by Lynn Vincent
To pass the time, he began experimenting with one of the signaling mirrors they’d found tucked into the survival kits. In the movies, heroes were forever using mirrors to flash bursts of sunlight, sending messages over vast distances. These survival-kit mirrors were rectangular, about three inches by four, and had a tiny cross of clear glass cut in the center. Morgan found that when the sun was in front of him, he could catch its reflection in the mirror. Then, by peering through the little cross, he could aim the reflected light at a target—the edge of his raft, for example. For longer distances, he held up his other hand and aimed the cross there. He thought maybe if he sighted the cross on his hand then aligned his hand with a more distant target—say, an aircraft or a ship—he might be able to signal for help.
• • •
The McVay group had slept in turns through Monday night, then began Tuesday by counting a collection of visitors. The trio of sharks that had mustered around the rafts the previous day had now grown to five. As the climbing sun chased the chill from their bones, McVay led the men in prayer. Though the warmth was welcome, it also melted the fuel oil so that what had clung in the men’s hair now ran down their faces and into their eyes. It was impossible to wipe away the insoluble mess, and the burn was nearly insufferable. With venomous fury, it stung for the first ten minutes the eyes were open. Then, perversely, it stung again the next time they were closed. McVay had gotten fuel oil in just one eye and could see with the other. He checked in with his men frequently to ask how they were doing.
With a day to rest and fortified by their rations, the men had recovered some pep, and none had significant injuries. McVay decided they would paddle over and link up with the man in the nearest raft who had been calling for help. Digging in with paddles, the straggling flotilla inched up each liquid hill and sledded down its back, only to be buffeted in the other direction by a new swell. It took four and a half hours to paddle fifteen hundred yards. It turned out that the man yelling for help was physically fine, just understandably lonely.
After that, McVay decided to reconfigure the spacing of the rafts and directed the men to lengthen the lines that tied them together. He hoped to expand their footprint on the ocean to improve their chances of being spotted from the air. During the first two days, the group had seen several planes, some of them likely patrol bombers on regular sector searches for enemy craft. At night, their red and green navigation lights flickered in the sky like close planets amid a blanket of stars. Only in darkness did McVay direct the men to fire flares. Their green fire speared the night, carrying the men’s hopes up into the sky. But time after time, the flares flamed out unseen.
Once, McVay’s heart tripped faster when he saw an aircraft emit a revolving white light. They’ve seen us! he thought. But the plane flew on, its lights stitching themselves into the sparkling firmament. Knowing that pilots and aircrews are preoccupied with flying their planes, McVay was unperturbed, and he tried to encourage the men.
“They probably won’t see us until they realize we’re missing,” he said. Apart from that, McVay was basing his hopes on ships, not planes, and he did not believe that any would reach the area until sometime on Thursday.
Otha Alton Havins, a second-class yeoman, and another sailor did their part to keep up the castaways’ spirits. Both had been part of Indy’s aviation unit barbershop quartet. On Tuesday afternoon, they harmonized a couple of popular choruses: “I Want A Girl (Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad),” and a GI’s song made popular by the Andrews Sisters just after the start of the Pacific war:
Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me,
Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no!
Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me
Till I come marching home.
Later that day, the flotilla bumped into a block of butter and the men plucked it from the water. Then they spotted another large, floating can. Thinking it was another ration can, McVay expended considerable time and effort trying to reach it. But when the men pulled it aboard, they found that it was an empty 40 mm ammo can. Maybe they could use it as a catch basin for rain, someone suggested. They decided to keep it aboard.
• • •
Giles McCoy and Felton Outland watched their shipmates float away, unsure they had made the right decision. The day before, they had been part of a tight cluster of four rafts secured with short lengths of rope. But every wave bashed them together in a violent version of bumper boats. Prevented from sleeping by the unpredictable jolts, their uniforms chafed, and the rafts threatened to break and fail. Making matters worse, the men on one of the rafts had begun to lose their minds and the men on the other three rafts were afraid of what they might do. Finally, on Tuesday, unable to rest, they decided to cut all the rafts free.
Now as the eddies sent the little craft off to four separate fates, dead bodies and sharks coursed through the spaces between them. Outland had weakened to a pitiful state, so McCoy, with his loud mouth, took charge of the men on his raft: Payne, Brundige, Gray, Kemp, and Outland. Mike Kuryla, on one of the other rafts, had been against splitting up. Some thought that maybe he’d been right.
• • •
In the raft group where Miner dreamed of knifing the filchers, Lieutenant Redmayne’s mind was also steadily slipping away. As the survivors neared the forty-eight-hour mark, all were exhausted. But Redmayne had lapsed into a half-slumber in which reality fused with phantasm. At intervals, he cried out, “I need to get to the engine room!”
Roughly sixty men now occupied the rafts in this group, with another sixty to eighty clinging to nets. Many sailors had already succumbed to their injuries and sunk silently below the waves. Over the past twenty-four hours, the rafts and nets had slowly drifted apart, like dandelion seeds caught in a breeze. Ensign Eames and those around him represented the fringe of this group, which was separated from the Haynes group by a few hundred yards.
Haynes, Parke, Modisher, Conway, and others worked tirelessly to keep their group peaceful and unified, but Redmayne’s group lacked strong leadership. And while other raft groups were faring better because they had some supplies, the rations in Redmayne’s group triggered fights and hoarding.
On Tuesday, the pilferers struck again, snatching rations from rafts and gorging themselves on water and malt tablets. Ensign Twible reported this to Redmayne, who pulled himself together and made his rank known.
“I’m Lieutenant Redmayne, the chief engineer, and it turns out that I am the senior officer in the group,” he announced to the men nearby. But it was too late. With chiefs outranking officers and thieves on the loose, the chain of command had long since broken down. Besides, what did rank mean out here in the middle of the Pacific? Redmayne was mainly ignored, and most men who found rations among the flotsam kept them.
Floating in a sagging life jacket, Ensign Donald Blum observed this chaos and decided it was time for a new strategy. Clearly, Redmayne had no authority, and Blum had never had much regard for enlisted men. He decided that if someone in this group was going to survive, it was going to be him. He gazed up at the rafts and saw that they were still completely full. Uninjured, he had not qualified for a seat on a raft under Chief Benton’s plan. But Benton was enlisted, and Blum was an officer. Blum bided his time until he saw a sailor’s lifeless body pushed gently off a raft. This was his opportunity. Blum quietly took the dead man’s vacated seat and began to refine a plan.
6
* * *
JULY 31, 1945, TUESDAY—AFTERNOON/EVENING
DICK THELEN, AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD from Lansing, Michigan, was battling nausea. The accumulation of oil and salt water in his gut had triggered it. Riding ten- to twelve-foot swells, up and down, up and down, hour after hour made it worse. He wondered how much more of this they could take.
Earlier in the day, Thelen had been relieved to swim into Robert Terry, a fellow seaman. The two had joined Indy at Mare Island on the same day less than two months earlier a
nd had become fast friends. Now, floating at the far fringe of the Haynes swimmer group, they vowed to watch each other’s backs. But their vigilance couldn’t stop the horrifying screams that erupted when sharks took their shipmates, or the unrelenting pain of hunger and severe dehydration. It was hard not to lose hope.
Thelen had already seen many around him give up and slip beneath the waves. But each time he was tempted to follow them, he remembered his father’s face. Before Thelen left for his assignment to Indianapolis, his father grasped his hand firmly, looked him in the eye, and said, “Dick, I want you to come home.”
Thelen promised he would, though at the time he thought the promise unnecessary, the war being almost over. Now, though, he could hear his dad’s voice and feel his firm grip. Thelen wouldn’t give up. He couldn’t. He had promised his father.
A short distance away, Father Conway began calling for any Catholics in the group to swim toward him. Thelen, a strong Catholic, swam over and joined a group that had grown to more than twenty-five men. Conway took time to talk to each of them in turn, hear their confessions, and give them last rites. A tremendous peace settled over Thelen. If rescue didn’t come, and the Lord took him now, it would be okay.
Many in the Haynes group felt that Conway’s spiritual offerings helped them more than anything the doctors could do at the moment. The priest’s efforts comforted Dick Paroubek’s soul so greatly that the yeoman felt he could relax for the first time since the ship went down.
• • •
Marine Corporal Edgar Harrell’s swimmer group was in desperate shape. Their numbers had dwindled from eighty to forty, with many of those who died joining the crowd of corpses that refused to float away. The living men’s tongues had begun to swell in their mouths, and the magnitude of their thirst became a torture conceived by demons. Overcome, some drank from the ocean, furtively at first, then blissfully as if bending their heads to take great quenching mouthfuls from a clear mountain lake. Others, more circumspect, succumbed to the deception that salt could be strained from seawater. These men teamed up, one holding a patch of torn clothing over his mouth and the other pouring water through.
It didn’t matter; all the seawater drinkers died painful deaths. A lack of fluid intake increased salt levels in their bodies, triggering the natural response of greater thirst. When they took in no fluid to decrease salt levels, water rushed out from their cells to do the job. Brain cells tore loose from their rightful locations, impairing judgment just enough to cause the men to seek poisonous relief. Thirst begged their hands to administer water to dilute the salt that was poisoning their bodies. They obliged with seawater, introducing more salt and increasing their thirst to the point of mindless lust. Blood vessels tore and fluid built up in the brain, causing seizures and insanity. They vomited and foamed at the mouth. Some died of kidney failure. Others’ brains short-circuited violently, as when a tree branch hits a high voltage power line.
Harrell watched, horrified, as young men, full of life and laughter and pranks just a day and a half before, went out of their heads. Surrounded by water, his thirst unbearable, he clenched his teeth against the cool seduction and prayed. In his head, he recited Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want . . .”
Harrell felt strength leaving his limbs, but his buddy Spooner was worse. The other Marine’s eyes were now so inflamed that they literally bulged from their sockets, making it impossible for him to close them. The constant slap of waves splashed salt on the raw surfaces of his eyeballs. The light of the sun sparked excruciating pain.
The day spun out cruelly, the men suspended in the troughs between waves with no soothing grace, only thirst, pain, heat, blood, sharks, and the coppery rotting stench of dead men. Finally, Spooner told Harrell that he planned to end his own life.
Harrell looked into the burned and swollen death mask that was his friend’s face. “How will you do it?”
“I’ll dive down so far that I’ll drown before I come back up.”
Harrell put his hands on his buddy’s shoulders. “Spooner, listen to me. There are only two Marines left in this group, and when everyone else is gone, you’re going to be with me. I know in my heart that God is going to deliver us and we’re going to survive this together.”
Harrell didn’t know if he’d gotten through. Quickly, he turned Spooner’s back to him and firmly fastened the other Marine’s life vest to his own. As night set in, Harrell’s vigor ebbed steadily, leeched away in the grip of creeping hypothermia. His mind drifted from the gruesome reality of liquid death and half-eaten corpses to the edge of unreason.
Tinian Island
Northern Marianas
By the time the castaways had been in the water for three days, two storms were gathering off mainland Japan. On July 26, the day Indianapolis dropped her secret cargo at Tinian, military weather forecasters began tracking Typhoon Eva, a storm with projected winds that could top seventy miles per hour. The second storm was incubating at Tinian itself, and if not for Eva would have been unleashed on August 1.
Little Boy had been ready for deployment the day before, on July 31, and was missing only a quartet of cordite charges that were kept separately for safety on takeoff. But Eva’s northerly track would take her over Okinawa in the Ryukyus and just south of Kyushu, Japan. So the Little Boy launch was put on hold in search of better weather.
Captain Deak Parsons and Admiral William Purnell, the officers who had briefed McVay on the bomb transport mission in San Francisco, had returned to the tiny island. Purnell, an assistant chief of naval operations, was Fleet Admiral King’s personal representative at Tinian. With Parsons and Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, Groves’s deputy for operations, Purnell formed a triumvirate that the three jokingly called the “Tinian Joint Chiefs.” Except, in terms of power, it was no joke. Together, the three men held in their hands the lives of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, as well as those of an estimated one million Japanese and American troops.
For Parsons, it was personal. The number of casualties at Okinawa had scaled a height he could scarcely fathom. Also, his kid brother, Bob, an eighteen-year-old Marine Corps private, had barely survived the Battle of Iwo Jima. On his way to Tinian, Parsons had stopped to visit his brother at the naval hospital in San Diego. One whole side of Bob’s face was crushed, and a rock had been driven up through his right eye, which doctors had replaced with a piece of pink plastic.
During his two years with the Manhattan Project, Parsons’s driving aim had been to bring a swift end to the war. That goal was now within reach. On July 31, three of Colonel Paul Tibbets’s fifteen B-29 Superfortresses—the planes that formed the secret squadron known as the 509th Composite Bomber Squadron—took off from Tinian. The planes sped to Iwo Jima, a distance of 730 miles, dropped a dummy unit, and practiced the daredevil turn designed to get the Enola Gay clear of the blast radius when she dropped the real thing. After the test, Parsons declared training complete, and General Farrell sent a message to Groves: The first atomic bomb was ready for combat deployment.
7
* * *
AUGUST 1, 1945, WEDNESDAY
Philippine Sea
THOUGH THEIR SHIP HAD plunged to the sea bottom nearly three days before, for many in the Haynes group, Wednesday dawned a day of celebration. Their beloved Indy had not sunk after all! She was anchored just below the surface—and there were treats to be had: Ice cream sundaes! Candy bars! Ice-cold Coca-Cola! The men dove happily down to take their pick. Not far off, a hotel was discovered suspended on the water, and anyone could enjoy an hour of rest there in the one available bunk if he just waited his turn in line. So far, the line was only fifteen men deep, because some had found an even better option: an A&W root beer stand with free floats served by beautiful pinup girls.
Captain Parke chased down one hallucinating man after another as they dove down to the imaginary ship or struck out for the root beer stand that lay just beyond the rolling wave crests. It was never-ending work, more than
any one man could handle in such circumstances, but the Marine would not give up. Parke had worked without ceasing for days, rounding up stragglers, trying to keep the group together until, late on the third day, he too succumbed to hallucinations. The Marine broke from the group and struck out swimming. Some heard him yelling, as if at a group of attackers, perhaps some imagined Japanese. Finally, Parke collapsed, dead of exhaustion.
The loss of their brave watchman stunned those men still in their right minds. If Parke couldn’t hang on, what hope did the rest of them have? And now that he was gone, whom could they trust?
• • •
From eighty souls to seventeen. By Wednesday morning, August 1, that’s how far the count in Harrell’s group had fallen. Sunrise elevated their body temperatures slightly and they were grateful for the warmth. But as the bright orb climbed, it turned unfriendly, scorching their heads. No one talked much. Dehydration had puffed up their tongues so that their words came out as if their mouths were stuffed with cotton batting. Wearing only waterlogged life jackets, the group rode the swells low, chins now resting in the sea. Up, down. Up, down. The only sounds, the slosh and slap of water that seemed larger than the sky.
At midmorning, one man broke the silence with a prayer. Another man followed. Soon, every still-sane man in the group had taken a turn, pleading with God for deliverance. Harrell looked at his watch. It was about 10 a.m.
The prayers continued for three hours. Not rote prayers, not learned ones. Humble and genuine supplication, punctuated by impassioned stories about loved ones who waited for them at home. Lapsed men who had perhaps never prayed beyond their childhood bedsides now cried out, specks in a monstrous wasteland, unseen except by the only One who could see. This they hoped with a fervency that burned hotter than the sun.