Killing the Rising Sun

by Bill O'Reilly

  Just as menacing, employees at the Sasebo Naval Station near Nagasaki are working double shifts to build special suicide boats designed to ram landing craft laden with US soldiers. The Japanese believe they know precisely where American troops will invade, so vast underground caves are being constructed behind the beaches and stocked with food and ammunition. All civilians are being forcibly removed from the southward-facing coastal regions so that barbed wire, artillery batteries, mines, and antitank defenses can be installed and camouflaged.

  As MacArthur continues reading the shocking report, he realizes that the enemy is “changing the tactical and strategic situation sharply.” No longer will the Japanese utilize the fukkaku strategy employed on Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, lying in wait to repel the American attack from hidden defensive bunkers. Now it is clear to MacArthur that they will defend the beaches with even more fury than the Germans guarded the D-Day landing zones within France. The sands of Kyushu could very well become an American graveyard.

  To MacArthur’s way of thinking, there are three ways for America to knock out Japan: a naval blockade followed by an invasion; a naval blockade followed by massive aerial bombing; or a straight-up beach invasion. As an army officer and a general committed to commanding the largest military force in history, MacArthur refuses to concede that the navy and the army air corps should determine the outcome of the war. Paranoid by nature, creating conflicts where they might not otherwise exist, MacArthur thinks the other two services are aligned in a conspiracy to prevent his army from getting the glory.

  Foolishly, MacArthur is openly antagonistic to Admiral Chester Nimitz, his naval equal in rank and power, calling his tactical strategies “just awful.” The navy, MacArthur believes, wants to “control all overseas positions after the war, using the army as a sort of home guard.”

  Nonetheless, he needs the sailors and fly-boys. The cornerstones of Operation Olympic are the ongoing pre-invasion aerial bombardment of Japan’s industrial sector and the obliteration of Japan’s navy by an American fast-carrier task force. After that, MacArthur’s Sixth Army will deliver the decisive blow with its landing on Kyushu.

  The general is not a man prone to histrionics, commanding instead with an air of quiet authority. He has confided in friends that he believes the Japanese will surrender by September 1, but the new report indicates that the enemy is spoiling for a fight.

  It also puts the timing of Operation Olympic in grave danger. MacArthur cannot attack for four to five months at the earliest, giving the Japanese even more time to prepare.2

  The confident tone of other recently intercepted Japanese communiqués makes one thing certain: the enemy’s determination to slaughter Americans will only increase during this lull.

  * * *

  Proof of Japan’s determination to kill Americans, even when all seems lost, lies one hundred feet deep in the Pacific, six hundred miles from Manila. Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto eats a fragrant dinner of fresh onions and canned sweet potatoes while plotting his submarine’s next maneuver; the Japanese commander is discouraged but far from beaten. The galley, like the rest of the cramped sub, smells of unwashed men, stale breath, and cooked fish. A saunalike humidity fills the hull in these equatorial waters, leading Hashimoto’s crew to sleep naked on sacks of rice in an attempt to ward off the heat.

  Hashimoto has deliberately positioned his vessel in the middle of the busy shipping lanes between Guam and the Philippines. But despite daily prayers at his makeshift Shinto altar, the gods have not yet blessed Hashimoto. It seemed he might be in luck yesterday, when I-58 launched two kaiten torpedoes after sighting an American cargo ship and its destroyer escort. But the armed freighter, Wild Hunter, opened fire with her deck guns, sinking the first torpedo and killing its pilot. The second kaiten was rammed by the destroyer, Lowry, and blown to bits. There was little damage to the US warship.

  More critically, that missed opportunity has turned Hashimoto from the hunter to the hunted. The American destroyer Albert T. Harris is currently prowling the same corridor through which I-58 sails, searching for the source of a periscope spotted by the Wild Hunter’s crew.

  Midway through I-58’s one-month mission, running out of fuel and food, Hashimoto knows he must turn back for Japan very soon. With every passing day of failure, Hashimoto increasingly despairs that he will not get his kill.

  * * *

  Thirteen miles from the Japanese submarine, in the dark of night, the USS Indianapolis steams toward the Philippines, having dropped her atomic cargo at Tinian Island three days ago. The sea churns; thin clouds drape the moon. Despite the late hour, the heat in the windowless sleeping compartments belowdecks is too intense for many of the crew. Three hundred sailors have made their beds on the hard steel deck, unprotected from the elements and anything else that may come their way tonight.

  Weary from the day, Captain Charles McVay takes one last walk around Indianapolis before turning in. Three hours ago, content that his ship and men were not in imminent danger, he ordered that the ship’s antisubmarine zigzag pattern of motion be ceased to increase sailing speed. He also ordered that hatches and doors remain open, letting in the nighttime air. In the event of an attack, these compartments will flood quickly, but McVay has received no intelligence reports suggesting that enemy submarines are lurking in this portion of the Pacific. The fact that he was not assigned a destroyer escort for this two-day journey further convinces him that his men are safe.

  Broad-chested and tall, McVay stoops as he enters his small cabin just off the bridge, strips off his clothes, and lies down for the night. Three days ago, his men off-loaded cargo that they had no idea was in fact the atomic bomb known as Little Boy. Immediately afterward, Indianapolis was ordered to sail with all due haste to Leyte, in the Philippines, for two weeks of training.

  McVay, himself, would not later be angry that he was denied information about the atomic bomb. In that way, he would never struggle with the moral or ethical dilemma of transporting the most lethal weapon in the history of man six thousand miles across the Pacific, there to be loaded in the bomb bay of the world’s most powerful airplane and dropped on a city of 350,000 men, women, and children.

  Sweating in the darkness, Captain McVay tries his best to sleep. His ship is due to dock on Leyte at 1100 hours. His mind is focused on the seventeen days of training awaiting Indianapolis in the Philippines. After being away from the war for four months, his men will go through a series of refresher courses to get them battle ready. Once that training is completed, Indianapolis will sail for Okinawa, there to await the beginning of Operation Olympic.

  Midnight.

  Sunday night becomes Monday morning.

  Far belowdecks, in the ship’s galley, dishes are washed and stacked in preparation for breakfast. Incredibly, the sounds of preparation are heard thirteen miles away on board the Japanese submarine I-58.

  As Captain McVay drifts into a fitful sleep in his Spartan cabin, the rattle of “clinking dishes” alerts a Japanese sonar operator that the USS Indianapolis is target ready.

  * * *

  Quickly, Lieutenant Commander Hashimoto gives the order to load six lethal torpedoes. The seas are too rough to launch kaiten suicide bombers, so he chooses to fire conventional Type 95 torpedoes. It is better this way: the kaiten are unpredictable in rough seas. The Type 95, on the other hand, is the best torpedo in the world, armed with the largest warhead on either side of the conflict, with an effective range of more than six miles.

  Hashimoto orders the sub to surface, allowing him to scan the horizon and flood the dank confines of the vessel with fresh air. To the lieutenant commander’s shock, his unsuspecting target is running in a straight line and unprotected by an escort vessel. Rather than hurry the attack, Hashimoto patiently levels his vessel at a sixty-foot depth and slows her speed. For twenty heart-pounding minutes, I-58 edges closer to Indianapolis. Hashimoto expects to be discovered at any time, believing the enemy ship has sonar devices that will dete
ct his approach.

  But this is not the case. Even though Indianapolis was retrofitted with the most up-to-date equipment during her recent repairs in San Francisco, the technology to hear sounds underwater and detect imminent threats was not installed—a situation that proves fatal.3

  Hashimoto slows I-58 to three knots.

  Calmly, knowing that he will get just one chance to sink this American ship, Hashimoto brings his sub to within 1,500 yards of his target.

  The cold-blooded job of the wartime submariner is to sink enemy ships, but the harsh reality is that the attackers may also be sent to a watery grave. Submarine warfare is the most lethal on earth; in the German navy, for example, 80 percent of all submariners never returned home. The Japanese fatality rate is lower, but not by much. Also, it is not the job of the attacking submarine to rescue survivors in the water. That task is left for other vessels that might be in the vicinity. As soon as torpedoes are launched at an enemy ship, the submarine dives as quickly as possible to escape.

  At 12:02 a.m., Hashimoto decides it is time to kill. “Full salvo,” he orders. “Two-second intervals—FIRE!”

  A look through his periscope shows that Indianapolis is still taking no evasive action. Six torpedoes purr silently through the water, on course to slam broadside into the American ship.

  Hashimoto maintains his vigil at the periscope, wondering if the attack will be a success or yet another failure. Minute upon minute passes. He sees nothing but inky blackness.

  Then, suddenly, the sky turns bright orange.

  “A hit, a hit,” Hashimoto shouts to the men crowded around the periscope. Throughout the submarine, the I-58’s crew dances with joy. Tonight they will feast on rice and boiled eel as a reward for a job well done.

  Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto finally has a kill.

  * * *

  Shock envelops the Indianapolis.

  The lead torpedo blasts a hole in the starboard side of the bow. The engine room powering the ship’s mighty propellers—“screws,” in navy parlance—is not yet hit, and the vessel keeps pushing forward at a speed of seventeen knots. This causes ocean water to pour into the gaping wound like a torrential river, racing through open compartments and instantly flooding the forward portion of the ship. Radio operators immediately send SOS signals, alerting any vessels in the vicinity that Indianapolis needs help. “We are torpedoed and sinking fast,” the desperate radio operators add to the standard SOS dots and dashes. “We need immediate assistance.”4

  The distress calls abruptly end when a second torpedo strikes within an instant of the first, tearing a hole in the right side of the ship and exploding three thousand pounds of aviation fuel. That cuts the electrical power necessary to send further emergency messages.

  Hundreds of men are killed instantly—many of them burned beyond recognition.

  In his cabin just off the bridge, Captain Charles McVay quickly throws on a pair of shorts and walks out to inspect the damage. Thick smoke and the almost total blackness of the dark night prevent him from seeing much. At first the skipper is actually relieved, believing that the blow to his ship is less brutal than the damage Indianapolis suffered off Okinawa. So it is that when Lieutenant K. C. Moore, the damage control officer, informs McVay that the forward compartments are flooded and his ship is going down, the captain does not believe him.

  Three minutes later, that changes. Second in command, executive officer Joseph Flynn delivers a harsh dose of reality: “I think we are finished,” he informs McVay. “I recommend we abandon ship.”

  The captain is stunned—this a devastating personal blow to the unblemished record of this career naval officer. The Indianapolis is a significant command, the vessel so highly thought of that she was once the flagship of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Even though McVay was denied the destroyer escort from Guam to Leyte that could have mitigated the attack, he will now have to answer as to why he compounded the mistake by stopping the defensive zigzag sailing pattern and opening all the ship’s hatches in hostile waters.

  But right now, Captain Charles McVay III must set aside his own emotions and focus on saving the lives of his men.

  Eight minutes after the torpedoes hit, the Indianapolis lists 18 degrees to starboard—and leans more to the side with every passing second.

  Reluctantly, McVay orders Commander Flynn: “Give the order to abandon ship.”

  But that order is never delivered to the men. Indianapolis is without electricity, and the ship’s bugler does not follow the order to sound the command.

  By 12:17 a.m., Indianapolis is listing 60 degrees, little more than ten minutes after the first strike. The bow of the ship has been sheared off, “just like you had taken a saw and cut if off clean,” in the words of one junior officer. Many of the sailors panic, forgetting to don life jackets as they leap into the thick coat of oil now covering the water. They swim frantically, desperate to put distance between themselves and the sinking ship, knowing that Indianapolis will suck them into the depths as she goes down if they are too close.

  “I started to walk forward to see what I could see, and what I seen was about sixty-foot of the bow chopped off, completely gone,” sailor Woody James will recall. “Within a minute and a half, maybe two minutes at the most, the bow is starting to go down. It filled up with water that fast. Everything was open below deck, and the water just flooded in and we were still under way, just scooping water. Complete chaos, total and complete chaos, all over the whole ship. Screams like you couldn’t believe and nobody knew what was going on.”

  Of her crew of 1,196, more than eight hundred men make it into the sea. The military foul-up that saw an extra shipment of life jackets delivered to Indianapolis back in San Francisco now seems like an act of providence. But of the ship’s thirty-five life rafts, only a dozen are launched because as the ship rolls to its side, the other rafts become inaccessible.

  Captain Charles McVay is one of the last to leave Indianapolis. He stands on what used to be a vertical section of the port hull, then walks into the water like a man stepping off a curb to cross the street.

  McVay looks back and see his ship rise straight up into the air. Her propellers spin slowly, silhouetted by the moon. Then the ten-thousand-ton cruiser knifes straight to the bottom of the Pacific.

  The survivors are disoriented. Moments ago they were sleeping, dreaming of the things men dream of when the end of a war is near and the return home is inevitable. Now many are burned and maimed from the blasts. They bob helplessly in the darkness, their bodies rising and lowering on the heavy swell. No longer a crew, they drift off in small packs, borne by the current. Knowing that they are due in the Philippines by morning, most men are confident of rescue when it is clear they are overdue.

  But the SOS that should save them has not been heard. No one knows the Indianapolis has been sunk, and there is no search under way for the surviving sailors.

  The situation seems like it can’t get any worse.

  Then the sharks appear.

  * * *

  Two days after the Indianapolis sinks, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz arrives in Manila to meet secretly with General Douglas MacArthur. The newly appointed commander of United States Army Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific (USASTAF) has been flying for most of the last five days, traveling 8,500 miles from Washington to Manila. Spaatz is here not of his own volition but because he was ordered to brief MacArthur by the acting army chief of staff, General Thomas Handy.5

  A man of average height with an Errol Flynn–type mustache, the fifty-four-year-old Spaatz was present in Reims, France, when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945, and is now posted to the Pacific to facilitate a similar situation for the Japanese. But his first order of business will be ensuring the deployment of the atomic bomb. Handy gave Spaatz the order verbally, but Spaatz refused to take the assignment unless given instructions in writing. “Listen, Tom,” Spaatz told Handy, aware that he could be tried for war crimes if held personally liable for the loss
of life that would ensue. “If I’m going to kill 100,000 people, I’m not going to do it on verbal orders. I want a piece of paper.”

  Handy protested that putting such an order in writing compromised security. Even Harry Truman had refused to affix his signature to any order connecting him with the dropping of the A-bomb. But Spaatz insisted. Finally, Handy caved. “I guess I agree, Tooey,” the acting chief of staff admitted. “If a fellow thinks he might blow up the whole end of Japan, he ought to have a piece of paper.”

  Handy signed the order, but it was actually written by General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project.

  It is, perhaps, the most important directive in world history.

  * * *

  Once satisfied that his posterior was covered, Spaatz endured a grueling journey via military transport from Washington, DC, to Honolulu to Guam, and now to MacArthur’s corner office in Manila. There has been nothing comfortable about these flights aboard lumbering military transport planes, whose engines drone so loudly that men cannot speak without shouting; and where sleep is only secured sitting up, numbered in minutes instead of hours.

  Yet General Spaatz barely rested after reaching his new headquarters in Guam, even though the luxury of a villa and the comfort of a horizontal bed awaited. The career aviator pressed on, increasing the length of his journey by another two days in order to meet with MacArthur in person. There is a purpose to his haste: he wants MacArthur to know about the atomic bomb before it is dropped. As Groves later comments, “If the weather had been suitable, the bomb would have been dropped before MacArthur had ever been informed by Spaatz, which would have been quite surprising [to MacArthur].”

  Spaatz, a man known for his curt speech pattern and matter-of-fact planning, is weary as he greets MacArthur. His body is not used to the tropical heat; he sweats through his uniform. And yet the weight of what he must tell the general compels him so much that he cannot rest until he hands the A-bomb order to a man whose legendary status will soon earn him the nickname “Caesar of the Pacific.”