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Authors: Doug Stanton

In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (13 page)

BOOK: In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors
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When he snapped back to consciousness, he found himself shooting to the surface at great speed, like a man in an express elevator. He was not in an elevator, though. He was in an air bubble, a huge one, and its dry jaws were clamped around the lower half of his body, leaving his head and shoulders sticking out as he rocketed upward.
He erupted with such force that he rose three feet out of the water. With a splash, he fell back into a black world of screaming men. All around him, the sea was littered with
crates of potatoes, ammunition cans, stray life vests, and dead bodies.
He looked around and knew he had one decision to make:
Am I gonna live, or will I die?
Hope Afloat
What did I think about when I was in the water?
I fantasized about meeting my parents at a dim roadside bar
in the north woods of Wisconsin to share the story over a few
very cold beers. I bargained with God. As the days dragged on, I
thought less and less while I dreamed more and more.
—JACK MINER, radio technician second-class, USS
Indianapolis
MONDAY, JULY 30, 1945
As they floated through the inky murk of the night, even the most lucid of the
Indy
’s survivors found themselves in an extreme state of disorientation. Without the ship as a point of reference, they had little idea of where they were headed, or how far they had traveled, or how many of their crewmates had made it off alive.
In fact, they were floating now in a slightly southwesterly course, headed in the general direction of Borneo rather than toward their sunken ship’s intended destination of Leyte, which lay 650 miles ahead nearly due west. Behind them, another 650 miles to the east, was Guam, their previous port of call. They were drifting through the dead middle of a no-man’s-land, a pocket of ocean that spanned some 10,000 square miles.
And they were spread along a roughly three-mile-long line that was lengthening—and widening—by the minute. During the first several hours, the majority of the men had collected in several groups, all scattering in different directions. Each was separated by about a mile of an oily, pitching sea. Initially, no group knew for certain that any other existed, but as time passed, the scared boys would find themselves separated from one cluster and then united with another. Gradually, commands of sorts were evolving.
Dr. Haynes, Captain Parke, and Father Conway found themselves in charge of the largest group of survivors, which consisted solely of boys in life vests and some in inflatable life belts; Haynes would come to think of them as his “swimmers.” Along with Parke and Conway, he set about collecting the boys, shouting orders that all sailors within
earshot should swim to him. Ed Brown and Bob Gause, hearing the doctor’s high-pitched cry, moved toward the sound. Gause was in serious pain, having jumped forty feet from the stern of the ship before she went down, only to hit the massive steel rudder. He didn’t think he’d broken any bones, but he could barely swim.
Many of the boys were bleeding, vomiting, and overcome with diarrhea. Quite a few had broken legs and arms; some had fractured backs and skulls. Those too seriously damaged by the explosions had already drowned. Haynes, wearing only his cotton pajama pants and life vest, paddled through the wailing crowd, trying to help. Haynes knew that the boys, when in good health, could live for maybe thirty days without food and perhaps seven without water. But the severely weakened and wounded among them, he guessed, had only hours—some, if lucky, maybe a day or two—before they would be dead. Rescue had to come soon.
About half of the 900 survivors had gotten off the ship with either a life vest or an inflatable life belt. These latter proved worthless as the fuel oil ate into the seams and they started to leak. The boys wearing them began to sink and, if they were too weak to swim, to drown. Those without belts or life vests dog-paddled frantically about, keeping lookouts: whenever a boy died, he was flocked by several others eager to take his vest.
Conway and Haynes spent the bleak early morning hours swimming back and forth among these terrified crew members, sometimes dragging loners back to the growing mass using an awkward, modified sidestroke. At one point, Parke spotted what looked like a blinking red light. He froze. “Nobody signal back!” he shouted in a hoarse whisper. The marine worried that the light was from the sub that had sunk them. If it found them, they were dead men. They’d be machine-gunned for sure. Then the red light faded. Had it even been real? the boys wondered.
The second-largest group was led by ensign Harlan
Twible and chief engineer Richard Redmayne. It numbered about 325 men, most of whom had jumped from the
Indy
after the Haynes group but before McVay and McCoy; unlike the swimmers, the Twible-Redmayne group had left the ship from the flooded rails of the starboard side, which was awash with precious lifesaving equipment. Most of these boys had been lucky enough to grab hold of something: among them, they had five floater nets, four rafts, and a smattering of random supplies. These included some malted milk tablets (meant to slake thirst), biscuits in watertight tins, and a few wooden beakers of potable water. Four of the five floater nets were piled with the wounded, while the fifth was commandeered as a rest station for the healthy. Each net held about fifty men, none very comfortably (this was twice the recommended number). Every shifting body upset the balance of the whole, causing the boys to knock heads and slip under the waves bucking beneath them. It was miserable.
Captain McVay found himself paddling alone through the dark, and it unnerved him. He didn’t want to believe that he’d been the only man to survive the sinking, and yet, above the slap and slosh of the waves in his face, he heard no shouts; none of his boys drifted out of the gloom to meet him. At this same time, about a mile away, Private McCoy, clutching a life vest he hadn’t had time to put on, was bobbing on the oily tide and vomiting like crazy. He, too, didn’t know where the hell he was.
All the groups were traveling in a prevailing westerly equatorial current that was pushing ahead at a steady ninetenths of a knot—or about one mile an hour. The northeast trade winds were also blowing westerly at an average of 3 knots, or 3.5 miles an hour. The rate of drift was such that the boys would average about twenty-four miles per day. This put the nearest body of land, an island called Mindanao, about three weeks ahead of them.
However, the factor that truly determined each group’s direction and speed of travel was something called the Leeway
Effect. This phenomenon involves the relationship between exposed body surface, ocean current, and wind. For instance, if a survivor had more of his body submerged in the water than exposed to the wind, the current acted upon him to a greater degree than the trade winds. This meant that those strapped and sunk up to their chests in life vests were typically more affected by the current, while those sitting high in rafts were more forcefully pushed and tugged about by the breezes.
The swimmers started drifting south from the
Indy
’s sinking point at a steady one and a half miles per hour, and those in life rafts and on the floater nets began drifting slightly north on the faster three- to five-knot winds. The Twible-Redmayne group blew the farthest north, while Haynes and Company drifted the farthest south. In between these two groups, McCoy and McVay were still fighting through the chop. In shape, the mass of floating bodies resembled a teardrop, with its thinnest end pointing southeast toward the tiny islands of Yap and Ulithi.
17
Almost none of the boys adrift knew anything about survival at sea. All were without sails or means to make sails. Only a few of the twelve rafts had functional paddles. No one aboard any craft had a compass. As the boys drifted through the predawn darkness, the temperature was already rising by the hour. No one knew what would happen next, yet most remained hopeful that sometime in the next forty-eight hours this unbelievable ordeal would be over. They be-lieved
that when the
Indy
failed to show in Leyte at its scheduled time of arrival the next day, search parties would be dispatched. They told themselves and one another that rescue was imminent. They told themselves they could be in Leyte in less than two days—and out of the water before that. They prayed aloud for this.
 
 
Released from the giant air bubble and coughing up stomachfuls of seawater, Private McCoy cursed and struggled to regain his wits. He knew that he was a marine, and that he was expected to be tougher than any of the raw navy kids. If he quit, what would they do?
He tied himself tightly into his life vest and tried his best to assess his situation. He figured that a distress message must have gone out from the ship, but he couldn’t imagine that planes would be arriving anytime soon. Up ahead, he could make out a life raft and decided it was a far better place to spend this Monday morning than drifting alone in his life vest. As he prepared to swim to the raft, a shipmate slid up to him, completely taking him by surprise. The boy was in bad shape. He didn’t have a life vest, and he was straddling a gunpowder can about the size of a paint bucket. It was the only thing keeping the kid’s ass off the cold ocean floor.
McCoy looked at him. “We’re gonna have to get you a life vest.”
“I know.”
“Well, we’ll just wait for something to float by.”
“Where you headed?”
“Over to that yonder raft.”
“No, you stay here,” said the boy. “They’ll be picking us up any minute.”
“Like hell.” McCoy, who wished for a moment that he’d let the kid keep believing, took off. He tried stroking
through the oil-covered sea to the raft, but the film was at least two inches thick. He could barely push through it in his sodden life vest.
Shit
. He struggled back to the boy, spitting out oil.
“I can’t make it,” the boy said.
“I see that.” At that moment, a dead body drifted out of the darkness and continued past them, as if on a mission of its own. McCoy couldn’t tell who it was; the face was smeared with oil. He paused, then gingerly reached out, pulled the corpse close, and removed the dead man’s life vest. Then he gave the body a gentle push. It sank beneath the waves and was gone.
McCoy handed the vest to the sailor, and tried to figure out the right next move. He could hear yelling from the direction of the raft; it sounded like a group of guys. “Over here, over here!” they kept shouting. “We got a raft!”
McCoy thought they sounded like they wanted company, and he didn’t blame them. As his legs dangled free beneath the surface, he felt that at any second something was about to grab at them again.
To hell with it
, he thought, and tore off his life vest and tossed it to the boy. Then he took an enormous gulp of air and started swimming.
McCoy dove deep and bobbed up every ten feet or so to breathe. He figured it was about 100 yards to the raft, but it was tough going. By the time he’d drawn close, he was gasping and nearly unconscious. His arms flailed until he finally grabbed hold of a line hanging from the craft’s side. He hung there, choking on the oil and staring at his hand, as if disembodied from it. Slowly, he watched it open and release the line. Then he began to sink.
It was at this moment that he felt somebody grab him by the hair and yank him aboard. He rolled over, vomiting, and then looked at the horrific-looking collection of boys before him. McCoy was shocked to see one man so badly burned that the skin was stripped from his arms. The boy’s pain was
so intense that no sound was coming from his open mouth as he stared up at the sky.
McCoy stuck his finger down his own throat and started vomiting again, attempting to purge his system of the fuel oil and seawater. Inhaling the oil’s fumes was as bad as swallowing it, and he worried that his lungs were going to collapse.
On the raft were four other boys, all vomiting as well. The raft itself was a six-by-ten-foot rectangle of balsa wood stretched with gray canvas. It was already wrecked. Half the bow was gone, and the wood latticework floor was in pieces. Its floor was suspended off the frame on lines that let it hang about five feet beneath the ocean’s surface. McCoy wasn’t so much sitting on the thing as he was standing up in it, his arms draped over the side.
The morning’s waves raised the broken craft about fifteen feet every ten seconds, then dropped it out from under the boys with its passing. The abrupt motion kept snapping McCoy’s head backward as if he was being punched again and again. His legs and arms ached; he felt like he’d been kicked in the chest. The waves were also making some of the boys feel seasick, compounding their oil-induced nausea. McCoy looked around and decided that he’d done a very stupid thing. This was a very bad place to be.
Nobody said anything; the screaming had stopped. McCoy couldn’t at first identify any of the boys because they were all smeared with fuel oil. He could barely remember his own name. Gradually, as he wiped the oil from his eyes, he took in the strange scene. In one corner was a tall, rawboned youth by the name of Bob Brundige, a cotton farmer’s son from Tennessee who was maybe nineteen. He silently eyed McCoy from behind his black mask of oil. McCoy simply could not bear to look at his baleful eyes.
In another corner of the raft was a thin, soft-spoken sailor from North Carolina named Felton Outland, eighteen and
one of the ship’s anti-aircraft gunners. Felton had walked off the ship without even getting his hair wet. But then, like McCoy, he’d been sucked deep underwater by the vacuum of the sinking ship—he’d nearly drowned. He was fully dressed, in a long-sleeved denim shirt and dungarees, his white pillbox sailor hat stuffed in one of his pockets. He appeared unhurt.
Also aboard the raft were nineteen-year-old Ed Payne, a farmer’s son from Kentucky, and Willis Gray, about twenty-eight, from Chicago. Payne and Gray, shivering in the pitching raft, were dressed only in T-shirts and dungarees. Both had scrambled from their bunks in enlisted men’s country and didn’t have time to fully dress before jumping off the ship.
18
“All right, loosen up,” McCoy announced. “We’re gonna get picked up in the morning just as soon as they find us missing at Leyte. Okay? So let’s keep a sunny side up to this situation!”
Outland pitched in to spread some cheer, but Brundige only grunted. Payne and Gray were busy getting sicker.
Tied to this raft were three more, each tailing the other on ten-foot lines, making a total of seventeen boys in the group. In the raft immediately behind McCoy’s was coxswain Mike Kuryla, who had also nearly drowned in the sinking ship’s suction. With every passing wave, all four rafts collided and knocked the boys against the rails, or pitched them forward on the submerged flooring, where they sunk before shooting up again, spluttering.
BOOK: In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors
4.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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