Indianapolis

by Lynn Vincent

  When the hearing was over, Toti helped Pilling gather his paperwork, then crossed the aisle to say goodbye to the Murphys. Quiet congratulations bubbled among the survivors. The hearing had gone as well as it possibly could have, they felt. The weight of testimony had clearly come down on the side of passing the Senate resolution.

  Toti didn’t say so, but he knew there was still a towering obstacle to passage: Senator John Warner. During Warner’s term as Navy secretary, he’d had the opportunity to take action on McVay’s court-martial, but chose not to. Would he now support a bill that, in essence, did what he had refused to do while he was in charge of the Navy? Or would he recoil from appearing to change his position?

  It would still be up to Warner whether to take the exoneration resolution to the senate floor for a vote. Would he?

  JULY 2005

  THE WESTIN HOTEL

  INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

  AT THE WESTIN HOTEL in Indianapolis, the vast lobby buzzed with the festive air of a state fair midway. Sixty-two of the ninety-two living survivors arrived to warm greetings and supporters from all over the globe. World War II exhibit tables lined a wide, carpeted hall. Survivors posted themselves at book-signing tables. A thirteen-foot-long scale model of Indianapolis dominated the lobby, drawing crowds. More than eight hundred people bounced between exhibits and little clusters of admirers gathered around the old Indy sailors to hear their stories.

  At the ship model, survivors recounted the night of the tragedy, pointing to the port rail or the fantail or the quarterdeck. “This is the last place I touched her,” they would say. “This is where I abandoned ship.”

  Exactly sixty years had passed since the sinking, and two years since the last formal reunion. But this, 2005, was a banner year. The acting secretary of defense, Gordon England, would be the speaker at the reunion’s main event, the formal banquet on Saturday night. England was the highest-ranking member of the defense department ever to keynote a reunion. His presence validated the survivors’ long fight for McVay.

  That fight did not end with the Senate Armed Services Committee. After the hearing, two months passed as Senator Bob Smith and his new military legislative aide, Margaret “Ducky” Hemenway, battled the Pentagon. Every time Ducky sent draft exoneration language to Senator Warner’s office, a more powerful aide there disemboweled it. That’s because Warner was under heavy Navy pressure to leave McVay’s culpability alone. Repeatedly, Smith appealed to Warner to take SJR 26 to the floor for a vote, and Warner’s answer was always the same: no.

  In the end, the man who finally persuaded Warner was the same one who sank Indianapolis. In November 1999, Mochitsura Hashimoto wrote a letter to Warner. The letter expressed Hashimoto’s dismay over the fact that McVay was ever tried in court.

  I have met many of your brave men who survived the sinking of the Indianapolis. I would like to join them in urging that your national legislature clear their captain’s name. Our peoples have forgiven each other for that terrible war and its consequences. Perhaps it is time your peoples forgave Captain McVay for the humiliation of his unjust conviction.

  When he received Hashimoto’s plea, Warner was so astonished that he called Smith to his office to show him the letter in person. For Warner, it was the final weight on the scale. He decided to take the exoneration resolution to the Senate floor. On October 12, 2000, the measure passed. It was the same day of another naval sea disaster, when terrorists attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors and wounding thirty-nine more.

  House Joint Resolution 48 also passed, and with stronger exoneration language. But even after President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, his Navy secretary, Richard Danzig, refused to enter the language in Captain McVay’s record. There was no movement until George W. Bush took office and appointed a new Navy secretary, Gordon England.

  Months later, England met with Toti to discuss the history of the exoneration battle. Then he met with Senator Smith, who asked him to allow the amendment of Captain McVay’s service record.

  “It will be done,” England told the senator. “You have my word.” Secretary England then directed the chief of naval operations to enter the following language into McVay’s record:

  1. in light of the remission by the Secretary of the Navy of the sentence of the court-martial and the restoration of Captain McVay to active duty by the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, that the American people should now 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 the sinking of that vessel; and

  2. in light of the fact that certain exculpatory information was not available to the court-martial board and that Captain McVay’s conviction resulted therefrom, that Captain McVay’s military record should now reflect that he is exonerated for the loss of the USS Indianapolis and so many of her crew.

  The survivors did not trust the Pentagon to make the entry in McVay’s record, so they asked that Toti be allowed to do it. While reviewing McVay’s record, Toti was surprised to find an entry about McVay’s Bronze Star, the one awarded him at the Potomac River command in 1946, for action on Indianapolis three months before she sank. The record entry said, in error, that in 1946, McVay’s whereabouts were unknown and that his medal had been “returned to stock.”

  Toti knew about the valor award McVay had received for action in the Solomon Islands, but not about this second honor. He showed the service record entry to Secretary England, who asked Toti whether McVay had any living relatives.

  Only Charles B. McVay IV—“Quatro”—Toti said. “Kimo died two months ago.” Kimo had lived to see Congress exonerate his father, but not long enough to see it become a matter of official Navy record. He died of cancer in June 2001, at the age of seventy-three.

  “Present the medal to Captain McVay’s living son,” England said.

  Toti called on Quatro and presented him with the Bronze Star. Quatro was shocked to learn that his father had won a second award for courage under fire. Apparently, McVay had not told his boys about this new honor, perhaps out of shame for having lost the ship on which he earned it.

  Quatro was in attendance at the 2005 reunion, smiling and greeting survivors and families. Toti was also there, one of a slate of guest speakers that also included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. Toti was a captain now, having put on his eagles in August 2000, two months before Admiral Don Pilling retired from active duty. Toti never learned whether Pilling was caught off guard in the September 1999 Senate hearing—or whether he intentionally “threw the game” with his surprise Saturday phone call.

  Survivors who had made the trip to Indianapolis ranged from Harold Bray, at seventy-eight the baby of the bunch, to the oldest, Thomas Goff, who was ninety-eight. One survivor didn’t have to travel at all. Jimmy O’Donnell, whose wife watched Indy pass beneath the Golden Gate as the ship left the States for the last time, was the only survivor from the cruiser’s namesake city.

  L. D. Cox and Glenn Morgan were at the reunion, too. After the war, the two remained close friends, their kids growing up together, their families spending holidays with each other in Texas. Cox and Morgan sometimes spoke together, telling their survival story at VFW halls and civic organizations.

  All of these old friends gathered, and the mood in the Westin lobby was ebullient. Paul Murphy, who had retired as an engineer, now used a wheelchair. But this day he jumped out of it, laughing. “I don’t need this thing today!” he said to a young woman standing with him. “You get in and I’ll give you a ride!”

  The woman, a filmmaker and friend of the survivors who was taping the day’s events, sat down in the chair and Murphy took her for a spin, a half-chewed cigar hanging out of his mouth and laughing like a kid.

  A young Japanese woman had also come to the reunion. Her name was Atsuko Iida, and she was the granddaughter of Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Like Kimo, the old Japanese submarine commander had lived to see McVay exonerated. But h
e died two weeks later, at the age of ninety-one. Initially nervous about attending the ship’s reunions, Atsuko worried about upsetting the families of Indy’s lost at sea. This year, though, encouraged by her husband, Jahn, she had brought along her two young sons and her mother, Commander Hashimoto’s daughter. This would be the first time the Hashimoto family met so many people connected to Indianapolis.

  In the lobby, Atsuko and hundreds of others queued up at a long row of rectangular tables stacked with hardcover blue books. Only 317 Survived, a collection of first-person accounts written by the survivors and edited for publication by Mary Lou Murphy. Visitors snapped them up two and three at a time and cheerfully waited in line to get their heroes to sign them.

  Survivor Ed Harrell had also just published a book, Out of the Depths: A Survivor’s Story of the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Harrell had written it with his son, David, a pastor, and so was signing two books that day.

  • • •

  The day passed in celebration. The next night, before the banquet, the young filmmaker was walking past the model of Indianapolis when another man in a wheelchair began to speak. It was Bob Bunai, a former signalman first class. At ninety-six, Bunai was the second-oldest living survivor. For sixty years, he had refused to speak about the disaster. Even in the survivors’ new book, Bunai’s entry was short and sweet:

  I joined the Navy to see the world. Since we were too busy fighting a war, I didn’t see the world.

  Now, suddenly, in a reedy voice that crackled with years, Bunai stood and began to tell his story. Quickly, the filmmaker swung up her camera. After more than a half-century of silence, it was as if someone had flipped a switch. With his family standing nearby, Bunai spoke for twenty minutes straight, finally unburdening his soul about those terrorizing days in the water. His voice climbing high with passion, Bunai reached such a fever pitch that he tottered and nearly fell. Family members caught him and lowered him gently back into his wheelchair.

  But Bunai wasn’t finished. He shook his finger at the filmmaker’s lens, and his voice crescendoed. “For sixty years, I cried! I cried a lot! But now . . . I ain’t gonna cry anymore!”

  The old gentleman’s sentiment reflected that of all the survivors. For sixty years, they had gathered to fight for three things: to remember their brothers lost at sea, to build a monument honoring that sacrifice, and to exonerate their captain. Over the decades, they were faithful to their first purpose. The second goal took exactly half a century. Now, finally, McVay’s record reflected his innocence. Their quest was complete.

  • • •

  At the banquet that night, a procession of speakers paid homage to the Indianapolis survivors, the families of the lost at sea, and also the rescuers, many of whom had come. To close out the evening, per long tradition, Glenn Morgan climbed onto the stage as he did each year to lead the crowd in singing a final song, “God Bless America.”

  Morgan stepped up to the microphone. “Now, we haven’t done this before,” he said, “but what I’d like to do is to have all the children come up here.”

  The banquet hall broke into applause as the children and grandchildren of survivors and lost-at-sea families began streaming toward the stage. School-age children weaved their way through the banquet tables, while parents led their preschoolers by the hand.

  “That’s right, come on, y’all,” Morgan said from the stage, beckoning.

  From a table near the front where she sat with her husband and sons, Atsuko Iida watched the children wending their way forward. She glanced at her own two boys, unsure.

  Suddenly, the Indy families seated around her began motioning her toward the stage, encouraging her with smiles: “Yes, Atsuko! You, too! Go up there . . . go!”

  Nervously, Atsuko stood. Taking her sons by their hands, she began making her way toward Morgan and the large group of gathering children.

  In this hall, there was no more room for hatred. In those war years, families on both sides had been torn. Hashimoto may have claimed a victory in the war’s final moments, but he returned home to find his country in ashes. And the survivors’ joy over America’s victory was swallowed up in the trial they endured.

  Now, though, they were healing. There would always be scars, a part of each man locked forever inside his beloved ship. But over the decades, their wounds slowly knit closed, each reunion a touch of balm on the pain.

  Atsuko reached the front of the room with her boys. At the microphone, Morgan sang the first notes. Five hundred people watched with smiles and tears as Hashimoto’s family and the Indianapolis families joined together and sang, as one.

  The End

  FINAL LOG ENTRY

  AUGUST 19, 2017

  USS INDIANAPOLIS

  THE PHILIPPINE SEA

  EIGHTEEN THOUSAND FEET BELOW the surface, a “remotely operated vehicle,” or ROV, whirs across the seafloor, heading for what is known technically as the next “seafloor anomaly.” Festooned with lights, painted garishly yellow, and wrapped in metal nerf bars, the high-tech vehicle looks more like a portable generator than a seagoing vessel. Driven by a joystick in a control room at the other end of a six-kilometer-long cable, the vehicle hovers several meters over the seafloor, slowly motoring up to a triangle-shaped object embedded in the silt below. Orbiting its unusual quarry, the ROV’s camera resolves an object that has been shrouded in darkness for seventy-two years. The number 35 pops out of the inky black, as crisp as the day it was painted.

  “That’s it Paul, we’ve got it. The Indy!”

  • • •

  “Paul” is philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen, whose team on August 19, 2017, found what many argue is the most important American military shipwreck to be discovered in a generation: USS Indianapolis. Allen owns the ultra-high-tech research vessel Petrel. Five days before the discovery, ROV pilot and researcher Paul Mayer sat alone in a Mark V inflatable boat. On a sea like a glass sheet, without so much as a puff of wind to ruffle the surface, Mayer waited under the glaring tropical sun. He was fishing, for both actual fish and clues about the local currents.

  Mayer and Robert Kraft, Petrel’s director of subsea operations, and their team had for weeks scoured the area where Indy was said to have sunk. But time and again, the ship’s remote sonar scans had come up empty. That got Mayer and Kraft puzzling over the currents in the area. Now, a windless day presented an opportunity to check how both Petrel—a gleaming-white, three-thousand-ton ship—and the diminutive Mark V would respond to local currents.

  The Petrel team had been working to locate Indianapolis for weeks, but the effort had started many months before. To guide their underwater exploration, they made meticulous charts of Indy’s speed of advance (SOA), looked at the relative positions of the 1945 rescue locations to back-project their potential origins, and reviewed old records in search of clues. In the end, the SOA calculations proved to be most fruitful—so much so that they ultimately allowed Petrel to succeed where others had failed.

  With an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, the team searched thousands of square miles of uncharted Pacific Ocean terrain—soaring mountains and plunging canyons as high and deep as their counterparts in the Hindu Kush. Petrel researchers divided this terrain into a set of grids. Equipped with a sophisticated mapping sonar, the AUV returned massive, high-resolution panoramic images of the sea bottom, which the crew then sifted for anomalies that looked man-made, or that didn’t seem to fit the surrounding seafloor.

  After weeks of searching, Grid 19 ultimately held the prize. The discovery came late at night. Initial, telltale images began filtering back to the on-duty crew and sparked a mounting excitement. First, a potential debris field, with signs of larger objects that appeared inorganic. Definite signs of wreckage.

  Kraft was informed, and upon seeing the images, couldn’t lower the ROV fast enough. The AUV returned sonar data to Petrel. The ROV would return live video. Kraft had a good feeling, but once the ROV was launched, it would take three to four hou
rs to reach the bottom.

  Slowly, the ROV made its descent. When it reached fifty-five hundred meters—three and a half miles below the surface—the explorers got their first glimpse of the once-proud flagship of the 5th Fleet.

  The Petrel crew, some of whom are retired Navy men themselves, watched in reverence. This vessel was much more than a shipwreck, and every one of them took a moment to pay his respects.

  The discovery of the bow came first, and then, after another AUV pass, the whole debris field was laid out before them. The panoramic sonar image revealed a number of astonishing facts. The bow, ultimately separated as a result of Commander Hashimoto’s torpedo attack, had crashed into the seafloor more than a mile northeast of the rest of the hull. The main portion of the hull sat on the sea bottom, pointed to the southeast. Remarkably, the main part of the ship rested upright on the seafloor in a crater of its own making, hundreds of feet wide, surrounded by a spiderweb of giant cracks that look exactly as though Indy had slammed into a windshield.

  Lack of oxygen, near-freezing temperatures, and the absence of light had preserved Indianapolis so perfectly that it seemed she could have gone down the same day she was discovered. Remarkably detailed photos and videos collected by the Petrel crew show everything from helmets and shoes to cases of Colgate and individual pieces of dinnerware scattered across the seafloor. The expedition returned iconic images of Bofors guns, rifled five-inch gun barrels, and victory tallies still fresh as the day they were painted. Even turret No. 3 somehow stayed in its barbette.

  The heavy cruiser did suffer some major damage during its descent to the seafloor. While the bow definitely separated at frame 12, as several eyewitnesses attested, the next 13 frames of the forward structure are also missing, as if the ship were chewed into small pieces all the way back to frame 25 in front of turret No. 1. Whether this was an effect of onboard fires, explosions, or the sheer force of the ship falling through the water column is a mystery.