by Peter Nelson
For the next year everyone involved worked hard to get legislation passed that would clear Captain McVay’s name. We got further along in the 106th congressional session than we had been at the end of the 105th session. Now legislation had been introduced in both the House and the Senate. The legislation would express the “sense of Congress” that Captain McVay’s court-martial had been a miscarriage of justice and never should have happened. It would also award a Presidential Unit Citation to the USS Indianapolis’s final crew, in recognition of their courage in the face of tremendous hardship.
On September 14, 1999, at the age of fourteen, I testified along with several survivors before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The head of the committee, Senator John Warner, informed me that I was the youngest witness ever to appear before the committee. Senator Warner had said he was going to gavel the hearing in and stay for about fifteen minutes, and then he would have to leave. Once the hearing officially began, we stayed before the committee for more than three hours and won over Senator Warner, who remained through the entire hearing. Senator Warner said that he had come to the hearing fully ready to support the navy’s position but had “righted his course” after listening to our testimony. It seemed we were winning the battle.
The past five years of my life have been a journey down a bumpy road with many jolts and upsets, but well worth every bump. My dad says you learn more about an individual’s character after a defeat than after a win. I have learned that winners shake off the bumps, don’t cast blame or make excuses, and continue down the road with their goals and destination intact.
This journey I have made has allowed me to learn the true cost of freedom. Throughout America’s history, men and women have put their lives on the line, while losing friends and loved ones, to ensure that you and I and all Americans can enjoy liberty. Through my fight to exonerate the captain of the USS Indianapolis, I am trying to pay back at least a little bit of honor to some of the people who provided my freedom. I am trying to honor a group of veterans to whom honor is everything.
Hunter Scott
Pensacola, Florida
Chapter One
The Sailor
July 1945
The horror has seared my mind like a hot poker and I cannot forget it. After fifty years the dates and faces have lost their distinction, but the horror never gives way. The older I get, the more it bothers me. I can still hear the screams of the injured and dying.
Cozell Smith, 1994
The sailor finds himself swimming in the open ocean, wondering in shock how it came to this so suddenly. It’s just past midnight. He’d been sleeping above deck, because it was too hot below and it smelled of sweat and bad breath and dirty laundry. He woke up at eleven-thirty, half an hour before his turn to stand watch. He went to the mess hall, grabbed a cup of coffee from the fifty-gallon urn and took his coffee topside. A quarter moon appeared briefly in a break in the clouds, high overhead. Now it’s dark. He looks up, straining to see the moon. There’s no light. The last light he saw was his ship on fire, flames, smoke, mixed with the horrible sounds of men screaming.
“I can’t swim!” the man hanging on to him shouts.
The sailor wonders how they could let a man who can’t swim join the navy. The sailor’s name is Cozell Lee Smith, but they call him Smitty. The man whose life he’s saving is named Dronet. Smith has no life jacket. Dronet has no life jacket. Smith has already warned Dronet not to get scared and grab him around the neck, that he’ll leave him if he does. He’ll save Dronet’s life if he can, but if he has to, he will cut him loose. He’s already tiring. He’s a strong swimmer, but Dronet is heavy, weighing him down.
Smith swims. He gets a mouthful of seawater. He spits, coughs, keeps swimming. He inhales fumes and feels sickened by them. He hears screaming. He wonders how many others there are. He can’t see a thing. It’s too dark. He can’t tell what direction the screaming is coming from. He strains for breath and accidentally swallows another mouthful of seawater, but it’s not just seawater. It’s fuel oil from the ship’s ruptured tanks, thick and gooey. Instantly he’s covered in it. It goes down his throat. More fumes. He feels sick and retches. He pushes his vomit away from him in the water. Dronet is coughing.
“What is it?” Dronet asks.
“Oil,” Smith gasps. “Hang on. Keep kicking.”
The irony is that if Smith hadn’t joined the navy, he might well have been working in the oil fields back in Oklahoma. He’d volunteered at the age of seventeen, fresh out of tenth grade. His father, a barber, signed the permission papers with the thought that joining the navy might keep his son out of the kind of trouble a boy might get into, hanging around in a small town with nothing to do.
He spits. The oil goes down his throat even when he tries not to swallow. The ship burned oil to heat its boilers, which created the steam needed to turn the turbines to drive the propellers, which seamen call screws. It was, for its size, one of the fastest ships in the world, with a flank speed of thirty-two knots. He’d been standing at his watch station in “the bathtub,” an antiaircraft battery protected by a circular splinter shield, shooting the breeze with Jimmy Reid, another coxswain from his division, when they heard the explosion. The shock of the blast nearly knocked him off his feet.
“What the heck was that?” Smith asked. Reid said he thought it was a boiler exploding.
“That could be good,” Reid said. Smith wondered what could be good about it. “We’ll go back to the States for repair,” Reid explained.
Then the ship began to list, still moving forward but tilting to starboard, five degrees, then ten. Smith thought it would stop any second, but it didn’t, listing fifteen degrees, then twenty. It slowly dawned on him that the unthinkable was coming to pass. They were sinking. Were they? Impossible. Not impossible—it was happening. When the list reached thirty degrees, he climbed down from his position and scrambled to the high side, grabbing hold of the steel cable lifeline that girded the ship. Other men had nothing to grab on to and fell. One man fell backward into the number three gun turret and hit it hard with his head. His head cracked with a sound like Babe Ruth hitting a baseball. That man was dead. A second man fell into the gun turret, and Smith could hear his bones break. The ship kept rolling over on its side until it reached ninety degrees. Smith ran across the hull of the overturned ship. In the dim light, through the smoke, he saw other men scattered down the length of the ship, some running, some standing frozen with fear. He was about to jump off the keel when Dronet stopped him and asked him for help, explaining that he couldn’t swim. Now they’re together in the water.
A scream. Smith looks around. Where is the screaming coming from? Is a scream something to be avoided or approached? He swims. Smith is tired. His eyes sting from the oil. He looks up. The moon is again breaking through the clouds. He tries not to swallow salt water.
“Kick!” Smith commands.
The screams grow louder. They swim to a group of men, about eight in all.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” one is screaming. “Let me go. Just let me go, please. . . .”
“Hang on.”
“No—let me go. . . .”
“Hang on!”
Two men are supporting the man who’s screaming. The screaming man has his arms around the shoulders of the other two. His eyes open and close. His mouth is open in a grimace. Smith notices something white, shining in the waxing moonlight. It’s the man’s bones. The flesh has burned off his arms and his bones are showing. The salt water stings him. He wants to die. He wants the others to let him die but they won’t. Smith says nothing. The man with the burned arms looks around, looks at Smith, then looks away. He’s in agony. The others speak to him, urging him to hold on. Then his head tilts forward, face in the water. For a long time, he doesn’t move. The two men supporting the man with the burned arms finally give him up for dead and release him. The man whose bones are showing floats toward Smith and Dronet. Smith is exhausted from supporting Dronet and feels as i
f he’s about to drown. The man whose bones are showing is wearing a life jacket he doesn’t need anymore, so Smith takes it off him and helps Dronet into it. Dronet can’t swim—he needs the life jacket more than Smith does. Freed from the jacket, the burned man sinks.
For now there’s enough buoyancy in the life jacket to support both of them. Smith finally rests, hanging on to his new friend.
In the distance he hears somebody shouting, “Help me—somebody! Please! Oh God . . .” Other men scream but don’t use words. Men are injured. Men are dying all around him. There is confusion everywhere. Smith tries not to panic. He can’t help anybody right now. Two men near him in the water are talking.
“Torpedoes,” one says.
“How many?”
“I heard three.”
The moon disappears. When it’s gone, it’s pitch-black. The screams continue through the night, men suffering from and succumbing to their injuries. As the screams abate, Smith realizes the quiet doesn’t mean things are getting better—it means only that men who were screaming have died. He feels lucky that he has no injuries, but that isn’t much to feel lucky about.
At first light, the seas are calm. Smith is cold and welcomes the light because he knows it will bring warmth. He’s covered in oil, thick and greasy. It stings his eyes. Dronet is covered in oil too. Everyone is, shiny black unidentifiable faces bobbing in the water. As the light grows in strength, he sees something floating in the water near him. Hanging on to Dronet, he kicks toward it, hoping it’s food or water, but instead it’s a body. He can’t tell whose.
There were 250 new recruits on the ship. They were all headed for the Philippines for gunnery practice, before an invasion of the Japanese main islands. What sense did that make? Smith had been firing the guns for over two years—he didn’t need any practice. The dead man is floating facedown. Smith swims away from the body. He looks around. He sees a second body, then a third. There are bodies everywhere. How many of my shipmates are dead? How many of us have survived? He sees a splash in the distance, and thinks it could be a man slapping his hand against the water, trying to swim, but then he sees a fin. The terror of it hits him. To his left he watches as a body is suddenly pulled under. He sees a tail.
The water is full of sharks.
Chapter Two
The Boy
November 1996
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Emily Dickinson
An old man sits in his leather-upholstered recliner with his hands folded calmly in his lap. His house, in Mobile, Alabama, is a comfortable ranch on a dead-end street. The old man was once a sailor and still owns a small boat, but it’s been a while since he’s taken it out. It’s the winding down time in his life, when the pull of the future begins to lose its power. In old age, memories merge and meld, or break loose and drift away. Things that happened fifty years ago seem like they happened only yesterday, while things that actually happened only yesterday slip the mind and disappear.
A boy kneels on the floor in front of the old man. He is here for the old man’s memories. His name is Hunter Scott, and he is eleven years old. He’s working on a project for his school’s history fair. The theme of the fair this year is “Triumph and Tragedy.” The boy wants to know about the war.
The old man’s name is Maurice Glenn Bell, and he is seventy-one years old, born February 17, 1925, the same year Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf and John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee for teaching evolution. Bell regards the young man. He has spoken to schoolchildren before, but he’s never had one approach him with such keenness. The boy is wearing sneakers, jeans, a navy blue windbreaker over a white turtleneck. He has a sweet face and an easy smile, large brown eyes with long lashes. Some boys his age are already trying to cultivate an edge, but Hunter isn’t interested in that. He has driven with his family from nearby Pensacola, Florida, a military town where at the highway rest areas, old jet fighters propped on pylons point defiantly toward the sky. Hunter’s voice has a soft twang to it, his speech punctuated with the “yes, sirs” and “no, ma’ams” one hears from Southern kids taught to be polite and to respect their elders. He holds the old man’s Purple Heart in his hands, and understands that it’s a medal given to men who were wounded in action, but he doesn’t really know what that means. His first question is, “What do they put on it to make it purple?”
Bell says he isn’t sure. He considers. There are reasons for old men to tell young boys about war, and there are reasons not to. Some men feel it’s too easy to tell a war story, too simple to catch a young man’s interest with tales of high risk or near-death experiences, and too inadequate to leave it at that, out of context. You don’t want to make something horrible sound appealing. Some feel there’s no way to ever put it all into words, so why try? If you don’t want to lie about it, but you can’t really tell the truth either, silence becomes the only alternative. Men who survive know that the difference between those who make it home and those who get left behind is more a matter of fate than merit, and nothing to take any personal credit for. Generally speaking, the men of Bell’s generation who served in World War II didn’t talk much about the war afterward. Nonetheless, Maurice Bell invites Hunter to ask any questions he wants, and promises he’ll do his best to answer them.
“How long did you serve on the Indianapolis and what were your duties?” the boy asks, reading from a set of questions he’s prepared.
“I served two years on the Indy,” Bell says in a firm sure voice. He speaks slowly, softly. “I did boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois. I was in the Seventh Division. We were charged with cleaning the decks and manning the twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns, so I guess I helped shoot down some planes. Some Japanese planes.”
It’s the first time Hunter has talked to a WWII veteran. It reminds him of a scene in a movie, which was how he got involved in this history fair project in the first place. The movie was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, about a massive great white shark menacing the waters of a summer resort island. The scene was the one where police chief Brody (played by Roy Scheider), marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) wait through the night aboard Quint’s fishing boat for the harpooned killer shark to surface. They pass a bottle around, swapping scar stories and sea chanteys until Hooper asks Quint about the place on his arm where he’s had a tattoo removed.
“Don’t tell me,” Hooper says, laughing hysterically, “ ‘Mom . . .’ ”
“That, Mr. Hooper, was the USS Indianapolis,” Quint says ominously. Quint’s fictional account is historically inaccurate. He gets the dates wrong. It’s also highly dubious that any survivor of the Indy would ever have a tattoo of the ship removed. The men who served on the Indianapolis loved their ship, despite what happened to it, or maybe because of what happened to it.
“You were on the Indianapolis?” Hooper asks.
“What happened?” Brody wants to know.
“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief,” Quint says. “It was comin’ back from the island of Tinian Delady, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes . . .”
It was while watching Jaws with his dad that Hunter got the idea for his history project. Triumph and Tragedy. Captain Quint was a fictitious character, an invention of author Peter Benchley. Maurice Bell had actually been there.
“Did you know what your mission was or what the cargo was that you were carrying?” Hunter asks Bell, reading from his clipboard.
“No, we didn’t,” Bell says. “I helped load and unload it but they didn’t tell us what it was. We welded some containers to the deck so they wouldn’t move but we didn’t know what was in ’em.” He remembers the rumors, that the crates were full of scented toilet paper being shipped to General MacArthur, supreme commander of the southwest Pacific theater and hero of the Phili
ppines.
“Do you remember what you were doing when the torpedoes hit?” Hunter asks.
“That was my night to sleep all night,” Bell answers. “Usually we had to stand watch part of every night, but every fourth night you were allowed to sleep the whole night. My first thought was that one of the boilers had exploded. That’s what I thought. It was dark and then the emergency lights came on, and I reached for my life jacket but I couldn’t find one, so I went up on deck to get one, and then when I found one, just as I reached my hand down to get it, somebody snatched it away.” Bell leans over the side of his recliner and reaches his hand to the floor to illustrate. Hunter tries to imagine what Bell must have felt when the life preserver was suddenly gone. Bell remembers how they were supposed to keep their life preservers with them, how they’d taken on a fresh shipment of them in San Francisco just before sailing. After he grabbed another life preserver, his memory goes blank.
“You know, I’ve tried my best all these years to remember what happened next,” Bell continues, “but it all was happening pretty fast. One of the torpedoes blew the bow off, but the ship was still moving at sixteen or seventeen knots, so the force of the water coming in crushed the bulkheads. Bulkhead after bulkhead. I grabbed hold of one of the lifelines and the next thing I remember, I was standing on one of the ship’s screws, about forty feet up in the air, and I jumped from there. My feet were on the side of the ship and it rolled on over as I was jumping. The first thing I was afraid of was the suction from the ship sinking. And after that I was afraid the Japanese sub that sank us was going to come back and strafe the survivors, because I’d heard they did that.”