by Lynn Vincent
There it was, Toti thought, the ugliness beginning to splash.
Among the next witnesses was author Dan Kurzman. An iron-chinned journalist of the old school, Kurzman was used to political subterfuge. In 1952, he broke the story that a failed assassination attempt on King Farouk of Egypt was being kept secret. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson’s State Department accused Kurzman of unethical behavior, a charge that was later crushed beneath the hammer of facts, forcing State to issue a formal letter of apology.
In researching the story of Indianapolis, Kurzman told the committee, he met many survivors whose character and courage represented “the true naval tradition and would make anybody proud of the Navy. But sadly, I discovered there was another Navy: a small, but powerful one, composed of highly ranked naval figures who were great fighters, but somehow lost their moral perspective. That’s what this hearing is all about. The conviction of Captain McVay was a dark episode in the illustrious history of the U.S. Navy, and today, still casts a shadow over its image.”
Kurzman had spent hours hunkered down in the National Archives and found there what he referred to as “the smoking gun.” It was a memorandum from Edward Hidalgo, the special assistant Navy Secretary James Forrestal had once told to make the sensationalism go away. The memo said, “The causal nexus between the failure to zigzag and the loss of the ship appears not to have a solid foundation.”
Hidalgo, Kurzman said, had spoken with a legal expert about a response to an appeal by McVay. The expert favored additional language to the effect that McVay was convicted of a “super technical charge.” But it was felt that such language would tend to imply an apology for having convicted him at all.
Kurzman also interviewed Hashimoto, who said that McVay had been a victim of bad luck. I-58 and Indianapolis happened to meet at a rare moment when the degree of visibility permitted a torpedo strike. This bad fortune might never have befallen McVay if he had been given an escort and proper intelligence.
Kurzman ended his testimony with a pair of powerful questions. “Is the American democratic system so inflexible that an injustice cannot be rectified? Is the U.S. Navy, which so gloriously helped conquer the enemy, incapable of conquering itself?”
6
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SENATOR BOB SMITH THOUGHT the hearing was going well. Warner, sitting to Smith’s left, had been impressed with young Hunter Scott. He was also clearly moved by the passionate testimony of the survivors, Smith noted—Murphy, as well as McCoy, and Twible, who had tried to help keep order in the Redmayne raft group.
On the bench before Smith was a sheaf of materials, including a sheet of paper given to him by Mike Monroney. Smith called the first witness for the Navy.
Dr. William Dudley, the director of naval history, went first. Dudley delivered a lengthy history of the Indianapolis sinking, court of inquiry, and court-martial based on commercially published books and Navy press releases. Dudley cited one primary source, McVay’s September 1945 oral narrative on the sinking.
Next, Admiral John D. Hutson testified. Hutson, the judge advocate general counsel of the Navy, told the committee that he had personally read the entire record of the trial. “I conclude that the proceedings were fair and provided the due full process of law.”
Hutson argued that while modern courts-martial are, in effect, criminal trials, courts-martial before 1950 were much different affairs. Such proceedings often incorporated “the fixing of accountability and resolving vexing issues of command and discretionary action.” The head JAG’s testimony was brief, and he referred the committee to a detailed written statement in which he refuted the claims of Hunter Scott and the survivors.
“Thank you, Admiral Hutson,” Smith said. “Admiral Pilling?”
Commander Bill Toti squared his shoulders to the bench. For an awful moment, he wondered what in the world he’d been thinking. He was an upwardly mobile officer on the verge of making captain. But this subterfuge could get him fired as Pilling’s assistant, or at least reprimanded.
Karen had pleaded with him not to do it—“It’s too dangerous,” she’d said—but he’d done it anyway. Now, part of him thought he should have listened to his wife.
On the other hand, his long study of Indianapolis and McVay had convinced him that a grave injustice had been done, and that the survivors would never again get this close to righting that wrong. In the end, he’d made his decision—to work against his own boss, but, he hoped, in favor of history.
“Senator, thank you for the opportunity to appear here today and address the committee,” Pilling said, smooth and polished as always. “I also have a brief statement. Then we will be ready to respond to your questions.”
Pilling noted that the investigation after the sinking of Indianapolis revealed the Navy’s weaknesses: in how ships were routed and tracked; in the quality of survival equipment; and in the material condition of Indy herself, an older ship.
The admiral then echoed Toti’s Proceedings article on the absolute responsibility of a commanding officer for his ship. “Admiral McVay understood these concepts perfectly. After his rescue, he told reporters . . . ‘I was in command of the ship and I am responsible for its fate.’ ”
Pilling addressed the charge on which McVay was convicted: hazarding his vessel by failure to steer a zigzag course. He emphasized that McVay was not court-martialed for the sinking, but rather for poor judgment. His decision to steer a straight course increased Indy’s vulnerability to a submarine attack. Whether a zigzag course would have prevented the sinking was an open question, the admiral said. But it was clear to him that it would have “shifted the odds” in Indy’s favor.
Finally, Pilling noted that McVay was a courageous officer decorated for action in combat. He also lauded the crew’s heroic struggle to survive. “I understand and applaud that those men, the survivors of Indianapolis, should defend their captain against what some see as an unfair attack on a valiant naval officer. I hope that my comments may help to make clear that the court-martial . . . was not undertaken to attack him, but to defend the crucial principle of command accountability.”
At the head of the chamber, Smith spoke into his microphone. “Thank you very much, Admiral. I understand the position that all of you are in. I respect it. I want you to know that. It is not my style to try to attack here and to demean in any way. I am trying to be objective. I have done a lot of research, not as much as some others, such as Mr. Scott, but in reading your statement, Admiral Pilling, it is weak.”
Toti winced: Here it comes . . .
“Not the statement, but the court-martial,” Smith continued. “Let me just say why. . . . There were hundreds of American ships sunk out there in the war. Nobody was court-martialed for the sinking of his ship other than Captain McVay. . . . Based on your own testimony, you are saying it was a judgment that they court-martialed him for, not the zigzag, not the sinking of the ship. You had the commander of the submarine who sank the ship, the Japanese officer, testify at the court-martial that ‘I popped up with my periscope and there he was, and I sank him. Zigazgging would not have made a difference.’ So let me ask you a point-blank direct question: Was Captain McVay to blame for the sinking of the USS Indianapolis? Yes or no?”
“As I said in my statement, sir, he was not tried for the sinking.”
“So if he was not tried and court-martialed for the sinking,” Smith countered, “then he was court-martialed for a judgment he made not to zigzag. . . . If it is seven hundred ships that sank, did we look at every single one of those sinkings and look at the judgment of those captains prior to that? Did we analyze each one of those?”
Since coming to work for him, Toti had learned that certain things happened to the admiral’s face when he got angry. First, his face would go completely stoic. Then the corners of his mouth would start to curl up. Some people would mistake this for a smile. In the next stage, Pilling’s face would begin to turn red. That was happening now.
Smith continued hammering. “Did
we say, ‘Well, he did not zigzag, he did zigzag, he did know this, he did not know that?’ I do not think we did. . . . It is, to me, bizarre that one individual would be court-martialed on a judgment. Would any of you gentlemen wearing the uniform like to be court-martialed on an error in judgment that had no direct impact on the loss of lives? How would you feel if that were you or your son?”
“If I could just respond, Senator,” Pilling said. “In the first place, as the judge advocate general pointed out, the role of a court-martial before 1950 was very different.”
“I understand that.”
“The second thing I would point out is that Fleet Admiral King—I mean, Nimitz—said he should not go to court-martial, but he should receive a letter of reprimand for a judgment error.”
“Well, that’s a big difference, let’s face it. A big difference between a letter of reprimand and a court-martial. But you said that the Navy had a number of weaknesses. That is the term you used in your statement.”
“Right.”
“The way they noted and tracked ships, and weaknesses in survival equipment on board,” Smith said. “But it is interesting that when the Navy talks about their mistakes, they are not mistakes, they are weaknesses. When we talk about a possible mistake in judgment by Captain McVay, it is a court-martial offense.”
Smith now turned his guns on Hutson, the JAG: Were any of the men who allegedly received an SOS from Indianapolis court-martialed?
Smith was referring in part to the SOS messages reportedly received by the Coast Guard vessel Bibb and USS Hyperion. A search of radio logs and dispatch files revealed that Bibb received no such message. A January 1946 memorandum from Hyperion indicated that the ship received messages “indicating the loss of Indianapolis” sometime before August 4, 1945. The rescue began on August 2, and the memo does not say that the messages related to Indy were distress messages.
Over the years, additional information about distress signals arose, including an account by a sailor named Clair B. Young. In 1955, the Los Angeles Times and Saturday Evening Post ran ten-year retrospective articles on the loss of Indianapolis. Young came forward. He said that at half past midnight on July 30, 1945, he was a seaman on watch at the Quonset hut quarters of Commodore Jacob Jacobson, commander of Naval Operating Base (NOB), Leyte Gulf, Philippines, when a messenger approached him with an urgent radio dispatch. Upon reading the message, Young saw that it appeared to be a garbled SOS from “CA 35” that included the ship’s location and condition. According to Young, he woke Jacobson, who read the message and said, “No reply at this time. If any further messages are received, notify me at once.”
In 1955, Young wrote to the chief of naval operations about the “lost distress signal” and shared his recollection of those events. Later, in a 1991 personal letter to Kimo McVay, Young added new information: He had noticed “a strong odor of alcohol” in Jacobson’s room and, a few days after the incident, Young noticed “CA 35” on the Ships Present board in the port director’s office. But he felt there was nothing he could do about it because others already knew about the SOS.
Another man, Donald Allen, wrote to Hunter Scott in 1998. In 1945, Allen was a teenage sailor serving on limited duty at Tacloban after having suffered a heat stroke near New Guinea. On the night of July 29, Allen wrote, he was standing watch in the officer of the deck’s Quonset hut at Philippine Sea Frontier when a radioman came in bearing an Indianapolis SOS that included the ship’s position. According to Allen, a duty officer sent two seagoing tugs to the rescue, but these were recalled hours into their journey by Commodore Norman Gillette. An examination of PhilSeaFron’s logs for the period shows that two seagoing tugs were indeed dispatched on July 29—but in response to a large convoy caught in a storm between Okinawa and Luzon, not in response to Indianapolis.
A third sailor, Russell Hetz, wrote a letter to Hunter in 1998. According to Hetz, LCI-1004, the landing craft to which he was assigned, received two distress messages from Indianapolis, eight and a half minutes apart. Six weeks later, an officer with “a lot of clout” came aboard and ripped the pages relevant to the distress calls out of the landing craft’s log. Later investigation, however, showed that LCI-1004’s logs appear complete.
It is true that the Philippine Sea Frontier operations plot showed that Indy had arrived in Leyte Gulf. Could the messenger Clair Young reported have been sent by the OOD where Allen was standing duty? Possibly. Since Jack Miner saw the Radio 2 antenna needle jump, it is not out of the question that multiple stations could have received Indy’s distress message. However, the power was out in Radio 1 and in Radio 2, Chief Woods was able to send an SOS but not the ship’s position. The distress call Hetz reported did not involve coordinates. Could that have been Woods’s signal? That is also possible. And yet a conspiracy involving all three reported distress calls would have had to drop a now seventy-plus-year cone of silence over the Sea Frontier radioman and the duty officer who dispatched the tugs that Allen reported were in response to Indianapolis. The tug crews and their captains, as well as the landing craft radioman and its captain, would also have had to keep quiet. In addition, someone would have had to falsify LCT-1004’s log in order for historians to later find it complete, and both commodores Jacobson and Gillette would have had to knowingly sign falsified war diaries for NOB Leyte Gulf and Philippine Sea Frontier, neither of which mentions a distress signal from Indianapolis. During the sinking investigation, the communications logs of all stations involved in the sailing and loss of Indianapolis were searched, and no SOS message was found.
• • •
Now Hutson answered Smith’s question. “No, sir,” he said. “There were no other courts-martial related to the tragic loss.”
“The perception is that [McVay] was court-martialed because the ship went down and 1,200 sailors went into the water,” Smith said. “. . . Frankly, I think you have to ask yourself, honestly . . . if the ship had not sunk, and Captain McVay had entered port, would he have been court-martialed?”
It was a direct hit. Toti, who had always been short, now wished he were shorter. He knew—knew—Pilling must surely recognize Smith’s question as the same one Toti had presented during the hearing prep the previous week. Toti expected that any second, Pilling would turn around and scorch him with a knowing glare: busted. But Pilling did not.
Smith’s question to Hutson explicitly addressed an assertion in Hutson’s written statement. The admiral disputed what he called “the popular misconception” that McVay was brought to trial for having his ship sunk in combat, when he was actually court-martialed for hazarding his ship. “In fact,” Hutson had written, “the actual loss of the ship was not an element of either of the two charges referred against Captain McVay.”
The Navy had long held this position, and while it was technically true, the handwritten notes of Lieutenant Carl Bauersfeld cast the issue in a different light. Bauersfeld was assistant counsel to Captain Thomas Ryan, the lead prosecutor in the case. In the winter of 1945 while preparing for trial, the lieutenant created a “proof matrix,” written in two columns on the lined sheets of a yellow legal pad. In the left-hand column Bauersfeld listed for Charge I against McVay—that of negligently hazarding his vessel—seven separate elements of proof. For example, one element was that McVay was captain of Indianapolis. Another was that the ship had been sailing unescorted. In the right-hand column, he listed the evidence that Ryan could use to prove each one.
As written by Bauersfeld, the seventh element of Charge I was this: “He [McVay] . . . through said negligence did suffer the said U.S.S. Indianapolis to be hazard[ed].” Next to this specification, the lieutenant wrote, “This may be proved by showing ship was torpedoed by expert witness.”
The expert witness, of course, was Hashimoto. When the Japanese commander was en route to Washington, D.C., in December 1945, United Press International reported on his arrival. The wire service repeated the Navy’s claim that Ryan had called Hashimoto not to testify against McVay, but
to verify that Indianapolis had indeed been sunk by a submarine. But according to Bauersfeld’s notes, that was only semantically true. Ryan actually called Hashimoto in order to convict McVay.
In the conclusion of his written statement, Hutson asserted that according to “the record of trial, 54 years of naval correspondence, and history, Captain McVay was never charged with losing his ship.” The prosecution’s notes, however, indicate that McVay likely had to lose his ship in order to be charged. Without Hashimoto’s testimony, the cause of the sinking was inconclusive. Without the sinking, “hazarding” could not definitively be proved. And without hazarding, the rest of the charges against McVay might have collapsed for lack of foundation.
In the hearing room, the sparring continued. Senator Warner and Dr. Dudley, the historian, weighed in. Punches and counterpunches. Warner seemed troubled by some of the Navy’s assertions and he said so.
Senator Smith pointed out that Captain Oliver Naquin made a judgment not to share the ULTRA intelligence on the Tamon group. The Pacific Fleet chose not to investigate I-58’s report of sinking an enemy ship—another judgment. Why, Smith wanted to know, was McVay prosecuted for an error in judgment while those responsible for equally—or more—fatal judgments were not? Again, the query echoed Toti’s murder board questions.
Finally, Smith said, “There is an injustice here. We should change injustices, not rewrite history, but change injustices.” He gazed down at the admirals. “That man wore the uniform, just like you wore it. He was one hell of an officer. He would not have been given that bomb to take to the Enola Gay if he was not, as has already been stated. I think to punish him—and he endured punishment that none of us could ever understand and paid the ultimate price for it. We have a chance . . . to make it right. Not to overturn a court-martial. Not to demean the reputations of any of the other officers who may have made errors in judgment. Just to simply say we made a mistake. The court-martial was a mistake. . . . It was an injustice done to a good man.”