by Lynn Vincent
Lynde McCormick and George Murray were in the same Academy class, 1911. In 1941, McCormick was serving as assistant war plans officer under Admiral Husband Kimmel when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Nimitz retained McCormick on staff, where he served as war plans officer for key battles, including Guadalcanal. From October 1943 to March 1945, he served on King’s staff, as assistant chief of naval operations for logistics and plans, and accompanied King to the second Yalta conference, preparatory to ending the war.
These men, charted on the penciled witness list, had remade the Navy in their own image. They were the metalsmiths of a new global sea power, hammering out fresh strategies and tactics, deploying the largest fleet in history to win the worst war in history against arguably the most brutal and cunning enemy in history. Indeed, they would be celebrated as naval heroes for generations to come.
Murray and Oldendorf were so highly regarded that they had personally accepted the Japanese surrender. Just four weeks earlier, New York City had honored Nimitz with a ticker-tape parade that led up Broadway from Battery Park to City Hall, where he was greeted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and addressed the crowd from a stage built to resemble the bow of a ship. Four million people turned out.
Now, in the afterglow of victory, Nimitz’s chief of staff and other leading lights of the Pacific war would be dragged out in open court to testify about the failures Snyder had enumerated—failures that had led to the death of nearly nine hundred men on the eve of victory, and more than a thousand if you tallied Underhill under similar intel failures. Unless . . .
. . . the court-martial were to take place before the admirals could testify in the supplemental investigation. By bringing McVay to trial immediately, King could ensure that the admirals’ testimony, not slated for completion until mid-December, would never reach the public ear. In addition, he could prevent the introduction of potentially mitigating and even exonerating testimony, improving the odds of a guilty verdict. Whether either of these was King’s aim remains unclear, but by pushing the court-martial ahead, he would achieve both.
Already, drumbeats signaling high-level failures were beginning to emerge in the press. Though the war was over, syndicated columnist Bill Cunningham had been in receipt of some troubling letters from service members around the world. Some asked for help, others cited dangers and injustices. “Something ought to be done,” Cunningham wrote, “and I’ve decided to do, at least, something.”
What he had decided to do was turn his nationally syndicated column, “Cunningham’s Comment,” into a homeland version of the celebrated “B Bag” feature in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The B Bag published anonymous letters to the editor in which enlisted troops could get gripes off their chests without fear of retribution. Though operated from inside the War Department, Stars and Stripes was editorially independent and had no bigger supporter throughout the war than General Eisenhower himself. The B Bag earned troops’ trust by publishing items like a fall 1944 letter from a soldier who asked how it was that though the European theater was in the middle of a supply crisis, a shipment of five thousand cases of whiskey had somehow made it to officers’ messes throughout the continent.
The very first time Cunningham decided to emulate the “B Bag” was the same day King reversed himself. In his November 10 column, Cunningham mentioned two cases. The first concerned a Marine unit in postbomb Nagasaki that was quartered in a ramshackle building with a surplus of rats and lice, but no fresh food. The second he called “Case of Cruiser.”
“Case No. 2 concerns the loss of the USS Indianapolis, and the charge that a major Navy disaster, and a piece of major Navy criminal negligence was deliberately covered by withholding the announcement until it could be blanketed by the headlines of V-J Day,” Cunningham wrote.
Recounting Indy’s no-escort sail into submarine waters, he continued, “When she failed to rendezvous with a DE off the Philippines or make contact with an anti-aircraft plane on the appointed morning, nothing was done and evidently shoulders were shrugged. . . . Who and where is the officer or bureau responsible for that, and what action was taken? None.”
At this date, the public knew little of any failures on high with respect to Indianapolis. Cunningham received this complaint from a crew member of one of the rescue vessels. He had also heard from the mother of a young officer who survived for days in the water—one of those who died the afternoon of August 2, after rescue was finally under way. How could she draw any comfort from her son’s sacrifice, the mother wrote, when his life and those of hundreds of men around him could have been saved if the Navy had been alert? “Those agonizing hours my child suffered will not let me rest.”
The day Cunningham’s first B Bag column ran, Forrestal called his special assistant, Edward Hidalgo, into his office. Wagging his finger at Hidalgo, Forrestal said, “Eddie, I’ve been reading about the McVay case in the papers. We don’t need that kind of publicity. Do whatever you can to put an end to it. Find out the truth . . . get rid of this sensationalism.”
First thing on Monday, November 12, Forrestal walked into his office to find King’s original note, agreeing to the delay of McVay’s trial. By day’s end, though, King and Forrestal had conferred. There would be no record of their conversation, only of the result, another handwritten memo by King:
12 Nov 45
THE SECRETARY DIRECTS THAT GENERAL COURT MARTIAL OF C.O. INDIANAPOLIS BE PROCEEDED WITH AT ONCE . . .
8
* * *
NOVEMBER 1945
Washington Navy Yard
Washington, D.C.
ON NOVEMBER 21, CAPTAIN Thomas J. Ryan signed a copy of the order convening McVay’s court-martial and naming him as judge advocate, or prosecutor. The trouble was, the Navy had not yet been able to decide on charges. Still, Ryan reported to the office of the judge advocate general, Rear Admiral O. S. Colclough, and began to review materials in the case.
Ryan knew McVay, who had been two years ahead of him at the Academy. Afterward, Ryan was posted in Japan when, on September 1, 1923, the worst earthquake ever to hit the nation shook Yokohama and Tokyo into splinters. The temblor triggered a forty-foot tsunami that swept ashore and drowned thousands. As aftershocks and wind-whipped fires tore through Yokohama’s streets, Ryan and another man plunged into the wreckage of the city’s Grand Hotel and rescued a woman pinned beneath a heavy beam and a tumble of masonry.
Later that year, a photographer snapped a photo of Ryan in full-braid dress uniform receiving from President Calvin Coolidge the Medal of Honor for that rescue. With his clear brow, full lips, and strong chin, Ryan had the look of a superhero.
He and McVay later fought in the same World War II campaign, at Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands, in 1943. Now the two would meet again, with Ryan on his way up and McVay, it seemed, on his way down.
The judge advocate general, Colclough, was busy weighing a litany of potential charges. He presented them to Forrestal:
Failure to ensure that the communication department was maintained in a proper condition of readiness for emergency transmission.
But radioman J. J. Moran’s testimony before Van Metre and Coney revealed that the radio rooms were modernized at Mare Island, properly tested, and that McVay’s radiomen were both experienced and proficient.
Failure to keep a sufficient lookout for enemy submarines.
But testimony by Chief Gunner Harrison and others showed that all watch stations were properly manned.
Failure to issue and cause to be effected orders needed to maintain watertight integrity.
But Indianapolis had been sailing in Yoke Modified, a cruising condition common to ships of her class.
There were other potential charges, but these too conflicted with testimony and documents already in evidence. As Colclough cast about for something that would stick, it was decided that “failure to zigzag” could easily be proven since no one disputed that Indianapolis was steering a straight course when she was hit. Zigzagging, of course, had be
en at McVay’s discretion. But discretion is not a defense for poor judgment, which King felt McVay’s had clearly been since the 5th Fleet flagship now lay at the bottom of the sea.
Colclough also zeroed in on a second charge: failure to order “abandon ship” in time. The problem with this charge was that a great deal of evidence to the contrary was provided at the court of inquiry. Hence, to secure a guilty verdict on this charge, he wrote to Forrestal, “It must appear that the accused did not use due care in deciding that more time was needed to ascertain the extent of the damage.” Ironically, Colclough acknowledged to Forrestal that if McVay had immediately ordered abandon ship instead of waiting as he did to get more information, that could have prompted disciplinary action for giving up the ship too soon. Still, Colclough urged Forrestal to add the second charge, even if it might be disproven.
“This specification is recommended, however, on the grounds that its use will permit Captain McVay to clear himself of criticisms made in the press. . . . Full justification for ordering a trial on Charge II springs from the fact that this case is of vital interest not only to the families of those who lost their lives but also to the public at large.”
Translation: To try McVay only on Charge I, failure to zigzag, would afford neither the families nor the public a chance to hear the story of the sinking of Indianapolis, since McVay could simply plead guilty and end the trial before it began. Charging the captain with the second specification would impel him to defend himself. In this way, Americans still demanding answers for this last, catastrophic blow of the war would receive them.
That much was true—but those answers would be filtered through a forum in which the thrust of inquiry was focused on one man and one man alone. On November 29, Forrestal adopted Colclough’s recommendation, issued the charges against McVay, then had the captain placed under arrest. Military authorities did not place the captain in jail, but the arrest restricted his movements to Washington, D.C.
The trial was to take place at Washington Navy Yard, a base once commanded by McVay’s father, and was set to begin on Monday, December 3. That gave McVay four days to prepare his defense.
• • •
The announcement of an unprecedented trial sparked preparations to match. A construction crew worked through the weekend transforming a large room on the top floor of Building 57 into a space fit for a spectacle. Carpenters, electricians, and shipfitters expanded the gallery to accommodate up to two hundred spectators. Three weeks before, Forrestal had bemoaned media attention. Now, though, workmen hammered together a special section for the press.
McVay had been assigned a defense attorney—John Parmelee Cady, a Navy captain. Like Ryan, Cady had been at the Academy with McVay. His classmates at first considered him a pious, serious young man, hailing as he did from the Puritan confines of Rhode Island. In his plebe year, Cady’s go-to rule book was his Bible. By his second year, though, he had relaxed a bit, and by his third, he had become, according to his peers, “well encrusted with salt.” So salty was he that in the summer of 1921, his exploits during a midshipmen’s practice cruise became the stuff of legend. In the Norwegian city of Christiania, Cady drank too much pilsner with a fetching blonde “Norske,” then nursed the resulting hangover by hanging his head out a porthole all the way to Lisbon. After the Naval Academy, Cady took a law degree at George Washington University, graduated in 1932, and promptly failed the bar. He later passed, but by the time of McVay’s trial, he really no longer even wanted to be a lawyer. Worse, he found himself involuntarily assigned at the last minute to a nationally watched trial.
Cady visited Admiral Snyder’s office to examine the accumulated record of the supplemental investigation. There, he found testimony and evidence numbering more than a thousand pages. He chain-smoked his way through as much of the material as he could, and technically had access to all of the facts. But while the machinery of the prosecution had had months to sift mountains of evidence and build its case, Cady had just ninety-six hours to wrap his brain around it all and make an argument.
On November 30, the day after Forrestal convened the court-martial, Inspector General Snyder boiled it all down in writing for King, including the chain of intelligence failures that set conditions for the Indy disaster and that had nothing to do with McVay:
• The supplemental investigation had corroborated McVay’s conclusion that the Philippine Sea was safe, as told to him by Commodore Carter and the Guam routing office. The Guam operations officer, a commander named Lawrence, stated that he had not received any information from higher echelons and considered Route Peddie safe.
• Intelligence had been received in King’s offices, and presumably in Nimitz’s and Murray’s, that there was a considerable increase in Japanese submarine activity to the west of Guam in the Philippine Sea. “It would appear,” Snyder wrote, “that the increased tempo of submarine activity in this area would have dictated a revision” of policies concerning escorts.
• The hunter-killer antisubmarine operations that commenced shortly after Indy’s departure “would have appeared to have been sufficient reason” for Vice Admiral George Murray to divert Indianapolis, “but no action was taken.”
• Snyder reiterated the failure of several commands to follow up on the intercept of Hashimoto’s sinking message, and to check on Indianapolis’s safety.
• Both CincPac Advance (Carter’s office) and Commander Marianas (Murray’s office) failed to pass down the ULTRA intelligence showing the location of I-58 west of Guam—or if the information was too highly classified—take action themselves.
Snyder’s summary then ticked off a list of culprits for the delay in reporting the loss of Indianapolis. He mentioned McCormick, Sancho, and Oldendorf, but focused particularly on Commodore Norman Gillette at Leyte: “Although his headquarters presumably had been given the intelligence of increased enemy submarine activity in the Philippine Sea, and despite the additional fact that the failure of the Indianapolis to arrive was known to his watchstanders, he took no action until after the survivors were sighted.”
Among Snyder’s conclusions was this: Despite having had to forgo refresher training to transport “extremely high priority freight” on short notice, “testimony of all survivors indicates that the ship was working hard every day to attain top efficiency condition, and while there was a considerable percentage of new personnel, the morale and discipline were excellent, which was further evidenced by the splendid behavior of the crew after the explosions until the ship sank.”
In addition, Snyder wrote, it might be difficult to prove that zigzagging would have improved the security of the ship, given that Carter and Murray also failed to inform McVay of the increased tempo of Japanese submarine operations.
Snyder’s memo, the fruit of his long familiarity with the facts of the case, might have been all Captain Cady needed to successfully defend Captain McVay. But the memo was addressed only to Admiral King, and its admissions of the culpability of still other admirals would remain a matter of private correspondence.
• • •
When Cady accompanied McVay into the courtroom for the first time on December 3, McVay appeared pale but composed. Louise McVay accompanied her husband. Dark-haired, with a broad forehead and quiet, wide-set eyes, she walked beside him up the courtroom aisle, then broke off to take a seat in the newly expanded gallery. McVay proceeded through the bar to the defense table, passing Ryan, who acknowledged him with a nod. Seated with Ryan was Lieutenant Carl Bauersfeld, an attorney assigned to assist the prosecution.
Instead of the throng of the spectators the Navy had expected, only about forty people had shown up. Wire service reporters and photographers were setting up in the space reserved for press.
There were seven members of the court, and they formed the civilian equivalent of a jury. The president, Rear Admiral Wilder Baker, took his place at the front of the room, flanked by two commodores, Paul S. Theiss and William S. Popham, and a convocation of captains: Homer Grosskop
f, John Sullivan, and Charles Hunt. The seventh man on the court, Captain Heman Redfield, was absent the first day due to a travel delay.
McVay gazed up at the court, his face taut and set, but he betrayed no emotion. He had many unanswered questions. During questioning at the inspector general’s office, McVay had been shocked to learn of the hunter-killer operation led by USS Harris. According to Coney and Van Metre, at least two of his officers had seen a message about a submarine contact somewhere in Indy’s vicinity. By instruction, every message of that nature was routed to him immediately, day or night, with a copy also going to the OOD. And McVay was appalled to hear that Commander Janney had, against policy, apparently spoken of this message in the wardroom. Why hadn’t Janney, an experienced senior officer, informed him, too?
McVay couldn’t ask him, of course. Janney, his head of navigation, was dead, lost at sea just like Moore, Lipski, and every one of his department heads save Redmayne and Haynes.
It embarrassed McVay to still be walking the earth alive, to have been the oldest officer on the ship and find that no line officer between himself and a reserve lieutenant had survived. While on the raft, he thought it would have been easier to have gone down with his ship. What he dreaded then now lay dead ahead.
Beside him in the courtroom, Cady was smoking a cigarette. A current of tension flicked through the air. At the head of the room, each member of the court was duly sworn. Ryan then addressed Cady: “Does the accused have any objection to the charges against him?”
Cady stubbed out his cigarette and stood. “Yes.”
The first charge against his client, “through negligence suffering a vessel of the Navy to be hazarded,” stated only a conclusion while failing to state an offense, Cady said. “Negligence” implied knowledge that should have been acted on and was not, and there was no proof that McVay had such knowledge.