Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  For weeks, the Americans had attacked with carrier task forces and shore-based bombers, softening the beach, no doubt, for the inevitable mainland invasion. The enemy’s Third Fleet and Twentieth Air Wing were launching wave after wave against Honshu. Naval aircraft from the Ryukyu Islands, now controlled by the Americans, ranged over the East China Sea and along the coasts of Kyushu and southern and central Korea. Carrier task forces were also attacking the remaining Japanese surface fleet in their homeports. In the past week alone, the enemy had sunk nearly a hundred ships, and destroyed or damaged locomotives, rail yards, factories, lighthouses, oil plants, and ammunition depots. With the Americans now able to consolidate their forces in the north and west, the assault was vicious, concentrated, and relentless. Japan had not flagged in resistance, but in fight after fight, her planes fell from the sky like broken kites with soot tails. Ships not sunk were left burning.

  The hour was growing desperate, Hashimoto knew, and there was nothing he could do except take the fight to the enemy. As part of the Tamon attack group, he would do exactly that, proceeding east and then south, down into the Philippine Sea. His orders were clear, the mission strictly offensive: move into the sea west of Guam and the Marianas, find the enemy, and attack.

  4

  * * *

  ON THE SECOND DAY out of San Francisco, Cleatus Lebow almost got into a fistfight. Some fathead from another division was picking on Clarence Hershberger again. Hershberger was only eighteen, an Indiana kid who worked with Lebow and Paul Murphy in fire control. Hershberger had really wanted to be a Marine—mainly because girls really went crazy for the uniform—but the Marines wouldn’t take him because he had flat feet. Hershberger was a swell fellow, Lebow thought, but a missing tooth had left a wide gap in his smile, and there were a couple of tough guys who just wouldn’t stop picking on him. Finally, Lebow told them that if they didn’t knock it off, he was going to let them have it.

  Other than that, the ride over to Pearl was proving fast and mostly quiet—well, other than all the drills the skipper had ordered. The extra training was a good thing for the new men, Lebow thought now, sitting in fire control. As Commander Flynn had observed, the whole lot of them were “green, green, green.”

  Lebow had not expected to see the forward areas again, but he was not as surprised as some. While on leave from Mare Island, he’d visited his folks in Abernathy, Texas. When it was almost time to go back to the ship, a disquiet seized him. He found that he dreaded returning to Indianapolis, and he had never felt that way before. He confided this to his mother, Minervia, who reminded him that Jesus would be with him wherever he went. This counsel reassured Lebow at the time, but now his disquiet was back, and he still didn’t know precisely what the problem was. Maybe it was those nine Indy sailors who died off Okinawa. That had really rattled him. But there had been other things—things he had not told his mother.

  During the short preinvasion bombardment of Iwo Jima, Admiral Spruance had parked Indianapolis a few thousand yards offshore, where Lebow and Murphy joined in the shelling. Iwo had been an ugly island before, Lebow thought, barren and dominated by an ashy peak that burped steam like a stinking old drunk. Then it turned horrific.

  On D-Day, February 19, Lebow watched the attack through his range-finder and could actually see the shallows turning red with the blood of American boys. The sight clawed at his heart. Then, during the bombardment of Okinawa in the last week of March, he was again looking through his range-finder at the shoreline. He swept his gaze left to right along the beach, which stacked itself into black volcanic rock that rose to form a cliff about two hundred feet high. He was inspecting the cliff when movement caught his eye.

  Lebow saw a woman. She looked young to him, and Japanese. A pair of Japanese soldiers hemmed her against the cliff’s edge, and in her arms she held a baby. Clinging to her leg was another child, maybe three or four years old. As Lebow watched, the soldiers pressed the woman closer and closer to the edge. Finally, with nowhere to go, she scooped the older child into her free arm and jumped to her death.

  Lebow had not had time to feel much then. He thought all things Japanese were evil, especially after Iwo Jima. But enemy soldiers forcing women and children to their deaths was a new level of depravity. The memory stuck with him, made him uneasy, and probably contributed to this dread that was still parked in his gut. He hadn’t known that Indy would be going back to the forward area, but now here they were. He wondered if he was also right, as he had told his mother, that something awful was going to happen.

  • • •

  Furman and Nolan slept and sat with the bomb. Nolan was also waging a losing battle with seasickness. He had known it would plague him and began swallowing pills to fight it even before he and Furman boarded the planes in Albuquerque. The pills made him sleepy, and he spent a great deal of time in his bunk suffering nausea so vicious that he feared he was going to die, while also fearing that he wouldn’t. There was only one upside. The time Nolan spent secluded in the flag lieutenant’s cabin facilitated continual radiation checks on the cargo without drawing attention to what might otherwise have appeared to be oddly frequent visits to his quarters.

  Furman, meanwhile, set about absorbing the wonder of his first experience on a warship at sea. Indy rumbled along in rhythm with the sea—up, down, side to side—shuddering and thrumming with the effort. Designed to give and bend, she yielded to the tons of water that coursed around her, rolling forward with a purposeful grace, averaging thirty knots. The speed, Furman learned, was a tactic that would not only shorten the trip but also keep them safe from enemy subs. Even the fastest of the Japanese boats could only make about nineteen knots.

  Each day, Furman observed gunnery practice—since he was impersonating an artillery officer, it seemed the thing to do. One of the ship’s observation planes towed behind it a brightly colored sleeve, a kind of long windsock, and Indy’s gun crews blasted away at it. Furman thought the pilots who drew the job of being shot at had a most unenviable assignment.

  Despite his bent toward secrecy, Furman quickly formed friendships with several Indy officers. He especially enjoyed the Irish types—Father Conway, Moore, Flynn, and the engineering officer, Commander Glen DeGrave of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Furman considered them all good examples of Hibernian blood, spirited men of strong convictions and good humor. Flynn, who was nicknamed “Red” for his hair, even looked the part. A 1927 Naval Academy grad, he had already been assigned to take command of another ship and hoped to catch up with her on this voyage.

  The engineering officer, DeGrave, regaled Furman and Nolan with humor-leavened rants about the indignity he was about to suffer. Just as they were putting to sea, DeGrave received orders. The Navy had decided that at fifty-one he was too old for further sea duty, and he was to be put off Indianapolis at Pearl Harbor. DeGrave was furious about this and kept Furman in stitches with salty grousing about his impending fate.

  Meanwhile, the bomb transport mission was proceeding without incident—if you didn’t count the fire and the near capsize. The decoy crate seemed to be working well. The box was stenciled with Army quartermaster marks that were both indecipherable and, in every respect, misleading. Still, rumors and wagering on the contents continued. One sailor told Furman that after much deliberation, he’d hit on what was in the crate: a ransom for General Jonathan Wainwright.

  The Japanese had taken Wainwright prisoner when the Americans surrendered at the Philippine island of Corregidor in the summer of 1942. To ransom the general would take something really special, the sailor allowed, since Wainwright was the highest-ranking American POW of the war. And the sailor had figured out what that special something was: The crate contained none other than the heart-stoppingly beautiful screen siren Hedy Lamarr!

  Furman laughed but neither confirmed nor denied the sailor’s suspicion. It was as good a rumor as any—which meant it was about as far from the truth as you could get.

  5

  * * *

  AFTER
THREE DAYS AT flank speed, Diamond Head rose into view, its jagged southern rim like teeth sawing into the sky. When the ship passed abeam the old volcano, the 1MC came to life, announcing that Indianapolis had just broken the speed record for the 2,091-mile passage from Farallon Light off San Francisco to Diamond Head—the whole voyage in 74.5 hours. All over the ship, the men sent up a cheer—not least because many were looking forward to beer on the beach and bronze-skinned island girls.

  But after Indy moored in Pearl’s green-water lagoon, McVay allowed almost no one to leave the ship. Dr. Haynes thought perhaps there were medical exceptions, and he tracked down Flynn.

  “I’ve got a corpsman with a fractured leg,” Haynes explained. “I need to offload him and transfer him to the hospital.”

  “Sorry, Lew, but nobody’s leaving the ship,” Flynn said.

  Haynes insisted. “He’s got a fractured ankle and he’s in a cast. He really should be in a hospital.”

  But Flynn was equally insistent. “Like I said, nobody’s leaving the ship—nobody but the yard workers and men with orders.” Haynes did not press further. A rabble-rouser at the Academy, Flynn had mellowed into a man who loved a good joke but would also tell you no in a way that left little room for argument.

  One man with orders to disembark was the engineering officer, DeGrave. By the time Indy tied up at the pier, he was mad as hell all over again. He had beaten “over-age” orders before, but the ones he had in his pocket now were final. He stomped down the brow having spit out only minimal goodbyes. His replacement, an ex–merchant marine named Lieutenant Richard Banks Redmayne, had served for five months as DeGrave’s assistant. Now, at age twenty-seven, he would ascend to the top spot, engineering officer for the flagship of the 5th Fleet.

  Indianapolis took on fuel and stores. Six hours after tying up, a line-handling crew cast off again. On the bridge, McVay rang for steam. The engine room, now under Redmayne’s command, gave it to him, and the ship nosed out through the harbor gate. Haynes stood topside watching. On the way in, he’d noticed that the normally busy harbor was entirely deserted, which meant Indy could pull right up for fueling without the usual lengthy wait. Now she was sailing past a strange steel city of American ships, all just sitting outside the antisubmarine nets, doing nothing. Haynes realized then that whatever was on the hangar deck in that well-guarded crate was awfully important.

  • • •

  On July 23, when Indianapolis was halfway to Tinian, the Pacific joint intelligence center issued a ten-page submarine update, classified TOP SECRET ULTRA. Addressees on the message included eleven different Pacific commands, but with a tiny distribution: Only sixteen people would see this intelligence. The update was tabular in format and contained revisions to data that had been published on July 16, the day Indianapolis sailed from Mare Island.

  The July 16 report had pinpointed the IJN submarine I-372 in Yokosuka, Japan. The July 23 report updated this information: Task Force 38 aircraft had sunk I-372 in Yokosuka. The new report also revised the positions of submarines in the Tamon group. Analysts charted I-47 and I-53 at Nansei Shoto, between Okinawa and the nearest of the major Philippine Islands, Luzon, and plotted I-58 in the central Philippine Sea, in the vicinity of the Caroline and Mariana Islands.

  • • •

  By day, flying fish leapt like dancers along Indy’s southwesterly track toward the Marianas. At night, her screws spun a luminous green wake that ribboned from the stern like the trailing robe of a queen. Tinian lay about fourteen hundred miles south of Japan, and five nautical miles southwest of Saipan, appearing from the air as green as Ireland, its warm coastal waters percolating with brightly striped fish. McVay had decided to make the transit from Pearl to Tinian at twenty-four knots, and now he was well ahead of schedule.

  Along with his crew, McVay puzzled over the contents of the crate, albeit along a narrower line. He knew that Purnell, the admiral who’d given him the assignment, was deeply involved in some secret project, though he didn’t know just what. But considering what Furman had said about the shipment cutting time off the war, McVay knew it had to be a weapon.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. His job was to make sure the shipment, whatever it was, arrived quickly and safely at Tinian. Indy’s weeklong steam would put her in the anchorage there on the morning of July 26. It would be a homecoming of sorts.

  In June 1944, Indianapolis arrived off Saipan with Spruance on her bridge. The admiral’s sprawling surface force, along with Admiral Mitscher’s carrier planes, had just bested the Empire in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Now the Japanese meant to defend Saipan at all costs.

  America paid a high price to capture the island, losing 11,000 of 71,000 ground troops. As the Marianas invasion pressed on, Indy’s flag plot, Spruance’s tactical control space aboard the ship, became a smoke-filled room, the scene of grand debates on strategy and tactics. Admiral Kelly Turner and General Harry Schmidt sent 41,000 troops, mostly Marines, ashore at Tinian to face a defending Japanese garrison of 8,500. After eight days of fighting, only 313 Japanese soldiers survived.

  Now Spruance’s flagship was returning to the island, albeit without his flag. During the transit, McVay and Flynn continued their shipshape project with firefighting and abandon-ship drills for the new men, as well as drills specifically related to the special cargo. McVay also issued standing orders for continued gunnery practice.

  Dr. James Nolan’s seasickness had abated some. Since he was posing as a gunnery officer, he decided it would be prudent to at least observe some naval target practice. This though he disliked guns and was afraid of them. Moving carefully so as not to trigger another wave of nausea, he joined Furman topside, where he stood with Commander Stan Lipski, Indy’s gunnery officer, and Ensign Donald Blum. As the four men watched Indy’s five-inch guns eject fire and smoke, the deep concussion of each salvo thundered in Nolan’s chest.

  At twenty-one, Blum was the junior gunnery officer, one of the men Flynn had labeled “green, green, green.” Blum reported to Indianapolis at Mare Island after receiving his commission through the Navy’s V-12 program, a college curriculum designed to churn out a steady supply of officers to staff the war. He was among the ship’s most junior officers, which was perhaps what prompted his habit of highlighting privileges he enjoyed in contrast with the humble circumstances of the enlisted.

  The gun barrels recoiled with each blast and coughed thick smoke, which the seabreeze ushered aft amid the lingering smell of explosives. Blum turned to Nolan with a question: “How big are the guns you shoot in the Army?”

  The doctor froze for a moment and cursed his lack of foresight. If he was going to pose as an artillery officer, why hadn’t he at least prepared himself a bit of a script? But he recovered quickly with a dash of humor. Nolan made a large circle with his hands and held it up in the air with a smile. “About this big.”

  Blum and Lipski burst out laughing. Nolan and Furman laughed, too, and breathed inward sighs of relief. But when they weren’t looking, Blum glanced at Lipski and raised his eyebrows.

  En route to Tinian, some sailors felt the skipper’s extra gunnery practice was about the last thing Indianapolis needed. Seaman Second Class Don McCall had spent the last three years burning across the Pacific with Admiral Spruance, doing the real thing. Tall and narrow-faced, McCall had red hair that rolled back from his forehead in a thick wave that wasn’t strictly regulation. He grew up in Mansfield, a speck of a town in central Illinois. His father, a strong, honest man who raised his kids to be likewise, fell suddenly ill after exposure to lime-mortar. Three days later, he was dead. McCall was only ten. After that, his mother took a job running a sewing machine for a New Deal program, the Works Progress Administration. But there was never enough money. When McCall reported to Indianapolis, he was eighteen years old. It was the first time he ever remembered having enough to eat. And they even paid him—eighteen dollars a month.

  McCall loved the Navy and saw his first action at Tarawa. When Indy arrived the
re in November 1943, the island had looked to him like an emerald floating in a sapphire sea. When she left, Tarawa was nothing but stumps and smoke. In battle, Spruance always insisted on a ringside seat and often ordered his flagship positioned close to the beach rather than commanding from a distance. McCall served as an air-sea lookout on the starboard side of the bridge, where he often worked directly with the admiral on sighting enemy shore batteries for the gun crews using binoculars and Indy’s “pelorus,” an instrument for observing a target’s bearing from the ship.

  McCall saw a lot through his binoculars that he later wished he hadn’t—like civilians forced to leap in droves from the cliffs at Saipan in the summer of 1944. That kind of thing had caused a lot of the fellows to despise all Japanese. McCall didn’t. Peering through his glasses at savage hand-to-hand combat, he would sometimes see an enemy soldier fall and think, “That man had a family.”

  6

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING OF July 24, a few hundred miles north of Indy’s track in the upper reaches of the Philippine Sea, a radarman aboard the destroyer escort USS Underhill picked up a bogie. It was a Japanese “Dinah,” a bomber, shadowing Underhill and her convoy.

  Commanded by Lieutenant Commander Robert Newcomb, Underhill (DE-682) was escorting six troopships bearing battle-weary soldiers of the Army’s 96th Division after their final assault on Okinawa. Throughout the war, American shipbuilders had delivered more than 550 destroyer escorts like Underhill in an effort to counter Axis submarine threats in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. The ships were small, fast, and equipped with five-inch and three-inch guns, as well as 40 mm and 20 mm antiaircraft defenses. Destroyer escorts sailed in company with slower, less defensible ships such as transports, as well as cruisers, which were not equipped with underwater sound detection or other antisubmarine gear.