by Lynn Vincent
Amid the whirlwind of organized events was a long, unplanned interlude that proved the most important of the entire weekend. McVay and the men, more than two hundred of them, gathered on the rooftop of the Severin. There, they embraced with tears and caught up with one another’s lives.
It had been fifteen years since they’d last been together, arriving in San Diego Bay’s deep-water channel aboard USS Hollandia, a small escort carrier, on September 26, 1945. The ragged remains of Indy’s crew that day manned the rails of the baby flattop, their floating home since leaving the base hospital at Guam. Most of their faces showed joy and relief, but guilt and depression lurked here and there, nascent cancers that would one day metastasize.
As Hollandia passed the familiar landmarks—the jetty, Ballast Point, downtown San Diego—the 1MC crackled to life. Docking was imminent, and the Hollandia crew were to muster topside in dress blues. Not the Indianapolis crew, though. Most wore ill-fitting, borrowed undershirts and dungarees instead of pressed Navy crackerjacks and Dixie cup caps. They’d lost everything to the deep—wardrobe, payroll, and all. Senior ensign Don Howison looked forward to buying some new clothes, but first he’d have to get some money. Most of his crewmates had the same problem. The men had assurances that they’d enjoy thirty days of “survivor leave” with paychecks in hand once they arrived on base. But which base? They had no idea.
Edgar Harrell, his buddy Spooner, and the other seven surviving Marines thought their welcome was a bit lackluster. A lone military policeman pointed the Marines away from vehicles decorated with Welcome Home banners and toward an ordinary bus. Stretcher cases like Machinist Mate First Class Roberts, who barely escaped Engine Room 1, went directly to Balboa Naval Hospital.
The rest of the crew hailed a waving crowd and admired the decorations on the vehicles that clarioned, “Survivors of the USS Indianapolis!” Some men welcomed the festivities, overjoyed to be home in a world at peace. Others remained conflicted, including John Woolston, who wanted to know why the Navy was parading them around “when all we’ve done is lose a ship.”
As the buses rumbled toward downtown San Diego, Seaman First Class Sam Lopez, who’d thought the men crazy for trying to use their weight to right the ship, mourned his childhood friend Harry Linville. Lopez and Linville joined the Navy together and had spent the last two years aboard Indy. Both had survived the kamikaze attack, but Linville was killed in his sleep when Hashimoto’s torpedo slammed into his berthing compartment. Other survivors also thought of the friends they’d lost. With only 316 men left, it was easy to be reminded that 879 were missing.
The buses paraded on through the cheering crowds, and onlookers walked along right beside them. There were smiles and blown kisses, and survivors stuck their heads and arms out through the windows, waving at well-wishers, some reaching for the hands of good-looking girls. A perfect stranger walked up to the bus and handed Louis Erwin and Lyle Umenhoffer a pair of cold beers.
Aviation Machinist Mate Jim Jarvis, who was awakened after the torpedo strikes by the sudden silence in the port hangar, couldn’t help but chuckle. His good friend from the aviation division, Joe Kiselica, the Connecticut sailor who resented his Purple Heart, had found his way onto one of the convertibles out in front. Kiselica looked just like Douglas MacArthur. Somehow he had rustled up a corncob pipe and was yelling out to the crowd, “I have returned!” The crowd whooped and hollered.
By the end of the next day, most of the men had found a train out of town. Seaman First Class Dick Thelen couldn’t wait to see his father, whose face he had remembered in the water every time he was tempted to give up. When he finally arrived home in Michigan, Thelen wrapped his father in a crushing hug and told him, “Dad, you brought me home.”
While aboard Indianapolis, Salvador Maldonado made friends by sharing cookies and baked goods from the ship’s bakery. But when he was finally home, he just couldn’t adjust. When his sister, Aurora, finally suggested he do some baking “just like you did on the ship,” she didn’t know what she had unleashed. Accustomed to baking for nearly twelve hundred men, Maldonado whipped up twenty pies at a time. He didn’t know how to make just one.
For many of the men, returning home meant reaching for some kind of “normal” that remained stubbornly out of reach. There wasn’t any notion of “post-traumatic stress” or counseling. Doctors admonished the survivors to just forget about the experience and move on. A good fraction did just that, starting careers as firemen, policemen, salesmen, and engineers. Despite the ministrations of parents and wives, others faltered and stumbled. Some, like Clarence Hershberger, turned to drinking. After surviving the sinking and saving Lebow’s life, Hershberger went home to find that while he was in the water, his father had cheated on his mother and abandoned the family. The weight on his nineteen-year-old shoulders proved too much.
No matter their circumstances, all the survivors had one thing in common. No one talked about the tragedy. But now, in Indianapolis, together for the first time since arriving in San Diego in September of ’45, they shared their stories.
For years, Bob Gause, the former quartermaster, would jolt awake at night, screaming and bathed in sweat, nightmare images of circling sharks melting away in the wakeful darkness. Gause’s first job out of the Navy was as a sponge diver and commercial fisherman, and he made it his personal mission to kill every shark he could find. If he found baby sharks trapped in his nets, Gause dragged them into his boat and took grim satisfaction in watching them die. Every time he remembered the faces of the shipmates he’d lost, it renewed his thirst for vengeance.
James Belcher, the crack fisherman who helped supply food to Morgan’s raft group, had remained in the Navy and married Toyoko Inoue, a Japanese woman from Sasebo. For Toyoko, life in America was difficult at first. Her Asian features and thickly accented English sometimes drew disdain from Americans. Some were garden-variety racists. Others still nursed anger over the war. Belcher, who had more reason than most to cling to his animus against all things Japanese, wondered: If I can forgive, why can’t they?
Some men struggled with alcoholism and rage, and some seemed unable to hold a job. Louis Campbell, an aviation ordnanceman, never escaped the shame of things he’d done in the water to survive. Others simply moved on. Ensign John Woolston, for example, was still a naval officer and would go on to design the Thresher-class submarine.
• • •
Among the youngest survivors present was Granville Crane, who was thirty-three. Crane reported to Indianapolis in April 1943 at the age of sixteen and was aboard for eight of the ship’s “thriller battles,” as he later called them. Floating in the Haynes group, Crane clung to his Christian faith, praying aloud constantly but making no bargains with God. After the ordeal, thankful to be alive and back home with his family, he became a pastor. Now, he was slated to give the benediction that would close the reunion’s main event, a formal banquet to be held the following evening.
For Felton Outland, the hardest part of being at the reunion was that the men he wanted to see most were those who hadn’t made it out of the water. Outland had told no one about his ordeal until he met a beautiful young woman named Viola on a blind date. One day, they were sitting on the beach at Nag’s Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. They had been seeing each other for three or four months by then, and Viola thought Felton was unusually quiet. Finally, he broke his silence. With his molasses Carolina drawl hushed against the sound of the rumbling breakers, he told Viola the story of those awful days in the water. Not all of it. Just enough for her to know that it was part of who he was.
Felton and Viola married and settled in among the green plains of Sunbury, North Carolina, where Outland took up farming. When Newcomb’s book Abandon Ship was published, many survivors devoured it, hungry for the whole story. But Outland wouldn’t touch it. He didn’t think he could stand to relive the horror. But Viola read it, and Outland didn’t mind when she asked a question now and then.
One day in early 1959,
he surprised her. “I want to go on a trip,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to look up some of the buddies I was on the raft with.”
There was one fellow in particular he wanted to look up, Outland said, a Marine named McCoy, the last man to join his raft group. Outland had been the one to pull McCoy from the water. “I don’t remember his first name, but he told me his people live in Missouri,” Outland told Viola.
It was a spur-of-the-moment trip. The Outlands climbed into their ’55 Ford, drove to Viola’s sister’s tobacco farm through a biblical rain, and dropped off their kids. Then they drove west over winding two-lane roads that cut through the country where President Eisenhower’s spanking new interstate system had not yet spread its net.
When the Outlands reached Kentucky, they stopped to visit the Abbotts, George’s parents. Outland shared the story of how George had sacrificed his life jacket, saving Outland’s life. The Abbotts wept, but were grateful to know their son had died a hero. Outland then asked to use their phone to call ahead to St. Louis in search of McCoy. The Abbotts insisted on covering the long-distance charges.
An operator picked up, her voice scratching over the line. “Long-distance information, St. Louis.”
“Uh, yes, ma’am. I’m looking for a man named McCoy.”
There was a pause, then: “Sir, we have two hundred McCoys in St. Louis. I’m going to need a little more information. Do you have a first name?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t remember his first name. But he was a Marine in the war, and we both survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. We spent five nights in the water together. I haven’t seen him since then, and I’m trying to get in touch.”
Outland heard a noise of amazement through the phone. Then the operator said, “Well, sir, I will certainly help you find him!”
And she did.
The informal reunion of Outland and McCoy sparked a nationwide effort. “If you thought enough of me to come look me up,” McCoy told Outland when they met in St. Louis, “we’re all going to have a reunion.”
McCoy, who had become a successful chiropractor, wrote letters to as many survivors as he could track down. The effort spread to Michigan and to Dick Thelen, who had lost three friends while swimming for a plane-dropped raft at the cusp of rescue. Thelen’s wife, JoAnne, had a gift for rallying troops. She, too, wrote scores of letters, and with her husband crisscrossed their corner of America tracking down survivors.
Now, fifteen years after being pulled from the water, they were finally together again. The rooftop reunion spilled down into the Severin’s lounge, where questions and answers floated through the cigarette haze over highballs and beer. Did you see this? Do you remember that? Even when the bar closed, the men stayed, their laughter like a balm, their tears beginning—just beginning—to disinfect psychic wounds that had plagued them for years.
George Horvath had always wondered who helped him onto a raft when a shark was chasing him. That night, he found out. For Horvath, it was the beginning of healing. The next night, for the first time since August 1945, he slept without the recurring nightmares in which Indy’s black stewards leapt from the fantail and smashed into the still-spinning screws.
When Adrian Marks spoke on the first night of the reunion, Outland stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Viola at their table. He knew Marks’s speech would be vivid and detailed, and he could not bear to hear it. But the next night, when the time came for McVay to give his remarks, Outland remained. He wanted to hear his captain.
After a warm introduction, McVay rose to walk to the dais and his men, the men of Indianapolis, rose with him, sending him forward on waves of applause. At the platform, McVay paused to collect himself, then reached inside his dinner jacket and pulled out his notes. He looked out at the room where five hundred people waited, ladies in their evening wear, men in suits and dinner jackets, the men’s expressions a mixture of affection and respect, as if he were still their commanding officer.
“You have been very kind to invite me to be with you tonight,” McVay began, “and it is with a feeling of humility and respect that I thank you for the privilege of being your speaker on this occasion. . . . As you know, I was the last commanding officer of the USS Indianapolis. In talking with you, please think of me as a . . . spokesman for the ship of which we were all so proud. Please think of me, too, as a shipmate, who shared with you good fortunes and ill fortune.”
Indianapolis was “a great ship with a distinguished record in both war and peace,” McVay said. “She gained her reputation not because of her design or her machinery, but because of you who fought [on] her.”
He recalled for the men, who knew it well, and for the assembled guests and press who perhaps didn’t, Indy’s lengthy pedigree: Bougainville, the Solomons, Lee, Attu, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Palau, Yap, Ulithi, Woleai, the Philippine Sea, Guam, Tinian, the Western Carolines, Lingayen Gulf, Mindoro, Okinawa, Gunta, and the home islands of Japan. Indianapolis’s war record read like a résumé of much of the struggle for the Western Pacific.
McVay asked the men to imagine what Indianapolis, the ship herself, might say to them if she could. He told them he thought she might say:
Thank you for turning out in so great a number tonight. I want to tell your wives and your families how proud I am of you. By your presence here tonight, you’re telling me and your shipmates who are not with us that what you stood for in war still means much to you in peace. You still believe that freedom is worth fighting for.
Don McCall, now thirty-five, sat in the audience with his wife, Rita, and listened. He had been a seaman second class when the ship sank, the Navy the best life he’d had to that point, after growing up fatherless during the Depression. But after Indy went down, he left the service and became a brick mason. He just didn’t think he could ever go back to sea again.
McCall hadn’t wanted to come to the reunion. Every man he’d known aboard Indianapolis had been killed. But Rita had insisted, and she’d been right. Even though he had to introduce himself to the other survivors, he found that all were instantly like his closest kin, bound together by an experience that no one who had not been there could ever fully understand.
BOOK 5
AN INNOCENT MAN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
SUMMER 1999
1
* * *
JUNE 1999
Officers Athletic Club
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
COMMANDER WILLIAM TOTI’S RUNNING shoes pounded against the hard asphalt of the Pentagon’s north parking lot, and when he looked up ahead, he found he was already looking at Admiral Don Pilling’s back. Toti started most mornings here, as he had since coming to work for Pilling, and the two men often commenced their workouts at the same time. Pilling was more than a decade Toti’s senior, but he was taller, faster, and a natural athlete, so it usually wasn’t long before the white-haired admiral left Toti in the dust.
In the fifteen months since Toti reported to the Pentagon, the two men had developed a collegial working relationship, not familiar but warm. Pilling had a blue-blooded way about him. He didn’t tolerate preening juniors. He had never set foot in a Walmart. He was famous for never dialing his own phone. Toti found this aristocratic air a bit intimidating until he got to know the man. Toti grew to understand that Pilling was neither effete nor arrogant. It was only that his intellect was in such a constant state of multitasking that he seemed to orbit at altitude, separated from those who operated on a more ordinary plane. Don Pilling was simply smarter than almost everyone around him, but unself-consciously so, and keenly appreciative of others’ gifts.
The admiral was aware of Toti’s research on behalf of the Indianapolis survivors. But Toti had not shared with Pilling the fruit of his efforts: an article he’d submitted to Proceedings, a prestigious publication of the United States Naval Institute (USNI). The institute, a private military associatio
n with offices on the campus of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, is a nonpartisan forum for debate on issues of national security and defense. Proceedings, USNI’s flagship publication, had been continuously published since 1874. While wholly supportive of the Navy, the peer-reviewed magazine was known for its independence. Over the decades, its editorial board had reviewed, accepted, and published many articles that clashed with both official policy and unofficial orthodoxy, sometimes to the consternation of military brass.
These facts made Proceedings a perfect destination for Toti’s piece, which he had titled “The Sinking of USS Indianapolis and the Responsibilities of Command.” He could have just announced his findings to the survivors, but he wanted to publish them first, to allow critics to poke holes and throw stones. After more than a year of research, Toti’s position did not precisely mirror the survivors’ opinion that the Navy’s court-martial of McVay was flawed. Still, it challenged the Navy JAG office’s oft-repeated opinion that the court-martial was “sound and remedial action is not warranted,” as Commander R. D. Scott had written in the JAG analysis that had angered Toti.
From the books he had read about Indianapolis, Toti at first thought there had been a great deal of serendipity in I-58’s attack. There was some of that—but there was more. Toti’s research enabled him to actually reconstruct the attack: what Hashimoto could see through his periscope. What position he took up. The details of his torpedo spread. Toti even connected with an astronomer who was able to pinpoint the phase and position of the moon.
This research convinced Toti that not only did Hashimoto have fate on his side, he also surfaced in what amounted to a perfect firing position, then executed a textbook approach and attack. From Toti’s perspective as a sub commander, the Japanese skipper’s probability of success was almost as certain as sunrise. Hashimoto was going to get a hit.