by Lynn Vincent
Time ticked toward midnight. The wind picked up, chilling the air. The crew had long since dispensed the last drop of water. Marks knew there were men in his plane near death. As the hours passed, he could hear them crying softly with thirst and pain.
17
* * *
BOILERS CHURNING HOT, USS Doyle sliced through the sea with the urgency of a bullet. Over the radio, Claytor had heard that Marks collected more than fifty men, and also about the second Dumbo. This meant there were at least a hundred men still in the water on this blackest of nights. Claytor imagined their terror. How many would be lost to cold or sharks? How many would simply give up hope?
At 10:42 p.m., Claytor issued an order that no man aboard had ever heard before: “Turn on the searchlight and point it at the sky.”
Claytor’s officers and sailors were stunned. At night, the crew of a warship made a religion of keeping it dark, skulking around under dim red lights, even hiding the orange glimmer of their cigarettes.
Some on the bridge were aware of Marks’s warning about possible submarines in the area. Allowing any light to escape the ship was like painting her with a bull’s-eye for the enemy. Still, they understood. Doyle was more than an hour away from the survivors, and Claytor wanted the men in the water to see the light, dig deep, and hang on just a little longer.
A sailor complied with the skipper’s order and the ship’s twenty-four-inch searchlight streamed skyward, piercing the night with a perfect tower of brilliant white. Standing topside, Charles Doyle gazed up at this unprecedented beacon and hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Like the rest of the crew, he trusted his captain. He also knew that for the first time in his Navy service, his ship had just become the brightest target in the Pacific.
• • •
When Marks saw Doyle’s light on the southern horizon, he decided he had never seen a finer example of American courage. Claytor knew there might be enemy subs—Marks had told him so himself. And yet the Doyle captain had resolutely trained his searchlight at the sky.
The reaction on the Dumbo was electrifying.
“Look!” Marks said to the men crying for water and clinging to life. That light they saw was a destroyer on its way. There was water on aboard, and doctors. Rescue was coming soon.
And as he watched, joy and relief washed across their faces. They settled back against the bulkheads and gazed upon that lovely light, now certain of their salvation.
Doyle’s light had a similar effect on men still in the water. Lebow and Hershberger’s group had dwindled from 130 to 35, and they had almost given up hope. But when Hershberger saw the luminous tower, he realized for the first time that he was going to make it.
L. D. Cox’s group began with about thirty men, and Cox had watched two-thirds of them die. Then, when he saw Marks’s plane taxi past at a distance, he assumed he and the rest of his group were doomed. But when he saw Doyle’s beacon, it was as though a light switched on in heaven. Around him, fresh fire surged in the men, a sudden, burning will to live.
In Morgan’s group, depression had also set in. After Lanter spotted the plane earlier in the day, they had all watched and watched as it skated back and forth on the horizon. Then darkness came, erasing it from the sky, and with it their hope. Then Doyle’s searchlight appeared, and Morgan felt chills race up his spine. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Far to the north, McVay, too, saw Doyle’s light arrowing straight up. He did not know that the man who’d ordered this beacon was his wife’s cousin, Graham Claytor.
• • •
Doyle plunged toward the survivors, her searchlight making intermittent sweeps ahead to avoid running anyone down. Claytor told his OOD to proceed directly to the two Dumbos. Just before midnight, a lookout spotted a pistol flare in the distance, but they could not investigate it because they had reached Marks’s wallowing plane. Ten minutes later, Doyle lowered a whaleboat over the side, and it motored over.
The winds were friendly—a gentle breeze from the north-northwest—but the seas were rough. Whitecaps splashed salt water into the whaleboat as her bow bit into the midnight sea. There was a boatswain and a bowhookman aboard, and when the whaleboat reached the plane, each man threw up a line. The Dumbo crew began lowering survivors down from the wing.
The transfer operation was wild and precarious. The whaleboat’s steel hull bashed against the plane’s thin skin, forcing the boatswain to shove a bumper between them to cushion the blows. The boat crew reached up as high as they could to haul the survivors down into the boat, then tucked them under a canopy to shield them from the wilding sea.
At half past midnight, the first survivors arrived alongside Doyle. At the fantail, the whaleboat crew shoved from below and the topside crew pulled from above as load after load of survivors was hauled aboard. There was a cargo net draped over the fantail. Those who could not climb it were hoisted in a sling fashioned from canvas and lines. Sailors in dungarees shepherded the ragged castaways belowdecks.
The last Indy sailor to be pulled up was Art Leenerman, whose corpse Marks had been towing behind the Dumbo in a raft. Just as the canvas sling crossed Doyle’s rails, Leenerman sputtered awake, shocking his rescuers. No one was more shocked than Leenerman, who had passed out lost at sea and woke up wrapped in canvas and flying across the fantail of an unknown ship.
Meanwhile, Claytor huddled with his communications officer. One of the men transferred from the Dumbo had delivered possibly the last news Claytor expected to hear: “I am from the Indianapolis, and we sank five days ago.”
Claytor was astounded. Indianapolis? That was Charlie McVay’s boat! And these men had been in the water for four days and five nights? How could that be? Claytor’s mind sped to his cousin, Louise. Had her husband survived? Claytor had his communications officer draft a secret message.
HAVE ARRIVED AREA. AM PICKING UP SURVIVORS FROM USS INDIANAPOLIS (CA 35) TORPEDOED AND SUNK LAST SUNDAY NIGHT.
The message, addressed to the commander of the Western Carolines Submarine Area, landed like a bomb in the upper echelon of the Pacific Fleet. Within hours, the hard copy of his transmission was covered in bold, red pencil marks:
HOLD, DO NOT SHOW.
ADMIRAL EDWARDS AND REAR ADMIRAL BIERI WANT ANY INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON POSSIBLE SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT OF CA 35.
LOCATION SHEET SHOWS HER IN PORT PHILIPPINE AREA.
Someone scribbled over the message classification:
PROBABLY TO BE UPGRADED TO TOP SECRET.
18
* * *
AUGUST 3, 1945, FRIDAY—JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT
Philippine Sea
IT WAS FULL DARK when Bassett neared the position described in the message traffic. Cloud cover blocked all starlight. At the helm, Albert Lutz, the quartermaster, steered the ship through pelting rain and a pitching black sea. The OOD ordered speed reduced first to fifteen knots, then slower, until finally the boilers were allowing only enough steam to make way. The ship crept toward the unknown in extreme darkness, guns at the ready in case of attack. The air on the bridge was so charged with tension that Lutz felt as if he were in the middle of a Hitchcock film.
Captain Theriault had already brought the crew to general quarters. It was possible that the mystery ship had been sunk by an enemy sub. Given that this vessel still had not been identified, it was also possible that the whole thing was a Japanese trick, and Bassett was sailing into an ambush. It would not have surprised Theriault for a Japanese sub to put a few expendable men in the water to attract a fake rescue, then lie in wait to sink the rescue ship. He ordered his lookouts to keep sharp eyes abeam while the sonar hut below the flying bridge kept pinging ahead, searching for steel targets lurking off the bow. Both radar and sonar returns were empty. Still, Theriault proceeded with extreme caution.
For weeks, Bassett had been on antisubmarine patrol, but a lot of the men were pretty sure they would have to head north soon, with the invasion force, to face the Japanese up close. The whole of Amer
ica’s military might was now aimed at the enemy’s home islands. Allied bombers had continued torching ports, factories, earthworks, rail yards, and airfields, reducing vast sections of the Empire to rubble and fire. And yet the Japanese would not surrender.
As a result, Bassett’s crew felt poised at the brink of Armageddon, and most were not terribly thrilled to be under Theriault’s command. Ensign Malcolm Smook knew Theriault to be the only officer aboard without a college education, and felt the skipper walked around with a chip on his shoulder.
Lutz considered the man both an elitist and a coward. Earlier that year, when Bassett was ordered to the Battle of Okinawa, Theriault pleaded illness. The ship’s doctor signed off on his removal from the ship. Lutz, who was thrilled to see him go, ushered Theriault aboard an LCVP and watched as the boat ferried him a short distance to a merchant ship, which was to take him to the rear. When Theriault arrived at the merchant vessel, he indicated to its crew that since he was now a naval officer, some of the civilian seamen should carry his bags. One of them gave Theriault the finger. If he wanted to come aboard, he could carry his own damn bags. Lutz and some buddies watched the scene from Bassett and applauded.
Now the Bassett crew fanned out along the rails to look for these reported survivors. Officers ordered Bill Van Wilpe and a couple of his mates to the bow, armed with binoculars. Van Wilpe, a nineteen-year-old from Ringwood, New Jersey, was a quiet, brainy farm boy the approximate size of a redwood tree. Though he served as a gunner’s mate, Van Wilpe didn’t enjoy the adrenaline rush of naval gunnery as some of the other men did. The 5-inch gun was so loud he swore it loosened the wax in his ears.
But Van Wilpe did love being at sea. If the Navy hadn’t drafted him, he would have joined the merchant marine. Now, reaching the bow, Van Wilpe manned the port side, put the glasses to his eyes, and commenced scanning the night.
• • •
William Claytor’s ship was a hive of motion. The condition of the survivors stunned the Doyle crew. The Indy men were emaciated and shark-bitten. Some had lost as much as forty pounds. Their skin looked like burned bacon and was pocked with oozing sores. Many were delirious. Belowdecks, ministrations began: small sips of water and fruit juice. Light food if they could tolerate it. The sponging away of thick coatings of fuel oil, which could not be removed except with diesel. Then, showers and clean skivvies.
The men of Doyle gave up their bunks for the men of Indianapolis, most of whom dropped into the sleep of the dead. Two-thirds of the men Marks’s crew rescued were stretcher cases, but every one of them was still alive.
Meanwhile, on the bridge, Claytor had ordered the engine room to make bare steerageway, and the helmsman guided the ship as it crept forward through the thicket night. Signalmen scanned the water with searchlights. Sailors lined the rails and kept their eyes peeled for more survivors.
Just after 1 a.m., Doyle lookouts spotted another searchlight to the north. Her signalmen challenged the vessel and received a response: She was USS Bassett.
• • •
Aboard Bassett, the wrenching shouts of a half-dozen lookouts tore the silence. “Life raft, port beam!”
Soon a pair of LCVPs was waterborne and en route. Ensign Jack Broser, of Brooklyn, New York, captained LCVP 1 with Coxswain Jack Paul as his boat crew engineer. Broser held a battle lantern aloft. Its battery-powered glow illuminated the rolling swells, revealing strange creatures just below the surface—jacks, trevally, and other huge blue-water fish. There was no telling what else lurked down there in the dark.
Peter Wren, a twenty-five-year-old ensign from Richmond, Virginia, commanded LCVP 2, and he was first to reach survivors. It was a large group—seventy-five to a hundred men—floating in the water, and they were nearly impossible to see. Wren’s hookman, a young man still in his teens, held up a battle lantern. Its narrow beam danced over the survivors like an old-time stage light, picking out oddly dark faces punched with white eyes.
Were these men American or Japanese?
Wren drew a .45 pistol from his belt and shouted down from his boat, “Who are you, and what ship are you from?”
“Just like a dumbass officer!” came the shouted reply. “Asking dumbass questions!”
Wren knew then that these were definitely American sailors.
“Okay, then, what ship are you from?” he called back.
“Shove off, ya dumb bastard! Who needs ya?”
Impressed that the men still had spirit, Wren directed his coxswain to come about to the lee side of the blackened mass and made ready to start pulling them aboard. But there were too many for his boat to handle alone. As the coxswain came about in the dark and the hookman trained the battle lamp on the bobbing heads, Wren struggled to get out a radio call for help. In the six- to eight-foot seas, the radio gear worked at the swell tops but fuzzed into uselessness in the troughs. Finally, he got his transmission off. Then, in a series of partial messages snatched on the wave crests, he put it together that Broser was on his way.
Wren’s coxswain motored close to the floater group, swells rocking the boat like a carnival ride. Wren leaned over the gunwale and grabbed a man under the arms. He pulled—hard—and felt the man’s flesh and muscle begin to pull away from his bones. The survivor let out a scream, and Wren quickly shifted his grip to the man’s life vest. With another swell and a giant heave, Wren was able to get him into the boat.
Soon, Wren saw the light of Broser’s battle lamp dancing against the water in the near distance. LCVP 1 plunged down a swell, approaching the survivor group from the side opposite Wren. Broser cut his engines and drifted up to the oily pack of bobbing heads. But due to the lousy radio, he still didn’t know what he was looking at.
“Identify yourselves!” Broser called out. “What ship are you from?”
“Indianapolis!” came the cry.
But the faces before him were completely covered in oil, and Broser was still leery. “What city do the Dodgers play in?”
“Brooklyn! Help us!”
Satisfied, Broser ordered his coxswain to pull parallel with Wren on the opposite side of the survivors. But one of them mistook the boat for the enemy.
“Japs!” a survivor cried out, and swam for his life.
Instantly, Broser doffed his hat and gunbelt and dove over the side. He chased down the survivor, headlocked him, and dragged him back to the boat.
On the other side of the survivor group, Wren’s boat was full. It was time to motor back to Bassett. But when he looked back to find her homing lights, all he saw was an unbroken obsidian veil, no star or glimmer of light anywhere. In seas this rough, there was no way he could get back to the ship.
• • •
At the same moment Wren was wondering how to get back to Bassett, her bridge was the scene of a showdown. Lieutenant R. S. Horowitz, the OOD, heard Wren’s voice scratching over the radio, asking him to turn on a searchlight. But nearby, an argument had broken out between Captain Theriault and several officers.
A few minutes earlier, a seaman had called out, “Look at that fish!”
The sailor had spotted a shark. But “fish” is also Navy slang for “torpedo.” Theriault, who had parked his ship where another had possibly just been torpedoed and sunk, lunged for the engine-order telegraph and dialed it to all-ahead full.
“Get the LCVPs aboard!” he yelled. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The engine room was about to comply when another officer reset the telegraph, canceling Theriault’s order.
“No way,” the officer said. “We’re going to stay here until we get every survivor aboard.”
Theriault repeated his order. Bassett was to leave the area immediately. But the other officers physically blocked the skipper’s path to the fantail, where the rescue effort was being coordinated, and gave him only one open avenue: to his quarters.
Around this time, Bill Van Wilpe, the big farm boy, headed for the fantail and happened upon a group of officers. He saw Theriault with an officer wal
king behind him, and another on each flank. Officers do not give way to enlisted, so Van Wilpe got out of the way to let the group pass. He didn’t know what had happened, but it looked to him as though the captain was a prisoner.
• • •
Aboard Doyle, Claytor continued his patrol for survivors. The destroyer escort inched ahead through heaving seas, her searchlights trawling over the surface. Sailors lined the rails, eyes straining to spot something, anything, where there was mostly nothing. Meanwhile, other ships established voice contact with Doyle. In the hours after midnight, USS Madison and USS Ralph Talbot checked in.
At 3 a.m., shouts went up as two rubber rafts and seventeen pairs of eyes blinked against Doyle’s roving lights. Claytor’s crew brought these survivors aboard. At a quarter to five, the searchlight picked out two more rafts, and Doyle’s crew saved twenty-two more men.
• • •
Peter Wren bounced his LCVP over troughs and crests, the belly of his boat filled with men near death. Once Bassett’s officers quelled Theriault’s plan to flee the area, Horowitz, the OOD, ordered the searchlight switched on. Broser’s boat was full, too, but he had agreed to remain with the survivors still in the water so that they would not feel abandoned.
Ensign Malcolm Smook watched from the bridge as Wren pulled alongside Bassett’s port rear quarter in seas so wild that they sometimes lifted his boat higher than the ship. A Jacob’s ladder hung over the ship’s side and waves smashed over the fantail as Bassett sailors tried to pull survivors aboard without crushing them between the LCVP and the ship.
The rescue continued as Wren and Broser skippered the LCVPs round robin between the survivors and the ship. The number of Indy men aboard Bassett climbed—twenty, forty, sixty—with the seas growing more turbulent as night pressed toward dawn. After one of Broser’s return trips, Van Wilpe lumbered down the port side and, with his immense wingspan, helped haul men up and over the side. It didn’t take him long to realize that the LCVP crews must be having a hell of a time fishing these men out of the water. He asked to be relieved from his current duties so that he could help rescue survivors. Permission was granted, and Van Wilpe clambered down the Jacob’s ladder and into Broser’s boat.