by Lynn Vincent
“Lew, I’m dying,” Lipski murmured. “Tell my wife I love her, and that she should marry again.”
“I will, Stan,” Haynes whispered.
Haynes stayed near, offering words of reassurance. Supported only by partially saturated life vests, Yeoman Dick Paroubek and Signalman Third Class Frank Centazzo held Lipski’s hands up out of the water and kept his legs flat so that they would not dangle and cause him any more pain.
Stanley Lipski took a long time to die. When he finally let go, Haynes cut away his life jacket and let his friend, one of the most respected officers aboard Indianapolis, slip silently into the deep. Haynes, Paroubek, and Centazzo watched Lipski recede, down and down, until he disappeared.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” someone began, “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters . . .”
Like a flame passed from one candle to the next, the Twenty-third Psalm spread from man to man, those who knew it joining in, voices rising until the benediction glowed warm over the spot on earth where Lipski left this life.
Combat Intelligence, CincPac, Pearl Harbor
Under the somnolent sway of palm trees outside a two-story plantation-style building not far from the Pearl Harbor shipyard, a set of stairs led down to an unremarkable and windowless basement office. There, on the afternoon of July 30, CINCPAC’s ULTRA magicians intercepted a message: The captain of the Tamon group submarine I-58 was reporting to his high command that he’d sunk . . . something.
I-58 had attacked on 29 July at 2332, the message said. “Sinking confirmed. Obtained three torpedo hits.”I
The code men decrypted everything they could, but there were two parts of the transmission they could not recover—the type of ship sunk and the location.
Sometimes, Japanese sub commanders exaggerated their successes, hoping to curry favor or save face. The most likely scenario was that it was another enemy hoax—the Japanese had been known to fabricate sinking reports, hoping to bait American rescuers into a trap.
In any case, the intercept was one of about five hundred processed that day. Without a vessel type or location of the alleged sinking, there wasn’t much to go on. Still, the magicians put the intercept into the mill for processing. Linguists checked the Japanese-to-English translation, then the message was delivered to Captain Smedburg in Combat Intelligence and to other stations around the world.
Also on July 30, Commander Amphibious Forces Pacific (COMPHIBSPAC) tried to raise Indianapolis for a planned test of the ship’s new radio teletype equipment. When the test failed, COMPHIBSPAC asked for a relay through Radio Guam. That test also failed, prompting COMPHIBSPAC to notify CincPac Advance that radio checks would be discontinued until Indianapolis advised that she was ready for further tests. The CincPac Advance communications officer was not unduly alarmed. Maybe the ship’s new receivers weren’t working.
Meanwhile, operations staffers at Leyte had been tracking Indianapolis on their plotting boards. Using McVay’s planned speed of advance of 15.7 knots, they approximated the ship’s position and moved her west along Route Peddie accordingly.
On the eastern end of Peddie, Captain Naquin’s staff at Guam consulted Indy’s routing orders. According to her Plan of Intended Movement, she had crossed the Chop line and was now Philippine Sea Frontier’s responsibility. Several hours later, when the clock struck the time of Indy’s estimated arrival at Leyte, Guam would simply wipe her off their map.
* * *
I. Hashimoto obtained only two torpedo hits.
4
* * *
JULY 30, 1945, MONDAY—EVENING
Ten to Twenty Miles from Sinking Site
COZELL SMITH WAS STILL floating in Buck Gibson’s net group when a shark barreled up from below and locked its jaws onto Smith’s left hand. Instantly, Smith was pulled under. A single, horrific thought shrieked in his head: I am going to be eaten alive!
The shark dragged Smith ten feet below the surface. Enveloped in a storm of bubbles, he held his breath and shoved at the shark’s snout with his right hand. The animal snapped its head back and forth, holding Smith’s arm in viselike jaws while trying to saw it off with its teeth. Then Smith’s right hand slipped on the shark’s skin, and he felt his middle finger jab a soft spot and go all the way in.
Suddenly, the shark let go. Smith popped through the surface gasping, his hand shredded and bleeding. He struck out swimming in a wild race back to the nets.
The men on the nets had seen the attack. “No! Get away! Get away!” they cried, terrified of the chum line that streamed from Smith’s hand.
As he neared the group, they kicked him and clubbed him with arms and fists. But the shark attack had charged Smith with adrenaline and he bulldozed through the group, climbing over men’s bodies like a rat fleeing fire. He landed in the middle of a net, where a sailor whipped out a knife and began slashing at him. Smith threw up his arms to protect his face and body. Suddenly, he realized the man would kill him, just like the shark. He fought his way back into the water and swam clear of the treacherous group, where he floated about a hundred feet away, his only company a dead body that bobbed facedown beside him. Not having a life jacket or anything to support him, Smith clamped his right hand around his left wrist and held it that way for a long time, kicking his feet to keep his head above water.
Just out of sight of the Gibson net group, L. D. Cox saw a giant shark shoot up from below and snatch the man next to him, life jacket and all, the attack so close that the splash curled over Cox like a breaking wave. Instinctively, he ducked and squeezed his eyes shut against the spray. When he opened them again, his buddy was gone.
Several swells over from the Haynes group, gurgling screams tore the air. Seaman First Class James “Denny” Price and his friend Seaman James King pulled up their legs as sharks ripped into the outer circle of their group. King, severely injured in the sinking, decided he couldn’t take it any longer. Pulling free from Price, he shucked his life jacket and dove beneath the surface to end his own life, but Price dove down and caught him before he could get away. It was the third time King had tried it. A nearby friend questioned Price’s sanity. Why did Price keep risking his own life to go after King?
Price could only reply, “It’s the right thing to do.” Now, to keep King from giving up again, Price grabbed his life jacket and wrapped it around them both. They huddled together as the sharks chewed into the group. Price could feel them hitting his feet, and he shivered with revulsion. There were so many now, he was practically walking on their backs.
In the Redmayne group, Harpo Celaya knew all about the sharks. Hours before, they had set up a patrol beneath him, their rough hides grazing his legs as they reconnoitered. He knew that if he actually saw a shark, he might come undone, so he clung to his rope and refused to look down. Then he heard an unearthly sound, a scream unlike any he’d ever heard a man make. The sharks had eaten another sailor.
Sometime later, relief arrived when a friendly face swam up. It was Fred Markmann, a watertender from New Jersey. Harpo had always thought Markmann looked a little like Popeye. He even had the famous forearms. Now he was in bad shape, in both body and spirit. Celaya offered to share his rope.
“I hurt my leg bad, Celaya,” Markmann said. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’ll be back ashore having a beer before you know it.”
“That ain’t gonna happen.”
The sun was falling fast. For the next few hours, Markmann seemed intent on making his own prediction come true. He pushed away from Harpo several times and tried to swim off to die. But Harpo kept after him, pulling him back to the relative safety of their little length of line.
Harpo’s throat stung with thirst. Unconsciously, he sucked on his St. Anthony’s medal, which seemed to help. Just yards away, a tiny group of men on one of the rafts had begun to guzzle from the meager water supply and stuff their faces with hardtack. The trouble was that no on
e man could do anything to stop them. The raft men were packed in so tightly that moving was next to impossible without exerting a week’s store of energy. Nor did any officers step forward, including Redmayne, although by now he had identified himself as an officer to Harlan Twible, a junior ensign. Twible wanted to take charge but feared overstepping Redmayne’s seniority.
Finally, surrounding sailors began to yell for justice. Once again, it was Chief Benton who swam up and took charge. He asked the men to stop consuming the crackers and water. They’d likely be in the water for some time, he said, and it was necessary to save the provisions and ration them equally. This worked for the time being.
• • •
Glenn Morgan’s stomach executed a final hard squeeze, ejecting green bile from his mouth. After that, the nausea subsided. The other men were beginning to feel better, too, and conversation set in. The first topic was what the men had seen and heard before Indy went down, and how they got off the ship. It was Moran’s story that interested Morgan most.
“I was ordered to send an SOS,” he said, “and I did it. From Radio 1.” The men sat in their raft, undulating waves lapping at the edges.
“How do you know it went out?” Morgan said.
Moran shot him the glance one shoots at a complete lunkhead. “You can always tell. There’s a meter that shows whether the signal’s going out. It didn’t show where I was, but it was showing in Radio 2. Sturtevant was in there. He saw it.”
Another voice chimed in. It was Fred Hart, the radio technician who got the ship’s position from Radio 1, but abandoned ship before taking it to Woods. Hart sat in the adjacent raft, next to Lieutenant Freeze. He knew there was power to the transmitters in Radio 2 because he turned on a small AC generator as soon as he entered the compartment. And if Sturtevant saw the antenna meter loading up in Radio 2, Hart felt there was absolutely no reason why the SOS message wouldn’t have gotten out.
“Just because a signal went out doesn’t mean anybody received it,” Moran countered.
Moran’s realism didn’t dampen Morgan’s spirits. The whole fleet would be looking for them!
Meanwhile, a shark had already found them. Earlier, Moran had spotted a large dorsal fin slicing the wave crests. The shark—someone dubbed him Charlie—was a dark olive green, seven or eight feet long, with a head about a foot wide. Charlie commenced a steady orbit around the flotilla and was still there as swells carried the rafts into their second night adrift.
• • •
Don McCall, the sailor who first had enough to eat after joining the Navy, floated alone just past the outskirts of the Haynes group. His body temperature was dropping. He thought of his hometown library, where there had been a fine old potbelly stove. After his father died from lime-mortar exposure, McCall and his sister sometimes had to swipe coal from passing trains in order to heat their house. Other times, McCall spent winter days in the library, devouring books. Now, shivering under the cold moon, he concentrated on the library stove, and the people he’d met in stories. He remembered the crew from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Tortured with thirst, and with their ship snagged in the sweltering equator doldrums, the crew lamented:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
McCall found that he was growing thirsty, too. Up the swells carried him, and down again, the cool sea glittering like treasure in the moon’s fairy light. McCall was not tempted. He knew from his books not to drink it.
5
* * *
JULY 31, 1945, TUESDAY—MORNING
Sixteen to Thirty-two Miles from Sinking Site
THE CASTAWAYS HAD BEEN in the water for about thirty hours and in the Haynes group, Captain Parke’s main objective was to keep everyone together. Many men had dozed on and off through the night, fitful spells of sleep snatched from a waking nightmare. Parke swam around the huge ring of floating sailors, encouraging and assisting, comforting the men who were injured or burned. More than once, he gave away his own life jacket to support exhausted survivors and treaded water until he found an empty one. The wounded quickly grew to rely on the Marine’s comforting presence, and the sound of their moans and pleas became as constant as the slap of water against the men.
“Captain Parke!” they called. “Captain Parke!”
Haynes, meanwhile, had begun ranging out from these swimmers to see how he could help other groups. Making rounds beyond the outskirts, he swam up to Denny Price, who was on one of the three Gibson group nets. The young seaman was still holding tight to his friend King, whom he had saved again and again because it was the right thing to do.
Haynes examined King. “He’s gone, son,” he said to Price. “It’s time to let him go.” Heartbroken, Price unwrapped the life jacket that had bound him with his friend and watched King’s body sink slowly down, feetfirst. King’s head was tilted back, eyes open, and he seemed to Price to be staring upward as he sank. Price thought he could see right down into the dead boy’s soul.
• • •
Some men on a raft in the Redmayne group began hogging down rations again. Then, just after sunrise, Twible, Benton, and an ensign named Eames tried to ration a small amount of food to each man—half a cracker and one malted milk tablet. Even then, some men managed to filch more than their share, while others got none. This drove Radioman Jack Miner crazy. But with the rafts and nets overfilled with men, the scoundrels were out of his reach and there was nothing he could do but stew in anger. Miner had a plan, though. He also had a knife. If the time came when he could get off his net with ease, he was going to kill the filchers—or worse.
• • •
Buck Gibson kept thinking about fried chicken and being picked up by a destroyer. As dawn seeped up to light the second morning, Gibson knew the burned boy still lay beside him on the floater net because he’d reached out all through the night to be sure. But as the sun rose in full, Gibson saw light fall on bare bone. Something had eaten the boy’s broken leg during the night and the gnawed end now jutted from the net into the water. Gently, Gibson jostled him. He was dead. Gibson did not share this with the sailors near him. He had already planned to keep the boy on the net even if he died. At least that way he could return his body to his family.
The sky grew brighter, and someone initiated a count-off. Gibson discovered there were 167 men in his group, which had now added two more floater nets that were within shouting distance. Because he was a gunner’s mate, Gibson knew that Indianapolis was scheduled for gunnery practice off Leyte. He passed the word along the nets: If they could hold on for just a day or two, help would be coming. Gibson’s experience and certainty gave the men around him hope.
The Gibson nets were beginning to drift apart. Having fled one net in the group, Cozell Smith was happy to find another, more hospitable net about a hundred yards away. After the shark tried to tear off his left hand, Smith had used only his right to remove the life jacket from the dead sailor who’d been keeping him company. Using the jacket as support, he kicked over to a new net and found his friend Seaman Curtis Pace, along with Denny Price, who was deep in thought over losing King. With them was Joseph Mikolayek, a twenty-four-year-old tough guy from Detroit. The good-humored Mikolayek had always taken his job seriously, and that meant caring for his men, who included Pace, Price, and Smith. Having attained the ripe old age of twenty-four after serving two years aboard Indy, the “old man” was revered by the younger sailors. Smith was relieved to find his character hadn’t changed in the water. Seeing Smith’s damaged hand, Mikolayek quickly tore off part of his shirttail and created a makeshift bandage.
• • •
In Glenn Morgan’s group, Kenley Lanter sat in a raft with a seaman second class named Harold Shearer, a twenty-four-year-old from Canton, Ohio. Shearer sat motionless on the latticework. After the torpedoes hit Indy, he was climbing a ladder toward the quarterdeck when he grabbed a superheated railing
to keep from falling. Now burned strips of flesh hung from his arms, which he held straight out before him like a monster in a Boris Karloff picture.
In the afternoon, J. J. Moran spoke to Morgan quietly. “Have you had any water?”
Morgan said that he hadn’t. Moran said he hadn’t either. The two men looked to another raft, where they knew some sailors had opened one of the water kegs and begun drinking from it. Until Moran mentioned it, Morgan hadn’t paid attention to how much of the group’s remaining water was already gone.
“All right, attention all hands,” Moran said. “From this point on, our remaining water will be rationed. We will issue ourselves equal amounts, three ounces in the morning and three ounces at night. Those cups from the survival gear have graduated measurements. Use them. The Spam and hardtack will also be rationed.”
It was the first time since the sinking that anyone in the group had asserted some kind of authority. Lieutenant Freeze was too badly burned to take charge. That left the group with six petty officers and Moran, a first-class radioman, the senior man. Being a first-class on a warship was a big deal—nearly all the way up the enlisted food chain, with only a chief being higher. A first-class had earned his chops. He started at the bottom chipping paint just like everyone else and worked his way up to both leadership and technical expertise. When a first-class told a junior man to do something, that sailor didn’t ask questions.
No one asked Moran questions now or challenged him. Why should they? Morgan thought. The rationing plan was simple logic. But it was more than what Moran said—it was the way he said it. There was a firmness in his manner, a conviction that inspired confidence. Morgan felt comfortable with the parameters Moran laid down. It was then that Morgan noticed for the first time that the volcanic burn in his eyes had begun to subside. For the first time, he was beginning to feel that, all things considered, he was actually in pretty good shape.