.

  Before meeting Indy’s skipper, Charles McVay, Purnell and Parsons agreed to reveal only what the captain needed to know and no more. Now McVay appeared in Purnell’s office, and the admiral laid out the mission.

  Indianapolis would depart the next day, July 16, carrying highly classified cargo, Purnell said. The cargo would be accompanied by two Army officers, Major Robert Furman and Captain James Nolan. McVay was to make a high-speed run to Pearl Harbor, where he would drop off passengers and take on fuel. He was then to proceed to Tinian Island in the northern Marianas. During both passages, the cargo was to be kept under armed guard at all times. During neither transit was McVay to allow another ship to share the horizon with Indianapolis.

  McVay would not be told the contents of the shipment, Purnell said. But should some emergency occur at sea, the shipment was to be saved at all costs—even before McVay’s vessel or the lives of his men.

  • • •

  When Kasey Moore told Katherine that Indy had been tapped for a special mission, Katherine came undone. In the privacy of their Quonset hut, she mounted her protest: “But your repairs aren’t even finished!”

  Katherine was right. There were projects that needed buttoning up, bulkheads to paint, and the slight but persistent list the ship had developed after workmen removed an aircraft catapult. Moore had tried everything to troubleshoot the list, but the ship’s clinometer mocked him. Now that they were getting under way, he’d have to correct it by shifting ballast. Also, the freshwater evaporators had turned temperamental, frustrating him to no end.

  He explained to Katherine that workmen would join them as far as Pearl Harbor, and the rest of the work would be completed by the fleet auxiliaries in the forward areas. Nimitz and Spruance had emphasized front-line repairs in the Pacific theater. Spruance, in particular, did not want to hamper the fight by forcing his ships to return to mainland yards too often.

  Katherine Moore didn’t care what the admiral wanted. She fled into the Quonset hut’s tiny bathroom, shut the door, and wept.

  17

  * * *

  JULY 15, 1945

  USS Indianapolis

  Hunter’s Point, California

  BY 2 P.M. ON July 15, the temperature at Hunter’s Point had notched up into the high sixties, downright balmy by San Francisco standards. On the fo’c’sle, Dr. Lewis Haynes puffed a stogie and gazed down at the pier. It was nowhere near quitting time, but the normally bustling waterfront was dead quiet. The doctor thoug
ht that strange. As he watched, a pair of Army trucks trundled to a stop alongside the ship. During the 30-mile steam down to Hunter’s Point, Captain McVay had told Haynes and other officers that Indy was going to tie up and take on some cargo. Haynes guessed that whatever that cargo was, it was in these trucks.

  Far below Haynes, Coxswain Louis Erwin mustered with a working party that Louis DeBernardi had assembled on the pier. Erwin, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, had served on Indianapolis since her first campaign as Spruance’s flagship at the Gilbert Islands in 1943. DeBernardi, a first-class boatswain’s mate, had joined the Navy in 1940. He narrowly missed the horror of Pearl Harbor when his own ship sailed for Australia on December 6, 1941. As the two men watched, armed soldiers jumped down from the Army trucks. Some posted themselves like guards. Others threw open the rear flaps on one of the trucks and lowered the tailgate. Next, a pair of Army officers emerged and supervised as soldiers unloaded a wooden crate the size of an automobile.

  From high above, a crane on the Indianapolis hangar deck lowered a line. Moving quickly, sailors in the working party wrapped the crate in cargo straps and hooked them to the line. Amid shouts and hand signals from the pier to the hangar deck, the line snapped taut. The crane hoisted its great load skyward, swung it gently over the ship, and settled it on the main deck. Another crew of sailors then pushed the crate into the port hangar.