Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  For Toti, this changed the calculus. With the outcome virtually guaranteed, the question was no longer whether McVay had hazarded his ship, but rather, what he could have done to prevent Hashimoto’s strike. At I-58’s range and firing position, the Indy skipper’s options declined dramatically. And without knowing that Hashimoto was there and poised to fire, McVay’s options were essentially zero. Even a random zigzag at just the right moment would not have saved Indianapolis.

  Hashimoto would not and did not shoot when Indianapolis was broadside to him. A submarine commander in 1945 had no active homing systems. Once his torpedoes were away, he had no means to control them. What Hashimoto had to do was try to determine the target type, estimate her course and speed, and fire not where Indianapolis was, but where he expected her to be—with or without a zig.

  To account for the potential of a zig, Hashimoto fired a spread of six torpedoes with two degrees of separation. What Toti figured out was that if there was no zig, torpedoes 2 and 3 would strike home. If Indy sped up, it would have been torpedoes 1 and 2 that scored. If Indy did zig, or if she slowed down, torpedoes 4 and 5 (or less likely, torpedo 6) would hit. In any case, Hashimoto was hoping for a couple of hits, and that’s exactly what he got. As Captain Glynn Donaho had testified at McVay’s court-martial, in that scenario, zigzagging would have been of no value whatsoever.

  In 1945, and for the next fifty years, the Navy claimed that McVay was not charged and convicted for any deficiency that led to the sinking of Indianapolis. In fact, prosecutors built a case that Indianapolis was hazarded before she was ever detected by I-58, and would have been hazarded if Hashimoto had never seen her.

  In other words, McVay’s failure to sail a zigzag course, in and of itself, represented a hazard to his ship, and it was that charge—not the sinking—on which he was convicted. Toti recognized this as a legal fiction. In fifty years, no one had asked the Navy this: If Indianapolis had sailed a straight course and reached Leyte safely, would McVay have been court-martialed?

  The answer was obvious: of course not. So, legal gymnastics aside, McVay was convicted not of hazarding his vessel, but of having it sunk from under him. Another question then followed: If a ship without antisubmarine capability was sunk by a submarine in a war zone, can the captain of that ship be held responsible?

  The answer to that question is yes.

  This was where Toti’s thesis diverged from the opinion of the men who had asked for his help, and, ironically, converged with Commander Scott’s. In his Proceedings article, Toti quoted a captain who explained how the Navy’s principle of accountability for the safety of one’s crew derived directly from the American tradition of the citizen-soldier.

  The Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the European tradition of a professional officer caste that puts its own stature and survival above that of troops forcibly drawn from the peasantry. Instead in our democracy, the military leader’s authority over his troops was linked to a parallel responsibility to them as fellow citizens.

  Accountability is a severe standard: the commander is responsible for everything that occurs under his command. Traditionally, the only escape clause was an act of God, an incident that no prudent commander could reasonably have foreseen. The penalties of accountable failure can be drastic: command and career cut short, sometimes by court martial.

  Severe, indeed. So severe that a naval commander is charged with detecting and correcting problems before they manifest in failure.

  “Captain McVay’s ship was lost,” Toti wrote. “He failed to take ‘all necessary measures’ to protect his ship. And in our system of responsibility of command, it does not matter whether that action would have been effective—he should have tried. That is why he was found guilty.”

  So on one count, Scott was right: McVay’s conviction was legally sound. But did that make it just? Toti argued that it did not.

  To prosecute McVay was like prosecuting the parents of a child who dies in an accident. Like the captain of a ship, parents are ultimately responsible for every aspect of their children’s lives. Yet the parents of a dead child have suffered enough and, absent the grossest kind of negligence or malfeasance, prosecuting them would achieve no justice.

  And so it was with McVay—because of the unique, all-encompassing nature of the responsibilities of command, he may indeed have been culpable for Indianapolis’s misfortune, even though there was nothing he could have done to avoid it. It had been argued for decades that he was not responsible and that therefore his court-martial was improper. Toti saw it another way: McVay was responsible, and yet to court-martial him, though technically legal, was manifestly unjust.

  Such subtle distinctions meant little to the survivors. As they aged—some now in their nineties—many wondered whether they would live to see their exoneration quest fulfilled. Already, it was too late for McVay. On November 6, 1968, in the early afternoon, he dressed in his usual uniform of a pressed khaki shirt and matching pants. At 12:30 p.m., he walked out the front door of his home on Winvian Farm in Litchfield, Connecticut, sat down on a stone step, put a .38 revolver to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

  Some said it was a crumbling marriage, his third, that drove McVay into irredeemable despair. That may have been true in part, but Kimo and Quatro told Toti they thought it was Indianapolis. For twenty-three years, McVay had borne silently the torture of those 879 deaths, his guilt and grief swelling in that eternal river of hateful letters. Before ending his life, he had confided in his housekeeper, Florence, about nightmares that had lately plagued him, dark dreams that teemed with circling sharks.

  Charles McVay took a long time to die. With his third wife, Vivian, inside the house, he lay on the steps, breathing heavily for half an hour before McVay’s gardener discovered him. At a nearby hospital, an emergency surgeon pronounced McVay “legally dead but still alive,” a condition that may well have described the old skipper before he put the gun to his head. McVay finally succumbed to his head wound at 4:05 p.m.

  For Toti, McVay’s death gave rise to a special kind of regret. The man had given so much for his crew, for his country. His last mission helped change the course of the war, maybe even world history. Toti wished that somehow he could have made a difference for McVay before it was too late.

  McVay was not the only Indianapolis survivor to end his own life. At least a dozen more committed suicide within a few years after the sinking. In a sense, the telegram the families received announcing that Indy had sunk with “100 percent casualties” was true. Even among the survivors, no man who went into the water was the same man who came out.

  • • •

  By the time Toti completed his run, Admiral Pilling had long since disappeared into the locker room. Toti wondered how Pilling would react to his conclusions concerning McVay and Indianapolis. The Proceedings editorial board had accepted his article for publication. Toti, though technically a representative of the office of the chief of naval operations, had submitted his article without asking permission from his boss, the vice chief. Careerwise, maybe not the safest move. Though he had tried to present a nuanced argument, there were some admirals in the naval hierarchy who were famously linear thinkers. A man was either a team player or he wasn’t. For those officers, Toti’s writing clearly placed him in the latter camp. And perhaps also in the camp of a precocious Florida eighth-grader named Hunter Scott.

  Hunter (no relation to Commander R. D. Scott) had gotten involved with the survivors while researching the Indianapolis story for a school history fair project. Over the past two years, he had single-handedly brought more attention to Indy’s story and the survivors’ exoneration battle than anyone before him. Hunter’s was a pitch-perfect human interest story: Young boy helps old men in their lifelong quest to correct historic injustice. The whole situation was absolutely made for TV—and that’s where Hunter had been: on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, Good Morning America, Today, and more. The list was long, and the Navy brass wasn’t happy about it.


  Hunter had done remarkable things, Toti felt, and all the more remarkable because he was now only thirteen years old. Ironically, though, it was that very fact that had backfired to extend decades of inertia. In arguing that today’s admirals were still somehow in league with the admirals of 1945, Hunter was sincere. But he was also irritating the very people whose help he needed to exonerate McVay. He was calling on the Navy to overturn McVay’s court-martial, which was for the Navy a Catch-22. On the one hand, it was not in the Pentagon’s power to overturn a legally sound court-martial. On the other, nobody in the Navy wanted to appear to be beating up on a kid.

  2

  * * *

  JUNE 1999

  Offices of Senator Bob Smith

  Dirksen Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “LOOK, BOB, I RESPECT you, I’m on the committee with you, but come on,” Senator John Warner was saying. “This is some kid’s school project. Is this really worth a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee?”

  Warner’s response was typical of the uphill battle Senator Bob Smith had been fighting for a year. That’s how long it had been since Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, first spied a line item on his daily agenda that stopped him cold.

  “What’s this?” Smith said, and shot a quizzical look at his legislative assistant, John Luddy. “ ‘USS Indianapolis and Hunter Scott?’ ”

  That had been in April 1998. Luddy had been sitting on the opposite side of Smith’s dark, polished desk. Through a window in the Dirksen Senate Office Building suite, both men could see budding spring trees along Constitution Avenue, and beyond them, the imposing dome of the Capitol.

  “It’s a meeting with the survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sir,” Luddy said.

  A former Marine Corps infantry officer, Luddy was Smith’s senior advisor on military affairs. He summed up in a few lines the ship’s story, the court-martial of McVay, and the survivors’ long fight to exonerate their captain.

  “Hunter Scott is an eighth-grader. He’s a constituent of Joe Scarborough’s.” Scarborough was a congressman representing Florida’s 1st Congressional District.

  Smith, a fifty-eight-year-old former history teacher, knew of Indianapolis only from the scant information he’d read in textbooks. “Okay, I get it that the survivors are still trying to clear their captain,” he said. “But what’s an eighth-grade kid got to do with it?”

  It started with a grade-school history project, Luddy explained.

  Hunter’s interest in Indianapolis was triggered in 1996 when he sat down with his dad to watch his dad’s favorite movie, Jaws. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the film. But this time, when the fishing boat captain, Quint, told the horrible tale of surviving the sinking of Indianapolis, Hunter really listened. As soon as the scene was over, he stood and faced his dad. “Is that a true story?”

  “Yes,” his dad said, smiling. “And please move from in front of the TV.”

  But Hunter was fascinated and pressed for more information. He needed a topic for his school history fair and felt he had found one. His father, a high school principal, promised to take Hunter with him to the University of West Florida library, where he was working on his PhD dissertation. But even university-level history books yielded only a few lines of information about the Navy’s greatest sea disaster. Surprised, Hunter’s dad next showed him how to search microfiche for newspaper articles from 1945. There the boy found more, but only the high points, and those repetitive and without context. The internet, in 1997, was also not very useful.

  That was when Hunter decided to try to contact the survivors. He put an ad in Pensacola’s Navy newspaper. Maurice Bell, a survivor living in nearby Mobile, Alabama, replied. Hunter traveled to interview Bell, who was seventy-one at the time, and with Bell’s help, the project took off. By the time Hunter learned of Indianapolis, the survivors had been holding reunions for more than thirty-five years. Bell gave Hunter a list of all living survivors. Over the course of a year, the boy called or wrote to every single man. Though some turned him down, many wrote back, eager to share their stories. Some had never even told their families about those terrible days at sea. Hunter, then just eleven years old, was the first to hear their pain.

  He began sending the survivors a questionnaire he had prepared. Many answered it and sent it back, some with mementos and photographs. Their stories galvanized the boy: the horror of friends dying in their arms, the terror of the sharks. Survivor Paul Murphy called it “fear beyond words.”

  For his history fair project, Hunter printed out news articles from 1945. He obtained a map of the South Pacific and marked the location of the sinking. He even wrote to Hashimoto, who responded with a few kind words and a photograph of himself as a young commander, standing at the periscope aboard I-58. The project grew to include enough documentation to fill two three-ring binders.

  From all the material Hunter collected, one theme emerged that he had not expected. To a man, the survivors were still outraged over the treatment of their captain. Hunter won his school history competition. Then Joe Scarborough, his congressman, decided to put Hunter’s project on display in his office, and that attracted the attention of local reporters.

  Senator Smith listened with interest as Luddy summed up, saying that Hunter Scott had been all over the news. It started with a couple of appearances in 1997. The following year, Hunter appeared on all the major network evening news broadcasts, plus Fox and CNN, as well as all the major morning shows. George magazine had even named the kid one of its “20 Most Fascinating Men in Politics.” Luddy then explained that Hunter’s evidence of McVay’s innocence had convinced Scarborough to craft a 1998 resolution declaring the sense of Congress that McVay’s court-martial was unjust. The measure had failed, but Hunter and the survivors weren’t giving up.

  Smith sat back, fascinated—with both the kid and the subject matter. He had great respect for veterans of McVay’s era. Smith’s father, an Annapolis graduate, had been a Navy pilot during World War II. He died in a plane crash just a few months before Indianapolis sank. Smith was a Navy veteran himself, having served two years on active duty, one in Vietnam.

  • • •

  A couple of hours later, Smith, Luddy, and a small knot of legislative staffers greeted Hunter Scott and a handful of survivors in the senator’s large conference room. Introductions were made: Glenn Morgan, a seventy-six-year-old Texan, had brought Mertie Jo, his wife of fifty-five years. Paul Murphy, who was now seventy-five, and his wife Mary Lou hailed from Colorado. Smith also met survivor Mike Kuryla and his wife, Lorraine, and survivors Bob McGuiggan, Dick Paroubek, Dick Thelen, and Woodie James.

  Hunter and the survivors took seats at the long conference table, and Hunter laid out for Smith the case for exonerating Captain McVay. Smith’s first impression was that the kid seemed about twenty-five years older than his actual age of thirteen. He spoke with authority and without referring to the notes he carried in a ring binder as thick as a phone book. At intervals, Hunter asked the survivors to speak to specific issues, and Smith was struck by the way these grizzled World War II heroes took his lead. The boy was knowledgeable, organized, and passionate, and the survivors were knowledgeable, determined, and sincere. Together, Smith thought, they made a hell of a team.

  Hunter had already helped push legislation to the U.S. House. Though the bill hadn’t passed, Smith admired the boy’s devotion to a cause larger than himself and identified with his refusal to give up. The senator’s scheduler had allotted thirty minutes for the Indianapolis meeting, but two and a half hours flew by as Smith listened and asked questions, fascinated. Then Hunter came to the bottom line. Joe Scarborough was sponsoring a new bill in the House concerning McVay. Would Smith sponsor a Senate version?

  This draft legislation, Senate Joint Resolution 26, would declare the sense of Congress that the court-martial charges against Captain McVay were “morally unsustainable,” and his conviction a “miscarriage of justice that le
d to his unjust humiliation and damage to his naval career.” SJR 26 also declared that “the American people should recognize Captain McVay’s lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the USS Indianapolis and the lives of the men who died as a result of her sinking.”

  Smith considered all that he’d heard. Privately, he felt that if Hunter and the survivors were right, then a grave injustice had been done—one the survivors had been trying to undo for fifty years. Aloud, Smith said he appreciated all that had been shared about Indianapolis and Captain McVay. He promised only that he and his staff would dig deeper.

  That had been a year ago. Since then, Smith’s staff had been drilling down into the truth about the loss of Indianapolis. The senator had assigned one member of his staff to work exclusively on the project, reading case files and taking statements from survivors. Smith himself also spent a lot of time with his nose in the books.

  He admired young Hunter Scott for the work he’d done to get the survivors this far. Beyond that, though, Smith’s question became about the survivors: Were they right? Maybe. Or maybe McVay screwed up. Maybe he should’ve been court-martialed. These were the questions that Smith and his staff were running down for themselves. Over five decades, documentation had swelled to include newly declassified material, such as the ULTRA intelligence program, as well as legal analyses, scores of articles, and a number of full-length books. The latest of these, Fatal Voyage by Dan Kurzman, was published in 1990.

  While conducting research for a book about the atomic bomb, Kurzman, a former NBC News and Washington Post correspondent, came across Navy documents related to the Indianapolis story. His wife encouraged him to dig deeper.