by Peter Nelson
As for Oldendorf, he never got the second message. Waldron’s communication went through the communications center in Okinawa, but there, for whatever reason, it disappeared. That meant that Admiral Oldendorf knew why the Indianapolis was coming, because he’d received the first message, but not when. For all he knew, she was still unloading cargo at Tinian. In other words, neither McCormick nor Oldendorf knew what was going on, and neither was directly to blame, but neither had cause to be alarmed when the Indianapolis didn’t show up.
That left it up to the PSF or Philippine Sea Frontier, an administrative command overseeing a vast area ranging from “the Chop” at 130 degrees east longitude all the way west to Thailand, north to the twentieth parallel and south to the Dutch West Indies. The PSF oversaw local naval defenses, routing, dispatching, transport, salvage, repair, harbor control and routine shipping but had little to do with combatant ships, which were under the control of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet as well as all Allied naval forces in the southwest Pacific area. At the time of the sinking, the PSF, headquartered at Tolosa on the southern part of Leyte Gulf, was run by a Commodore Norman C. “Shorty” Gillette, who had taken over only a few days earlier for Vice Admiral James Kauffman, who was away on leave. Gillette’s chief of staff was a Captain Alfred N. Granum. Leyte Gulf operations were administered by NOB (Naval Operating Base) Leyte Gulf, led by Commodore Jacob H. Jacobson, with headquarters in the town of Tacloban, a city of 50,000 people midway up the gulf. The new port director in Tacloban, Lieutenant Commander Jules Sancho, 42, with the assistance of his operations officer, Lieutenant Stuart B. Gibson, 35, watched over the arrivals and departures of over 1,500 noncombatant ships a month, about 50 a day, seeing to their berthing, servicing and provisioning. Both Sancho and Gibson were experienced naval men. It was Gibson who received the dispatch from Waldron telling him that the Indianapolis would arrive on the 31st. Gibson noted the information in his logbook, and mentioned it to Sancho, who mentioned it to Jacobson, though Gibson, Sancho and Jacobson were all somewhat surprised they’d been told, because it wasn’t their job to keep track of combatant ships.
Philippine Sea Frontier headquarters in Tolosa maintained plotting boards keeping track of ships and planes within its jurisdiction, but it wasn’t the PSF’s responsibility to check the arrival times of combatant ships, or to send messages inquiring why a combatant ship hadn’t arrived. Indeed, a letter from CINCPAC labeled Pacific Fleet Confidential Letter 10-CL-45 specifically ordered them not to, stating, “Arrival reports shall not be made for combatant ships.” As far as the PSF and Captain Granum were concerned, the Indianapolis was a Fifth Fleet combatant ship, reporting to Admiral McCormick, part of a Fifth Fleet combatant ship task group, and therefore none of their business, so when 11:00 Tuesday morning came around, PSF assumed the Indianapolis had arrived and took her off their plotting boards. In the port director’s office at Tacloban, Gibson noticed the Indianapolis hadn’t arrived but figured if he wasn’t supposed to report arrivals, then he certainly wasn’t supposed to report a nonarrival, not even to his new boss Sancho (on whom he wanted to make a good impression), or Jacobson, or Granum down bay at Tolosa.
There was other information the navy failed to act on. The night of the sinking, Captain Hashimoto had radioed back to Tokyo on a standard frequency the following message: RELEASED SIX TORPEDOES AND SCORED THREE AT BATTLESHIP OF IDAHO CLASS—DEFINITELY SANK HER. Hashimoto’s message was immediately intercepted, decoded and passed on by combat intelligence at CINCPAC on Guam, but intelligence assumed Hashimoto was only boasting to make himself look better to his superiors back in Tokyo. After all, there’d been no SOSs received to corroborate the claim. The message was disregarded.
Even the army contributed to the chain of errors. At four in the morning on Tuesday, July 31, the pilot of an army air force C-54, traveling from Manila to Guam, flew over the site of the sinking. Those below with working flare guns fired them at the sight of the plane. The pilot reported seeing star shells, tracers and what looked like gunfire down below, approximately 430 miles east of Manila, but the army concluded it was probably some naval action, maybe a battle between surface ships, and not the army’s concern.
On August 13, to help answer everybody’s questions and to determine what exactly happened, Admiral Nimitz convened a court of inquiry on Guam to investigate the sinking, even though some of the men were still lying in the hospital in the Philippines or on Peleliu recovering. The judges at the court of inquiry were Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., Rear Admiral Francis E. M. Whiting and Vice Admiral Murray, Commander Marianas. The judge advocate prosecuting the case was a Captain William Hilbert. Men were questioned as soon as they could walk, but there was an odd air of secrecy about it. Nurses and corpsmen were told not to discuss the events on the ward, and survivors were warned to keep a lid on what had happened to them, lest the navy look bad in the eyes of the public. The press corps was placed under a news blackout about the sinking until the end of the war, but that wasn’t unusual. One by one, the survivors were interviewed, asked to remember what had happened the night of the sinking. What was the weather like? How good was the visibility? When did they hear the order to abandon ship?
The court of inquiry interviewed forty-three witnesses, including McVay, Redmayne, Blum, Horner, Twible and fifteen enlisted men. The court interviewed McCormick, who said it wasn’t his fault because he never got the message that the Indianapolis was coming to train under him. They interviewed Gillette, Granum, Sancho and Gibson from PSF, but PSF blamed CINCPAC for not telling them what to do about nonarrivals (though Sancho added that Gibson never told him the Indy was overdue). They interviewed Carter from CINCPAC, who blamed PSF and said it was only common sense that overdue ships should be reported. They interviewed Naquin and Waldron from Marianas command, and Naquin admitted he’d known of the Tamon group but nevertheless considered the threat from submarines “negligible.” The interrogation of Naquin and Waldron was compromised, some later felt, because one of the three judges ruling on the evidence was Admiral Murray, the head of the Marianas command and Captain Naquin’s superior officer. Murray was, therefore, sitting in judgment of himself because it was his command’s possible negligence that was being called into question. On any civilian court, a judge would recuse himself for conflict of interest.
Captain McVay attended the hearings, wondering to what extent the navy was going to blame him. He’d been made an “interested party” to the court of inquiry, meaning he’d been allowed to sit in and observe as the facts were brought out, which implied that he might be a concerned party later if the court of inquiry led to an actual court-martial. He’d given a press conference on Peleliu on August 5 and told members of the press corps the navy had, in his opinion, in so many words, messed up by failing to notice the Indianapolis overdue and thereby delaying rescue, so he was glad to see that officers from PSF, Marianas command and CINCPAC were being included in the questioning, but he wasn’t encouraged by the way he’d been personally treated. For example, the court of inquiry issued a finding of facts on August 13, the day Captain Hilbert began his questioning, stating that his investigators had turned up a negative check of all stations that might have received an SOS. In a foreword to the court of inquiry report written the same day, Admiral Nimitz blamed McVay for failing to transmit an SOS message immediately after the explosions. Seconding that opinion, Admiral King wrote
Measures had not been taken in advance to provide for the sending of a distress signal in an emergency. The failure of the Commanding Officer of the Indianapolis to have anticipated an emergency which would require the sending of a distress message on extremely short notice and his failure to have a procedure for dispatching such a message established on board ship undoubtedly contributed to the apparent fact that no message was sent. The responsibility for this deficiency must rest with Captain McVay. It is possible that mechanical failure might have precluded the sending of a distress message even if one had
been available in proper form, but the record indicates no such message was ready and that this emergency had not been anticipated.
Yet McVay had ordered an SOS sent as soon as he was sure the ship was lost. Both Nimitz and King wrote their opinions believing the court of inquiry had thoroughly and accurately checked all stations that might have received an SOS, and that the people interviewed had told the truth. Both failed to take into account the possibility that if somebody had indeed received an SOS from the Indianapolis the night of the sinking and ignored it, with men dying as a consequence, the odds of anybody stepping forward and confessing to such negligence were indeed small.
It was going to be easier, McVay knew, to blame him for failing to anticipate the emergency than it would be to conduct a more thorough investigation. It would be easier to simply lay the responsibility on McVay’s shoulders, since captains bear the ultimate responsibility for what happens to their ships.
McVay even confided his misgivings to Gil McCoy, who’d recovered fairly quickly and was serving on Guam as Captain McVay’s driver. “I think they’re going to hang this on me,” McVay said. “How could they do that?” McCoy asked. “They have a way,” the captain replied. When the court of inquiry concluded on August 20, it recommended to Admiral Nimitz that Lieutenant Gibson and Lieutenant Commander Sancho should be sent letters of reprimand for not reporting the Indianapolis overdue. The court also ordered Admiral McCormick to discipline his staff for failing to decode CINCPAC’s July 26 cable. In McVay’s opinion, Gibson was being made a scapegoat, as were McCormick’s staff, and that didn’t bode well. Then Judge Advocate Hilbert listed what he construed as the facts of the case regarding McVay. He maintained that Waldron had indeed warned McVay of the submarine menace, that visibility was good enough the night of the sinking that McVay should have been zigzagging, and that he’d delayed sending an SOS. The court of inquiry ruled that as a consequence, Captain McVay should be issued a letter of reprimand and court-martialed for endangering the lives of his men through negligence.
While all this was going on, the war ended in the Pacific, just over three months after it had ended in Europe on May 8. On August 6, by order of President Harry S. Truman, the Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing or injuring 130,000 people and leaving another 177,000 people homeless after destroying or damaging 92 percent of the city’s buildings. On August 9, a bomb dubbed “Fat Man” was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing or injuring 66,000 people. The Japanese surrendered on Wednesday, August 15, finally convinced that further resistance was futile. President Truman broke the news to reporters at a press conference at seven o’clock that evening. Truman’s news was monumental, given the staggering costs of the war. Three quarters of the globe’s population had taken part, 1,700,000,000 people in 61 countries. One hundred ten million men and women had been pressed into military service. Twenty-five million military personnel and 30,000,000 civilians died. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. The United States lost over 400,000 men. Japan incurred 1,700,000 military and 380,000 civilian fatalities.
One hour after Truman’s press conference, the navy issued communiqué number 622, stating, “The USS Indianapolis has been lost in the Philippine Sea as the result of enemy action. The next of kin of casualties have been notified.” They could hardly have picked a time when the sinking was less likely to garner attention, waiting to release the news two weeks after they’d known the initial details. Newspapers carried the story of the Indianapolis, but the headlines screamed JAPAN SURRENDERS in hundred-point type, and right then, people didn’t want to hear about another ship lost, even if it was the worst disaster at sea in U.S. naval history.
The crew of the Indianapolis just wanted to go home. The survivors gathered on Guam and sailed for the States in early September aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hollandia, riding to the pier in five buses. Gil McCoy was anxious to see his mother. She’d had a premonition the night of the sinking, waking up in the middle of the night, saying, “Gil’s been hurt.” A week and a half after the sinking, while her son was already recovering on Guam, a telegram had arrived at her house informing her that her son’s ship had sunk and that he was missing and presumed dead, but she knew it wasn’t true. He’d finally managed to get a telegram to her telling her he was okay, but he wanted to see her in person, to apologize and put his arms around her and hug her again. First he had to return the jeep he was driving to the motor pool, but when he got there, there was a long column of trucks. He waited in line ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty, but the line was barely moving. He flagged down a marine lieutenant and told him he was afraid if he didn’t return the jeep in time, he’d miss his ride home. The lieutenant moved McCoy to the head of the line and arranged for a ride back to the pier, but when McCoy got there, he was too late. His ship had sailed. His heart fell.
“You McCoy?” a sailor asked.
“Yeah,” McCoy said.
“Your captain told us to wait for you,” the sailor said, indicating a small motorboat moored nearby. “Climb aboard and we’ll catch that ship for you.”
They caught the Hollandia on the fly. McCoy jumped from the motorboat to the ramp, elated to be able to ride home with his shipmates. He thanked the sailors who’d ferried him out. As he climbed the ramp, he looked up to see Captain McVay leaning out the door of the hangar deck, personally checking to make sure his orderly made it. McVay waved, then disappeared in the doorway. Not every captain would have left his launch to make sure his driver didn’t miss his ride home. Only a good captain would have done that.
Chapter Ten
The Court-Martial
September 26, 1945, to February 23, 1946
All commanding officers . . . in the naval service are required . . . to take all necessary and proper measures, under the laws, regulations and customs on naval service, to promote and safeguard . . . the physical well-being and the general welfare of the officers and enlisted persons under their command or charge. A captain’s responsibility for his ship is absolute.
Section 5947 of Title Ten, United States Code
The Hollandia arrived in San Diego on September 26. The surviving crew of the Indianapolis was given a parade, but the crowds were small and the celebration was relatively subdued. The men were bused to Camp Elliott, outside of San Diego, where they recuperated further, and when they were ready, they were sent home. Nineteen of them had to be taken off the Hollandia on stretchers, this nearly two months after the sinking. McCoy, Smith, Twible, Moseley, Bell, McGuiggan, Miner, Kuryla and the rest said their good-byes to their shipmates and went their separate ways, uncertain if they’d ever see one another again. Some took longer than others to recover from their injuries. Some put what had happened out of their minds. Others couldn’t, and never would.
Captain McVay went to his home in Washington, to the comfort of his wife, Louise, and to the judgment of his father the admiral, a forty-six-year navy veteran who understood how naval justice worked. The captain’s fate was in the hands of three men, Admiral Nimitz, Admiral King and the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal.
The fact that the court of inquiry had recommended that McVay be court-martialed did not require the navy to follow through with a trial. One alternative would have been simply to declare the incident an accident of war, terribly unfortunate and horribly tragic, but an accident all the same. The navy had lost 436 other combatant ships during the course of the war, and none of those ships’ captains had been court-martialed, even though in each case, close scrutiny might well have revealed mistakes, omissions or errors in judgment that could have been avoided. Wartime was not the time to second-guess the men fighting it. The difference was that the war was over now. That also meant the navy could no longer suppress information or keep stories out of the newspapers by arguing that exposure could damage the war effort.
Admiral Nimitz actually argued for lenience, perhaps because he’d served in the Pacific and had seen with his own eyes what the
men who’d fought the war had been through and was sympathetic, or because he was insulated by distance from the politics of postwar Washington. He was also privy to the ULTRA intelligence produced by SIGINT, and perhaps knew what the court of inquiry hadn’t known—that the Indianapolis had been essentially sailing blind. Nimitz issued an order, five days after the court of inquiry adjourned, correcting Pacific Fleet confidential letter 10-CL-45 by stating that port directors were now to report the nonarrival of ships as soon as they were officially overdue. Nimitz recognized that he’d failed to anticipate a problem. Perhaps it seemed inconsistent to him that he was supposed to court-martial a good navy man for similarly failing to anticipate a problem, especially after he’d been kept in the dark. Nimitz had compassion for McVay, who’d met with him at Pearl Harbor on his way home to plead his case.
That didn’t mean he could ignore the court of inquiry entirely or let McVay get off scot-free. Other ship captains needed to know, now and in the future, that if there was anything at all they could do to enhance the safety of their ships, they needed to do it, and the bottom line was that McVay could have been zigzagging. Nimitz needed to send a message to the other officers under his command that they needed to be on their toes and never drop their guards. That was true even though the war was over, and in fact, another war with the Soviet Union loomed in the not-too-distant future, or so it was feared. Vigilance was as important as ever. Nimitz wrote two letters. The first one, for Captain McVay’s file, read:
You erred in judgment when you failed to order zigzag courses steered on the night of the loss of the ship. The facts further indicate that you did not exert every effort at your command to cause a distress message to be sent out after the explosions and prior to the sinking. You are hereby reprimanded for the negligent manner in which you performed your duty in this instance.