by Lynn Vincent
Escorts sometimes fought off IJN subs and other times sank them. Occasionally, though, a Japanese sub commander scored a direct hit on a ship under an escort’s care. In those cases, the escort transformed into an ambulance on the spot and picked up surviving American crew. The Navy’s policy on escort ships had evolved as combat victories compressed the hot areas of Pacific operations into the north and west. Now Nansei Shoto, the area astride the shipping lane between Okinawa and Luzon, Philippines, was one of the hottest. Underhill was a replacement in this convoy, which also included a number of patrol craft and sub chasers. The original escort tapped for the mission was down with mechanical problems.
Soon, the Dinah had flown close enough that Underhill’s lookouts spotted it and sent up a cry. But the plane, it turned out, was no threat. Instead, she was a hound leading the hunters to their prey.
Within an hour, a pair of submarines snaked into the area. One laid a dummy mine—bait for Underhill. When the destroyer stood in to sink the mine with gunfire, the subs attacked, releasing at least two kaiten.
Underhill spotted one of the suicide subs on the surface. Quickly, Newcomb ordered a course change and rang for flank speed.
“All hands stand by to ram!” he said.
Underhill crashed the kaiten on its port side, but seconds later two explosions ripped the ship apart. Underhill’s entire bow forward of the stack was blown off. It sailed up and splashed down to starboard, where it floated like a giant ragged buoy, sticking straight up. One hundred twelve men died in the blast, including Newcomb. Other ships in the convoy quickly scooped up survivors.
In ULTRA traffic, the sinking of Underhill was quickly credited to the Tamon group being tracked by Captain William Smedburg and the combat intelligence office in D.C. Viewed on Smedburg’s chart, the Japanese attack occurred only a few miles from the last estimated positions of I-47 and I-53. It also occurred less than a week after I-372 was sunk at Yokosuka, where ULTRA intercepts had last placed her.
It seemed that the magicians were on a hell of a roll.
The Underhill intel filtered out to select theater intelligence officers and area commanders. At Guam, Captain Edwin Layton passed the information to Commodore James Carter, commander of CincPac Advance, who discussed it personally with his surface operations officer, Captain Oliver Naquin. Vice Admiral George Murray, who was the commander of the Mariana Islands, also received it, along with select senior officers in the Pacific. Properly sanitized, this information should have trickled down to commanders in the fleet.
• • •
As Indianapolis steamed for Tinian, McVay’s officers and men kept themselves busy. The communications officer, Lieutenant Commander Ken Stout, and his radiomen spent time testing four newly installed medium- and high-frequency radio transmitters called TCKs. The radiomen transmitted ship to shore and back again, and the TCKs all worked perfectly.
Earl Henry had also been working hard. Since pulling out of San Francisco Bay, he’d been a one-man dental assembly line. The pale green dental chair in his examination room rolled and dipped as Indy clipped through heaving seas, but it was bolted to the deck, and Henry had become an expert at pulling his drill from a sailor’s mouth in time to keep from drilling anything he shouldn’t.
The Pacific humidity had turned his exam room sticky and close, but he spent full days in there trying to fill the time until he could finally get a look at his little son. Jane had mailed the photographs as promised. After Tinian, Indianapolis would stop in at Guam, and Henry was expecting to receive the pictures then. He chattered about them nonstop to all the officers, including the skipper.
McVay kept himself occupied inspecting personnel and berthing, accompanied by a new yeoman, Richard Paroubek, a first-class petty officer who’d joined the ship at Mare Island in June. By then, Paroubek had twenty months of shore duty under his belt, including time spent on college campuses recruiting WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). With his Lawrence of Arabia eyes, he was good at it—plus, he joked, somebody had to do it. Finally, though, the Navy made him pick a sea billet. A friend in the Twelfth Naval District told Paroubek he could choose between a carrier, a destroyer, or a heavy cruiser, all under repair at Mare Island. Paroubek had lost two friends in the consuming blaze aboard USS Franklin, so he didn’t want a carrier. And he’d heard that destroyers had suffered heavy losses around the Philippines. He chose the cruiser Indianapolis as the safest bet.
7
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JULY 26, 1945
Tinian Island
THE SEA BREEZE BROUGHT the welcome smell of tropical land, signaling that Indianapolis was approaching the forty-square-mile coral lozenge referred to by Manhattan Project insiders simply as “Destination.” The OOD set the sea and anchor detail, McVay rang engineering to back down the engines, and the helmsman nosed Indy’s clipper bow into a basin on the island’s leeward edge called Tinian Town Bay. A year earlier, Admiral Spruance had stood on Indy’s bridge, overseeing the Allied capture of the island. Now, the Seabees, the Navy’s construction battalion, had hewn from the rough coral ground a half-dozen military-grade runways, and trucks and Jeeps sped through a grid of city streets named for those in the New York City borough of Manhattan.
Indy’s linehandlers pitched a hawser rope down to the pier, where a man looped it over a bollard. Signalmen raised the American flag on the fantail and, at the bow, hoisted the Navy jack, the white stars of the forty-eight states set in a field of blue.
As linehandlers worked to secure Indy in her mooring, McVay’s new yeoman, Richard Paroubek, stood at the rail, last in a string of curious sailors. As he watched, a miniature armada of motor whaleboats and other small vessels streamed toward the ship, all of them containing a lot of brass hats. Paroubek saw, too, that the pier beyond rippled with military police. From among the small boats advancing toward the ship, a landing craft emerged. Its broad, flat topside cargo space was designed to carry tanks, but now it was empty except for a lopsided number of officers.
“You men follow me.”
Paroubek looked up to identify the speaker. It was Commander Flynn. His order peeled the last three fellows off the port rail, with Paroubek at the end of the line. Just my luck, he thought. Wrong place, wrong time.
He trailed Flynn to the flag lieutenant’s quarters, where he entered and saw three men. Two were the skipper’s Army guests, the major and the captain. He also saw two metal canisters joined by a long pipe that was threaded through eyebolts on the canister tops. Paroubek looked at the oddball contraption and thought back to some reading he’d done. “That looks like it has to do with radiation,” he murmured.
The comment met a thick wall of silence. Flynn ordered Paroubek and the other men to carry the canisters out to the fo’c’sle for offloading.
• • •
At the same moment Indianapolis was offloading her secret cargo, world-changing events were unfolding elsewhere on the globe. In Germany, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin had issued the “Potsdam Declaration,” dictating terms for Japan’s surrender. The document, which vowed “prompt and utter destruction” if the Empire did not immediately accept the terms, was a high point for Churchill amid a crushing low. At home in England, he’d just been voted out of office. Voters had lofted the Labour Party to power, and Churchill’s deputy, Clement Attlee, was installed as prime minister.
Churchill’s defeat would be catastrophically misread by Japan. Leaders there saw it as a weakening in the Allies’ united front, a softened beachhead upon which dissent might gain ground. Foreign affairs minister Shigenori Togo banked heavily on such an outcome as he considered the Potsdam Declaration and prepared the Empire’s response.
• • •
At Tinian, Ensign John Woolston was standing on the fo’c’sle when Paroubek and the others walked by with the pipe on their shoulders, like comic-book headhunters with a pair of severed heads dangling from a pole. As Indy’s mysterious voyage unfolded, Woolston’s attention had been focused on
the large crate in the port hangar, his mind constructing then discarding possibilities. But the moment he saw the canisters, he knew what the cargo was as clearly as if the Army officers had copied him on a top secret memo. He’d read all the stories in Time.
An atomic weapon would explain the urgency, the secrecy, and the orders to save the cargo at all costs. It would also explain the empty harbor back at Pearl and Tinian’s brass-filled harbor now. All this flashed through Woolston’s mind just as Furman and Nolan walked toward him carrying their luggage. Woolston was sure that he was among a very few, if any, who had solved the mystery. Suddenly the urge seized him to tap Furman on the shoulder and say, sotto voce, “Hey, sir, how’s your uranium doing?” Or something. Something that would let the Army officer know he hadn’t fooled everyone. But Woolston knew that as junior as he was, that would be unforgivably brash. Besides, Captain McVay and Commander Flynn were standing nearby. In the end, Woolston decided he just didn’t have the guts.
Meanwhile, an Indy crane operator swung out a boom trailing a hundred-yard line with a buoy tied to it. Seaman Lyle Umenhoffer, who’d escaped the mess hall when the kamikaze hit, worked with some men from deck division to hook the mysterious crate to the line. A buddy of Umenhoffer’s was working the crane.
“Look at all that brass,” he’d said to Umenhoffer a few minutes earlier, when both men had a bird’s-eye view of the throng of gray and khaki uniforms. A startling number had the gold braid of high rank scrolling across the visors of their hats. Umenhoffer’s friend said he’d never seen so many “scrambled eggs.”
Umenhoffer had. On July 17, 1944, after 5th Fleet forces took Saipan, a whole galaxy of two-, three-, and four-stars clambered up a Jacob’s ladder and assembled aboard Indianapolis to talk strategy with Spruance. The visitors included Fleet Admiral Ernest King—a five-star—Admiral Chester Nimitz, and a constellation of other flag and general officers sufficient to have Indy’s entire crew tiptoeing around the ship for the rest of the day. Then, in January 1945 at Ulithi, Spruance resumed control of the fleet from Admiral William “Bull” Halsey in preparation for the invasion of Iwo Jima. From the decks of Indianapolis, Spruance would command more than a quarter-million Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen, including one hundred thousand ground troops. At Ulithi, so many stars graced Indy’s decks to consult with their fleet commander that the introverted Spruance wrote to his wife, “I have been very busy, mostly seeing people, which I do not enjoy in large doses.”
Now, as brass from every service branch watched from below, Umenhoffer’s buddy carefully lowered the crate and set it on the deck of a second landing craft. While most of the crew focused on this operation, Woolston had been watching as a crane on the other landing craft lifted the canisters down to its deck. Furman and Nolan had then climbed down a rope ladder into the craft.
Woolston noticed how absurd the canisters appeared. They were, in fact, the only items on a deck thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long. This, too, matched his new theory. As he watched, the boat quickly put her stern to Indy and growled away.
8
* * *
JULY 27, 1945
Apra Harbor, Guam
ON THE MORNING OF July 27, USS Indianapolis dropped anchor in Apra Harbor, Guam. A boatswain’s mate blew his high-pitched whistle and piped McVay ashore. A car then collected the captain for the quick ride up the coast to CincPac Advance headquarters.
Motoring northeast along the island rim, McVay could see on his left the coral-shadowed, turquoise waters of Apra, a deep-water port that was in many ways the perfect South Pacific moorage. Green strips of land wrapped like velvety arms around the blue basin, protecting it from the open sea. The channel entrance was narrow—some would say too narrow, for many ships had grounded trying to enter—but the slim access made it easy to protect the harbor from seaborne invaders.
At Tinian, McVay had received orders:
Date: 26 July 1945
From: CINCPAC Adv Hq
To: Indianapolis
Upon completion unloading Tinian, report to Port Director for routing to Guam where disembark Com 5th Fleet personnel X Completion report to PD Guam for onward routing to Leyte where on arrival report CTF 95 by dispatch for duty X CTG 95.7 directed arrange 10 days training for Indianapolis in Leyte area.
In plain language, the orders meant this: After Indy dropped the secret cargo at Tinian, she was to travel to Guam, then proceed west across the Philippine Sea to Leyte, Philippines. There, Rear Admiral Lynde McCormick would arrange the long-overdue refresher training for McVay’s crew.
Copies of the CincPac message, date-time group 260152, streamed out to seven other addressees, including a covey of admirals—Spruance and Nimitz, as well as Vice Admiral Murray, commander of the Marianas, who was headquartered at Guam. Also copied were Task Force 95 commander Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf and his subordinate, McCormick, commander of Task Group 95.7.
The message should have been classified “secret,” as were all warship routing messages, but was broadcast as “restricted” by mistake, lowering its importance. All addressees received the message except for McCormick, who was to arrange Indianapolis’s training. McCormick’s radiomen made a decryption error, scrambling the numbers in “95.7” and concluding that the message was not for their boss.
McVay had not been in the forward areas since April. To get the lay of the land, he planned to call on a classmate of his, Commodore James Carter, commander of CincPac Advance, Nimitz’s new Pacific Fleet headquarters. To be nearer the fighting, the admiral had chosen to stake his new claim on a bottle-green hill overlooking Agana, which Spruance and the Marines had captured a year earlier in a symbolic, full circle victory.
Three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, with America still stunned and reeling, five thousand Japanese soldiers stormed Guam’s crystalline beaches, sweeping away a garrison of four hundred U.S. soldiers. The island became the first American-held territory to fall to Japan. Then, retribution. After conquering Saipan in July 1944, Indianapolis took station off Guam and battered the Japanese in a thunderous symphony of shore bombardment. Sixty thousand troops—Marines, Army, and even Coast Guard—slogged ashore at Orote, Agana, and Agat. Tales of Japanese atrocities had hardened many hearts among invading U.S. ground forces. Their attitude was to take no prisoners, to give no quarter. After twenty days of savage combat, America again controlled the island, and Indy steamed into Apra to bring Spruance ashore, becoming the first American ship to enter the harbor since the beginning of the war.
Commodore Carter served as Nimitz’s assistant chief of staff and operations officer, but McVay knew him as “Jimmy.” When McVay appeared in his office, the two had a casual conversation. McVay explained that he had been out of the fight since Okinawa and asked Carter to catch him up on the operational situation.
“Things are very quiet,” Carter said.
He did not mention, either directly or in sanitized fashion, the ULTRA intelligence on the deployment of four IJN submarines on offensive missions to the Philippine Sea. Neither did he mention that one, and possibly two, of those subs sank Underhill. Or that Admiral King’s magicians had pinned I-58 to their maps five hundred miles north of what they suspected was Palau, near the Allied shipping lanes that crisscrossed the Philippine Sea between the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Philippines.
Instead, Carter said, “The Japs are on their last legs and there’s nothing to worry about.”
McVay explained his orders to take Indianapolis from Guam to Leyte.
“First of all, you will not be routed by this office,” Carter said. “That’s handled by the routing officer, Naval Operating Base Guam.” He added that Nimitz was anxious for McVay and his crew to complete refresher training in Leyte so that Indianapolis would be ready to embark Admiral Spruance and his staff, and resume duty as the 5th Fleet flagship.
“At the rate I’m going,” McVay said, “my refresher training will probably be conducted in Tokyo Bay.” He was only half joking.<
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After visiting Carter, McVay went to have lunch with Spruance and his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Arthur C. Davis. Over the meal, Spruance told McVay he wouldn’t need him for several weeks. Was there anything McVay wanted to do in the meantime? McVay said he’d like to get his refresher training in without delay.
“Go ahead,” Spruance said. “When you finish that, I might send you to Manila. The rest of the staff might be there, and they can use you until I’m ready to embark. Is there anything you’d rather do?”
“No, sir,” McVay said.
The admiral was in no rush, he told the captain, as he was busy working on the invasion plans for Kyushu, the Japanese island that had been nearest when Spruance sat aboard Indy and watched Franklin burn.
At about 4 p.m., McVay went to the routing office and huddled with Lieutenant R. C. Northover and Ensign William Renoe over a plotting board in a Quonset hut. Joseph J. Waldron, another lieutenant, listened in. Waldron was the convoy and routing officer for Naval Operating Base Guam. The plotting board depicted “Route Peddie,” an eleven-hundred-mile straight shot from Guam to Leyte across the Philippine Sea. The route missed a due-west heading by just eight degrees.
McVay told the junior officers that he’d like to leave the next day, July 28.
“What speed would you like to make?” Northover asked.
The question puzzled McVay, who felt the routing officers were in a better position to make that call than he was. In addition to fuel and mission considerations, a warship’s speed was also designed to reduce the threat of attack by enemy subs. With sufficient speed, a cruiser like Indy could outrun any Japanese boat.
“I haven’t been out here for over two months,” McVay said. “I don’t know what speed you are allowed to make. Is the sixteen-knot speed limitation still in effect?”