[WaPo] Just 34 days before the end of World War II, a U.S. Navy cruiser was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sunk in the Philippine Sea.The USS Indianapolis had been the ship of state of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and had just delivered core components of the Hiroshima-bound atomic bomb "Little Boy" four days earlier.
After unloading her top-secret cargo at Tinian and then making a quick stop in Guam to await further orders, the crew of the Indy were soon bound for the Philippine island of Leyte, unaware that their location had just been discovered by an enemy submarine.
A Japanese sonar man had picked up on the sound of rattling dishes in her kitchen from some six miles away. The submarine began stalking her through the water until it was close enough to engage.
The sub’s commanding officer, Mochitsura Hashimoto, gave the order to fire six torpedoes into her side at 12:04 a.m. on July 30, 1945. Two of the torpedoes hit their mark, and it took the Indy just 12 minutes to capsize and sink, forever entombing some 300 of her 1,195-man crew 18,044 feet beneath the surface of the moonlit water.
For the next five days, the nearly 900 sailors who had survived the sinking found their numbers whittled down as crew member after crew member fell victim to saltwater poisoning, drowning, delirium and shark attacks. Only 316 survived the horrific ordeal...
Their collective rescue took about 24 hours to complete — leaving some survivors in the water for five harrowing days. One of the discovered clusters of men included the Indy’s captain, Charles McVay...
Despite the nightmare he’d just experienced and survived at sea, McVay soon found himself in a different kind of fight — this one with the United States Navy.
The Navy had bungled many things regarding the Indianapolis and knew it: It denied McVay the escort he’d requested for protection while traveling through enemy waters; it did not respond to any of the distress signals sent from the Indy that listed her coordinates in the final moments of her sinking (the Navy has since disputed receiving any distress signals, though multiple servicemen claimed to have received them); it did not recognize or report that the Indy had not arrived at Leyte when she was scheduled to; and it had provided McVay with an incomplete intelligence report...
"The conviction meant that of the almost 400 U.S. captains whose ships had been sunk during the war, McVay was the only one to have been court-martialed," Stanton said. Indeed, he was the only captain in the history of the Navy to be court-martialed for the loss of a ship sunk by an act of war.
That distinction stayed with McVay for the rest of his life as he endured anguished letter after anguished letter ("Hate mail," Indy survivor Granville Crane Jr. later called it), from the families of the fallen sailors whose deaths had been blamed on him. "He read every letter he received and took them all personally," Stanton said.
In the end, McVay took his own life on Nov. 6, 1968, with a gift from his father of a toy sailor clutched in his hand....
Congress voted to exonerate McVay on Oct. 12, 2000. Hashimoto died 13 days later....