by Lynn Vincent
• • •
Though planes had flown over so high and so often than the men in his group had begun to ignore them, when Harpo Celaya saw the Ventura, he knew they’d been saved. Joy overtook him, and a surge of relief flushed tears from his eyes. He laughed and screamed. He thought of his Arizona home, his mother and father, Dolores. But as the Ventura flew off, he realized he had to be careful. He hadn’t been rescued yet, and he was damned if he was going to get this close, then drown like Markmann—or become lunch for a shark.
13
* * *
AUGUST 2, 1945, THURSDAY—DAY
Peleliu Airfield, Palau
AT PELELIU, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER George Atteberry, commanding officer of the patrol bomber squadron VPB-152, intercepted a transmission from one of his pilots flying up around Route Peddie. Knowing how long the coderoom jockeys took to decrypt things, Atteberry decoded it himself, saving hours. The message was garbled, something about men in the water. Probably some flyers. He drove over to another outfit, VPB-23, a squadron of Catalina flying boats. Atteberry hunted down the duty pilot, Lieutenant Adrian Marks.
Atteberry knew Gwinn could only circle the rescue area to the limit of his fuel capacity. It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to return to Peleliu before another plane arrived on-scene to relieve him. Without eyes on the survivors at all times, they might never be found again. Marks would have to leave immediately, Atteberry said.
Marks and his crew climbed into his PBY-5A Catalina flying boat, a thick-bodied seaplane with a distinctive “parasol” wing. Unlike planes designed with two wings, one attached to each side of the fuselage, a parasol wing is a single, wide airfoil held above the fuselage by struts—like a biplane, but without the lower wing. The Catalina’s large twin propellers were mounted side by side near the center of the wing just aft of, and above, the cockpit. This high placement kept the engines clear of ocean spray. The Catalina was a patrol plane, but when deployed for rescue—one of its primary missions—it was known as a “Dumbo.”
On the runway, Marks assumed the call sign Playmate 2, turned up his engines, and purred off to the north. The time was 12:42 p.m. About a minute later, Atteberry took off from Peleliu in a Ventura, call sign Gambler Leader.
• • •
From the word Marks received from Atteberry, another Ventura was circling a life raft up near Route Peddie. Marks assumed a plane had ditched. Probably one of the carrier boys, needing both assistance and consolation. Marks and his copilot, Irving Lefkowitz, were to fly to the scene and relieve the Ventura on station. Marks half-expected to drop some equipment, spend half a day circling a lone survivor, then vector in a ship to scoop him out of the drink. Even that would be a hell of a lot more interesting than cooling his heels on the island. For three days, he’d been listening to Glenn Miller records and flipping through novels while his last mission gnawed at his brain. On July 30, he and his crew had flown out over the ocean in search of a downed aircrew, but came up empty. Failure was an unusual experience for Marks, and it left a sense of disquiet in his chest.
By age twenty-four, he had graduated from Northwestern University and Indiana University Law School, passed the bar, married the daughter of the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court, and accepted a commission as an ensign in the naval reserve. Stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, Marks served on a ship that fought back. The following year, he earned his pilot wings, and now, at twenty-eight, had logged untold hours in the Dumbo, most of them rescuing less fortunate pilots who had lost their airplanes to the sea.
Though Atteberry launched after Marks, his plane was faster and he was already ahead. Marks was only eighty miles north of Palau, northbound in trail of Atteberry, when he spotted a destroyer escort steaming south below him. At altitude, the ship and its wake appeared as a thin, straight mark in the sea, as if an invisible child were tracing a white line with a stick. When Marks was overhead, the ship hailed him on the radio, just an acknowledgment of friendly forces, utterly routine. The ship turned out to be USS Cecil J. Doyle, and the skipper an acquaintance of his, Lieutenant Commander W. Graham Claytor, a fellow lawyer from Indianapolis. Doyle was en route to Kossol Passage, at the northern end of the Palau chain, after an unsuccessful joint sea/air submarine hunt. Marks told him about the men in the water up near Route Peddie.
“You’re probably going to get rerouted up there,” Marks said, his voice scratching over the frequency.
Claytor thought Marks was probably right. Whoever was in the water, somebody had to fish them out. It wouldn’t be Marks’s Dumbo, since open-sea landings were both dangerous and forbidden. And it could take hours for new routing orders to crawl through clogged official channels. Claytor thought it over. He didn’t have orders, but . . . ?
On Doyle’s bridge, Claytor told his officer of the deck to reverse course and increase speed to twenty-two knots. He’d worry about the paperwork later.
• • •
Sam Worthington’s Mariner orbited over the rescue scene for two hours and forty minutes, then pushed for Leyte. Thirty minutes later, the crew sighted a lone swimmer in his skivvies swimming west. But there was nothing they could do because they had already pushed out all their lifesaving equipment.
Graham, the crewman who first spotted the dye marker, was heartsick. Here was this brave guy trying to swim for it, and they had nothing to offer him. Worthington’s radioman transmitted the position and remained over the swimmer until Worthington knew Leyte had a navigational fix. Then, with fuel running low, he had no choice but to press for Leyte. With a prayer and a salute, the Mariner crew flew on. The swimmer never even looked up.
• • •
At eight in the morning on Thursday, August 2, the surface control officer at Philippine Sea Frontier—a Lieutenant Green—looked over his Expected Arrivals. Indianapolis appeared on the list, but had not arrived. If she hadn’t pulled in by now, she wasn’t going to, Green thought. He dashed off a memo to the plotting section: Could he remove Indianapolis from the board? The reply came five hours later: no. There were reports coming in. Men in the water.
A rising dread had begun percolating at commands around the Philippine Sea. At Leyte, the surface operations officer, Captain Alfred Granum, learned that Indy should have arrived three days ago and had not. From Peleliu and the aircraft on-scene, Frontier commander Norman Gillette learned of men in the water. He, too, discovered that Indianapolis was missing. Gillette sent a message to Guam:
INDIANAPOLIS HAS NOT ARRIVED LEYTE X ADVISE
Though brief, his dispatch vibrated with dawning panic. It sped to all stars around the Pacific: Admirals Nimitz, Murray, McCormick, and Oldendorf; to Commodore Carter at Guam; and to Indianapolis herself. Gillette may have been hoping that Lieutenant Waldron’s Guam departure message had been a mistake, that the great ship had actually never left port.
But no. Guam replied to Gillette that Indy had indeed departed Guam for Leyte—nearly a week ago. Perhaps, then, Indianapolis had reported to McCormick for training? Gillette sent the admiral a plainly worded query:
HAS INDIANAPOLIS REPORTED TO YOU
McCormick’s reply was equally plain:
NEGATIVE.
14
* * *
AUGUST 2, 1945, THURSDAY—DAY
Philippine Sea
MARKS AND LEFKOWITZ WERE still flying north over the open sea in the Dumbo that Atteberry had dispatched from Peleliu. At 2:10 p.m., they received a second message from the Ventura that was already flying up around Route Peddie: There were 150 survivors in the water.
How many? Marks thought.
That couldn’t be. There had been no word of a sinking, and if there really were that many ducks on the pond, the Navy would certainly know about it. This message was probably just as garbled as the first one. Still, he passed the information to Claytor on Doyle and increased his airspeed.
• • •
Aboard Doyle, Claytor heard the pilots’ chatter. One hundred
fifty men in the water? He called the engine room. “What can you do to give me more speed?”
The ship was already steaming at flank speed and running hot. Down in the fireroom, Coxswain Charles Doyle was wetting down shafts with a fire hose to keep from burning up a bearing. He heard the chief engineer tell Claytor that he could coax a couple of more knots if he overrode—or “gagged”—the safety relief valves. The safeties were designed to relieve pressure so that the boilers didn’t explode. Gagging them was dangerous, and only the captain could order it done.
In the fireroom, the chief engineer hung up with Claytor and turned to Doyle. “Gag the safeties,” he said.
On the bridge, Claytor made radio contact with Atteberry at 2:35 p.m., and Doyle assumed the call sign Birddog One. A half hour later, Marks began picking up signals from Atteberry’s plane, and just before four in the afternoon, had Atteberry’s Ventura in sight. But he was not prepared for what he saw next—men. Not dozens of them—scores. Maybe hundreds.
Marks raised Atteberry on the radio: “Gambler Leader, Playmate 2.”
“Playmate 2, Gambler Leader, go ahead.”
“I am on station and have the survivors in sight.”
“Roger, Playmate 2. There are a lot of them scattered over a wide area. Do not drop any equipment yet. I want to show you the area first, then you can decide how to deploy your rescue gear.”
Atteberry was concerned that Marks might drop all his gear to the first group in the water, not realizing there were more. Many, many more. Flying in trail of Atteberry, Marks took in the footprint formed by the survivor groups, which now spread over twenty-five square miles.
Skimming over the whitecaps at a recon altitude of just a couple of hundred feet, Marks, Lefkowitz, and their navigator, Ensign Morgan Hensley, saw a dot pattern of oil-covered men. Most were clustered together in groups of ten or more. Some clung to life rafts, others, in sodden vests, only to each other. Many floated alone. Groups composed primarily of rafts now formed the leading edge of a motley survivor convoy that continued its west-southwest drift. Though Marks didn’t know it, these groups had now blown eighteen to twenty miles south of Route Peddie, and nearly eighty miles from the sinking site. At the opposite end of the oily residue, thirty to forty miles northeast, the swimmers and those less exposed to the wind formed the tail end of the troupe. These men remained nearly on Route Peddie, but about forty to fifty miles from where they began their slow journey.
Marks was shocked at the sheer scope of the disaster unfurling before him. He started to encode a message, then stopped. There were rules about information security, but he decided that in this case rules should be broken. He sent a message in plain English:
BETWEEN ONE HUNDRED AND TWO HUNDRED SURVIVORS AT POSITION REPORTED. NEED ALL SURVIVAL EQUIPMENT WHILE DAYLIGHT HOLDS. MANY SURVIVORS WITHOUT RAFTS.
Marks gave the message the highest-possible priority—the same category as an enemy contact report. His radioman sent the message in the clear and reported an immediate “Roger” from Peleliu. What the radioman couldn’t know was that the officer who received the message at Peleliu did nothing. He did not pass the message to Marks’s skipper, or to anyone else. He simply sat on it.
Marks tipped the Dumbo’s big wing port and starboard, cutting a trail behind Atteberry. Surveying the scene, he marveled. Out here in the open sea, the odds that these men would be spotted were so minute as to be unbelievable. What were the chances that the Ventura would fly directly over the survivors? From a normal sector-search altitude, the head of a man floating in the water would be less than a speck, as undetectable as the diameter of the cross-section of a human hair seen endwise from across a room. In a word, invisible.
While conducting a sector search, a pilot could take in twenty square miles at a glance—a box covering four hundred miles. Under these conditions, even spotting the oil slick had been miraculous. The sea that day was preternaturally smooth—the term “like glass” was not hyperbole. It would take sunlight hitting the oil exactly right at the exact moment the crew had been looking at that exact spot for them to distinguish the black slick from the hundreds of miles of dark blue ocean that surrounded it.
Marks considered the odds that these men had been spotted one in a billion.
• • •
Three hundred miles west, the men of the high-speed transport ship USS Bassett had settled in for a quiet watch, the topside crew monitoring the race between the ship’s bow wave and a spirited school of dolphins. Then Radioman Third Class James Bargsley received a message from the Philippine Sea Frontier, marked URGENT. There were 150 men in the water, and Bassett was to proceed at best speed to assist.
The skipper, Lieutenant Commander Harold J. Theriault,I ordered, “All ahead, flank speed,” and his crew snapped into action. The medical department came to full alert. In the galley, mess cooks began prepping light foods and fruit juices. The ship carried a complement of smaller boats called LCVPs, which stood for Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel, and were used mainly in amphibious operations to beach troops and equipment. Now, though, their shallow drafts and flat, bargelike decks would prove perfect for hauling near-dead men from the sea.
Intrigue stirred Bassett’s crew: survivors in the water from a mystery ship? Which ship could it be?
Commands ashore were beginning to ask the same question. In short order, Bassett’s radiomen received a second message: The first vessel on-scene was to advise Peleliu and all addressees what ship the survivors were from and the cause of the sinking.
• • •
After leading Adrian Marks on an aerial tour over the survivors, Atteberry signaled the Dumbo’s reconnaissance complete. Marks knew that no ship would arrive in the area until midnight. He decided to drop his gear, focusing on the survivors who had only life jackets. At 4:05 p.m., the crew opened a hatch and began shoving out life rafts, water casks, and other supplies. Rescue was their primary mission, and they were accustomed to the procedure.
Then came a moment when Marks knew normal procedures would not be enough. His crew saw a man floating alone. Moments later, the man was gone, taken by a shark.
• • •
Sunblind and exhausted, Seaman First Class Dick Thelen heard Marks’s plane and saw a large rectangular shadow tumble from its belly.
A raft! And only about fifty yards away!
Thelen, his friend Robert Terry, and two more buddies from the Haynes group agreed to swim for it. After floating without food or water for more than a hundred hours, each stroke of Thelen’s arms felt like flopping a cast-iron post into the water, each kick as if his legs were made of stone. Out front, he made it to the raft, where some other men had already clambered aboard.
Thelen looked back for his friends and was surprised to see one of them still some distance away, clutching his chest, his face a mask of agony. Then, in a blink, he disappeared. Thelen clutched the edge of the raft, shocked. Was it a heart attack? He glanced around wildly, looking for the other men. He saw no one but Terry, still swimming, slowly closing the distance.
Terry’s arms smacked weakly against the swells like toy paddles. He was struggling to stay afloat. Thelen wanted to go back and help, but he was so spent he feared he would drown. But that was okay because Terry was only ten feet away now.
“Come on! Come on!” Thelen yelled, stretching out his arm toward his friend. “You’re gonna make it!”
The encouragement was no sooner out of Thelen’s mouth than his insides seized. A shark reared out of the water and snatched Terry from sight.
Thelen clung to the raft, shaking all the way down to his feet. Certain he would be next, he waited to be eaten. But minutes piled up one upon the other, and death did not come for him.
Why them and not me? he asked himself in anguish.
The sun was falling. The men already on the raft were too weak to pull Thelen up, and he was too weak to pull himself aboard. He hung on to the raft’s edge and berated himself for agreeing to swim for it. Maybe if they’d
all stayed with their group, his friends would still be alive.
• • •
As the afternoon wore on, more planes arrived from Peleliu, dropping rafts and survival gear, which fell from the sky like a life-giving rain. With the help of his friend Clarence Hupka, Cozell Smith made it to a raft despite his shark-shredded hand. On the edges of Smith’s group, Cleatus Lebow and Clarence Hershberger also watched objects tumble from the sky, including big tins of water. Many of these burst on impact, spilling their pure contents into the poison sea. Lebow’s throat burned with thirst and watching the tins break drove him over the edge.
He let go of the floater net and swam away. He had made it some distance when Hershberger caught up to him and hauled him back to the net. Lebow waited awhile then struck out again. Hershberger splashed after him and pulled him back a second time. If Lebow broke away again, Hershberger said, he’d have to let him go because he wouldn’t have the strength to go after him. “What are you doing, anyway?”
Lebow’s eyes lit up. Among all that gear dropping from the plane, he’d seen a box of B-29 bomber parts, Lebow said. “We can put an airplane together and fly home!”
Hershberger peered into his friend’s overbright eyes and considered this for a moment. “Cleatus, it’s getting dark,” he finally said. “Let’s wait until morning and do it then.”
“Okay,” Lebow said simply. In the tilted logic of his delirium, the idea was just rational enough to save his life.
* * *
I. Pronounced “terry-oh.”
15
* * *
ABOARD HIS DUMBO, MARKS made a rebel decision. He keyed his mic and raised Atteberry.
“Gambler Leader, Playmate 2.”
“Playmate 2, go ahead.”
“I’m going to attempt an open-sea landing.”