by Peter Nelson
At 4 P.M. Saturday, the day the Indianapolis hoisted anchor, a report came into the Marianas command from a merchant ship called the SS Wild Hunter, sailing for Manila carrying army cargo. The captain of the Wild Hunter was a man named Anton Wie, a seasoned professional. His position was seventy-five miles south of the Peddie route, and he said he’d seen a periscope. Twenty-eight minutes later a second emergency message from SS Wild Hunter reported that it had spotted the periscope again and this time fired two shots at it from a range of about 2,000 to 2,200 yards. An antisubmarine “hunter-killer group” was sent to investigate, comprised of spotter airplanes and the destroyer escort USS Albert T. Harris.
The next night at dinner, Commander Janney mentioned that he’d overheard ship-to-ship radio traffic about the Wild Hunter and the Albert T. Harris and the hunter-killer group activity. Jack Janney told those at his table quite casually that they’d probably pass the area where the Wild Hunter had spotted the periscope sometime around midnight. Again, no one was overly concerned. Erroneous reports of submarine sightings were commonplace.
McVay exercised his discretion at about 7:30 that night and gave the officer of the deck, Lieutenant Charles McKissick, the order to secure from zigzagging. From the navigation bridge, gazing forward past the fire control deck and the two 8-inch gun turrets with their 25-foot-long barrels, McVay saw that the seas were choppy and the sky was overcast. It was, in McVay’s opinion, a night of good solid darkness, in waters that were, according to the best information he had, relatively safe. The ship also sped up to 17 knots to maintain the desired 15.7 average. The faster a ship sailing in a straight line traveled, the safer it was. Lieutenant McKissick was relieved as officer of the deck at 8:00 by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Keith MacFarland, who found the seas choppy with long swells rolling in from the southeast under “very dark” skies. Sharing the bridge on the eight to midnight shift with MacFarland were the supervisor of the watch, Commander Stanley Lipski, chief engineering officer Lieutenant Richard B. Redmayne and Quartermaster Third Class Vincent Allard, who noted in the log that it was so dark that he couldn’t recognize people on the bridge.
Between 8:00 and 8:30, Commander Janney visited the bridge to drop off the night orders, which described the desired course and speed and stated that if there were any changes in weather or sea conditions, or any radar contacts, they were to wake and notify Captain McVay. Janney reported again that there was a hunter-killer group up ahead searching for an enemy submarine.
“We should pass the area around midnight,” he said. They’d heard such reports before and nothing had ever come of them. As the ship cut through the darkness, Quartermaster Third Class Allard made notes in the deck log: “Moonrise 10:30 . . . altostratus clouds at medium altitude . . . cirrostratus at high . . . nothing at low altitude . . . total amount of sky covered, in tenths—six.”
Captain McVay came on the bridge at 10:45. He reviewed and signed the night orders. He’d gone over Lieutenant Waldron’s intelligence reports with Commander Janney. Having directed his men to wake him if conditions changed, trusting that his officers were competent and capable, he went to bed in his emergency cabin, not far from the bridge, where he could sleep with a voice tube at his ear if anyone needed to call him. He’d given his own cabin to a friend from the Naval Academy whom he’d met on Guam, a Captain Edwin Crouch who was on his way to the Philippines.
It was hot and humid below as the ship, a mere twelve degrees from the equator in midsummer, traveled in what was called “Condition Yoke Modified,” which meant that the air ducts and most of the watertight doors on the second deck were left open to cool things off below. Many of the other doors and hatches below decks were open as well. Men carried mattresses topside, or blankets, anything to sleep on, if they could find a space. An eleven- to sixteen-knot breeze was blowing up from the southwest.
At midnight, Lieutenant John “Jack” Orr relieved Lieutenant MacFarland as the officer of the deck, and damage control officer Lieutenant Commander K. C. Moore relieved Lipski as supervisor of the watch. For a moment, the four men stood together, assessing the situation. Visibility was about 3,000 yards, somewhat improved from before, but the question was, had it improved enough to warrant waking the captain? At midnight, there were thirteen men on bridge, including a coxswain, a quartermaster, a helmsman, messengers, even a bugler, whose job it was to sound the alarm if the ship’s communications were to fail. Men on watch strained their eyes against the darkness, a moon slightly better than a quarter full, sporadically shining down through the cloud cover directly behind them to the east. To the west, there was only darkness. To some it may have seemed like they were the only ship on the sea.
They weren’t.
A Japanese sub lay directly ahead.
Chapter Six
The Sinking
July 30, 1945
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
The enemy sub’s identification number was I-58, and she’d been in service a mere ten months. She carried a crew of seventy-eight. To sink the Indianapolis, she had two weapons to choose from. She was armed with nineteen new oxygen-fueled wakeless T-95 torpedoes, each with a range of 3.5 miles at 48 knots, or 5.5 miles at 42 knots, delivering a payload of 1,210 pounds of explosive charge, fired from six forward torpedo tubes. She also carried six kaitens, the underwater equivalent of Japan’s kamikaze planes.
The I-58 was state-of-the-art Japanese technology. She displaced 3,000 tons when submerged. She was 355 feet long, 30 feet abeam, and could cruise at 14 knots submerged and 17 on the surface. She could safely dive to 120 meters (390 feet). The I-58 had a soft rubber coating on the outer hull, so that sonar pings didn’t bounce off it in the pattern of a ship, creating instead the sonar image of a whale or a school of fish that would, it was hoped, fool American sonar operators. She also had a type 1M3 radar, used to search the skies for aircraft, a type 2M2 radar used to search for surface ships, and two types of sonar, one acoustic and the other electric.
The captain of the I-58 was Mochitsura Hashimoto, a thirty-six-year-old son of a Shinto priest, born in Kyoto. He was a 1931 graduate of the Japanese Naval Academy and had served as torpedo officer on the sub I-24 when it was part of a five-submarine squadron lurking in the waters off Hawaii during the attack on Pearl Harbor. By July of 1945, Hashimoto had any number of reasons to feel dismay. His country was under daily bombardment, the war effort looking hopeless. The once proud Japanese Navy had only four big attack submarines left, three transport subs and eight obsolete subs that carried only two kaitens each. His personal record as captain of the I-58 was less than stellar, claiming one unconfirmed tanker hit off Guam and not a single kill in action off Okinawa, where his ship had been under constant harassment the previous spring. Since he’d left base at Kure on July 16 under orders to harass enemy communications and attack enemy ships off the Philippines, diving during daylight hours and surfacing at night to hunt, Hashimoto had only managed to fire two kaitens at a tanker, both of which missed, their pilots perishing for nothing. On Wednesday, July 18, under a bright moon, he’d waited on the Saipan-Okinawa route but found no targets. Beginning Sunday, July 22, he’d waited on the Leyte-Guam route, the Peddie route the Americans called it, praying at the Shinto shrine in his quarters for an enemy ship to sink before the moon waned.
The weather on Sunday, July 29, had been bad all day, the skies cloudy, promising poor hunting. By nightfall, visibility was zero. He dove to await moonrise, turning in for a nap and waking at 10:30. At 11:00, he gave the order for night-action stations, cruising at a depth of 60 feet, speed 3 knots, night periscope up. He took a reading,
sweeping his periscope a full 360 degrees. To the east, he saw a moon still low in the sky, a little more than a quarter full. In that direction, he could almost see a horizon.
“Hujyoo seyo,” he said. (“Surface.”)
“Barasuto o kara ni seyo.” (“Blow main ballast.”)
“Sentoo-taisei ni tsuke.” (“Action Stations.”)
One sonar man thought he heard a ship, perhaps as far as 20,000 meters off, a distance of about 12 miles. Over the hydrophones, it sounded like somebody doing the dishes. When the I-58 surfaced, navigator Lieutenant Hiromu Tanaka went topside, climbing to the bridge of the conning tower to scan the horizon with powerful binoculars. With great excitement Tanaka shouted, “Tekikan o akai kyuujyuu-do hookoo ni hakken.” (“Bearing red nine-zero degrees, possible enemy ship.”)
When Hashimoto climbed to the bridge and picked up the binoculars, he saw a black dot on the horizon, about 10,000 meters off, a distance of slightly better than 6 miles. His pulse quickened. The moon was directly behind the ship, which seemed to be sailing straight toward him. Had the moon been anywhere else in the sky, he probably wouldn’t have spotted the ship—it was almost a freak occurrence, that the moon would come out from behind the clouds just then, directly behind a ship, in the middle of the open ocean. It seemed like providence. For once, he was in the right place at the right time. He gave the order to dive.
“Tekikan o kakunin. Gyorai o yooi. Kaiten o jyunbi seyo.” (“Ship in sight. All tubes to the ready. Kaitens stand by.”)
For a moment, the fact that the Indianapolis was heading straight toward him concerned him. What if he’d been detected, and the ship was a destroyer coming to attack him? A ship coming straight at him presented a very narrow profile and would be extremely difficult to hit. If only it would zigzag, he could get a better look at it.
When the Indianapolis was 4,000 meters away, about 2.5 miles, Hashimoto turned his ship to starboard and moved south. From his new perspective, he estimated the height of the Indianapolis’s masts at about 90 feet. That told him he was looking at a capital ship, either a battleship or a large cruiser. Knowing the size of the ship, he could compute her speed by counting the engine rotations through his hydrophones. He estimated her speed at 20 knots, or 23 miles per hour. As the Indianapolis drew closer, coming within 2,000 meters, he revised his estimates and figured she was doing about 12 knots, or almost 14 miles per hour.
At 11:54 P.M., he ordered six torpedoes readied, set at a depth of 4 meters, speed 48 knots.
“Ichi ni tsuke,” he said, staring through his periscope. (“Stand by.”)
“Ute!” he said. (“Fire!”)
Within fifteen seconds, six torpedoes were on their way, launched with a spread of 3 degrees in a fan pattern. Hashimoto waited. It would take a torpedo traveling 48 knots (approximately 60 miles per hour) about a minute to travel the 1,500 meters to the ship.
At 12:02, Captain Mochitsura Hashimoto looked through his periscope and saw a column of water shoot up into the sky near the front of his target, followed by tongues of red flame lighting up the darkness.
“Meecyuu!” he said. (“A hit!”)
A few seconds later, he witnessed a second explosion.
“Meecyuu!” he repeated.
• • •
Mike Kuryla had gotten off watch a few minutes before midnight. With his buddy Paul, a fellow coxswain who’d taught him how to roller-skate one shore leave, he’d leaned against the splinter shield and sipped coffee, staring down at the water below. When the moon came out from behind the clouds, they could see the wake the ship made, and the black waves rolling endlessly on. Kuryla drained his coffee, took his shoes off, lay down on his back with his shoes under his head as a pillow, and was just closing his eyes when suddenly, his whole body stung, the way a batter’s hands sting hitting a baseball with a cracked bat. His ears rang. A second explosion sent him flying. He sat up, saw smoke and flames between him and his forward battle station. He quickly manned the 5-inch gun where he was, training it out to sea, but there was no enemy in sight. Maybe the boilers had blown, he thought. Maybe they’d hit a mine. Maybe they’d been torpedoed.
Jack Miner had liberated a cot and crawled off to sleep in his underwear in what was referred to as “Battle II,” the backup command center that would be used if the main bridge were ever knocked out of commission. The portholes were open and a breeze blew in, a delightful spot for sleeping, he thought.
Morgan Moseley had a terrible cold and hadn’t eaten a thing all day. He was in charge of the galley, the bakeshop, the butcher shop and cold storage, and had spent the entire day Saturday cleaning because there was to be an inspection on Sunday. His quarters were three decks down, beneath the mess hall, just aft of midship. He was in bed when an explosion knocked him out of his bunk. He’d just gotten to his feet when the second explosion hit the ship.
Harlan Twible had spent the afternoon writing letters to his new bride and to his parents. He’d reported twenty minutes early (as was customary) for his second watch, 2000 to 2400 hours. There was nothing to be briefed about, no news, no sightings, gun mounts in good shape. Twible stared out to sea, but the skies were overcast and visibility was nil. It was so dark, in fact, that Twible had to leave his watch station to visit the aft guns below him to make sure they were manned. Ensign Donald Blum arrived to relieve him shortly before midnight. Twible briefed Blum on what had happened during his watch—nothing—mentioned that the ship was no longer zigzagging, commented on the darkness of the night and then descended from the sky aft tub. The first torpedo struck as he was descending, nearly knocking him off the ladder. He’d just hit the deck below when the second torpedo struck.
Gil McCoy was guarding the brig, where there were two prisoners. He’d reported thirty minutes early. The brig was as far aft as you could go, located in the very fantail of the ship, two levels below deck, and guarding it was one of the lousier duties a marine could pull, particularly on a hot, humid night, because there was no ventilation. Sometimes it seemed like there was no point, either—if somebody could break out of the brig, where were they going to go on a ship in the middle of the ocean? The brig opened onto a large room full of bunks where men slept and snored. McCoy was wishing he were topside when the torpedoes hit. The first torpedo exploded directly forward of the compartment in the bow where the thirty-nine-man marine detachment was quartered, killing everyone sleeping there. If McCoy hadn’t reported early, he might have died with them. The first torpedo struck the Indianapolis on the starboard side (the right-hand side as you face forward) at about frame 7, ripping the first thirty to sixty-five feet of the ship off as easily as tearing the corner off an envelope. The explosion ignited a gas tank containing 3,500 gallons of highly volatile aviation fuel, the flames venting high in the air from the forward smokestack. The second torpedo, which slammed McCoy into the bulkhead and knocked the lights out in the brig, struck at about frame 50, amidships below the bridge, opening a large hole perhaps forty feet across and knocking out communications and all but emergency electrical power.
Captain McVay, who’d been asleep in his emergency cabin, first thought another kamikaze plane had found them. The second blast threw him from his bed. He then thought it could be mines—but they were too far out to sea for mines—or torpedoes, or perhaps his boilers had blown. His cabin filled with bitter white smoke. He hurried to the bridge, where he tried to make sense of the chaos all around him.
“Do you have any reports?” McVay asked.
“No, sir,” Lieutenant Orr replied. “I’ve lost all communications. I tried to stop the engines but I don’t know if the order got through to the engine rooms.” (The engines in engine room 1 were destroyed, but engine room 2 was intact and operating.)
“Send word down to Radio one to get out a distress message. See what information you can get. Has anyone seen the damage control officer?” Instead of the damage control officer, Bugler First Class Donald Mack stepped forward.
“Reporting for duty.”
McVay ran to his cabin, quickly put on his pants, shoes and a shirt, then returned to the bridge. He was hoping he could still save the ship. He heard noises from below. Explosions. Bulkheads collapsing, one after the next, as the ship’s engines drove her into the sea, mindlessly plowing forward, the bridge unable to communicate with anyone, as if the body of the ship had been separated from the head. With each collapsed bulkhead, the ship took on more water. There were higher-pitched sounds coming up from below as well, sounds of metal ripping, pipes shearing, electrical wires sparking, men screaming in pain. On deck, men hooked up fire hoses, only to find there was no water pressure. Damage control officer Lieutenant Commander Moore reported in.
“Forward compartments flooding fast. There are no repair parties there. We’re badly damaged—do you want to abandon ship?”
McVay remembered the damage they’d sustained from the kamikaze pilot at Okinawa. They’d made it through that. Perhaps they could make it through this. He knew of other ships that had lost their bows and survived. It would be a big mistake to give the order to abandon ship until you were absolutely certain the ship was going to sink. Lives could be lost unnecessarily. Perhaps he was guilty of having too much faith in his ship, but she’d given him reason to have faith before on numerous occasions.