Left for Dead

by Peter Nelson

  Hunter tries to imagine what it would be like to be in the middle of the ocean, swimming for your life. His father, Alan Scott, an educator, worked on fishing boats as a kid and was once a semiprofessional sports fisherman. Hunter has hauled in blacktip sharks off the pier and duskies off the beach, practicing “catch and release” now that the shark populations have been decimated by overfishing. Hunter isn’t afraid of sharks, but that’s easy to say when you’re standing safely on a beach or boat. In the movie Jaws, Quint’s soliloquy about sharks was more frightening than anything Steven Spielberg did with screaming actors or animatronic fish, words that conjured up feelings of hopelessness and terror.

  “Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour,” Quint tells Brody and Hooper. “Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, Chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. Well, what we didn’t know, ’cause our bomb mission had been so secret—no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, the sharks come cruisin’, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know, it’s kinda like the old squares in battle, like you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark would go for the nearest man and then he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got . . . lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white . . .”

  After hearing Quint’s monologue, Hunter had stood up, blocking the television, and asked his dad, “Was that true?” His father suggested he move aside. Then the middle school principal in him replied, “Well, why don’t you go to a library and find some books and look it up?” It was Hunter’s history teacher, Mrs. Prevatte, who suggested he interview sources in person for his history fair project. Hunter placed an advertisement in the Gosport, a navy newspaper out of the naval air station in Pensacola. In the ad, Hunter introduced himself as a sixth grader at Ransom Middle School, looking for survivors of the Indianapolis. Maurice Bell answered the ad.

  “The man next to me when I jumped had been taking a shower when the torpedoes hit, so he was completely naked,” Bell remembers. The naked man had held on to Bell until he could find a life jacket of his own.

  “I wound up in one of the largest groups,” Bell continues. “We had three rafts, so we put the men who were wounded in the rafts. I remember one man had broken his back, so we put him in the raft. We had no water. Somebody found a can of malted milk balls. Just enough to make me hungry. The seas weren’t so bad that night. There were no breakers, you see—just big rollers, so you don’t really know how rough it is. We really couldn’t tell.”

  “Did you see people get attacked by sharks?” Hunter asks.

  Bell has lived with this for over fifty years. He has answered this question before.

  “I saw several,” he says. “One man in particular comes to mind. He’d drifted off maybe fifteen or twenty feet from me, and it seemed like everything had gotten real quiet, and then he screamed as the shark attacked, and all of a sudden he went straight down. And I never saw him again. The shark must have grabbed him by the leg or something. What happened was that two or three other sharks would see the water splashing, and then they’d come in and try to get him.”

  Hunter tries to imagine what it would feel like to know that at any second, you could be pulled out of the world you know, gone in the blink of an eye.

  “That was how it was. Everything would get real quiet, and then all of a sudden the sharks would start attacking. They would go in a circle around us, and then that circle would get smaller and smaller.”

  The old man stirs the air in front of him to demonstrate, making broad sweeping circles with two fingers pointing down. Hunter has seen circling sharks in cartoons. He wonders how a man could have stood five minutes of this, let alone the five nights and four days the men of the Indianapolis spent in the water.

  “Then,” Bell says, his hands in front of him, palms facing down, fingers together, thumbs extended, “they would come right in and start attacking us.” He pushes his hands forward and down until the thumbnails touch. “All over. Sometimes they’d come up from the bottom, or from the sides. I knew I could have been grabbed at any time, but by the grace of the Lord they didn’t.”

  “Did you have any fears?” Hunter asks, wide-eyed.

  “Well, I didn’t know,” Bell says, “but I never gave up. If I had, I wouldn’t be here. One man we found floating with his head down, with his face towards the water, and I held him up for three or four hours, but finally he gave up and died. I took his life jacket off him, and we took the stuff from his pockets and put it in the raft, you know, to send to his family or whatever, and then we let him go. But I never thought I was going to die, so I just never gave up. A lot of ’em just died from the exposure. They’d just give up, or else they’d have hallucinations. I almost did. One time some guys I was with started saying they saw an island over there, saying, ‘Look at all the beautiful girls in grass skirts with baskets of fruit on their heads,’ and the girls were singin’ and hollerin’ and offerin’ us glasses of fruit juice. I looked and looked and I almost saw ’em, two or three times, but I never did see ’em. But I come close. We had a little bit of rain one day, but just enough to get a few drops on my tongue. The thing was that the water down by our feet was cold all the time, even though the water up by our heads would get pretty warm during the day, so guys would dive down to get a drink because they thought the cold water down by their feet was fresh water. A few hours later, they’d be dead too. The water was so salty it’d swell your throat up and cut you off. I probably would have drunk it too but I wasn’t that out of my head yet. I guess my biggest fear then was that they weren’t going to find us, because planes would fly over, sometimes two a day, and we’d try to signal ’em but they’d just keep on going. Finally a plane come down, but it had its torpedo doors open, so we thought maybe they thought we were the enemy. The pilot was a man named Wilbur Gwinn, and he spotted us. They say he was fixing his antenna and that’s what made him look out and see us.”

  It was dark, entering into the fifth night, before Maurice Bell was rescued. Bell recalls other planes arriving on the scene once Gwinn sounded the alarm, ships as well, and how the fear then was that somehow they’d be missed or overlooked and left behind.

  “One of the men in our group,” Bell tells the boy, “had a small flashlight that we were supposed to be able to use to signal SOS, but we’d been trying it for days and it didn’t work. Well, one of the men in the small boat that picked us up said he thought he saw the light flicker for just a second.” Bell isn’t sure what to make of this, but allows for the possibility of divine intervention, an angel in a flashlight.

  “And they came over and got us. I was covered in black fuel oil, but fortunately I didn’t get any of it in my eyes like some of the others had. They’d put men in metal stretchers and then when the waves would rise up, the sailors on board the bigger ship would grab hold of it. And when I got on board I tried to take one step and started falling forward, and two other sailors grabbed me just before I hit the deck. I might not have survived that fall. Then a big old sailor sat me down on a bucket in the shower and started scrubbing, trying to get the oil off my head, but I kept sliding off the bucket so he got in the shower with me and held me up. They cut my clothes off me and gave me clean underwear and then they took me to the cafeteria and gave me some food, and I looked at it and said, ‘I can eat more’n that,’ so he said, ‘You can eat all you want,’ but two bites made me sick. They gave me a glass of water or juice and put me to bed and I just slept, and when I woke up I turned over and saw a sailor and he offered me a cold glass of milk, and it was the best milk I ever had in my life.”

  Bell was broug
ht to a hospital in Guam. He was there when the war ended.

  “By then,” he tells the boy, “I was in the main part of the hospital and able to get up and walk around. I’m glad they dropped the bomb. I know it killed a lot of Japanese people, but we were preparing for the invasion of Japan and it would have killed millions on both sides if we did.”

  When Hunter asks him whom he blames for the tragedy, Bell answers first that he doesn’t blame the Japanese submarine captain, a man named Mochitsura Hashimoto. “The Japanese were out to sink all the ships they could, just like the navy was trying to sink all the Japanese ships they could,” he says. “Hashimoto was only doing his duty to his country.”

  The men of the Indianapolis were proud to have helped deliver the weapon that ended the war, honored to have been chosen for the task and for the role they played in history, just as they were proud of their ship and of their captain, a man named Charles Butler McVay III. When Hunter asks him whom he blames for the tragedy, Bell thinks of how the navy treated his captain after the war ended. Bell is proud of his country, proud of the cause and the mission he participated in as a young man, so long ago. Maurice Bell had a harder time being proud of the navy in which he served after it court-martialed Captain McVay, the only captain to be tried out of the approximately 350 captains who lost their ships during the war.

  “That was the worst thing the navy could have done,” the old man tells the boy. A palpable sadness enters his voice. “It dishonored the captain and the crew. I’ll never sail again, but if I did, I would want Captain McVay as my captain, because he was one of the finest men I’ve ever met. I went to New Orleans once and looked him up and visited with him after the war. He was at the first reunion we had, in 1960, but he wasn’t at the next one because his doctors wouldn’t let him come.”

  When Hunter had first begun researching the sinking of the Indianapolis, after seeing Jaws, he’d found that most of the accounts of the war in the Pacific treated the incident as a footnote. Finally he tracked down a book called Fatal Voyage by Dan Kurzman, which told the full story of the sinking and its aftermath. What had happened to Captain McVay, Hunter came to discover, was as shocking as what had happened to his men in the water.

  McVay had been afraid to come to the first survivors’ reunion, fearful that his men still blamed him for what happened to them. Before July 29, 1945, he’d been a perfect captain, popular and respected, commanding but approachable, quite handsome with black eyebrows and graying hair that gave him a Cary Grant–like dignity. To his men, he seemed confident and capable but not aloof or detached, no by-the-books Naval Academy drone. He was a sportsman who’d occasionally taken time, when the war allowed it, to shoot skeet off the fantail, or throw a fishing line over the side, sometimes inviting his men to join him. He didn’t undermine his own authority by fraternizing with his men, but he didn’t overexert his authority over them either.

  Captain McVay was a ladies’ man who’d supposedly dated Hollywood starlets. He’d married a Hawaiian heiress named Kinau and had two sons by her, Charles IV and Kimo, before marrying his second wife, Louise. His father was an admiral, as was his grandfather. It was entirely expected in the McVay family that Charles number three would someday himself achieve the rank of admiral, if not Fleet Admiral or chief of the navy.

  In some ways, Hunter Scott can identify with Captain McVay. He’s been hunting since he was five and knows a thing or two about shotguns, and he loves to fish. As the son of a middle school principal, Hunter can appreciate what it’s like to have for a father an authority figure who expects a lot of his son. Hunter can imagine the shame Captain McVay must have felt at his court-martial, knowing that his father was looking on.

  What Hunter cannot imagine, because he’s only eleven and because no one can truly know the heart and soul of someone in deepest despair, is what must have been going through the captain’s mind when, at the age of seventy, on a cold November day in 1968, he lay down in the front yard outside his house in Litchfield, Connecticut, and shot himself through the head with his navy-issued .38-caliber revolver. Hunter can’t understand either why relatives of the men who died on the Indianapolis sent Captain McVay hate mail for the rest of his life, hounding him long after the fact, particularly during the holidays. Surely Captain McVay felt responsible, even if losing the ship wasn’t his fault. Surely he grieved the loss of his crew. Surely he empathized with the wives and parents and families they left behind. Why were they trying to make it worse? Is that the reason, Hunter wonders, why he was holding a small toy sailor when he killed himself?

  Why did the navy blame him?

  It took the Indianapolis only fourteen minutes to sink. It took her captain twenty-three years and three months to follow her down. He left no suicide note. No one will ever know exactly what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger. Hunter knows only that there is something confusing that needs to be clarified, and something wrong that needs to be corrected. The captain’s name should be cleared, not just for the captain’s sake, but for the sake of men like Maurice Bell. Captain Charles Butler McVay III’s court-martial dishonored the crew, Bell said so himself, and he doesn’t deserve to feel that way, because Maurice Bell is an honorable man who served his country and nearly died for it.

  Even an eleven-year-old boy knows when something isn’t fair. Hunter was looking for a topic for his project on the theme of Triumph and Tragedy, and now he knows he’s found a good one.

  He has no idea how far it’s going to take him.

  Chapter Three

  Background: The Enemy

  1914–1945

  Shouting confusedly, they all began to scramble for the ships.

  High in the air, a dust cloud from their scuffling rose, commands rang back and forth—to man the cables, haul the black ships to the salt immortal sea.

  Homer, The Iliad

  When World War II began, the world was in many ways unlike the world we know now. There was no television to watch, only radios to listen to. There were no satellites to provide us with instantaneous global communications. Information resided in books in libraries, not in computers where it could be summoned with a few clicks of a mouse. Air travel abroad was expensive and flights were limited. Compared to today, the countries of the earth were in many ways quite ignorant of one another. The enemy being faced and fought in the South Pacific by the likes of Maurice Bell or Captain Charles B. McVay III was to a great extent an unknown quantity.

  During the First World War (1914–1918), Japan actually entered into an alliance with the United States and occupied German colonial holdings in China and in the South Pacific. In 1931, an explosion on the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railroad, said to be caused by Chinese nationalists (some historians today think the explosion may have been set by the Japanese as an excuse), prompted the Japanese army to occupy all of Manchuria. On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops fought a Chinese patrol on the Marco Polo Bridge, twenty miles west of Beijing, a provocation the Japanese army used to justify occupying all of northern China, then advancing rapidly into eastern and southern China. When World War II broke out in Europe two years later, in the fall of 1939, Japan entered into a tripartite alliance with Germany and Italy, pledging mutual aid for the next ten years, then invaded French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam), claiming the invasion was purely for defensive purposes.

  It seemed to outside observers that Japan’s military aggression abroad was welcomed at home by the Japanese people. The October 29, 1929, crash of the U.S. Stock Exchange on “Black Friday” had plunged the entire world into a devastating economic depression, choking off Japanese trade with other countries, slowing Japanese industrial growth and increasing turmoil and unemployment in a country about the size of Montana. About half the population of 80,000,000 were peasants or fishermen living in relative poverty and deprivation. Under such conditions, a strong military provided both a sense of security and hope. Japanese politicians were talking about Japan leading the way toward a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperit
y Sphere,” fulfilling what seemed to them a kind of national destiny.

  What Japan called a “Co-Prosperity Sphere,” others called world domination. It became clear to the United States that Japan’s expansionist policies included ambitions toward British, French and Dutch colonial holdings in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. It also seemed logical that Japan was likely to move while England, France and the Netherlands were busy fighting Nazi Germany in Europe. U.S. representatives, directed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, made repeated efforts to negotiate with the Japanese to get them to pull their troops back, even though similar attempts to negotiate with Nazi Germany had met with disastrous results. To fortify his negotiating position, on July 26, 1941, President Roosevelt froze all of Japan’s assets in the U.S., estimated at $131,000,000, and five days later, he banned the export of oil to Japan, which relied on the U.S. for 80 percent of the oil it consumed. Immediately, the Japanese naval chief of staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, went to Emperor Hirohito and recommended that Japan attack the United States. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Imperial Fleet, argued that the only answer to the American threat was a sudden massive attack against the U.S. naval forces currently being marshaled at Pearl Harbor, which he described as “a dagger pointed at our throats.” The Japanese estimated that America’s industrial might gave the U.S. ten times the production capacity of Japan. They hoped to deliver such a massive blow to U.S. armed forces at Pearl Harbor that, in the time it took America to recover and rebuild, Japan could establish a perimeter of fortified island bases in the Pacific, calculating that those bases would be strong enough to deter retaliation and force the U.S. to negotiate a settlement.