August 2, 2015
The Tragic Fate of the USS Indianapolis
By Carl M. Cannon
On July 28, 1945, Capt. Charles Butler McVay III stood on the bridge of the USS Indianapolis as it eased out of the harbor in Guam and headed east into the vast open water of the Pacific Ocean.
McVay’s ship was a 610-foot Portland class heavy cruiser weighing 9,800 tons. Along with the USS Houston, which had been sunk with great loss of life in early 1942, the Indianapolis had been one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s favorite ships. Commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1932, the Indy had been chosen as FDR’s “Ship of State”—a kind of pre-war version of Air Force One—on several important trips, including his “good neighbor” voyage to South America in 1936.
Three years earlier, following her shakedown cruise, the Indianapolis had picked up FDR at his Campobello Island summer home off the coast of Maine. The ship carried the president, himself a former secretary of the Navy, to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
In 1941, the Indianapolis was moved, along with much of the U.S. fleet, to Pearl Harbor. But the Indy was lucky. When the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, the ship had just arrived at Johnson Island, about 700 miles southwest of Hawaii, for a bombardment exercise.
When word reached the ship of the attack, all extraneous weight was burned or thrown overboard so the Indy could race back to Honolulu. Among the ballast jettisoned that day was President Roosevelt’s ornate bedroom suite.
In the next four years, the ship and its crew saw action in some of the most decisive battles in the Pacific theater. At Okinawa, she took a hit from a kamikaze pilot. Nine American sailors were killed and 26 wounded, but the ship steamed under her own power back to California for repairs. It was there, in July of 1945, that she was given her fateful last mission.
On July 12, 1945, Capt. McVay received mysterious orders. The Indianapolis was at Mare Island, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, undergoing repairs that had been expected to take months. Now, the captain was informed by his superiors that he had 96 hours to get his crew together for a top secret mission. Initially, he wasn’t even told where they were going, or why.
The “where” turned out to be the U.S. Army’s B-29 base at Tinian Island in the Marianas. This was a distance of 5,300 nautical miles, and the Indy was asked to cover it in 10 days. She was one of the fastest ships in the U.S. Navy, and under Capt. McVay’s guidance, she and the crew of 1,196 sailors and U.S. Marines made it in time.
The “why,” which the captain only learned on July 15, 1945, turned out to be the cargo loaded amid great secrecy that the Indianapolis was taking to Tinian. It included a 15-foot-long crate and two small and very heavy lead-lined containers. Painted black, the two containers were only 18 inches by 18 inches, but weighed more than 200 pounds. The crate contained a firing mechanism for a secret bomb code-named “Little Boy.” The black containers held the uranium-235 that made “Little Boy” the most devastating weapon the world had ever seen.
The combination of those components would produce a cataclysmic explosion over Hiroshima that would help bring World War II to an end. Although that event was only three weeks in the future, most of the men aboard the USS Indianapolis would not live to see it.
Part II: “We are going to Leyte.”
This week, Barack Obama returned from his goodwill trip to East Africa. The president visited two countries, Kenya and Ethiopia, in four days, returning overnight after a 16-hour flight that included a brief refueling stop in Germany.
Air Force One allows for that kind of travel. If anything, Obama was leisurely. A dozen years ago George W. Bush went on a trip that included Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia—in just six days. On the way home, after refueling in Hawaii, the president spent all of one day there before heading home.
Eight decades ago, when Franklin Roosevelt went on a goodwill tour to four South American countries, he was gone for 28 days and 27 nights. Most of those nights were spent aboard the Indianapolis.
The Indy had been away from Hawaii on exercises when the Japanese launched a sneak attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and now, finally, 3½ years later, World War II was winding to its devastating and climactic end. The Indianapolis had done her part in that final drama by delivering key atomic bomb components to the B-29 base on Tinian Island.
Now, on the morning of July 29, 1945, she was leaving Guam on a course for Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. The plan was to rendezvous with the USS Idaho. It was a journey of 1,300 nautical miles on the open ocean. Capt. McVay had been informed only one day before departure that the Indy would be traveling without a destroyer escort.
A heavy cruiser, the Indianapolis was not equipped with sonar and didn’t normally carry depth charges. This was the job of the crews of the destroyers—certified submarine hunters—who would drop 55-gallon drums loaded with explosives overboard when they spotted subs. Those “ash cans,” as the sailors called them, occasionally hit a sub directly, blowing it to smithereens. More often, they’d miss the target, but the concussive effects of the explosion would disable the submarine, or even sink it. Even when they didn’t, the deterrent effect of destroyers was considerable.
At McVay’s request, Lt. Joseph Waldron, the ranking routing officer at the port in Guam, got on the phone to see when the next convoy was heading to Leyte—or whether a destroyer was around that could shadow the Indianapolis. The answer he received is that no ships were available. The Indy would have to make the trip unescorted.
The captain took this news in stride. That was his way. A Naval Academy grad and the son and namesake of a well-known admiral, McVay trusted the U.S. Navy to give him the best equipment, men, and information at its disposal. This was war, with an enemy who was not yet defeated. McVay gathered his officers together. “We are going to Leyte,” he told them, “to prepare for the invasion of Kyushu.”
Kyushu was one of the Japanese home islands. What their skipper was telling them was that the “Indy Maru,” as her crew affectionately called her, was still in the thick of the fight. This would prove to be truer than anyone aboard that ship could possibly know.
They set their course for the Philippine Sea the following morning. On July 29, 1945, they had a long, uneventful sail. They were making 17 knots through moderately choppy seas with swells that ranged from four to six feet high. The sailors did their chores and pulled their duty. When not working, they played cards, read books and magazines, talked to the ship’s chaplain, wrote letters home. The sun set very late that day, and before midnight there was a shift change.
Sailor Edgar Harrell later described his last moments aboard the Indy Maru.
“Her large engines, combined with the sound of her wake, droned a familiar lullaby,” he wrote. “Tired and homesick, and missing my little brunette back home, I wrapped my blanket around me and curled up on the steel deck hoping for a few hours of rest. After thanking the Lord for His provision and protection thus far, I asked him to watch over my loved ones back in Kentucky. Then, using the arch of my shoe for a pillow, I drifted off to sleep.”
At that very moment, a Japanese submarine captain had the USS Indianapolis in his sights. He’d first spotted it by the faint light of a quarter-moon, a mere speck on the horizon some nine miles away. But as the big U.S. Navy cruiser seemed to come toward the enemy sub, Capt. Mochitsura Hashimoto submerged his craft and watched as it grew ever-larger in his periscope. He gave the order to load torpedoes into their tubes. The Indy was an easy target.
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