Anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis

[Beetlegeuse]

The ship that delivered the Hiroshima bomb to the airbase on Tinian island, as made famous by Captain Quint in the film, Jaws. Sunk today in 1945.

[Beetlegeuse]

[Beetlegeuse]

Because of this OP I was looking into some peripheral details of the Indianapolis incident and found there was no end of jaw-dropping (and damning) information available but it was a thousand details scattered among dozens of unrelated sources. I'm an information packrat and as I was making notes from all these resources for my own use and I thought to roughly compile some of it and post it here.

Yes, it's long and wordy but these are just the details supporting the claim that the navy was out to screw the Indianapolis' captain and in the doing cover their own sorry asses.


The USS Indianapolis and her crew earned 10 battle stars for actions that included the assaults on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. And her crew shot down seven Japanese planes in the battle for Okinawa alone, which was an extremely important contribution because on several occasions only two or just a single kamikaze plane had been able to sink even the largest of US naval vessels.

The seventh plane was a kamikaze attacking the Indianapolis herself. Her crew's anti-aircraft fire caused the plane to deliver only a glancing blow and causing slight damage to the ship. However, the pilot dropped a bomb that scored a bulls-eye, hitting the ship directly, plunging through all her decks and going right out the bottom of the hull without detonating until it was well clear of the ship. So not only was this ship crewed by stalwart men, the hand of fate watched over her.

This was a ship that had played key roles in many pivotal actions in the Pacific, beginning with the search of Hawaiian waters for the Japanese fleet on the day Peal Harbor was attacked. Her crew served with highest honor and distinction and deserved better than to be remembered primarily for questions surrounding her sinking and the horror movie shark attacks.


When she set sail for Tinian, none of the Indianapolis' crew knew what they were carrying, not even Captain McVay. All they were told was you can't get there fast enough because what you're carrying will hasten the end of the war. Probably the only people on board who did know were two army officers who worked directly for the Manhattan Project and were escorting the bomb parts.

The bomb's fission mechanism and fuel was shipped disassembled into sub-components packed into two drums that were pretty heavy (one of the contained 140 lbs of uranium and lots of lead shielding) but otherwise unremarkable looking. These were casually secured in the two army officer's staterooms. But they also shipped a wooden crate the size of a car that was loaded onto the ship with much fanfare and that had a Marine standing guard on it 24/7.

The crew weren't idiots so the fact that they put to sea without any escort ships and were steaming wide-fucking-open told them they were involved in something very out of the ordinary. And the big wooden box worked perfectly because the crew took the bait, hook, line and sinker. They even set up a gambling pool to guess what it contained. Popular answers included Rita Hayworth's underwear and scented TP for MacArthur. No one guessed it contained an atomic bomb.

The Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser, smaller than a battleship but larger than a destroyer. A sort of blue water warship never meant to put to sea on its own, only as part of a convoy of ships with differing capabilities so the strengths of one could offset the vulnerabilities of the others. The Indianapolis, for instance, was not equipped with either sonar or hydrophones because it was always meant to be escorted by ships that did have sonar. She also was only lightly armored, with just 4" of armor amidships, compared to 13" for a battle wagon. But she was a fast ship (no doubt partly due to her thin skin) and the navy reckoned that a convoy of ships would be more detectable (not to mention slower) than a fast ship sailing alone ...

... and completely without the ability to detect the presence of a submerged submarine.

Captain McVay knew this was bad ju-ju so he specifically requested destroyer escorts but his request was denied.

Indianapolis delivered the bomb to Tinian and without the crew ever even leaving the ship she was ordered on to Guam and later to a rendezvous with a destroyer in the Leyte Gulf to engage in gunnery practice in preparation for the invasion of Japan, tentatively scheduled for November. McVay was told by the Ship Routing Officer on Guam that the Indianapolis must proceed on to Leyte Gulf without destroyer escort. The Captain protested again but he was told "You know very well that an escort is not necessary" (because there were no known Japanese submarines operating in those waters).

But the Port Director knew better. The truth was that naval intelligence had intercepted a coded message stating that the Japanese were sending four submarines into the area. But the message was sent using the diplomatic code that had been for broken some time. The Chief of Naval Operations was reluctant to act on intelligence gathered from those coded messages until it was something really juicy because they could only go to that well once or twice before the Japanese would have figured out that their code had been compromised and switch to a new one. So they lied to Captain McVay to protect the code.

Documents presented at the court-martial stated that the Guam Port Director had in fact informed McVay of submarine activity along his route. However, the historical record shows that orders from the CNO specified who would be permitted to receive this information and McVay was not on the list. Which could only have one of two implications. Either 1. the Port Director disobeyed an order from a Fleet Admiral or 2. the documents presented in the court-martial were not just incorrect but known to be so.

However, those four subs already were known to have sunk a destroyer escort, the USS Underhill, three days before the Indianapolis transitioned through Guam. McVay heard of the sinking indirectly but and was trusting in naval intelligence to tell him if other were true so he didn't regard it as confirmed evidence of enemy presence along his route.

He also was told that (for reasons of economy) he must make his average speed to Leyte Gulf no more than 15.7 knots. One of the reasons the Indianapolis was chosen for the Tinian mission was that she could make very nearly 33 knots, and no submarine could track down and target any vessel with such speed.

So the Indianapolis was sent into shark-infested waters -- metaphorically speaking -- and at the same time was being told it would be plain sailing. And to make matters worse, she could not utilize her best defense against a submarine attack: her speed.

And that was not the end of the Navy's fuck-ups.

McVay's orders said he should zig-zag "at his discretion" and "weather permitting." The Indianapolis was last sighted the day before the sinking by an LST (Landing Ship, Tank), which reported her to be zig-zagging and making 15 knots. But about sunset the weather closed in and McVay ordered the zig-zagging be dispensed with until the weather improved. It was a standard navy practice not to zigzag at night unless it was clear and with a visible moon because all ships ran "blacked out" and could not be seen to be tracked and targeted for a torpedo solution unless there was sufficient ambient light.

At five minutes past midnight the Indy took two Japanese Type 95 torpedoes, each carrying 1200 lbs of high explosive (60% TNT & 40% HND), one hitting her in the bow and the other amidships, essentially cutting it in half. The damage was so extensive that water pressure and all sources of electricity were knocked out, which meant the ship had neither an intercom with which to sound the order to abandon ship nor water with which to fight the many fires. So the order to "Abandon Ship" could only be spread by word of mouth, which explains in part why so many sailors (~300) went down with the ship.

The force of the impacts and the fact of two separate hits (and that McVay knew his ship was unduly top heavy) gave McVay to know there was no time to waste so he gave "informal" instructions to bring all hands topside almost at once. However, it was nine minutes later before the formal order to abandon ship was recorded in the ship's log, which later would come to bite McVay on the ass.

One reason the Indy went down in just 12 minutes was so many hasty "upgrades" were made to her above deck during the war, making her top-heavy. On her last inspection navy brass was made aware of this problem and were told that even a single torpedo likely would take her down in short order, but she still was put back into service.

Another reason she sank so swiftly is that it was 95°F, and all of the Indianapolis' hatches were left open to try to get some fresh air below deck, where it would have been hotter still and the air stagnant. Had they known there were enemy subs operating in the area, SOP would have been that all water-tight doors should remain secured, which would dramatically have slowed how fast she shipped water and subsequently sink.

After the Indy was torpedoed, McVay followed navy procedure to a 'T' to the extent that his circumstances would allow. Contrary to the story Captain Quint told in the film "Jaws," McVay did in fact have an SOS sent because the ship no longer could be connected to its earlier mission and the package it had delivered to Tinian.

And those transmissions were received by at least three naval installations. The officer in command of one of the receiving stations decided (unilaterally) it must have been a Japanese ruse and didn't forward it to proper channels. The commander at another was sleeping off a drunk and had ordered his men not to wake him. And the third station simply failed to route the message to the proper action officer.

Documents presented at the court-martial claimed otherwise, stating that although a radio operator had sent distress calls, none were received, possibly because of damage to the radio equipment. Which they probably knew at the time was untrue.

The Navy report's conclusion was that the failure to send the distress call was the primary cause of excessive loss of life from the Indianapolis' sinking. We know now that this was untrue, that she indeed had sent the messages but the receiving stations squandered the opportunity they presented.

Even without the SOS the Navy should have been stirred to action when the Indy came overdue for arrival at Leyte but did not. Ordinarily, the officer into whose command the ship was being transferred would have been notified of the time of its expected arrival but the message sent from Guam to Leyte was mistranslated and never reached him. Further, the lieutenant who was Port Director on Leyte had principle responsibility for confirming the arrival of all ships but he simply failed to perform that duty. The lack of a negative report of arrival was taken as a positive report of arrival and all commands who tracked movements of ships recorded the Indianapolis as having arrived simply because she hadn't been reported missing.

The Navy's conclusion was that the failure of the Leyte Port Director to report the Indianapolis overdue was a contributing factor to needless loss of life. Well no shit, Sherlock.

But wait, it gets worse.

The captain of the Japanese submarine transmitted a report that he definitely had sunk a US cruiser, and where the sinking took place. He did so on a frequency the US continually monitored and using a code that already had broken. Surviving records tell that the message was in fact intercepted and had been decoded by a mere 16 hours after the sinking. If US naval intelligence had plotted the position of the reported sinking and the probable location of the Indianapolis (based on dead reckoning from its last position report), they would have seen they were the exact same spot.

Shortly after midnight the following day (~24 hours in the water), survivors heard the sound of a passing airplane and tried to signal it with a flare gun. The aircraft was a US Army C-54 piloted by Captain Richard LeFrancis. LeFrancis saw the flares and noted their location in his log book. He reported the sighting when he arrived at Guam but he was told to drop the matter because the Army didn't involve itself in Navy business.

They finally were spotted at about 10 am on the fourth day by a navy plane on a routine sweep of the area. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Wilbur Gwinn went aft in his PV-1 Ventura bomber to troubleshoot a problematic trailing antenna. He happened to glance out a window and caught the glint of the sun reflecting just so off an oil slick. Thinking he might be about to score himself a Jap sub, Gwinn followed the slick to its source. Instead of finding a submarine he saw men's heads bobbing in the water. Lots and lots of heads.

On his first radio report he estimated there were 15 survivors. By his second report, that number had risen to 150. He wing-wagged his PV-1 to assure the survivors they had been spotted and dropped life rafts, sonobuoys and a radio transmitter into the water.

But the Navy STILL DIDN'T LAUNCH A FULL-SCALE RESCUE!!!. They wasted three hours because some were arguing it wasn't possible that those could be American servicemen in the water. They finally struck the compromise of sending a single PBY seaplane to perform further reconnaissance.

The pilot of that PBY was Lieutenant Commander Adrian Marks. He was only sent to reconnoiter, not to rescue, but what he saw forced him to change plans. Marks stated that he witnessed a man in the water, writhing and screaming as he was being eaten alive by a shark.

So he took the initiative to defy orders and attempted a risky open-ocean landing.

The sea was choppy so he performed a power-on stall with the plane's nose held high and leaving the tail to droop into the waves. The tail struck a wave crest and the fuselage slammed into the water causing the plane's hull to pop several rivets. So Marks' decision to land resulted in him finding himself numbered among the shipwrecked. But at least the PBY was still watertight, and as he began pulling sailors from the sea her crew learned that there were dozens of groups and hundreds of men scattered for miles around, so they simply set about water taxiing the PBY to collect as many as he could.

They stacked men like firewood inside the plane's fuselage but there were too many to all fit inside. The PBY's wings were made from doped fabric, not the sort of surface a sickly man could be expected to cling to, so the PBY's crew cut up their parachutes and used the silk to tie rescued sailors to the wings' upper surfaces.

Marks' PBY found and rescued 56 men. The rest were so widely scattered it would take days more before they stopped finding men and the search was called off. His plane was too damaged to repair on the spot so when the rescue ships finally arrived, once all aboard the PBY had been transferred onto them, the plane was scuttled.

Years later, after all the known details were collated, experts with detailed knowledge of WWII naval operating procedures and the events of the sinking of the Indianapolis estimated that if the alert system had worked as designed, the crew of the Indy probably would have been located almost two days sooner than was the case. And dozens of men died every hour they were delayed.

Of the 900 or so men who went into the water, and who might have been saved if the Navy had responded properly either to the SOS or the Indy's failure to arrive (or even the Japanese captain's report of his successful attack), only 316 survived. So it could be said that the Navy killed twice as many of the Indianapolis' crew as the Japanese had.

But the Navy was in no mood to take the flack for that so they put Captain McVay up for court-martial.

Against the recommendation of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, McVay was brought to court martial and charged with failing to sound the abandon ship and for "hazarding" his ship by failing to zig-zag. Nimitz probably would have been comfortable if McVay had been entirely exonerated but his personal recommendation was that he receive a letter of reprimand for failing to zig-zag, which, truth be told, was nothing more than a dog yummy thrown to the hounds baying for blood to try to appease them.

The charge of failing to sound the abandon ship was dismissed based on supporting testimony from subordinates but the court went ahead with the charge of hazarding his command.

In his role as CINCPAC, Nimitz submitted a report to the court noting that by McVay's written orders, not only was the zig-zagging discretionary, it was not standard procedure to zig-zag under those prevailing conditions. Incongruously, McVay's defense counsel chose not to hammer on these points in his defense.

Besides presenting the misinformation I already have detailed, the court flew in the captain of the Japanese submarine to testify. He stated (through an interpreter) that zig-zagging would not have saved the Indianapolis because the Japanese already had devised a counter to that tactic. That they would have taken the trouble to fly the man in special all the way from Japan to testify (which probably was a four day trip back then) only then to completely ignore his testimony I would argue is clear evidence of the intent of this court. The proceeding was a screw-job meant to make a scapegoat of McVay.

McVay was convicted on the hazarding charge and fined enough 'points' that his career was effectively ruined. Back then the services used a 'points' system (Adjusted Service Rating Score) to calculate when a servicemember's obligations to the country were completed, but the same system also was used in selections for promotion and to see who got the choicest job assignments.

Internal memos show that dissenting elements within the naval command structure called the charge and conviction "super-technical." Meaning it was outside both the intent and the spirit of the regulation under which McVay was charged. I note that some 380 naval vessels were lost in combat during WWII, and McVay was the only captain out of all that number charged with any offense.

Admiral Nimitz disagreed yet again with the proceeding and its decisions, so much so that he had McVay's sentence remitted and restored him to active duty. When the war ended he was made Chief of Naval Operations, he implored Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal to act on McVay's behalf, which he did.

But a military "remittance" is equivalent to a civilian grant of clemency. It didn't absolve him of blame, it simply shielded him from the legal consequences. So although McVay stayed in the navy and retired as a Rear Admiral in 1949, the sinking remained a millstone around his neck because the lingering public perception was that he had done something wrong, and his men died as a result. Although the Indianapolis' survivors universally praised their skipper's actions, he still from time to time would receive hate mail and prank telephone calls from loved ones of the sailors who died. "Merry Christmas! Our family's holiday would be a lot merrier if you hadn't killed my son."

Friends and acquaintances later would say that the incident continued to weight heavy on McVay's mind, and he grew increasingly lonely and despondent after he lost his wife to cancer. He killed himself with his navy service revolver in 1968, clutching in his other hand a toy sailor he'd been given as a good luck charm when he was a boy.

Thus the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis claimed its final victim.


The idea of exonerating McVay surfaced from time to time but never got any traction until 1998, when Hunter Scott, a sixth-grade student from Pensacola, Fla. created a school project documenting the incongruities and misinformation used to convict the captain.

His project came to the attention of Joe Scarborough, then a Republican US Congressman from Florida, who brought Scott's documentation of McVay's case before the US Congress. In October of 2000, both houses passed a law fully exonerating McVay, which was signed by Bill Klinton.

Hunter Scott received a Navy ROTC scholarship and is today a lieutenant and an aviator in the US Navy.


What follows is excerpted from a report written by Lieutenant Commander C.R. Woodward, USMC, in 1988 titled "The U.S.S. Indianapolis--Tragedy Amid Triumph":

...The sinking of the Indianapolis was not caused by Captain McVay's failure to zigzag. It was caused by a failure to provide timely intelligence information to the ship. The delayed rescue was caused by failure to report Indianapolis' non-arrival, faulty staff action in decoding message traffic, failure to share information and strict adherence to written staff procedures. If anything can and should continue to be learned from this unfortunate incident, it should be the importance of effective communication and proper command and staff action.

That is all. The drinking lamp is lit.

[Proximal]

Too late (and drunk) to effectively read and ingest everything you wrote.

But MEN sacrificed & died for our country & US.

May God bless them.

[Beetlegeuse]

Yeah, it's too damn long but there just wasn't any way to detail all the fuck-ups the military committed that led to the sinking and then fucking up the rescue and then fucking up the court martial and make it any shorter.

[Beetlegeuse]

Okay, I lied. This is a little shorter (albeit with more subjective analysis).


The Navy picked the USS Indianapolis for the Tinian mission because she was fast, almost 33 knots fast (37.3 mph). Fast enough that no submarine could target her unless by pure happenstance it found itself lying in her path and saw the Indy as she was approaching. And head-on shots are low percentage.

They sent her alone, believing a single ship was less likely to attract attention than a convoy, despite the fact that she was neither built nor equipped to sail without the support of other ships typically used in convoys, particularly the destroyers. She had no sonar and so lacked the ability to detect a submerged submarine (a shortcoming largely negated by her sheer speed). But she also was lightly armored (less than 1/3rd the armor thickness of a battleship) and had become ponderously top-heavy as the war progressed because of up-gunning and other modifications made to her deck and above. Navy brass knew that a single torpedo hit likely would cause her to roll over.

They got the bomb to Tinian and were ordered on to Leyte Gulf by way of Guam. At Guam the Ship Routing Officer told Capt. McVay that he would have no destroyer escorts for the run to Leyte Gulf. McVay protested but the SRO insisted that the Captain himself should know better because had been briefed that there were no credible threats along his route.

But the Navy knew better. I don't know if the SRO had been told, but "big Navy" knew to a certainty there were threats. They had decoded a message sent in the Japanese diplomatic code stating that the Japanese navy had dispatched four submarines to that area to harass the enemy. Further, three days before this conversation took place on Guam, one of those four non-existent Japanese submarines had sunk a US destroyer.

But the Director of Naval Operations had ordered that dissemination of information from this letter be limited in an effort to protect the secret that the code had been broken. DNO was waiting on a bigger event to let that cat out of the bag, so Capt. McVay was deliberately given misinformation.

So Capt. McVay sailed away from Guam believing the coast was clear, which obliged him not to use his ship's great speed but instead to follow orders and cruise at an average of no more than 15.7 knots (~17.9 mph). Which made him a sitting duck for submarines.

McVay's orders said he was to zig-zag at his discretion, and as weather permitted. He zig-zagged until sunset on the day before the attack, at which time the weather turned and by SOP the foul weather and lack of moonlight made it unnecessary.

And two hours before she was hit (~10:00 pm), they recorded the temperature as 95°F, which would have made the heat below decks stifling, so she cruised with all hatchways open to try to get a little fresh air below decks. But had they known there was a threat in the area, SOP would have been to keep all watertight doors secured. And she went down all the quicker because no watertight doors were secured.

As she went down the Indy sent a distress signal that was received by no fewer than three US land bases, but for a variety of reasons none of them raised the alarm.

Two people should have raised the alarm when she didn't arrive on schedule at Leyte Gulf but didn't. The first was the Port Director, whose job it was to report all failures to arrive. He did not, and later received a letter of reprimand for his failure (the only punishment I know of meted out for any of the many peripheral fuck-ups that contributed to the disaster). And there was no failsafe to their reporting system. When the Port Director failed to report the Indy's non-arrival, all connected commands simply assumed she had arrived.

And the commander of the unit that the Indy was being transferred to should have reported the failure to arrive, but he had not been informed that she was coming. A coded message informing him was sent from Guam but his coderoom screwed the pooch and mistranslated the message.

The skipper of the Japanese sub actually sent a full report of the sinking by radio, including the ship's location and that it was a heavy cruiser. And Big Navy decoded the message just 16 hours after the sinking. But they failed to correlate the location in the Japanese captain's message with the locations of known American vessels, else they'd have know that whatever cruiser he sank happened to be right where the Indianapolis was supposed to have been.

The first friendly sighting of the shipwrecked crew was by an Army pilot who passed over about 24 hours after she went down. He noticed when the Indy's crew fired signal flares and recorded their location. He reported it to the army on Guam but they told him the army doesn't meddle in navy business.

Sixty hours later (84 hours in the water), a navy pilot passing during daylight hours saw an oil slick and followed it expecting to find a crippled Japanese sub. Instead he spotted heads of floating seamen. His report finally instigated the the rescue operation.

Only 316 of her 1195 crewmen were rescued. Of the 879 who died, about 300 went down with the ship. Almost twice that many died because of the failures to note the Indianapolis was missing and launch a timely search and rescue. So you might say the Navy had killed twice as many of the Indy's crew as the Japanese had.

By the time this all came to a head, Japan had surrendered and the war was over. The Navy was too busy basking in the glory to dampen the party by admitting to its failures so instead they put Capt. McVay up for court-martial for failing to sound the abandon ship and for hazarding his vessel by failing to zig-zag.

The abandon ship charge was disproved in short notice but he was convicted of hazarding his vessel, despite not just a letter from the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet Chester Nimitz stating specifically that McVay's orders did not obligate him to zig-zag, but also from testimony from the captain of the Japanese sub (who had been flown in from Japan to deliver his testimony) that he'd still have sunk her, zig-zagging or not.

As punishment, McVay's service record was effectively penalized to such a degree that his career was ruined, and he was kicked off active duty.

When the war ended, Nimitz was promoted from CINCPAC to Chief of Naval Operations, who answers directly to the Secretary of the Navy. At the CNO's insistence, SecNav "remitted" McVay's sentence and restored him to active duty. But a remittance is akin to a grant of clemency in that it only lifts the penalties, it does not absolve from blame.

McVay spent his last for four years commanding a desk at the Port of New Orleans and retired a rear admiral.

In 1968 he used his navy issue service revolver to take his own life.

In 1998 a sixth-grade student in Pensacola used the railroading of Capt. McVay as the basis for a school project. A US congressman from Florida took note of the project and brought the matter before Congress. In Y2K, both houses of congress passed a bill (which POTUS signed) exonerating McVay of all charges.