Abandoned Ship. - Review - book review

National Review, August 20, 2001 by Jeffrey Hart

In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton (Holt, 333 pp., $25)

John Erskine's famous essay, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent," was first articulated as his 1913 Phi Beta Kappa address at Amherst College. A year earlier, the Titanic had gone down off Nova Scotia with enormous loss of life, and Erskine had much on his mind the complacency of Capt. Edward Smith, who-despite multiple iceberg warnings-had sailed his ship at night into the ice field at 22.5 knots.

Erskine's essay also comes to mind in connection with Pearl Harbor, and with the loss of the USS Indianapolis, which occurred almost at the war's end. Both disasters resulted from the Navy's failure to be intelligent, in Erskine's sense. The title of Gordon Prange's fine book about Pearl Harbor epitomizes the first: At Dawn We Slept. Doug Stanton's In Harm's Way, thoroughly researched and beautifully written, tells the horrifying story of the Indianapolis. In both disasters, individual mental sloth and the Navy's organizational dysfunction led to the tragic and shameful results.

Commissioned in 1932, the Indianapolis was a formidable cruiser during the Second World War. It had been Franklin Roosevelt's favorite warship, and now was the flagship of Adm. Raymond Spruance, victor at Midway, the triumph well characterized by John Keegan as "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare."

The Indianapolis, under the authority of Capt. Charles McVay, had the top-secret job of carrying components of the Hiroshima bomb from San Francisco to Tinian, where the bomb would be loaded onto the Enola Gay. (The bomb was called "Little Boy"; the Nagasaki bomb was called "Fat Man." As Stanton explains, the bombs were originally named for Roosevelt and Churchill, "Thin Man" and "Fat Man." But a change in design made the thin-man name inappropriate.)

After leaving the "gadget," as the scientists called it, at Tinian, the Indianapolis headed for Leyte in the Philippines, where it was scheduled for gunnery practice preparatory to the expected invasion of Japan.

On July 30, 1945, the Indianapolis was cruising, unescorted, west of Guam when two torpedoes struck it, sinking the ship in a few minutes. An estimated 300 men were killed by the blasts or entombed below. About 900 went into the Pacific. There they floated for four and a half days, clinging to rafts and nets, swimming in life jackets, without food or water, scorched by a relentless tropical sun and savagely attacked by hundreds of sharks. Only 321 survived; of these, some died later in the hospital.

Incredibly, the Navy personnel on Leyte were not alarmed by the fact that the Indianapolis was seriously overdue. Lazily, they assumed that it had been ordered elsewhere, not bothering to confirm this supposition with headquarters on Guam.

Lt. Cmdr. Mochitsura Hashimoto captained the Japanese submarine, a new top-quality ship. In addition to torpedoes, it contained three one-man submarines, effectively man-steered torpedoes. When Hashimoto spotted the Indianapolis through his periscope, he figured he could hit it with his ordinary torpedoes. The three kamikaze submariners were disappointed at losing this chance for glory.

Soon after the end of the war, Hashimoto was brought to Guam to testify at the court-martial of Capt. Charles McVay. Stanton does not quite say so, but this court-martial seems to have been a hurried attempt by the Navy to focus on McVay and deflect attention from the Navy's faults of omission and commission.

The Indianapolis was not equipped for antisubmarine warfare. It had no depth charges or sonar equipment, and it normally would have been escorted by destroyers.

McVay had been told that there was little likelihood of Japanese submarines on his route. Officers senior to his briefer knew the opposite was true, because the Japanese code had been broken. But according to Navy policy, no information could be passed to the likes of McVay if it might indicate to the Japanese that the code had been compromised. Hence the Indianapolis was sailing unescorted, without anti-submarine equipment, and misinformed, into lethal waters. A nice Catch-22.

Everyone remembers the account in the film Jaws of the shark attacks given by the fisherman Quint, who had been on the Indianapolis. I can almost recite it from memory, since I revisit Jaws every year at the beginning of the beach season. Stanton says the Quint character is based (but no doubt with Captain Ahab nearby) on Bob Cause, a crew member who survived to become a commercial fisherman and shark hunter in Florida. Here Stanton describes the advent of the predators:

Before dawn, up from the deep, perhaps attracted by the booming of the [Indianapolis's] exploding chambers or lured by the blood trail of the injured and the dead, the boys' greatest fears were coming to life.

By dusk on Monday, hundreds of sharks had encircled them. There were makos, tigers, white tips, and blues. Rising at the speed of a man on a gentle run, the sharks ascended from the depths of the dark sea to the paler glow of approaching night overhead, toward a sky empty of stars. As the heat of the day tempered into relative cool, the boys, lying in rafts, hanging from floating nets, and bobbing in life vests, began to feel things bumping from below-nudges and kicks that they mistook for the touch of their comrades treading water.