What is the USS Indianapolis story?

Answer 1

USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was a heavy cruiser sunk in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945 by a Japanese submarine. Most of the crew survived the initial sinking but were four days in the water, where most of them died due to a combination of exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks because the Navy did not know the ship had been lost and thus were not looking for survivors.

USS Indianapolis had delivered critical parts for the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian just a few days earlier and was enroute to Leyte when she was struck by two torpedoes fired from I58 just after midnight July 30, 1945. She sank in just 12 minutes. Subsequent testimony was that the ship transmitted three distress calls which the Navy long insisted were never received, but this is disputed today. The ship was still in a radio silence status as a result of her recent secret mission, and a murky Navy policy showed her arriving safely in Leyte when in fact she had not. Meanwhile there were 880 men in the water slowly dying. When the survivors were accidentally discovered and rescued four days later, only 317 ultimately lived. It remains the worst single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy, and a source of controversy to this day.

The Navy may have made a scapegoat of the captain, Captain Charles Butler McVay III. He survived and became the only captain of a combat-lost U.S. warship court martialed in WW2. Mochitsura Hashimoto, the skipper of I58 who torpedoed him, was called to testify at McVay's court martial. Hashimoto testified that zigzagging would have made no difference, but McVay was convicted of failing to zigzag despite the fact that his orders made zigzagging discretionary. He shot himself to death in 1968, clutching a toy plastic sailor. In October 2000 President Bill Clinton signed a resolution exonerating McVay for the loss of the USS Indianapolis.

Suggestions for further reading on this fascinating, tragic episode include:

All the Drowned Sailors, by Raymond B. Lech, Jove Books, New York,

In Harm's Way: the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the extraordinary story of its survivors, by Doug Stanton, H. Holt, 2001.