A Fate Worse Than Death... Pt. 2

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No worries.

Double dog.

Hey, let's try to get some shabby.

I bet ladies already got shifts coming to get us.

It'll probably be by the time we wake up.

You watch?

You say so, Clanker.

God damn, Japs might just come back and kill us all before they get here.

Nah.

They're long gone by now.

Well, I'm gonna nod off.

You guys take first watch.

Keep an eye for those chaps.

Aces,

I've had enough treading water without you kicking me.

Knock it off, will you?

Sorry, sorry.

That wasn't me.

Yeah.

Knock it off just the same.

It was Monday evening, July 30th, 1945.

By sundown, less than 24 hours after their ship had been sunk by a Japanese submarine, The surviving men of the USS Indianapolis, stranded in the water, began feeling something bumping against their legs and feet.

Nudges and kicks, which, in the dark, they mistook for the other men swimming and huddling around them.

Having so far survived a harrowing ordeal, feeling comforted by the hope that a rescue was on the way, as they nodded off to sleep that second night on the water,

few

would have wanted to know what would happen at dawn the next morning.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories

by Tuesday morning, the sharks were attacking.

In truth, the attacks had likely begun the very same night the Indianapolis had sunk, as sharks were known to closely follow ocean-going vessels for days, feeding on the refuse that was thrown overboard.

They had likely spent the first night and following day devouring the bodies of the dead as they fell to the ocean floor.

before the blood of the wounded and thrashing sounds of the surviving men likely drew their attention back to the surface.

One sailor awoke that Tuesday morning, half-tired, shivering in the cold water.

He tried nudging his buddy next to him to wake him up.

When his friend didn't respond, he pushed him harder.

To his horror, his friend's torso then tipped backward like a grotesque child's toy and floated away.

His friend had been eaten in half during the night, right up to the hem of his life vest.

In growing horror, horror, looking down at the crystal water below them, the men soon realized they had been surrounded by hundreds of swarming sharks.

Makos, tigers, white-tips, and blues, 10, 12, some of them perhaps even 20 feet long.

Survivors would later recount that they never knew fear like that, feeling sheer terror as their bare feet literally walked on the backs of these massive predators.

Any men separated from the larger group began disappearing below the water with a blood-curdling scream, other times without a word.

An empty life vest would suddenly splash back to the surface, the straps now shredded.

Other men were dragged across the surface of the water at waist level, screaming until they were finally pulled under.

The men covered their ears, trying to remain calm, trying to muffle the erupting terrified screams of their friends and fellow shipmates around them.

Optimism was replaced with a sense of helplessness.

No longer were they concerned about being rescued.

They just wanted to survive the sharks.

Some men just seemed to give up.

Others attempted to fight, to fend off the sharks by hitting them or slashing at them with their pocket knives.

Some sharks were bold enough to swim right up into the midst of the groups of men on their floating nets.

Survivors later recounted these sharks cleared the surface of the water with their charges, tearing the limbs off of thrashing men as they surfaced, the water quickly growing dark with blood, starting a frenzy in the water below.

And then, just as quickly as they began, the attack stopped.

The horrible gray shapes slowly circling below, dropping away once again

into the gloomy darkness.

By late afternoon on Tuesday, life for these boys had gone from horrific to unbearable.

If not killed by sharks, those who were injured, broken arms, legs, or spines, had gone into shock and died.

Others died from exhaustion.

Still others began killing themselves, giving up hope for survival and accepting what they believed was their fate.

Their shipmates watched in horror as they calmly untied their life vests, took a single stroke away from the group, and let themselves sink.

without a word.

Some just fell face forward into the water until they drowned, their friends pulling their heads back out by their hair and screaming at them to try and bring them back to their senses.

Others swam away from the group, waiting for a shark hit.

Then they would look up at the sky in a kind of terrified satisfaction when it happened.

And then they were gone.

The water around the men became a floating morgue, bodies and pieces of bodies floating by, arms, legs, half-eaten torsos.

The sharks would inevitably continue to return, often repeating their frenzied attacks in low-light conditions.

It became a terrible rhythm over the following days.

The sharks would attack each morning at dawn, then feeding on the wounded and dying throughout the day, and again feeding on the living during the twilight hours of the night.

The few life rafts they had managed to release from the ship came equipped with a meager amount of food supplies, including cans of spam.

Those men sitting above the water in rafts managed to find some nourishment, rationing their spam in pitiful slivers.

Those floating in the water, however, were a different matter.

When one group in the water began opening their spam cans to distribute amongst themselves, the smell of the meat set the sharks into another frenzy.

Dozens more men were bitten and killed.

The cans of spam were quickly abandoned.

Planes passed overhead regularly, the men thrashing and trying to get their attention.

but their thrashing only further enticed the sharks.

And flying above at thousands of feet, the men stranded below were impossible to see, even if the pilots were searching for them, which Captain McVeigh knew they were not.

And then, aside from hunger, there was the thirst.

Those who had a small amount of fresh water stored on the life rafts tried rationing it.

Three ounces in the morning, three in the afternoon.

Mercifully, over the next few days, rain clouds would infrequently pass overhead.

With nothing available to catch the rain with, the men could only cup their hands or open their mouths to try and catch as much fresh water as they could.

But if the black oil on the water around them was swallowed along with the rainwater, they would immediately begin vomiting the precious water back out of their stomachs.

It simply wasn't enough.

Increasingly dehydrated, men began gasping for air.

Their kidneys were shutting down, their hearts racing as the water in their blood diminished, reducing its volume and causing their blood pressure to drop.

Their tongues swelled inside their mouths, turning hard and dry.

Their throats squeezed shut, making it difficult to breathe.

They became increasingly lethargic, their muscles cramped painfully, their heads spinning.

The temptation to drink the seawater in front of them became unbearable for many.

One of the ship's medics, Dr.

Haynes, watched in horror as the men around him suddenly began dipping their bleeding lips into the seawater, drinking it slowly at first, and then gorging themselves on it.

He began swimming among them, trying to bring them back to their senses, screaming at them and punching at their faces to make them stop, knowing they would die if they continued.

They ignored him, staring back at him with glazed eyes as they drank.

Finally, the exasperated doctor gave up, realizing he could do nothing but float and watch, stealing himself for the coming insanity.

Some men made efforts to gather the dog tags from those men around them who were drinking the seawater, knowing they would soon be dead.

Soon enough, they began losing their minds, screaming, thrashing, whooping, and hollering, even appearing to be dancing and twirling in the water in violent fits before collapsing into a coma.

Men seen drinking seawater were now quickly pushed and shoved away from the main groups, left stranded by themselves to thrash and scream before the sharks took them.

Some men hallucinated seeing islands in the distance or ships, ignoring their friends' pleas and swimming out away from the group.

Reaching maybe 25 to 30 yards away, they issued a final blood-curdling scream before likewise disappearing.

Another freezing night passed, the quiet darkness rent with screams as the sharks once again fed on the living.

The men huddled closer together as the temperature plummeted.

It was so cold, they began announcing when they had to urinate, so others could gather around them for a brief moment of warmth.

By Wednesday morning, more screams began issuing from within the huddled groups, but these were not just screams of pain.

The men had started killing one another.

Deranged from dehydration and salt poisoning, they became violent, believing even their friends around them were Japanese soldiers.

They lashed out at them, stabbing each other with their pocket knives.

Those without knives were seen gouging each other's eyes out with their fingers or trying to drown the closest breathing thing they could reach.

Within minutes, an estimated 50 boys were killed.

Even without killing each other, by this third day, men were dying in droves.

At just 12 degrees north of the equator, the heat above the water was merciless.

The sun baked their heads and exposed skin, the sun's glare burning their eyes each time they opened them.

Their own eyelids began to feel like sandpaper dragging over their inflamed corneas.

The men did what they could, tearing strips from their clothing to tie around their eyes, blinding themselves for the sake of saving their eyesight.

Those within reach of it began smearing the acidic black oil on their pained faces and skin, which did offer a notable amount of protection from the sun's radiation.

Treading water became increasingly painful.

Extended exposure to the salt water, like mild acid, had caused painful ulcers in their joints and armpits.

Probing bacteria and microorganisms in the water likewise gnawed away at their tender flesh, their body hair even dissolving off of parts of their skin.

In his group, despite the bleak outlook, Captain McVeigh continued to maintain order, breaking up fights and calmly reassuring his men that their chances for survival were still good and that rescue was likely to take place by the next day.

And so they waited.

More drownings, more shark attacks, more hallucinations.

Some men could swear that they could see their sunken ship was steaming toward them on the water's surface.

Others started exclaiming they could see the ship drifting peacefully underneath them in the clear green water.

In their delirium, some among them tried diving down to attempt to reach the ship and find fresh water on board.

They were never seen again.

The sweltering heat turned once again into another freezing night, the silence marred by the screams of the wounded and dying.

Even after nearly four days, no one within the American Naval Command had yet realized the Indianapolis had been sunk.

The few hundred men that remained alive were running out of time.

Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

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This damn thing.

Damn it.

Yeah, it's good enough out on the hold.

All right, Calwell.

Go ahead and start her up.

Roger.

This damn island.

Let's get the hell out of here.

This heat is killing me.

It was now Thursday, the 2nd of August.

At 0900 hours that morning, Lieutenant Wilbur Chuck Gwynn had managed to repair his aircraft's damaged long-range antenna, landing briefly on the now American-held island of Pelelu.

His repairs complete, his Lockheed PB-1 venture bomber taxied down the runway, rising through the sweltering heat, the blackened and battered island dropping behind him as he directed his aircraft onto his designated course, a patrol and recon flight over the Philippine Sea.

Flying at only 3,000 feet, he was much lower than most transitory planes would be flying this route, allowing for closer observation of the water and the spotting of enemy ships and submarines.

In addition to his reconnaissance mission, he had also been tasked with testing out a new type of long-range antenna.

The problem was, the weighted sock attached to the end of the antenna kept breaking off mid-flight.

Gotta be kidding me.

Hey, Captain.

Yeah, go ahead, Hartman.

Sock fell off that new antenna again.

Yeah, I hear it.

Damn thing.

Can we make do without it?

Well, our long-range comms won't work.

We need that for our navigation, sir.

It'll be hard to dead wreck away out here over open water.

Ah, hell.

Man, I'd hate to run out of fuel way out here.

There's sharks in these waters.

Start reeling a wire up, Hartman.

I'll see if I can't jerry-rig it with something heavy.

Damn, experimental antenna.

Why do we have to be the ones they asked to test out?

Wait a sec.

What is that?

An oil slick.

Johnson, yes, Captain?

Come here.

Moving to the rear of the plane to attempt to secure the rogue antenna, he glanced down through the plane's belly and spotted something on the water.

A reflection of light.

A flashing glimmer.

An oil oil slick.

Having no word of an American ship being down in the area, he knew the only other alternative must be a Japanese submarine was in the water below, possibly damaged and leaking oil.

Returning to the cockpit, he began preparations for a bombing run.

Dropping down to 900 feet, he ordered the bomb bay doors open as they passed over the oil slick.

Alright, Johnson.

Get ready to drop on my mark.

Standing by, sir.

Almost there.

Wait.

Is that?

Captain, there's men down there.

Yeah, I see them.

I see them.

Aboard, Johnson, aboard.

We got men in the water.

But whose are they?

Although Lieutenant Gwynne had no idea whether they were Japanese or American, the men of the Indianapolis had finally been found.

His mission now shifting from search and destroy to search and rescue, Lieutenant Gwynn and his air crew circled around, dropping a raft and what supplies they had down into the water, along with packets of orange dye to mark the positions of the men they could see.

He counted an estimated 150 men, unaware that more than twice that number were still alive, but spread out over 25 square miles of ocean.

Radioing back an urgent report with his coordinates, the command channels around the South Pacific became rife with confusion.

Clearly, nobody had realized the Indianapolis had been sunk, her absence in Leyte having been disregarded.

Without any word to the contrary, the ship was assumed to have been rerouted to another destination.

Precious minutes ticked by as as command elements scrambled to make sense of who these men were and follow their established protocols.

With a limited amount of his fuel remaining, a second plane was quickly dispatched from Pelelu to replace Lieutenant Gwynn's plane in the air over the rescue site.

Although still unsure of the men's identity, rescue ships were deployed from Leyte Harbor.

However, with 650 miles of ocean to cross, it would still take them more than 20 hours to reach the men in the water.

Another Navy plane, a PBM-5 passing through the area, spotted both the oil slick and Gwynn's plane circling below.

By mid-afternoon, more planes arrived.

These planes likewise dropped their provisions of survival gear and supplies, the air crewmen horrified at the number of sharks they saw circling the survivors down below.

Flying his PBY-5A Catalina over the site, watching as the men below were attacked by sharks and dragged onto the water, Lieutenant Adrian Marks knew that every second meant lives.

Without waiting for permission, he brought his sea craft down on top of the rolling ocean, a daring risk.

Sure enough, the landing was hard, popping the aircraft's seams and countless rivets as she hit the 12-foot waves.

The plane was too damaged now to take off from the water, but with the propeller still spinning, Marks and his crew taxied the waters, pulling as many men up into the aircraft cabin as possible before nightfall.

They squeezed 56 men inside before running out of room, Lieutenant Marks then asking the men to begin climbing out onto the wings to make room for more.

And yet, another 50-odd men died in their efforts to reach the plane, either drowning from exhaustion or taken by sharks.

Meanwhile, the USS Cecil J.

Doyle, a destroyer escort ship on patrol just offshore of Pelelu, was now sailing at full speed to the area, the ship's crew still uncertain of who, or what, they were being sent to pick up.

B-17s and B-29s sent to the rescue site were dropping rafts, food, and water kegs onto the water below, doing their best not to drop them on top of the men.

Many of the water kegs unfortunately burst on impact.

Darkness fell once again.

Amid the rescue efforts, the sounds of painful screaming continued to sound across the water.

A light on the horizon near midnight marked the approach of the Cecil Doyle.

Against regulation, the ship kept her searchlights on.

Captain Claytor knowing it would make his ship an easy target for enemy subs, but also aware that the light would give give hope to the men in the water, as well as help prevent the ship from running into the survivors.

An hour after the Doyle's arrival, the USS Bassett arrived, its captain less willing to risk exposing his ship and ordering her spotlights turned off.

His crew defiantly kept the lights on anyway, ordering their increasingly irate captain off of the bridge to remain confined in his quarters.

Another nine ships would eventually arrive over the following hours, scouring the wider area in search of as many groups of survivors as they could find.

Even when being rescued, those men with the strength to fight still drew their pistols on the approaching rescue boats, demanding their rescuers first identify themselves.

The rescuers witnessed true horrors, burdened with the difficult task of selecting which among the unconscious survivors were still alive, to pull into the Higgins boats, and which they had to push away.

leaving them for dead.

As they pulled at their arms and torsos, the men screamed in agony, their skin so pickled by the seawater it was now easily separating from their bone and muscle.

To avoid hurting them, the rescuers did their best to lift them by their remaining pieces of clothing and life jackets.

Some came aboard with the flesh of their feet completely dissolved away, the bones of their toes now exposed.

Some of the men they pulled out of the water were lighter than the others, the rescuers horrified when they pulled up the torso of a still living and breathing man, his lower half having been eaten away by sharks.

Some rescuers risked their own lives, jumping into the shark-infested waters to drag the exhausted survivors closer to the rescue boats.

Some among the survivors even refused to be rescued in their delirium, even jumping back off of the rescue boats into the water, saying, I'm going home.

We don't need you.

In all, of the original 900 that made it off of the Indianapolis before it sank, Only 316 men survived long enough to be rescued.

Of these remaining survivors, much to the tragic frustration of the rescuers, more than half of these 316 men later died after they were rescued, before they could reach adequate medical attention.

After dropping them off at the nearest American installations, the ships returned to the area looking for more survivors, finding only decomposing bodies and the stench of death on the water.

Some bodies were recovered, the rest being given a ceremonial burial at sea.

As the surviving men lay in hospital beds in Guam over the following months, by late August, pictures of an atomic explosion over the Japanese city of Hiroshima were being passed around.

The men now realized what their ship had delivered to the island of Tinian months earlier.

With these images, soon came the news from September 2nd, 1945.

Japan had surrendered unconditionally.

The war was over.

As news of the loss of the Indianapolis finally made headlines around the country, families still unwilling to believe their sons had died were given firm assurances by the Navy that no hope could be had in finding any of the missing men.

As the surviving sailors and Marines recovered from their injuries and were returned home to their families, they were no less appalled to discover that their beloved captain, Captain McVeigh, the man who had suffered the same horrible fate on the water that they did, and yet continuously encouraged his men and gave them hope for survival, he was now being court-martialed by the Navy.

The court primarily blamed the sinking and ensuing deaths of the crew on two things.

First, the assertion that Captain McVeigh failed to issue proper abandoned ship orders in a timely manner, which included the implied failure to send out a distress message.

And second, the hazarding of his ship by by his failure to zigzag.

But as his men would attest, the torpedoes had heavily damaged the ship's communication systems.

Captain McVeigh was unable to effectively communicate with his ship, and he otherwise did issue abandoned ship orders in a timely manner to the best of his ability.

And although the radio shacks were flooded by the time he reached them, the surviving radio operator who had transmitted an SOS message, Jack Minor, testified in his captain's defense, assuring the court that a message had been sent, whether or not it had had been received.

In a controversial move, even the I-58 Japanese submarine commander, Mochitsura Hashimoto, was flown from Japan to the United States to testify in the trial.

Hoping to use him in favor of the prosecution, Commander Hashimoto embarrassed the Navy by arguing in defense of Captain McVeigh, explaining the angle of his attack and his release of six torpedoes in a widening fan formation.

I expected this, he told the court.

I sent six torpedoes to counter these evasive maneuvers.

It was an easy target.

He could not have escaped me.

In agreement with Hashimoto, further testimony from an American submarine commander, Glenn Donahoe, made the prosecution's case falter when he stated that zigzagging as a defensive maneuver was of negligible value.

Commander Hashimoto further indicated that had the torpedoes failed, he had several Khitan ready to launch next, a torpedo version of a kamikaze aircraft.

The sinking of the Indianapolis, he said, was inevitable.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, Captain McVeigh was acquitted on the charge of failing to properly issue abandoned ship orders.

However, even against the tremendous support of his surviving crew members, the testimony of Commander Hashimoto, along with these other witness testimonies, on December 19th, 1945, the Navy convicted Captain McVeigh of hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag.

Commander Hashimoto stated himself that he was intended to be a puppet for the court to use against McVeigh, that his translator repeatedly changed what he had said, and that the final decision was highly unjust.

However, there is even more to Captain McVeigh's conviction than what has been made known by most accounts because of the Navy's deliberate efforts to conceal this following information for decades afterwards.

He wasn't court-martialed for hazarding his ship.

He was court-martialed for sinking it.

The hypothetical question posed to the court was whether or not Captain McVeigh would have been court-martialed at all if he hadn't zigzagged and then arrived safely in Leyte, having never encountered the Japanese submarine.

The answer to this is, of course, no.

He would have never been court-martialed for failing to zigzag his ship if the ship had never been sunk.

Buried in the prosecution's trial notes, the true nature of McVeigh's court-martial was discovered decades later.

Regardless of the Navy's repeated public attempts to lessen the appearance of an unjust conviction, they had in fact convicted Captain McVeigh of sinking his ship, as if to say he himself was primarily responsible.

More than 350 American ships had been sunk during the war, and yet Captain McVeigh was the only captain to be court-martialed.

Like many among the frustrated survivors who supported their captain's innocence for decades afterwards until their deaths, even Commander Hashimoto never wavered from his opinion that this was an unjust decision.

Such is the politics in the armed forces, some would say.

Captain McVeigh was in no way at fault for the sinking of his ship or the death of his men.

That alone rests with Commander Hashimoto.

But the delay in the ship's arrival to Leyte was given little attention, with respective naval commands presuming the ship had been rerouted and then ignoring her continued absence while the surviving men were being eaten alive.

If not for Lieutenant Gwynne flying overhead, the U.S.

Navy's collective negligence may well have resulted in the death of all of these men, and this story would never have been told.

Many among the surviving crew of the Indianapolis believe it was the failures of many senior-ranking officials that resulted in the sinking of their ship.

But who better to be the scapegoat than their captain?

Following the Navy's decision to convict him, bereaved by the loss of their sons, their husbands, and their fathers, families of the lost men would spend years sending hate-filled letters to Captain McVeigh.

His wife and children would do their best to intercept these letters, but they simply could not stop him from reading all of them.

According to his family, each letter he read destroyed him.

Beginning in 1960, the surviving men and their families found some amount of comfort and healing when they once again found themselves in the company of their fellow shipmates.

Although clearly reluctant to attend, Captain McVeigh was present at this first survivor's reunion, and he was surprised after all of these years to find that his men still welcomed him as their beloved captain.

He was overcome with emotion as they stood and saluted him in unison as he entered the room.

Over the following years, the survivors would continue to cope with their grief and torment through their attendance to these annual reunion events, but they couldn't help noticing their captain's repeated absence.

Sadly, combined with an overwhelming sense of guilt, the burden of the tragedy weighed too heavily on Captain McVeigh's mind for 23 years.

In early November of 1968, on the front steps of his home in Litchfield, Connecticut, Captain Charles McVeigh ended his own life with his service pistol.

For the rest of their lives, the surviving men of the USS Indianapolis struggled through each day to cope with the trauma they experienced.

It would come back to them often, perhaps when simply taking a drink of cold water, or their wives waking them up from their thrashing and screaming.

During this time, more of the Indianapolis crew would unfortunately follow follow after their captain, as they simply could not escape from the haunting memories of this tragedy.

And despite its historical significance, the story of the USS Indianapolis went under the radar for decades, being excluded from the history books, unknown to generations of Americans, really not until the movie Jaws made reference to it.

On the 32nd anniversary of her sinking, on July 30th, 1977, a third U.S.

naval ship, a submarine, was launched, later commissioned in 1980 with the name of the USS Indianapolis.

Following her decommissioning ceremony in 1998, this submarine's captain, Captain William J.

Tody, was approached with a bold request by the attending survivors of the 1945 sinking.

Finally, after 60 years of fighting the Navy to resend their decision to convict Captain McVeigh, Captain Tody and the remaining survivors petitioned the U.S.

Congress.

With the help of a 13-year-old boy from Pensacola, Florida, Hunter Scott, along with his school history project on the story of the Indianapolis, the attention of Republican Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire was captured.

The case was brought before the Senate months later in 1999.

Despite major setbacks and resistance from the Navy and at the risk of his own career, Captain Tody broke legal guidelines by providing sealed testimony to Senator Smith, the information needed to alter the Senate's view of the matter and to correct the Navy's final decision.

And so, on October 30th, 2000, Captain Charles McVeigh was posthumously exonerated by the 106th Congress and President Bill Clinton.

Although his sentence was not remitted and permanently remains on his naval record, he was officially declared innocent, free from any culpability with regard to the sinking of his ship.

Along with the remaining survivors now in their aging years, even Commander Hashimoto lived long enough to celebrate the exoneration of Captain McVeigh.

Hashimoto died only 13 days after receiving this good news.

Several years later, in 2005, Hashimoto's daughter and granddaughter would be invited to attend a memorial event to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Indianapolis' sinking.

Although nervous at how they would be received, the American survivors welcomed these two women like family.

They have continued to be welcomed back and have attended many of the annual reunions.

Many believe that these men set an example of what it means to be proud of your country, to fight for freedom, for survival, and for justice, to fight with honor and to forgive.

To the men of the USS Indianapolis, to their families, and to those impacted by this tragedy and the many others like them,

we wish you nothing but fair winds and following seas.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Acascio, and Whitlaca.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stiddum.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone, production coordination by Avery Siegel, additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden, artwork by Jessica Cloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartime stories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.