Loss of the last major American warship

By WILLIAM H. STEWART
Special to the Saipan Tribune

This is a continuation of a series of articles commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.

Fifth of a seven-part series

After his rescue, Captain McVay was interviewed for purposes of recording his experiences associated with the sinking of the Indianapolis. He stated, “On Sunday night, the 29th of July, we had been zigzagging up until dark. We did not zigzag thereafter. We had intermittent moonlight, as I am told, but it was dark from about 2330 until sometime earlier the next morning.

“At approximately five minutes after midnight, I was thrown from my emergency cabin bunk by a very violent explosion followed shortly thereafter by another explosion. I went to the bridge and noticed in the chart house, that there was quite a bit of acrid white smoke. I couldn’t see anything.

“I got out on the bridge. The same condition existed out there. It was dark; it was this whitish smoke. I asked the Officer of the Deck if he had any reports. He said, Ino Sir, I have lost all communication. I have tried to stop the engines. I don’t know whether that order has ever gotten through to the engine room.

“So we had no communication whatsoever. Our engine room telegraph was electrical and that was out, sound powered phones were out and all communications were out forward. As I went back into the cabin to get my shoes and some clothes, I ran into the damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Casey Moore, who had the mid-watch on the bridge as supervisory watch. He had gone down at the first hit and came back on the bridge and told me that we were going down rapidly by the head, and wanted to know if I desired to pass the word to abandon ship. I told him, ‘No.’

“We had only about three degrees list. We had been through a hit before and we were able to control it quite easily and in my own mind I was not at all perturbed. Within another two or three minutes the executive officer, Commander Flynn, came up and said, ‘We are definitely going down and I suggest that we abandon ship.’ Well, knowing Flynn and having utter regard for his ability, I then said, ‘Pass the word to abandon ship.’”

Captain McVay continued, “The people who had the kapok life preservers on tied themselves together to try to keep themselves together during the night. They also had quite a long piece of manila line they had taken off a ring life preserver which they used to secure their ties on their kapok life jackets and they managed to keep together during the night. Most of those people within 48 to 60 hours went out of their head. Some of them lived through the period, but those who went out of their head earlier than, say 48 to 60 hours, didn’t last. The people that were in that group felt quite sure that a number of people just gave up hope because they would be with the bunch at sundown and in the morning they would be gone, so they feel that people just slipped out of their life jackets and just decided that they didn’t want to face it any longer.”

A debate broke out among U.S. military planners over whether Japan should be defeated by attrition or direct attack. General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz favored a direct assault. The Joint Chiefs of Staff scheduled an invasion of Kyushu for Oct. 1, 1945. It was estimated that 1.5 million troops, 36 divisions would be required with full knowledge that causalities would be heavy.

Two days before the search effort for survivors of the Indianapolis ended, a B-29 stationed on Tinian was positioned over a hole in the ground about the size of a grave where the cargo delivered by the Indianapolis would be lifted into the bomb-bay of an aircraft named the Enola Gay. On Aug. 6, Colonel Paul Tibbets, of the 509th bomber group and pilot of the Enola Gay, received his orders and in the early morning hours roared down a runway built only a year before by the 107th Naval Construction Battalion, bound for Hiroshima. The cargo the Indianapolis delivered to Tinian would soon create an event that would change the world. However, any other men still in the water still awaiting rescue, knew nothing of the fate of Hiroshima and they waited only for their own fate to deliver them from the torture they were experiencing, even if it meant death. Fate had also cheated Japan, as the course of history might have been changed had the I-58 sunk the Indianapolis and its secret cargo before it reached Tinian.

The B-29-45-MD (# 44-86292) Superfortress lifted off Tinian at 2:45 am, Aug. 6, 1945 for the six-and-one-half-hour flight to Hiroshima. At 31,600 feet, with a ground speed of 328 m.p.h., a bomb weighing 9,700 pounds, measuring 129 inches in length, with a diameter of 31.5 inches, containing 137.5 pounds of Uranium 235 was released and split into two sections. After falling to an altitude of 800 feet, nuclear fission began in one fifteen-hundredth of a microsecond. The firebomb that erupted was the equivalent of 13,00 tons of T.N.T. and thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. It melted granite and vaporized people leaving only their shadows on the few remaining buildings left standing in the city after the blast. This single bomb left 118,661 dead, 30,524 severely injured, 48,606 slightly injured and 3,677 missing. It exploded with the temperature of the fireball at the outer edge reaching 1,800 degrees centigrade 15 milliseconds after the explosion, with the velocity of the shock at 100 meters per second one thousand meters from the epicenter. When released over the city the temperature, at the instant of the detonation, reached several million degrees. A few millionths of a second later the surrounding air reached the point of white-hot heat and in 1/10,000 of a second an immense fireball was formed with a uniform temperature of about 300,000 degrees. In less than one minute the atomic cloud had reached a height of more than one half mile. At the hypocenter, iron melted. Within 900 feet of the hypocenter the surface of granite melted. Within one mile, railroad ties, fences and trees ignited spontaneously. The fireball as seen from a distance of five and one half miles from the point of burst had a luminosity 10 times that of the sun.

On Aug. 9, a second bomb, codenamed “Fat Man,” which was a plutonium device and carried by the B-29 Bocks Car had as its primary target the city of Kokura but bad weather forced the pilot to the alternate target of Nagasaki.

It was this second device detonated over Nagasaki that finally convinced the Japanese that the war was lost and surrender followed on Aug. 15, 1945. The formal ceremonies aboard the Battleship USS Missouri occurred on Sept. 2, 1945 in Tokyo Bay. The remaining Japanese garrison on Rota surrendered the same day.

By the time the war ended, fragments of the Japanese Army were scattered and marooned on dozens of islands throughout the Pacific and the Imperial Navy was at the bottom of the sea. As Admiral Toyoda remarked, “I do not believe it would be accurate to look upon the atomic bomb and the entry of Soviet Russia as direct causes of the termination of the war. But I do think those two factors did enable us to bring the war to an end without creating utter chaos in Japan.”

The country was already in a chaotic state. The military was impotent; the economy was wrecked and financially bankrupt. Starvation, death and tragedy were everywhere in Japan. As Theodore Roscoe wrote in his U.S. Naval Institute book Submarine Operations “The holocaustal incandescence which consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not blind observers to the fact that the maritime empire was already destroyed. And long before the first mass air raids smote Tokyo, many Japanese-held harbors in the Southwest Pacific were as deserted as the bays of the moon, and in many of Japan’s home seaports there were vacant docks with rusting bollards where only spiders tied their lines. The atomic bomb was the funeral pyre of an enemy who had drowned.”

It was finally over. More than a thousands days of war had ended and the occupation of Japan began.

Captain Hashimoto was ordered to the United States after the war to testify at Captain McVay’s Court Martial. McVay was accused of failing to zigzag during wartime conditions and for failure to issue the abandon ship command in a timely manner.

The former submarine captain was flown to the United States and on Dec. 13, 1945 testified as to the events surrounding the sinking of the Indianapolis. He later described his visit to the United States as “pleasant.”

Soon after the end of the war he became a Shinto Priest.

Captain McVay was later vindicated from any blame concerned with the loss of his ship. All personnel involved in the failure to report the ship’s absence from Leyte were also exonerated. On Nov. 6, 1968 in Litchfield, Connecticut, McVay committed suicide. He was found with a pistol in one hand and a toy sailor attached to a key ring in the other.

To be continued.

William H. Stewart is a military historical cartographer and has mapped many of the World War II Pacific battlefields. He is the author of the books, Saipan In Flames (translated into Japanese) and Ghost Fleet of the Truk Lagoon now in its 6th printing.

Reference sources: Due to space limitations many reference sources have been omitted. This information will be furnished those interested when requested from the author at e-mail: spno@zoomnet.net.