by Lynn Vincent
There were also two other ensigns, a seasoned warrant officer, and a few chiefs. Lieutenant Richard Redmayne was the SOPA—the Senior Officer Present Afloat, literally—but with everyone disguised in fuel oil, he did not declare himself. Chief Benton, who hailed from a small town in New Mexico, stepped into this break in the chain of command. The men, for the most part, obeyed him.
Rejected from the rafts, Celaya floated in exile. He hadn’t gotten along with too many men while on the ship, and he wasn’t sure things would change for the better out here. Grief gnawed at his mind as he replayed his leap from the ship and mourned his friend, Santos Pena. After the two original raft passengers fought him off the previous night, another pair of survivors tried to force their way aboard but were also repelled. Then so many survivors swarmed the raft that the two men couldn’t hold them off any longer.
Among this larger group was Redmayne. He had muscled his way aboard the raft and remained there, nursing his burned hands. Redmayne spent the dark early morning hours watching as a couple of chiefs directed the men to collect any useful supplies from the water and put them in the rafts—water casks, ration tins, malt tablets. They would be divided equally and distributed later. From time to time, he asked men nearby their name and rank. Surely, someone would outrank him and take charge of the group. In a group this large, under these circumstances, officers might be targets, and self-preservation called for cagey tactics. He would bide his time.
In the same group were Lebow’s poker buddy Paul Murphy and Lindsey Wilcox, a second-class watertender who had worked in the fire-room, deep in Indy’s belly. If he had not been relieved ten minutes before the torpedoes struck, he would have been killed. At twenty-one, Wilcox was a newlywed. He gave thanks to God and repented of every last sin he could think of, including the time he stole a pie from his grandmother’s kitchen window.
• • •
Glenn Morgan, who had rescued a single raft from under the seaplane, now had a small armada of four rafts, a floater net, and twenty men. The rafts slid up and down the long, glassy swells while smaller waves smashed over the sides. This group was near the McVay rafts but could not see them, as the swells towered overhead like walls, blocking their sight. At intervals, Morgan thrust his head over the edge of his raft and retched. It wasn’t seasickness. It was the fuel oil. Only in the morning did he realize that he, like his mates, was lacquered in it.
Morgan didn’t recognize everyone in his group. Three he knew well—Moran and Lanter, who shared his raft, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Howard Freeze, the senior man in the group. Morgan had stood watch with Freeze and thought him a fine officer. Freeze, who abandoned ship in his underwear, sat in the raft adjacent. Morgan saw that the lieutenant’s skin glowed a frightening pink, as if he’d been flash-fried.
Morgan rested in water to his waist, but the top layer of the Western Pacific was warm enough. To get more of their bodies clear of the water, the men took turns sitting on the raft’s edges, but only one or two at a time. Any more would push the raft deeper, causing the water to rise chest-high on the men still seated inside.
A bag lashed to the lattice held several small kegs of water and a pouch of survival gear. There was a first-aid kit, cans of Spam, fishing kits, malt tablets for controlling thirst, some hardtack, a hatchet, and small enamel cups. The bag also contained signaling mirrors, four-by-eight-foot pieces of canvas, and—most promising—flares. They were ten-gauge flare shells with a primitive little firing tube operated by a plunger.
“Morgan, fire off a few of those,” Freeze called from his raft, calm and reserved despite the severity of his burns.
“Yes, sir,” Morgan said. He loaded one of the green shells into the tube, held it straight up, pulled the plunger, and let it go.
The tube coughed smoke and a little green ball of fire sailed into the sky, reminding Morgan of a one-shot Roman candle. Quickly, he reloaded and fired a red flare and then a white one and watched them climb, too. But their fire looked anemic in the blazing sunlight, and Morgan doubted they could be seen at any distance at all. He checked the remaining supply of flares. There were only four or five.
“Sir, why don’t we save the rest of these,” he said to Freeze. “Let’s wait until dark.”
Freeze agreed, and remarked to one of the men that his pain level was such that he wished he had a large supply of morphine. “I’d rather die from too much morphine than die of these burns,” he said.
Then Freeze fell silent. Morgan could see that he had lapsed into shock.
MONDAY—DAY
Harman Field, Guam
Something about the naval battle he’d seen the night before was bothering Army pilot Richard LeFrancis. The action he and MacArthur’s general saw splashing like fireworks against the midnight sea had not looked to them like gunnery practice. In fact, it looked more like a large ship being sunk.
After landing his plane at Harman Field on Guam, LeFrancis caught a ride over to the Navy end of the island and tracked down a commander. He described the events of the night before, adding that the general thought he’d seen the ship firing back. The Navy commander told LeFrancis that he was unaware of any gunnery practice scheduled for that area, and that LeFrancis and the general had probably not seen the kind of action LeFrancis described.
Having done his due diligence, LeFrancis hitched a ride back to the Army side of Guam and for the time being let it go.
Ten Miles from the Sinking Site
As the morning sun warmed the Pacific waters, Gunner’s Mate Buck Gibson held a dying boy in his arms. The two sailors sprawled half out of the water on a floater net not far from the Redmayne group, the second-largest gathering of men. Dozens of desperate survivors had swarmed the flimsy island, and Gibson had to fight for a place to hang on as the net surged up and down in ten- to twelve-foot swells. He was surrounded by blackened faces, so coated with filth that he couldn’t tell who they were, not even the kid in his arms.
When Indy tipped sideways and boxes started sliding, Gibson had donned an old horse-collar life jacket and tossed a floater net over the port side. Before he abandoned ship, he ran into his buddy Tommy Meyer, of Marlin, Texas.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Gibson shouted. “If you don’t make it, I’ll go see your folks in Marlin. If I don’t make it, you go see my folks in Mart.” The two men shook on it, but Gibson hadn’t seen Meyer since. Now he cradled this younger sailor, whose right arm had been boiled crimson and black and smelled like cooked meat.
“Help’s on the way,” Gibson murmured softly, his Texas accent thick as sausage gravy. “How old’re you, anyhow?”
“Seventeen,” the boy murmured.
“Well . . . help’s on the way.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that. I’m not afraid to die.”
Gibson marveled. For three years he’d been afraid. Strafed and shelled and dive-bombed until he’d gazed down from Indy’s decks at the dark, swirling sea, and feared it might swallow him whole. Now he saw fear everywhere he looked, but this kid lay peacefully and did not complain.
On the far side of the floater nets, about a hundred yards away, Buck’s good buddy, coxswain Cozell Smith, clung to a single life vest along with Joseph Dronet, who could not swim. Dronet wasn’t the only one. Clarence Hupka, a baker, and Verlin Fortin, a watertender, had both served aboard Indy for nearly two years, but the Navy hadn’t taught either of them to swim. Both vowed to learn quickly.
Without a life jacket of his own, Smith had stayed afloat all night by attaching himself to Dronet. During the morning, he spotted Gibson and his group in the distance, hanging on to something. He swam for it and found the group clustered around a floater net, barely holding on to the edges, clinging to one another. Those without life jackets clambered on top of those who did, piling themselves three and four men high. Smith found this situation no better than the one he’d left, but he was too exhausted to swim back. He thought about something his father had said when he joined the Navy after completing
the tenth grade.
“Do you know what I’m signing?” his father had asked as he scribbled his signature on Smith’s Navy application.
Smith, then seventeen, replied in know-it-all fashion that yes, he knew: His father was signing his permission for Smith to join the Navy.
“No!” his father said. “I’m signing your death warrant.”
Now, Smith supposed his father had been right.
• • •
Viewed from above on these rolling blue dunes, the survivor groups were now spread over several miles of open sea, still connected by thick, winding mats of fuel oil. Three separate groups—Richard Redmayne’s, Glenn Morgan’s, and Felton Outland’s—would form around three different quartets of rafts with varying numbers of attendant floater nets. Several groups of raftless swimmers formed as well, some with floater nets, some with only the life jackets on their backs. The largest group with only life jackets was the one that included Haynes, Woolston, Conway, and Parke. But over the coming days, more than a hundred men would drift away from the Haynes group to join others, or form their own.
Ed Harrell’s swimmer group floated among those toward the north. With the sun full up, Harrell could see that about a third of the men in his group had died during the night. He and others removed their dog tags and vests and relinquished their bodies to the deep. But many of the dead refused to leave, and soon the fifty or sixty men still living found themselves swimming with a school of corpses.
By contrast, the McVay group, among those toward the southwestern edge of the survivor map, enjoyed a relative oasis. They had connected with another raft and floater net bearing five more men, bringing McVay’s castaway crew to a total of nine souls. Also, the men found on their rafts two good paddles, a Very flare pistol with a dozen flares, and a large sheet of canvas. There was a box of matches, too, but it had soaked through, rendering the contents mostly useless. They also salvaged some tubes of ointment and a few morphine syrettes from an emergency kit that was otherwise ruined.
Later in the morning, McVay spotted a pair of rafts in the distance. They popped into view when McVay’s raft topped the wave crests, then disappeared when it slid down into the troughs. The nearest of the new rafts was about fifteen hundred yards away, and someone aboard was yelling for help. But the seas had grown rough and his men were so exhausted from swimming for their lives that McVay knew they could not attempt to paddle over.
As Monday wore on, the McVay group floated near an emergency rations can and scooped it aboard. Food! Beautifully packed, with a double tin top to prevent water from seeping in, it contained several cans of Hormel Spam, along with malted milk tablets and tins of biscuits. McVay looked over the rations and did some quick math.
“I will open one Hormel tin per day,” he announced, adding that he would divide the twelve ounces evenly. He also calculated that each man could have two malted milk tablets and two biscuits per day. Rationed this way, he thought the provisions could last up to ten days.
Late that day came the most important find of all: a three-gallon water breaker. The men heaved it aboard. McVay examined it, then tested the water and found it salty. The breaker had apparently developed a hairline crack and admitted the sea, making the water nearly undrinkable. McVay decided not to tell the men. Instead, he announced that he would take charge of the water and save it until someone absolutely needed a drink.
The men floated and waited, and McVay, ever in control of the situation, asked questions of them one at a time, bidding them to answer to the group. John Muldoon, a first-class machinist’s mate, said he’d found his way to this small assembly with John Spinelli in a busted-out life raft. Spinelli, a cook, sat shirtless while George Kurlich, a fire controlman, was stark naked. Kurlich told his raft mates that he’d abandoned ship directly from the showers. From then on, the men kidded him: “Hey, George, did you at least turn off the shower before you jumped over the side?”
* * *
I. There have been varying accounts from different survivors as to the actual length of the line used to corral the group, but most standard heavy cruiser life rings had throw lines measuring approximately one hundred feet. A ring formed from such a line would measure about thirty feet across.
3
* * *
JULY 30, 1945, MONDAY—DAY
Tinian Island
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, LIFE on the island of Tinian agreed with Major Robert Furman. The Army had quartered him in a pyramid tent in sight of the ships at sea. The chow hall food was crude, but there was plenty of it. And he was pleasantly surprised at the available drinks and confections. Every week, each man received five glasses of cool beer.
When Indianapolis pulled into Tinian Town Bay on July 26, the first thing Furman did was search the faces of the assembled brass for news on the Trinity test. He saw in their eyes the determined glint of success. After the crane lowered the canisters into the waiting landing craft, Furman and Nolan climbed down a rope ladder—a maneuver Furman found tricky—and dropped into the boat. Once ashore, the shipment was carefully packed into a truck and shuttled to an assembly area under the charge of Captain William “Deak” Parsons and Project Alberta.
Francis Birch, a naval officer who would supervise Little Boy’s assembly, signed for the canisters. Then, perhaps for the first time since being recalled from his beach vacation, Furman took a long, deep breath and relaxed. He had passed the baton. Now, Parsons and the fifty-one Los Alamos scientists, engineers, technicians, and administrative officers of Project Alberta would complete the final leg of the race that Furman had been running since 1943.
First, the assembly. The weapon for which he had transported the fissionable material consisted of a gun that would fire one mass of uranium 235 at another. An initiator would then inject a burst of neutrons, triggering a chain reaction and a titanic accumulation of energy that would ultimately cause the bomb to blow itself apart and shower Armageddon on the target city. In its final form, the weapon would be only ten feet long and twenty-eight inches across. The scientists had dubbed it “Little Boy.”
Second, the delivery, aboard a B-29 bomber of the 509th Composite Bomber Squadron. Her pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, Jr., had named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay.
Furman believed the bomb mission just. Too many lives had been lost already. While he was shepherding nuclear scientists for Groves during the development of the bomb, one young scientist received a letter from his father, an infantry officer fighting at the front in Italy.
“This is some pretty horrible stuff I’m going through over here,” the father wrote.
The scientist wrote back, “Well, just hang in there. . . . I can’t tell you what I’m doing, but it’s going to end the war.”
“Glad to hear it,” the father replied. “But is there any chance it could be tomorrow or the next day? I don’t know whether I can last much longer.”
He did not last, but died instead.
Though this bomb was unprecedented in lethality, Furman believed using it would save hundreds of thousands of lives—perhaps millions—both American and Japanese.
For now, though, he found himself on this tiny coral rock, bunked down between an ex-policeman and future tree surgeon on one side and a member of the Massachusetts bar on the other. When no business pressed, Furman wrote letters to his folks or joined Captain Nolan to explore the beaches and shallows. Once, the pair ventured out past a sandy coastal shelf, over a ring of sharp coral rocks, and into crystalline water that flashed with a rainbow of tropical fish.
The Philippine Sea
Floating near Buck Gibson’s group, Seaman Second Class Curtis Pace was used to seeing silver barracuda flashing beneath his feet. But when a shadow larger and more menacing passed close below him, Pace panicked, kicking and flailing until a shout snapped his frenzy.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Turning, Pace saw a young sailor with horror in his eyes.
“Nothing,” Pace said. He didn’t want
to scare the kid. “Thought I saw something, that’s all. Musta been all the oil in my eyes.”
The kid relaxed. Pace glanced down in time to see a shark whip its tail once and its dark silhouette melt in with the predator squadron flying through the water below.
The sharks had been visible down there for a while. Scores of them cycloned in water columns that were clear as crystal for at least fifty feet before receding into sapphire. Many were likely oceanic whitetips, the most common ship-following shark and considered the most dangerous shark of all. The Japanese called them yogore, the word an assembly of kanji characters that convey the ideas of “pollute,” “defile,” and “rape.”
Usually loners, whitetips will gather in large packs around plentiful food, like jackals around the weak in the Serengeti. Bronze in color with paddlelike pectoral fins, they swim so slowly as to appear nonchalant, almost lazy. But once aroused, they are utterly relentless.
For now, the sharks around Pace seemed content to circle and wait, advancing in aggressive curiosity then retreating to await opportunity.
• • •
Evening came, the sky still bright but fading. A few hundred yards from Pace, Haynes and Parke kept the floaters organized. The group had formed into concentric rings expanding outward from the center, where the most gravely injured men remained sheltered—those dragging broken limbs, bleeding from wide gashes, or blinded with burns.
Haynes and Modisher swam from man to man offering any help they could, which was almost none since they had no supplies. Soon Haynes came upon two sailors taking turns holding up a severely injured man. It was his good friend, the gunnery officer Stanley Lipski. His eyes seemed boiled in their sockets. What remained of his hands appeared as charred meat clinging to bones.