National Affairs: Men Against the Sea

Blacked out and unescorted, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis was 39 hours out on the moonlit Philippine Sea, bound for the U.S.’s great new anchorage at Leyte. She had carried vital materials for the first atomic bomb from the States to Guam, and now, on Sunday, July 29, was logging 17 knots to rejoin the fleet. Shortly before midnight the end came for the veteran (commissioned in 1932) clipper-bowed “Indy.” Two explosions on her starboard side smashed her communications, fouled her controls. She sank within 15 minutes.

No one knows how many hundreds of her crew bobbed in the ocean the next morning. Three life rafts and a floater net supported a few. The rest drifted about, held up by rubber life belts or Mae Wests. By mid-afternoon all were blind from the tropical sun, and after dark they shook with cold. About 60 died that night. Their life jackets were ripped off for the living.

They expected rescue Tuesday, when the Indianapolis would become overdue at Leyte. But all through the day, planes flew nearby without spotting them. Thirst, salt water and sun swelled their tongues and split their lips. Their eyes throbbed.

The Long Wait. As best they could they kept together, some tied to a long rope like corks on a net. A demented sailor yelled that his mother had just handed him a glass of cold milk. Another pointed to an imaginary island; Seabees, he screamed, were drinking tomato juice, less than two miles away. This caused a weird mass hallucination, and nearly 100 men began swimming for the island.

Only a few returned. Before sundown, the men fought over life jackets, as their own lost buoyancy from long immersion. No one dared to sleep, for fear his jacket would be ripped from him. A Catholic chaplain tried to stop the fighting, swimming from one group of men to another. He died of exhaustion; 25 others died from the fighting.

The hallucinations grew worse on Wednesday and Thursday, and every few minutes another man would scream of his vision and die. Not until late Thursday morning, three and a half days after the ship sank, were the men discovered—accidentally, by a plane on a routine flight. When surface ships picked them up that night, the survivors learned they had not yet been reported overdue.

Last week the Navy Department announced the Indianapolis’ sinking, ordered an inquiry into what some called a colossal blunder. Of the 1,196-man crew, every last Jack was a casualty; 880 were listed dead or missing. Not since the Juneau was sunk by torpedoes in the Solomons (684 dead, four survivors) had the U.S. Navy suffered such a disaster.