Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  In that moment, Edgar Harrell knew he was going to make it.

  • • •

  In Radio 1, receivers the size of coffins began breaking free of the port bulkhead—which was now nearly overhead—and tumbling down the sloped deck. Seawater began pouring into the space. Moran had just finished sending the distress message again—straight through this time without repeated words—when Driscoll shouted, “Clear out!”

  Sturtevant, Moran, and the rest crawled uphill, clambered over the kneeknocker and out into the passageway. One by one, the radio crew burst into the controlled chaos outside. The ship was underwater up to the comm deck and still plowing forward under steam.

  Moran was standing at the forward stack when the ocean reached his waist and carried him away. Sturtevant made his way forward, where he spotted a twenty-five-man life raft still secured to the No. 2 turret. Working with three other sailors, he finally cut it down, but the deck of the ship was now nearly vertical. Throwing the cumbersome raft over the lifelines on the high side of the ship proved impossible. Instead, Sturtevant got into the raft with the others. Instantly, the force of the ocean surging back from the bow swept the raft over the aft edge of the sunken fo’c’sle, past the quarterdeck, and into the night.

  • • •

  Clinging to the bridge wing rail with Ralph Guye and Lieutenant Orr, Glenn Morgan could see hundreds of men clustered at the port rail below. He sensed fear spiking, coursing man to man as the port side and stern rose higher and higher above the ocean’s black surface. Morgan felt time running out. He knew he had to get off the ship before she rolled.

  He waved half a salute at Orr. “I’ll see you later, sir!”

  Morgan climbed over the rail and looked down. Below he could see the signal bridge and beside it, the pelorus—a sundial-shaped instrument on a pedestal. He should be able to slide down the overhead toward the signal bridge. But to reach the signal bridge deck, he would have to jump. If he landed on the pelorus, he might sustain an injury that would keep him from making it off the ship. He had to land between it and the signal bridge’s steel rail—a very narrow strip.

  Carefully, Morgan began his slide, then paused. Fixing his gaze on what looked like a safe spot, he jumped—and landed on target. He immediately scrambled over the rail, then slid on his shoe soles until he came to rest on the port side of the comm deck against the Bofors gun mount, its barrels now pointed straight up. Rushing water sluiced over the guns, pinning Morgan against the breech. He could feel Indy yielding to the sea. She was sinking and taking him with her.

  Suddenly, a great pressure released. Morgan felt the sensation of rising and clung to the gun barrel. It felt as if he were climbing it, but the barrel was actually slipping down through his grasp as the ship dropped away. White foam and debris boiled around him. He heard men calling, screaming. Down, down, the gun slipped, until the flash guard, shaped like a funnel, passed through his fingertips. It was the last thing he touched on Indianapolis.

  Free of the ship, Morgan found himself surrounded by rolling froth that glowed phosphorescent green, a billion plankton caught in the ship’s dying churn. That was when his heart flared with a sudden and ugly clarity. He had completely forgotten about Ralph Guye. He had promised Ralph they’d stick together, then he’d leapt the rail and abandoned him. Guilt flooded Morgan’s heart.

  • • •

  In Radio 2, Woods was still tapping out the SOS. He could hear the creaks and groans of crumpling bulkheads, feel the extremity of the list gathering speed. He knew Indianapolis was headed for the bottom. He waited as long as he could for orders, but none came.

  “Men,” he finally said to the sailors in Radio 2, “abandon ship.”

  Miner did not have to be told twice. Apparently, no one else did either, because by the time he turned toward the door to comply, the shack was empty. The starboard door was now located at the bottom of a sharp downhill, and Miner had to crabwalk carefully to reach it without falling. As he crawled over the kneeknocker into the passageway, he looked back a final time. The lights and power were still on. Woods had not moved. After evacuating his men, he stood fast, still keying the SOS.

  • • •

  At the stern railing, a stream of men abandoned ship, some jumping, some waiting for the water to get closer. Everywhere, men fought to swim away from the dying vessel, grabbing anything they could to keep them afloat. The suction pulled some men under as others barely broke free. Some felt no suction at all.

  About ten minutes had passed since the torpedo strikes and the ship heeled wildly under Harpo Celaya’s feet. He had not seen Thorpe since they parted ways at the quarterdeck. He knew he was going to have to abandon ship, and all he could think about was going below to his locker. He was on his way there when he ran smack into Santos Pena, who had left the bow and now was awaiting further orders by the No. 3 turret.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Pena said.

  “I’ve gotta get my life jacket!”

  Pena stopped him, explaining that he had just come from the forward area and the whole bow was gone. He knew they had to get off the ship and wanted to stay together.

  With Pena in the lead, Harpo climbed hand over hand up the main deck aft toward the port rail, which now stood out against the sky. Both men picked their way through the lifelines and leaned out, peering into a black maw. Pena jumped first, and Harpo followed a second later. He landed hard on something—or someone. He couldn’t tell.

  Harpo thrashed in the midnight sea, kicking and turning in desperate circles. “Santos! Santos!” he cried. “Santos, where are you?” There was no answer.

  “Santos! Santos!” he cried again.

  Harpo’s heart broke right there in the water when he realized that the hard thing he had landed on must have been Pena. His best friend had probably just saved his life, and now he had killed him.

  • • •

  The ship continued a rapid roll to starboard and lay nearly on her side. In the No. 1 mess, Norman Roberts and the rest of the men who had used their Mae Wests to escape the forward engine room now waited by a ladder to repeat the process. When the mess hall finally filled with water, they floated up past the sunken quarterdeck and out into the sea.

  Redmayne, the engineering officer, never made it to the bridge. Instead he crawled out of the No. 2 mess into a passageway near the bakery. After the torpedoes hit, he had burned his right hand while shielding himself from flames. Then he tripped blindly in a passageway, fell to the scalding deck, and burned the fingertips on his left hand. Now, the radical list had turned bulkheads into decks, and a row of welder’s oxygen cylinders that had once been mounted vertically lay before him like a ladder. Proceeding painfully up the cylinders hand over hand, he finally gained the main portside passageway.

  The ship continued to roll, now threatening to capsize. Topside, the throng of men on the rail had to decide if they would abandon ship. Would they tempt fate in the dark with the still-turning screws, or stay put and potentially be trapped in a capsize by unseen lines, cables, and debris?

  Nightingale made his choice. He clambered up the bulkhead to the 20 mm bathtub and jumped about five feet out into the water. Hundreds followed suit. Together, these men would form a group with Redmayne the senior man among them.

  • • •

  Seconds later, the ship rolled again, this time clear over to ninety degrees. On the main deck, gear began to tear loose and crash into sailors. Man after man lost his grip and went sliding down the deck, borne along in a cascade of debris. Gunpowder cans, life vests, rafts, furniture, crates of vegetables, and dead bodies all splashed into the water alongside the living. Again, George Horvath felt helpless as he watched injured shipmates tumble toward the starboard side to be swallowed alive by the sea.

  Still fighting to reach Radio 1, McVay leapt to the fo’c’sle deck, which was almost completely submerged. He pulled himself to the lifelines, climbed through, and began walking aft. McVay had reached the No. 3 turret o
n the afterdeck when the surging sea swept him off the ship.

  Men already in the water soon turned back to see a fearsome sight: The flagship of the fleet stood on end, her stern towering over them like a black skyscraper erected on a moon-silvered plain. They stared spellbound as Indy’s massive screws kept up a lazy turning and all around her the phosphorescent water glowed like green fire.

  Only twelve minutes had passed since the torpedo blasts. Now, amid a roar like waves pounding the beach in a storm, Indianapolis plunged straight down. McVay looked up to see men still leaping from the stern and the giant silhouettes of Indy’s port screws falling directly toward his head. He thought, Well, this is the end of me, and then turned and began to swim. Water and hot oil slid up the back of his neck, and soon he heard a loud swishing sound behind him.

  When McVay turned around to look, his ship, USS Indianapolis, was gone.

  FEBRUARY 1998

  PIER S-1A

  SUBMARINE BASE PEARL HARBOR

  OAHU, HAWAII

  “SKIPPER, WE’VE GOT A problem.”

  The Navy chief leaned in, speaking quietly into Commander William Toti’s ear. The two men were standing on the outdoor lanai at the Pearl Harbor Submarine Base officers club amid a crowd of guests that included the four admirals who led U.S. military forces in the Pacific.

  It was not a good day for a problem.

  Buttoned into full dress whites, Toti saw a blue Hawaiian sky arcing overhead. Around him, he heard cocktail chatter, glasses clinking, laughter—the sounds of a reception that followed the ceremony he’d been dreading for months.

  Toti looked at his chief and sighed. “What is it?”

  “It’s the plates, sir. All the Indianapolis plates in the galley are gone.”

  Instantly, Toti’s shoulders relaxed. He shook his head and laughed. As of that morning, the submarine’s galley had been stacked with dinner plates bearing the boat’s logo, crossed checkered flags with the designator “SSN-697” at the bottom, and “USS Indianapolis” at the top.

  If the plates were gone, Toti knew exactly who had taken them. Technically it was theft, but no one in the entire Navy would dare call it a crime.

  About thirty survivors had taken Toti up on his invitation to join him for the deactivation ceremony. That morning, the old sailors had begun to trickle in, many still hale and hearty, some pushing walkers. They wore golf shirts and dress shirts and American-flag ties. They sported CA-35 ball caps festooned with gold braid and commemorative pins. Some were round with home cooking, others thin, their trouser legs flapping around legs gaunt with age. One was dying of cancer.

  The young sailors in Toti’s crew greeted the survivors warmly and shook their hands with something between reverence and awe. These old salts were the stuff of legend. For more than fifty years, every sailor coming through boot camp had learned the story of their survival. The swimming pool at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, was named in their honor: the USS Indianapolis Combat Training Pool. Because of the Indy disaster, every recruit now had to pass a swimming test in order to graduate from boot camp. That was not true during World War II.

  For more than a decade after the sinking, the Indianapolis tragedy lay mostly unexamined. After more than six years of war and 60 million dead, people had seemed ready to move on. Then, in 1958, Associated Press news editor Richard Newcomb published Abandon Ship, a book that was part narrative, part investigative journalism. Newcomb, a Rutgers graduate, had served as a correspondent during World War II. “The story told here is not a happy one,” he wrote in the book’s preface, “and no official Navy imprimatur will be found upon it.”

  Newcomb found that while Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima seemed burned in the public memory, the greatest at-sea disaster of the war—indeed in American naval history—had receded into obscurity. “Some people knew one part of the story and some knew another, but the myth and mystery which had grown up around the case were amazing. The lack of authentic knowledge extended even into official quarters, and was most affecting where it was most unexpected—among those who had suffered through it.”

  Newcomb was the first author after the sinking to interview the Indianapolis survivors. Many told him they had never even spoken to their families about the ordeal.

  Before the deactivation ceremony, Toti’s sub crew had taken some of the survivors on a tour of their namesake submarine. Later, sailors and officers assembled in ranks, and guests filed into a seating area. Toti took his place at a podium under a white awning, its scalloped edges ruffling in the trade winds. From the dais, Toti could see the glistening combination caps of his officers and chiefs, and the white Dixie-cup caps of his petty officers and seamen. The survivors, wearing their ball caps, sat in chairs in the first row, the place of honor usually reserved for admirals.

  Toti squared up the pages of his speech, his heart a lead weight in his chest. Measured in commendations, his crew of 115 had proven themselves the best in the fleet. But with the Cold War long over and peace breaking out, the Pentagon had decided that America no longer needed so vast a sub fleet. Soon Indianapolis would be hauled up to Bremerton, Washington, to be scrapped, and Toti’s crew scattered to the seven seas. In the process, he felt, the nation would lose something precious. The world that had once needed Indy had changed. That was a good thing, Toti felt, but also profoundly sad, for it seemed to him that he was not here to praise Indianapolis, but to bury her.

  Toti glanced briefly at his notes and began. He thanked the guests in attendance and reviewed his history aboard the submarine.

  “We should celebrate the ship,” he said. “For she served us nobly, keeping us well and safe in a dangerous time. Indianapolis contributed greatly to that peace and to the end of the Cold War, and her success in that endeavor today leads to her demise. Today’s peace is her legacy. But it was not always so. Our nation has known terrible war, and another USS Indianapolis was not fortunate enough to serve during times of peace. That Indianapolis was a major participant in the worst war the world has ever known. And so, I would like to honor the crew members from the cruiser Indianapolis, our sister ship. That ship has inspired us through the years in a way you can’t understand unless you served on board.”

  Toti paused and let his eyes roam over the men in ball caps. As they gazed back at him, he saw a certain intensity of spirit, a warrior’s fire in their eyes.

  “No ship or crew in history has done more or sacrificed more than the cruiser Indianapolis. But we were at war, and in war, the nation calls upon its finest to perform greatly, and sometimes to suffer greatly in defense of freedom. Finally, gentlemen, I would like to correct an omission. I have observed that you never had the benefit of being able to put your ship to rest in a manner such as this. You never got to decommission your Indianapolis. But since our achievement was built on the shoulders of your sacrifice, I thought it appropriate that we finally correct this oversight. For our Indianapolis is your Indianapolis.

  “And so it would make me very proud if you would join with my crew here today, to finally and gallantly put an end to your service, and be once again dismissed together as a crew, one crew—the crew of USS Indianapolis. Shipmates, as I call out your names, if you would take your station and man your watch, we will all be a crew once again.”

  And they did. One by one, Toti called their names—the amiably ornery ones like Glenn Morgan, seventy-four—and the not-so-ornery ones like John Spinelli, seventy-five, who served on the cruiser as a cook. Spinelli was dying of lung cancer but had made the trip anyway. There was Paul Murphy, seventy-three, and Lyle Umenhoffer, seventy, and more than two dozen others.

  The old sailors took their places, standing with the young sailors in spaces that had been left between them. Toti noticed that the survivors stood at attention in exactly the right way. Though half a century had passed, they hadn’t forgotten how.

  At the reception afterward, Toti was chatting with guests when the chief leaned in to tell h
im about the missing plates.

  “Don’t worry about it, Chief,” Toti said, smiling. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He was still smiling when survivors Murphy and Morgan walked up and shook his hand. The men were accompanied by their wives, Mary Lou Murphy and Mertie Jo Morgan.

  Toti noticed a faint protrusion in the front of Morgan’s golf shirt, a slim round outline just above his belt.

  “Um . . . Glenn?” Toti said.

  “Yes?”

  “That wouldn’t happen to be an Indianapolis galley plate you’ve got in your shirt there, would it?”

  Morgan’s face crinkled into a sly grin. “A plate? Why, Bill, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Toti laughed.

  Murphy thanked Toti for inviting them, and then paused for a moment before continuing. “Me and the men have been talking,” Murphy said. “Standing in formation as part of the Indy crew again is something we’ll never forget.”

  “Paul, it’s my honor,” Toti said. “And I don’t think those young sailors who stood with you today will ever forget it either.”

  After the war, Murphy had gone on to become a mechanical engineer, and Morgan a division supervisor with Texaco. Now, both were retired. Murphy fixed his gaze on Toti and turned serious. “Hey, we’ve all been thinking,” he said, meaning the survivors. “There may never be another USS Indianapolis to carry on the reputation of our ship. That means you’re the last captain of the Indianapolis. Have you thought about that?”

  “Of course I’ve thought about it,” Toti answered.

  Murphy squared his shoulders and looked Toti directly in the eye. “Well, the last captain of the last Indianapolis needs you,” he said. “And some of us think you have a duty to respond to his call.”

  BOOK 3

  THE DEEP