Title: In Harm’s Way
Rating: 4 Stars
In Harm’s Way is the story of the WWII sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the struggle of the survivors as they endured four to five days in the Pacific Ocean.
On a top secret mission, the USS Indianapolis delivered the nuclear weapon to Tinian that was later dropped on Hiroshima. Successfully making that delivery, it was ordered to report to the Leyte Gulf in preparation for the planned invasion of the Japan islands. Told that the area was safe, it sailed off alone without any protection from destroyer class ships that could protect it from submarine attacks. Due to communication / bureaucratic snafus, Navy headquarters essentially lost track of it.
On the night of Sunday, July 29th, 1945, it was hit by two Japanese torpedoes. Nearly 300 of the sailors on board were immediately killed. The ship was damaged so severely that it sunk in about ten minutes. Consumed by flames and sinking so quickly, the remaining sailors were cast into an oil soaked sea. Many sailors were lacking life preservers. Only a couple of the rafts were released. Even on those rafts there was no food or water.
Due to damage to the radio station, a distress signal was barely able to be sent. Since there were no ships expected in the area and the Japanese navy apparently would send out bogus distress signals, these signals were ignored. The ship’s absence was noted, but due to the dynamic nature of wartime, all who noted it missing simply assumed that the ship was diverted to another mission. For days, no search / rescues were attempted.
At first, the survivors were convinced that someone would come to rescue them. As days went by, their hopes plummeted. As did their hopes, so did their life expectancy. Some grew tired and gave up. Most became hypothermic as they continued to spend days in the ocean water. Everyone suffered from open sores as the saltwater broke down their skin. Some grew so thirsty for water that they couldn’t help themselves and began drinking the saltwater. A few hours later they would die horrible deaths. Many would hallucinate and would sink into the water thinking that they were still on the ship. A large group of sailors became convinced that the Japanese were in their midst and would hack each other to death with their knives.
And then they were the sharks. Constantly cruising the clots of sailors, the sharks would have a feeding frenzy at night. On average, some fifty soldiers a night would be eaten by the sharks. In the morning, a sailor would tap the shoulder of a sailor in front of him and the sailor would flop over, his bottom half been eaten by a shark during the night.
The missing ship never did cause an alarm to be raised. Four to five days after the ship sunk, a US plane hunting for Japanese submarines just happened to see the oil slick. Getting a closer look, the pilot realized that there were still survivors. Raising the alarm, this immediately brought about a major search / rescue operation. Many of the sailors on the water refused to believe that they were being rescued. Of the 1200 members of the USS Indianapolis, a bit over 300 survived.
Apparently embarrassed by losing a ship and causing unimaginable sufferings upon the survivors, the Navy sought a scapegoat. It found one in the ship’s captain, Captain McVay. Surviving the ship’s sinking, he was court martialed. Despite the fact that the area was known to have Japanese submarines in the area and he was specifically not told about them (due to the top secret nature of how the knowledge was acquired), he was criticized for not taking a zigzag route. He was convicted even though he was told that the area was safe, that it wasn’t a real clear night, and that both US and Japanese submarine commanders testified that it wouldn’t have made a difference anyways. He was tried on the second charge of not abandoning the ship in an expeditious manner. Given that the ship sank in ten minutes, not even the court martial could stomach a guilty verdict on this charge. Some twenty years later, McVay would end up taking his own life. Even now, the few remaining survivors still living are trying to clear his name.
About the title? This is actually the second blog entry with this title. It’s probably inappropriate to joke, but as I wrote in my blog entry about Jaws, the author Peter Benchley struggled to come up with a title for his novel. His father, also a writer, jocularly suggested “Wha’s That Noshin’ On My Laig?” To make the connection to Jaws even tighter, the character Captain Quint (in the film version) gave a monologue where it’s apparent that he must have served on the USS Indianapolis and endured the extreme suffering of its aftermath. To make the connection yet even more tighter, one of the survivors that tells his story in this book is Bob Gause. He spent his postwar career as a commercial fishermen. Some of that time was spent shark hunting. Some have said that he served as the inspiration for Captain Quint.
I’ve now read several books on surviving desperate conditions during war. They are horrible and haunting tributes to the suffering that a person can endure and survive and the almost unimaginable will to live that some possess. If this sounds like an interesting topic, please also take a look at Hampton Sides’ On Desperate Ground, the story of the battle on the Chosin during The Korean War, and David Howarth’s We Die Alone, a must be read to be believed account of a Norwegian surviving a botched raid during WWII.
dorkenstein 