Read In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors Online

Authors: Doug Stanton

In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (19 page)

When he was done, he removed the boy’s dog tags. He wrapped them around his own arm, where they clinked tinnily. Haynes then paddled behind the body, placed one hand on the vest’s collar, and gave a gentle pull, easing out first the shoulders and then the arms. It looked very much like someone removing a coat from a sleeping child. Finally, the corpse slid free from the vest. Haynes quickly tossed the vest aside and then snatched the body before it could sink. The bodies of the bigger boys required more strength than those of the smaller ones, and strength was something Haynes hadn’t much of. Still, he was determined not to let any corpse sink without praying over it.
He drew the cold, wet body close, grabbed it tight in a bear hug, and paused. Aboard a ship, the chaplain would do this duty, but Father Conway was close to death himself. Haynes groped for a way to say good-bye to these boys, many of whom he knew only in passing. But he always said something. With his cheek pressed to the dead boy’s cheek, he could smell the salt and sweat, and he began:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name … . Thy kingdom come, thy will be done …
Sometimes he made it to the end of the Lord’s Prayer, and sometimes he didn’t. After several hours of burying the dead, he was often so spent that he could do nothing more than hold the dead boy and pray in silence, feeling, in his addled state, that he’d been an utter failure as a doctor.
He opened his arms and watched the body fall. It dropped for a long time, twirling feet first, like a man falling down a crystalline elevator shaft, getting smaller and smaller, no bigger than a doll when it finally disappeared.
Why, oh why,
Haynes wondered,
can’t I do anything to save these boys?
 
 
Now that he was going to die, McCoy decided he wanted to die clean. It made no sense, he knew, but nothing did now. Dying suddenly seemed like play. He untied his vest, tossed it in the raft, and slipped over the side of the raft for a last bath.
Brundige boomed, “What the hell you doing, marine?”
McCoy ignored him. The water was cool, the air hot, the shock instant. McCoy stroked around the raft. To his surprise, he was having fun. Looking down, he could see thirty or forty feet below, and he wondered what the water felt like down there where the sharks circled in glassy coils. He didn’t care about them anymore, didn’t give a damn. He dove. He felt like he was flying, as his head poked through a cool band of water. Half his body was warm, the other cold. He looked up and to his surprise he saw that he was only about six feet deep.
He prayed that his mother would understand why he had not been able to make it home; he prayed that she would know he’d tried his hardest to get there. And then he asked God to forgive him his sins, especially for the killing he had done on Peleliu.
He broke the surface, paddled over to the raft, and hoisted himself up. And then he began scrubbing himself with his T-shirt, rubbing at the smeared oil on his chest and arms. He wanted to be clean because he wanted to be identified if anybody
found his body. He realized he’d probably be chewed up by sharks, but he hoped they’d at least leave his face. He wanted somebody to be able to recognize him.
Brundige told him, “You still got oil all over you, you know. You stupid thing.” He said it again: “You stupid thing.”
McCoy liked that—
You stupid thing
. It made him laugh. He
was
a stupid thing. Sitting in this ocean, he felt like nothing more than a speck. All his life, he had thought he was tough. Now he felt like a speck, and he felt relieved to know the truth. He looked at Payne, Outland, and Gray, who were now passed out, sitting in the water up to their chins. McCoy decided he had better tie them together for safekeeping. He asked Brundige to help, and they drew the boys so close that their foreheads were touching. McCoy and Brundige cinched up all the straps on the vests to prevent their heads from falling into the water. They floated like that inside the raft, their feet dangling. McCoy and Brundige were each in a corner, hanging on the rails.
Sometime before nightfall, they started betting each other about who was going to die first. “I’m sure as shit gonna stay alive longer than you,” McCoy said.
“Like hell,” Brundige shot back. “I’m a Tennessee farmer, and I’m pretty damn tough.”
“Well, I’m a marine from Missourah, and I’m a lot tougher.”
“You go to hell.” After a while, they fell silent and drifted. Around them, Payne, Outland, and Gray started moaning. The sharks were circling the raft again.
“Well,” said Brundige, “I guess nobody’s gonna miss me but my mom and dad.”
“My mother’s gonna miss me,” said McCoy. “And I’m sure my dad will, too. And I also know I’m gonna outlive you.”
“We’ll see.”
“You know,” McCoy said finally, “if some damn shark
gets me, I hope the sonofabitch gets indigestion.” He laughed. “I really hope he has a hard time
digesting
me.”
They fell asleep with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.
 
 
By nightfall, Haynes was burying Father Conway and Captain Parke. The big marine went first. His selfless lending of life vests to struggling swimmers had finally taken its toll. Parke, an astonishingly strong and disciplined man, had died in mid-hallucination; he suddenly broke away from the group and started swimming for the horizon. His death shocked those still lucid enough to understand it.
Conway was next. The deteriorating condition of the priest crushed Haynes. He remembered the day Conway had come to his cabin on the
Indy
with the money for leave. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever done for the doctor.
For the past three days, Conway had kept drowning men afloat, praying with them as they died, refusing to quit even when it must have felt impossible to swim another inch. A few hours ago, however, he had finally succumbed to delirium, keening in Latin and babbling prayers, a soaring, incoherent litany. As Conway sang, Haynes had cradled the naked priest in his arms, smoothing his balding, sunburned head with a gentle hand. As Conway’s condition worsened, his keening grew in intensity. Soon he was blessing Haynes, hitting him repeatedly in the face as he delivered absolution. Haynes did nothing to stop the crazed priest. He watched and waited for him to die.
When Conway fell limp, the silence was deafening. Haynes heard only the water gurgle and swish around him. When it was clear that Conway was dead, Haynes removed his vest and set his friend’s body sailing into the deep.
Haynes was left holding the dog tags he’d collected from the boys he’d personally buried over the past three days. There were well over 100, their silver chains wrapped tightly around his fist. Suddenly they felt so heavy he could hardly believe it. He was so exhausted he could barely lift them up anymore.
“Oh, shit,” he said. And then he sadly tossed them away.
 
 
Back on Leyte, the port director’s office noted once again that the
Indianapolis
had failed to arrive. Once again, she was dutifully marked as overdue. The thinking in the office was that she would reach the harbor the next day, Thursday, August 2.
On the island of Tinian, B-29s were taking off continually, loaded with thousands of pounds of bombs. During the raids, a new plane lifted off every few seconds. The sky over Japan was raining bombs.
In an air-conditioned bunker on Tinian, a team of weapons specialists had gathered, and among them was Captain James Nolan. He and the other experts were huddled in the specially built bunker to assemble the pieces of Little Boy. Around this same time, the flight crews of the 509th Composite Group, led by Lt. Colonel Paul Tibbets, were practicing secret dummy bombing runs over Japan. Tibbets would eventually drop Little Boy from his B-29
Enola Gay
on Hiroshima.
Nobody thought to miss McVay and his boys.
Dead Drift
Captain McVay was like a father to our group. He kept us calm.
He kept saying, “We are going to be rescued.” And we just
figured, “Well, somebody’s gonna find us one of these days!”
—JOHN SPINELLI, seaman second-class, USS
Indianapolis
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2-FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1945
Something had gone wrong with the sock again. Lieutenant Chuck Gwinn wondered if he should land the bomber and fix it before getting airborne again. Or should he push ahead on his patrol sector, hoping for the best as he navigated by the seat of his pants, by dead reckoning? Gwinn decided to land. Better safe than sorry.
He banked the bomber back over the jungle scrub of Peleliu and brought the big plane down. A rancher’s son from San Martin, California, Gwinn was in his third year of service in the navy. With him this morning was a crew of four naval aviators: copilot Lieutenant Warren Colwell; chief radioman William Hartman, and two bombardiers, Herbert Hickman and Joseph Johnson. Gwinn, twenty-four, had logged over 1,000 flight hours as a navy test pilot. Normally, he and his crew flew a plane affectionately called the
Miss Deal
; this morning, they were out of luck—the
Miss Deal
was undergoing repairs. Instead they were flying a plane with the inelegant moniker PV-1 49-538, call-named
Gambler 17.
No problem. This flight was supposed to be routine. Piece of cake.
The plane, like the
Miss Deal
, was a Lockheed Ventura PV-1 bomber, with a split rear tail, two engines, and a range of 950 miles. On board, she carried two forward-firing .50 caliber machine guns and six .30 caliber guns on flex mounts; her bomb bay could hold 2,500 pounds of bombs. Her job was searching out and bombing Japanese submarines, but Gwinn, the lowest-ranked pilot in his unit, had yet to be tested. Although he had patrolled miles and miles
of the Pacific between Peleliu Island and the Japanese homeland, he and his flyboys still had not seen any action. Nothing.
Life on Peleliu was hell on earth. The island was a no-man’s -land, 500 miles from the coast of the Philippines, and 500 miles north of New Guinea. Daily temperatures reached 120 degrees, and stayed there. The humidity was drenching. The island, scene of one of the last major battles before the U.S. Marines’ decisive victories at Iwo Jima and then Okinawa, had come at a great cost: about 10,000 marine casualties. But the entire garrison of 10,500 entrenched Japanese soldiers had been wiped out. A bloodbath.
On the morning of August 2, this hotly contested piece of real estate was home to the Peleliu unit of the search and reconnaissance command, which fell under the supervision of Vice Admiral George Murray, commander of Marianas naval operations back in Guam. This was the same command from which the
Indy
had sailed six days earlier, the command that had given McVay his sailing orders. Reporting to Vice Admiral Murray was Captain Oliver Naquin, the surface operations officer who had neglected to tell McVay about Japanese subs along the Peddie route, part of which Gwinn would soon be patrolling.
At this morning’s flight briefing, Gwinn had learned that he might see American convoys passing in his patrol sector, which ran north from Peleliu for 500 miles. Other than that, the coast should be clear. He was to keep his eyes peeled for enemy subs cruising, and to sink any he spotted with a dive-bombing run. His other task was to test out a new antenna used in loran navigation, an innovation that had made the bombing of Japan an easier task. The long whip antenna was attached to the rear flank of the plane and steadied with the weighted sock, which kept it from slipping around. The problem was, the sock wouldn’t stay on.
By 9 A.M., Gwinn had a new one secured, and forty-five
minutes after his original departure, he taxied down the runway and roared the bomber north, over the Philippine Sea.
 
 
At about the same time, 700 miles to the west of Gwinn, on the island of Leyte, Lieutenant William A. Green received a report of the nonarrival of the USS
Indianapolis
from the naval operating base. Green’s job in the Tolosa office of the Philippine Sea Frontier was to monitor incoming dispatches regarding shipping traffic, and in the case of emergency, take up the matter with his superior, Captain Alfred Granum, the operations officer who maintained the office’s plotting board, and who had registered the
Indianapolis
as “arrived” in Leyte two days earlier.
This was the second nonarrival report Green had received; a similar report had come in on Wednesday. Now he requested permission from the Plotting Section to remove the ship entirely from the plotting board in Tolosa. Once more, it was simply assumed that the
Indy
had been diverted to other action.
 
 
Gwinn leveled the PV-1 off at 3,000 feet, the prescribed altitude for patrol and recon. The sea below him blinked like shattered stained glass. Scanning the horizon, he saw nothing.
And then, the new sock on the whip antenna fell off. This time, Gwinn kept flying. He would make do, although his radioman informed him that long-range communications would be rendered inoperative. Dead reckoning was a tricky navigational procedure way out here, and Gwinn didn’t want
to run out of fuel; he would be forced to ditch. And there were sharks in these waters.
The antenna was whipping back and forth against the aluminum side of the bomber. At 11 A.M., Gwinn decided to try and fix it by jerry-rigging some kind of new weight. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing; he was making this up as he went along. Bombardier Joe Johnson stood aft, looking out a window, trying to figure out what they could do to keep the antenna from beating the plane up any further. Inching out of his pilot’s seat in the cramped cockpit, Gwinn made his way down the narrow passage of the plane toward the rear, ready to give Johnson a hand. Through the window in the PV-1’s floor, he gazed at the endless miles of blue sea.
And then he spotted something. It looked like an oil slick, and it probably meant one thing: there was a Japanese submarine nearby, perhaps disabled by an earlier attack. If an American ship had been downed, Gwinn reasoned, he would have read about it in a report.
He knelt down on the cold floor of the plane, the engines thundering in his ears. Could it be true? Would they see action? He jumped up and headed back to the cockpit. It sure as hell looked like the slick of a leaking sub. Gwinn was ecstatic.
He changed the course of the plane and followed the slick to the north, beginning preparations for a bombing run. The bomb bay doors opened and he ordered the bombs, snug in racks and hanging ready to be “pickled,” or dropped. He next ordered the depth charges readied. The charges looked like fifty-five-gallon drums and were loaded with the explosive Torpex. They could be preset to detonate at different depths and then dropped out the bomb bay doors.
At 11:20, Gwinn lowered the PV-1 and started cruising at 200 miles per hour up the oil slick. Over the intercom, he told his bombardier to get ready. After flying about five miles, cruising at 900 feet, he spotted something in the water.
But what the hell was it? Gwinn was confused. As it came into focus, he realized it was a group of figures, and they seemed to be waving—it looked like they were slapping at the water, as if trying to attract attention. Enemy? Friendly? He had to think fast.
He yelled over the intercom to abort the bombing run and banked for another pass.
Gwinn took the plane down to 300 feet and roared up the slick. He quickly counted about thirty heads. He took a dead reckoning fix because the loran antenna was inoperable—he needed some kind of navigational point to report what he was finding.
A patrol plane, Gwinn’s PV-1 was loaded with emergency life rafts, beakers of water, life vests, and other lifesaving gear. As the plane passed low, Gwinn’s crew dropped a raft, vests, and a sonobuoy out the rear side hatch. Aiming the falling equipment was tricky—he feared hitting the floating bodies. The blackened shapes were now waving frantically as he passed over. He couldn’t see their faces clearly—it looked like they were covered with … oil? As he flew, he saw others who were clinging to life rafts.
The sonobuoy was a one-way floating microphone used in anti-submarine warfare. Gwinn hoped that whoever it was he’d spotted would swim over to it and yell out a name, an identity—anything. So far, no sound was coming back.
In an instant, his mission had flipped from search and destroy to search and rescue. At 11:25, he radioed a message to the search and reconnaissance headquarters on Peleliu; it read: SIGHTED 30 SURVIVORS 011-30 NORTH 133-30 EAST—the numbers indicating the latitude and longitude of the sighting.
This was the first report of the USS
Indianapolis
disaster.
But who were these people in the water? The idea that they were U.S. boys seemed out of the question; Gwinn was certain that he would have been briefed if an American ship
had been sunk. He counted close to seventy more heads, and then after another minute, spotted at least fifty more. The numbers indicated that these weren’t survivors from a sub, which carried crews of 100 or less. These boys had to have come from a major ship.
Gwinn wagged his wings—
I see you
—and skimmed low overhead, now looking down at bodies so closely crowded around the rafts that it was hard to estimate their number. He could make out lone swimmers only if they kicked the water and raised a splash. When they stopped kicking, they melted into the blue of the sea, as if swallowed by it. The pilot, whose vision was somewhat occluded, could ultimately make out four loosely scattered groups: the first contained about thirty people and was approximately six miles from the second group of about forty; the third group, two miles from the second, looked like about fifty-five to seventy-five people. There was also, Gwinn now saw, a fourth group, which numbered around twenty-five to thirty-five.
Gwinn, in fact, had just spotted parts of both Dr. Haynes’s group of swimmers and the large raft group under the command of Ensign Harlan Twible, who was still towing the unconscious officer Richard Redmayne by his life vest straps. Over the course of the night, both groups had been slowly breaking up into scattered clusters. Gwinn just missed Captain McVay and his small band of nine men and four rafts. Nor did he see McCoy and his gang of four. These two groups had drifted about eight miles ahead of the Haynes and Twible groups.
In the last fourteen hours, McCoy had drifted some twenty-three miles, for an astonishing total of about one hundred and five miles since the sinking three days earlier. McVay had drifted another sixteen miles in the same period for a total of one hundred and three. Haynes and Twible had each covered about seventeen miles and drifted roughly ninety-seven and eighty-seven miles, respectively, in all. As
Gwinn circled, they continued their swift momentum, driven by the current and the wind.
 
 
Dr. Haynes had drifted into another world, far from the realization of what was happening. When he looked up to find life vests tumbling out of the sky, it seemed to him the heavens were raining gear. When he saw them crash about 100 feet away, he felt too weak to swim to them. But, with painfully slow strokes, his neck bleeding as his own waterlogged vest chafed against it, he somehow managed to cover the distance. He grabbed a few vests, hugged them tight, and then steeled himself for the return trip to his boys.
Minute by minute, he felt his mind clearing as the glinting plane circled. He counted about 100 boys left in his scattered group, which had numbered at least 400 three days earlier. At this point, because of the failing vests, eachboy was sunk up to his chin, treading furiously just to keep his nose above the water. Even as the PV-1 circled overhead, some boys gave up and drowned.
Bob Gause waved his hat as if it were a signal flag. Never much of a churchgoer, he’d nonetheless spent the last twenty-four hours praying with all his heart, praying harder than he ever imagined possible. It seemed it had paid off. All around him, boys started singing out of tune, while others became so excited they started flapping their arms, often drowning themselves in the process.
Jack Cassidy, covered with saltwater ulcers, was wearing three life vests but he was still sinking into the heaving sea. His eyes were so matted with fuel oil that he had to pry them open with bleeding fingers to look up and see the plane, and the dye bombs that were now being released from its belly.
As the orange dye spread around them and marked the
boys’ positions, some of them began to sing even louder, shouting that the plane was an angel. They truly believed saviors were visiting from heaven.
24
Haynes, however, noticed with alarm that, in the commotion, his dwindling group was continuing to drift apart. Operating on nothing but a vapor of adrenaline, he tore open the pockets of the new life vests, looking for the precious cans of water he guessed would be stored there. But every one of the cans had exploded on impact when they hit the ocean. The survivors, Haynes knew, might live only a few more hours without water. He watched anxiously as some of the boys made their way to the rubber life raft that the plane had dropped. Soon the raft was crammed with as many as twenty men, with another twenty or so clinging desperately to the lifelines.
Meanwhile, Gwinn was trying to get a loran fix, which would offer a more accurate position than the dead reckoning fix had given. He struggled to the back of the plane, grabbed hold of the antenna wire, and reeled it in. Then he fitted it with a piece of rubber hose, hoping that its weight would be enough to prevent the antenna from tearing loose.

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