On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-58. The ship was returning from a top secret mission in the delivery of critical parts (the enriched uranium) for the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, to be used on Hiroshima from a United States air base on a small pacific island called Tinian. The ship was sunk in just 12 minutes. Of the 1,196 crewmen on board, about 300 went down with the ship. The remaining crew of 880 men faced exposure, dehydration, starvation and shark attacks from oceanic white tips. Because their mission was top secret and because their failure to arrive back at their destination went unnoticed, their rescue was long delayed resulting in the loss of about 600 more men. It wasn't until survivors were finally spotted by the crew of a PV-1 Ventura that was on routine patrol that the remaining men were rescued. A PBY Catalina under the command of Lieutenant R. Adrian Marks was also dispatched to lend assistance and report. He was able to rescue 56 of the 316 men in the water. All in all, only 316 sailors survived. The USS Indianapolis was the last major U.S. Navy ship sunk by enemy action in WW II.
The non-arrival of the Indianapolis was known at once to Lieutenant Stuart Gibson who failed to investigate the matter and made no immediate report of the fact to his superiors. Worse yet is that the Indianapolis did send distress calls before they sank. Three stations received the signals but none acted upon the call. One commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and a third thought it was a Japanese prank......eerily similar to Pearl Harbor! To cover their tracks, the Navy denied that a distress call had been sent. The receipt of the call came to light only after the release of declassified records. When the ship did not reach Leyte on the 31st, as scheduled, no report was made that she was overdue.
The Captain of the Indianapolis, Charles Butler McVay, had asked for an escort for his delivery of the uranium to Tinian knowing the pacific waters were infested with Japanese u-boats, but was denied that request by the Navy. He was instructed to zig-zag instead. Captain Charles Mcvay, who had commanded the Indianapolis since November 1944, survived the sinking and was with those who were eventually rescued. In November of 1945, he was then given a court martial and convicted of "hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag". The controversy surrounding the court martial was that there was evidence that the Navy itself had placed the ship in harm's way in that McVay's orders were to 'zigzag at his discretion, weather permitting". The most egregious of all is that our country betrayed their own (McVay) by summonsing Mochitsura Hashimoto, the commander of Japanese sub that sunk Indianapolis, with a court martial to testify against McVay. Hashimoto was stunned by our country's treatment of their own. He stated that his own country would not do that to him, further more Hashimoto testified in court that zig-zagging would have made no difference.
Fleet admiral Chester Nimitz remitted McVay's sentence and restore him to active duty but McVay retired in 1949. While many of Indianapolis's survivors said McVay was not to blame for the sinking, the families of some of the men treated him with unmeasured terms of vituperation. The guilt that was placed unnecessarily on McVay's shoulders, (scapegoating by our government), resulted in his suicide in1968. Using his Navy-issued revolver, he was discovered with a toy sailor in one hand on his front lawn. How sad for this man to endure such persecution. There is nothing worse than to be lambasted by the court of public opinion. That is by far the worse sentencing to be handed down.........especially if you are innocent.
In October of 2000, the United States Congress passed a resolution that Captain McVay's record should state that "he is exonerated for the loss of Indianapolis". In July 2001, the Secretary of the Navy ordered McCoy's record cleared of all wrongdoing.
