The sinking of the “Indianapolis”

At a quarter past midnight on 30 July 1945, in the middle of the Philippine Sea, two Japanese torpedoes struck the starboard side of the American heavy cruiser Indianapolis. The ship capsized and sank in about twelve minutes. Only four days earlier she had delivered to the island of Tinian the most important cargo carried by any US Navy vessel in the war: components of the Little Boy atomic bomb, together with its uranium “projectile”. Of the 1,195 men aboard, about 300 went down with the cruiser. The rest ended up in the water – many without rafts, some without life jackets – and waited for help for nearly four days, because no one ashore had noticed that the ship was missing. According to US Navy figures, only 316 of them were rescued.

The statement in war chronologies that Indianapolis was sunk just after midnight by a Japanese submarine after delivering atomic bomb materials to Tinian is accurate – the time refers to ship’s time, since the Japanese submarine’s log, kept in Tokyo time, recorded the salvo still under 29 July. Two points need clarifying. First, the ship was not searched for not so much because of “poor communications” as because no one was required to report that she had failed to arrive in port, and the question of distress signals remains disputed. Second, although sharks killed many of the survivors, most of the victims died of exhaustion, dehydration, exposure and salt-water poisoning.

Spruance’s flagship

Indianapolis, launched in 1931, belonged to the Portland class – two “treaty” cruisers armed with nine 8-inch (203 mm) guns. Before the war she was a ship on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt liked to travel. In the Pacific war she fought from the very first weeks: off New Guinea, in the Aleutians, in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, in the Marianas and off Palau. From 1943 she was the flagship of Admiral Raymond Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet. In February 1945 she accompanied the carriers in the first strikes on the Tokyo area and covered the landing on Iwo Jima.

From November 1944 she was commanded by Captain Charles B. McVay III, the son and grandson of admirals. In March 1945 the cruiser bombarded the defences of Okinawa before the landing. On 31 March, on the eve of the assault, a Japanese aircraft released a bomb onto her from a height of a few metres and then crashed into the sea by her stern. The bomb passed through several decks and the bottom and exploded beneath the hull; nine sailors were killed. Spruance transferred his flag to another ship, and the damaged Indianapolis made her own way to the Mare Island Navy Yard in California. Repairs lasted until July.

A cargo for Tinian

After her refit the cruiser was given a secret mission. In mid-July the Manhattan Project was completing preparations to use the first bomb against Japan. The B-29s of the special 509th Composite Group were already waiting on Tinian, but the weapon still had to be brought there. General Leslie Groves decided that at this stage – when time allowed – transport by sea was safer than by air. At the Hunters Point yard in San Francisco a crate containing the non-nuclear components of the Little Boy bomb was loaded aboard Indianapolis, together with a lead canister of enriched uranium – according to American studies, the part of the charge that in a gun-type bomb served as the “projectile” fired into the rest of the fissile material. The canister was secured to the deck of the captain’s cabin. The cargo was accompanied by two Manhattan Project men, Major Robert Furman and the radiologist Dr James Nolan, who travelled aboard under cover as artillery officers. McVay did not know what he was carrying; according to accounts, he was told only that every day saved on the voyage would shorten the war.

The cruiser left San Francisco on the morning of 16 July, a few hours after the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert. She reached Pearl Harbor (PL) on 19 July, setting a record for the route – according to the Navy she covered it in 74.5 hours at an average speed of about 29 knots. After a short stop she sailed on alone and on 26 July dropped anchor off Tinian. The cargo was transferred to barges and taken to the airfield. That same day the remaining parts of the uranium set out from New Mexico in three transport aircraft; by 29 July all had reached the island and assembly of the bomb could begin. Also on 26 July the leaders of the United States, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, threatening Japan with “prompt and utter destruction” if it did not surrender.

Alone to Leyte

From Tinian Indianapolis went on to Guam, the headquarters of Admiral Chester Nimitz, where part of the crew was replaced by new sailors. Her orders were to continue to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, where the crew was to undergo training before joining Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s force off Okinawa. The cruiser left Guam on the morning of 28 July, due to arrive at Leyte on 31 July. The route was more than a thousand nautical miles long.

She sailed without an escort. According to later findings, McVay asked for a destroyer but was told it was not necessary: destroyers were in short supply, needed to escort convoys to Okinawa and to rescue airmen shot down over Japan, and on this route lone passages by large ships were considered safe. Cruisers of her type had no sonar for detecting submarines in any case. The orders allowed the captain to zigzag “at his discretion, weather permitting”. What McVay was not told was that Japanese submarines were operating in the area of his route. According to documents released after the war, American radio intelligence knew of several of them, and on 24 July, north-east of Luzon, Japanese kaiten human torpedoes had sunk the destroyer escort Underhill. This information, protected as part of the secret of the breaking of Japanese codes, never reached the captain.

I-58 attacks

Lying in wait on the cruiser’s route was the Japanese submarine I-58, a large Type B3 boat adapted to carry kaiten human torpedoes. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. On the evening of 29 July I-58 surfaced about 250 miles north of Palau. According to his account, it was a night of intermittent clearing, with the moon veiled by cloud. Soon the lookouts spotted to the east the silhouette of a large ship steaming on a straight course, without zigzagging. Hashimoto took her for an Idaho-class battleship. He dived, closed to a favourable range and fired a spread of six conventional Type 95 torpedoes. He did not use the kaiten, whose pilots, according to his memoirs, begged to be launched.

At about 12.15 a.m. ship’s time two torpedoes struck Indianapolis on the starboard side – one in the bow, the other amidships near the magazines and boiler rooms. The explosions tore off part of the bow, started fires and wrecked the electrical system, and with it much of the internal communications. The ship, making about 17 knots, was still moving forward and taking water through her torn bow. She heeled rapidly to starboard. McVay, who had at first hoped to bring the damage under control, gave the order to abandon ship as the list deepened, but in the darkness and without power the order never reached many of the sailors. About twelve minutes after being hit the cruiser rolled onto her side, her stern rose vertically from the water and she was gone. Whether a distress call was sent remains disputed to this day: according to the radio operators, an SOS with the ship’s position was transmitted several times, but the Navy stated after the war that no station had received it. Claims that three stations received it and ignored it rest on later accounts and have not been confirmed in official records.

After diving, Hashimoto reloaded his tubes; when he raised his periscope, the target had gone. He reported to Tokyo that he had sunk a battleship and headed north. American intelligence intercepted and read this report but – according to historians’ findings – did not take it seriously, regarding it as the usual exaggeration of Japanese commanders.

Four days in the water

According to Navy estimates, 880–890 men reached the surface. Many were injured, burned or covered in the fuel oil that had poured from the tanks. Few life rafts had been released, so most of the survivors stayed afloat only thanks to their life jackets, and some did not even have those. Current and wind scattered them into several groups strung out over many kilometres; the largest numbered several hundred men, others only a few. McVay himself ended up in a small group of rafts and did not know for the whole time how many of his men had survived.

By day the blazing sun caused burns and dehydration; by night the survivors were chilled in water that, despite the tropics, sapped the body’s warmth after many hours. Salt water and fuel oil ate into skin and eyes. There was almost no fresh water or food. Men who could not bear their thirst and drank seawater fell within hours into delirium caused by hypernatraemia; some imagined that a ship full of food lay beneath the water, swam away from their group or attacked their comrades, taking them for Japanese. After a few days the kapok life jackets became waterlogged and lost their buoyancy. Every day hundreds of men were lost.

Sharks, drawn by the bodies of the dead and wounded, followed the survivors. Those who lived described attacks on men at the edges of the groups, especially at dawn and dusk. The culprits are most often identified as oceanic whitetip sharks, possibly also tiger sharks. The number of men killed by sharks is unknown – estimates range from a few dozen to about 150. The sharks also tore at the bodies of the dead. The great majority of the victims, however, died of exhaustion, dehydration, exposure, injuries and drowning.

No one searched

Ashore, no one knew that the ship had sunk. The staffs of the Commander Marianas on Guam and of the Philippine Sea Frontier on Leyte kept plots of ships’ positions, but the positions of large vessels were worked out from their routing, not from reports – it was assumed that they would arrive on time unless they reported otherwise. Combatant ships, for their part, kept radio silence. On 31 July Indianapolis was removed from the plot on Guam as having reached her destination, and the staff on Leyte logged her as arrived. The port director’s operations officer at Tacloban, Lieutenant Stuart Gibson, knew that the cruiser had not come in but did not report it to his superiors – no regulation required the non-arrival of a ship to be reported, and delays were common. Gibson and several senior officers later received reprimands, which were subsequently withdrawn. After the disaster the Navy introduced a system of ship movement reports intended to rule out any similar oversight.

Rescue

The survivors were found by chance. Before noon on 2 August a Ventura patrol plane from the base on Peleliu, piloted by Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn, spotted an oil slick and then men in the water. Gwinn dropped a raft and a radio transmitter and reported a group of survivors; it was not yet known what ship they came from. Every available aircraft and ship was sent to the scene. The first of the flying boats, Lieutenant Adrian Marks’s Catalina, landed in heavy swell against orders and pulled 56 men from the water – those who could not fit into the hull were tied onto the wings. The damaged aircraft could not take off again; it was later sunk. After dark the destroyer escort Cecil J. Doyle arrived and pointed her searchlight at the sky as a signal to the survivors, and during the night and the following day more ships joined – seven in all. For several days afterwards the area was searched and the bodies found were buried at sea.

In the end, of the roughly 1,195 men aboard, 316 survived according to Navy figures; two of those rescued died later in August. Indianapolis was the last major US Navy ship sunk by the enemy in the war, and her sinking is usually regarded as the greatest loss of life at sea that the American navy suffered from the loss of a single ship. The public learned of the disaster only in mid-August, when the world’s attention was absorbed by Japan’s surrender.

The court-martial of Captain McVay

The Navy’s inquiry placed the blame chiefly on the ship’s commanding officer. According to available accounts Nimitz recommended stopping at a letter of reprimand, but the Commander-in-Chief of the fleet, Admiral Ernest King, had McVay brought before a court-martial. The trial was held in December 1945 at the Washington Navy Yard. McVay was charged with delay in ordering the crew to abandon ship – of which he was acquitted – and with hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag, for which he was convicted. He was the only American captain in the war to be court-martialled for the loss of a ship sunk by the enemy, although the US Navy lost hundreds of ships in action. Particular controversy was caused by calling Hashimoto himself as a witness: on 13 December he testified that zigzagging would not have prevented his attack. In 1946, on Nimitz’s recommendation, the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, remitted the sentence, and McVay returned to duty. He retired from the Navy in 1949 with the rank of rear admiral. For the rest of his life he received letters from families of the dead blaming him for their deaths; in 1968 he took his own life.

Exoneration and the wreck found

For decades the surviving sailors campaigned for the verdict to be reviewed, most of them convinced that the captain had been made a scapegoat for the errors of the high command. The case returned in the 1990s when a sixth-grade pupil from Pensacola, Florida, Hunter Scott, made it the subject of a school project in 1996 and publicised the survivors’ accounts. In September 1999 the Senate Armed Services Committee heard witnesses, and Hashimoto, in a letter to its chairman, again supported McVay’s exoneration. In October 2000 Congress passed a resolution stating that the captain should be exonerated for the loss of the ship, and President Bill Clinton signed it. Hashimoto had died a few days earlier, on 25 October. In July 2001 the Secretary of the Navy ordered the decision to be entered in McVay’s record.

The wreck long remained undiscovered, because the position of the sinking was known only approximately. Only in 2016 did a naval historian find in the records of the landing ship LST-779 an entry noting that she had passed Indianapolis a dozen or so hours before the attack, which made it possible to narrow the search area. On 19 August 2017 an expedition funded by Paul Allen found the wreck at a depth of about 5,500 metres. The survivors’ story also entered popular culture – best known is the scene in the 1975 film Jaws in which the fisherman Quint, played by Robert Shaw and supposedly a survivor of Indianapolis, tells of nights among the sharks.

Significance

For the course of the war the sinking of Indianapolis made no difference: the cruiser had completed her mission. Assembly of the Little Boy bomb on Tinian began on 30 July, the day the cruiser went down, and a week later, on 6 August, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima – the beginning of the atomic attack that was followed by the bombing of Nagasaki and Japan’s surrender. According to the ground crew, among the messages written on the bomb were greetings to the Emperor “from the men of the Indianapolis”. Had she been sunk a few days earlier, on her way to Tinian, part of the uranium intended for the first bomb would have been lost.

The disaster also showed how weak, even in the last weeks of the war, were the procedures on which the lives of crews depended: lone passages without escort, no obligation to report a ship’s non-arrival, intelligence that did not reach commanders at sea. The price of these failings was paid by the survivors who waited four days for help, and in personal terms by Captain McVay, the only one punished, although the inquiry had also revealed the errors of others. The fate of the Indianapolis survivors became one of the best-known tragedies of the Pacific war, and the posthumous exoneration of her captain one of the last acts by which the United States came to terms with those events.