USS Indianapolis: Two Captains, One Name, and a 55-Year Fight for Justice

Lee Habeeb (00:10):
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is Our American Stories. October is Italian-American Heritage Month. All month long, we’re celebrating the Italians that made this country great, from Columbus to Capra. Up next, retired naval officer Bill Toti, a proud Italian-American himself. Our story begins when Bill was working in the private sector as a network contractor, when an attack on the network occurred, resulting in a breach involving unclassified material. A government official came out publicly blaming his crew. Commander Toti picks up the story from there. Let’s get into it.

Bill Toti (00:47):
The problem with this statement was that it wasn’t true. I tried to gently nudge the Admiral into correcting his statement. When he ignored me, I not so subtly stated that if the Navy didn’t correct the record, I would do so publicly. The Admiral’s reaction was what you might expect. I was advised to keep quiet and take my lumps. Another Navy official reminded me that it wasn’t good business to blame the customer. But I persisted. It’s true that I was circling the wagons, and it’s true that companies often do so when faced with potential blame.

Although good companies that understand and practice the art of communicating in a crisis will work hard to avoid preemptively raising their shields until the facts are better understood. In this case, the facts were well understood before I took my somewhat provocative position. When a Navy friend suggested that contractors are apt to circle the wagons when bad things happen, I reminded him that the government was equally capable of circling wagons. Even when the facts are not on their side.

Newspapers are replete with cases of this happening, but one of the most egregious is the case of Captain Charles B. McVay III during World War II. It’s a gripping story. It’s one of these things where if somebody wrote it up as fiction, you would say it was contrived. But it happened. If you’ve seen the movie Jaws, you’ve heard one of the characters tell the true story of how the crew spent nearly five days in the water while enduring all sorts of hardships, including shark attacks.

Archival film clip: Quint in Jaws (02:28):
Japanese submarines slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We were coming back from the island of Tinian. We had just delivered the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. 1,100 men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger, thirteen-footer, you know? You know that when you’re in the water, Chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail. Very first light, Chief. Sharks come cruising. So we formed ourselves into tight groups.

You know, it was… kind of like old squares in a battle, like you see in a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was shark comes to the nearest man, that man, he starts pounding and hollering and screaming. Sometimes the shark go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you, right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.

Bill Toti (03:42):
The story of the Indianapolis was not in the American conscience. In fact, I didn’t know if it was true or not. I had to ask my history of sea power professor, who co-wrote our textbook with Admiral Nimitz, whether it was true or not, and we learned it was. It was a Portland-class cruiser, 1,196 men, huge crew, required a lot of men to operate those boilers. And it had a lot of guns. And, of course, every one of the guns was manually operated. So it was a huge crew. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s ship of state.

Back in the days before Air Force One, when he traveled the world, he would ride the Indianapolis. During the Battle of Okinawa, it was the flagship of the entire formation, the entire fleet. Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Army Air Forces, all commanded from this ship by Admiral Spruance. So it was a storied ship. It wasn’t that old. It was only 15 years old when it was sunk, okay? But in March of 1945, they get hit by a kamikaze actually before the landings began. Only great seamanship kept this ship from sinking. Put a big hole through the hull, through the bottom of the hull in the engine room.

They had to seal the compartments. They sealed nine guys inside the compartments who died. So they lost nine sailors. But through great seamanship, they were able to keep the ship afloat and then limp back to Mare Island. So setting the stage, July 1945, the United States needs a vessel of opportunity to transport the only uranium bomb that we had. Remember, we had not tested the uranium weapon, but we’re pretty sure it would work. But they needed a ship of opportunity to transport it to Tinian so we could load it up and drop it on Hiroshima.

Indianapolis just happened to be finishing its repairs. It was available. It was selected, it transported, actually broke a speed record for crossing the Pacific, delivered its cargo, expected to go to the Philippines, to Leyte, and that was the ship that they were going to command the landings for the invasion of Japan from. After midnight on the 30th of July, they’re about halfway between Guam and Leyte. It’s kind of dark, kind of cloudy. They had been zigzagging all day. When the clouds covered the moon, McVay said you could stop zigzagging.

A lot of second guessing going on here, as you can imagine. But the point is that we were trying to preserve fuel for the invasion of Japan. And so there’d been a speed limit of 16 knots in the Western Pacific to preserve fuel. To zigzag and get to Leyte, in the time that he was ordered to get there, he had to travel 23 knots. So he said, we might as well slow down and go straight.

Bill Toti (06:29):
Nobody could see us.

Bill Toti (06:29):
There’s no moon. Steam a straight course while it’s dark, resume zigzagging if you need to, but never got to do that because the cloud uncovered the moon for just enough time. I-58 was there, launched their attack. We’re talking about no more than 10 minutes from beginning in. Six-torpedo spread, two of them strike. The ship goes down in 12 minutes. 300 or so went down with the ship. 900 make it into the water. After they’re rescued, 316 are still alive. The commanding officer of the submarine went through his entire World War II career without ever sinking a ship until July 30, 1945, when he just chanced upon the Indianapolis.

That was the first ship he ever got to sink. Jaws created a bunch of myths. It’s wonderful that Steven Spielberg did this, but They didn’t have the internet in those days. And there was only one book published about the tragedy when the movie was made. And so the mission was so secret. No SOS was ever sent. Quint says that. Not true. The secret part of the mission ended after they dropped off the atomic bomb. They didn’t even list this as overdue for a week. They never listed them as overdue. Didn’t see the first shark for about half an hour.

They were sunk at just past midnight. It was dark. Nobody saw any sharks until the next day, until the sun came up. And the whole bit about the sharks, you know, has been overplayed. Yes, sharks were there. Yes, sharks bit guys. But most of the shark damage was to the cadavers, guys had already died. Sharks went after those. It’s not less pleasant. It’s still horrific. You’ll hear many people say sharks killed everybody who died in the water. And that’s simply not true. Many of the guys that died in the water were burned badly from the torpedo and the fires, and went into the water severely injured and died from those injuries.

But one aspect of the story is sadly true. After the war, Captain Charles McVay was court-martialed for having his ship sunk. He suffered further indignity when the Navy called the commander of the Japanese submarine that sank his ship to testify against him. McVay was convicted and endured decades of hate mail from families of those who were lost at sea during the tragedy. After all, if the Navy blamed him for the sinking, why should they think otherwise? Following two decades of public scorn and with no relief in sight, McVay took his own life in 1968.

Third-generation Navy officer, Naval Academy graduate. His dad was a four-star commander of the Asiatic Fleet. He received a Silver Star while he was XO of USS Cleveland for the battles of Kula Gulf and Kolombangara, and earned a Bronze Star while CO of the Indianapolis during the Battle of Okinawa. McVay was well-respected, well thought of, but again, a really sad story.

Lee Habeeb (09:44):
And you’ve been listening to retired naval officer Bill Totiy tell one heck of a story about not only Captain McVay, but about himself. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories with retired naval officer Bill Toti. When we last left off, Commander Toti was telling us the true story of the USS Indianapolis, the cruiser made famous in part because of the film Jaws. While the film spawned many falsehoods about the sinking passed off as fact in the eyes of the general public, one sad thing remained true.

Her captain, Charles B. McVay, had been court-martialed and convicted for the incident and eventually took his life after years of angry letters from the family members of the dead. There was one problem, though. The sinking very likely wasn’t his fault. Let’s get back to the story. Here again is Bill Toti.

Bill Toti (10:52):
One thing you should know is that whenever a Navy captain boards his ship, a watchstander announces his presence over the ship’s public-address system, first by ringing a bell and then reciting a specific phrase. In the case of USS Indianapolis, the skipper would be rung aboard with the phrase, Indianapolis, arriving… The watchstander doesn’t say Captain of the Indianapolis Arriving because according to naval tradition, the captain is the ship. So when McVay boarded his ship, he heard the same thing I did when I boarded mine. I served three tours on the submarine Indianapolis.

I wanted to serve on the Indianapolis as a junior officer because of the cruiser. And so I actually asked to transfer off of USS Omaha and go on deployment right after I was married. My wife will never let me forget this. So that I could transfer to the Indianapolis because I knew that was such a heroic name of a ship. I would, Omaha, Indianapolis, that’s the ship I wanted to be on. I was later navigator and later sent to command it. At the end of my tour, the Soviet Union had collapsed. President Clinton declared peace is breaking out all over the world.

We’ll never need submarines again. We’re going to cash in our peace dividend and decommission perfectly good submarines halfway through their life. So I was ordered to decommission my USS Indianapolis 18 years into its 35-year life. But I decided that because the World War II cruiser survivors, who I kind of got to know a little bit, never had an opportunity to decommission their ship, I would invite them to come to the decommissioning of mine. But on one condition, I… I told them, you’re gonna have to stand in formation with my crew during the decommissioning, and we’re going to decommission my submarine together. And so they

Bill Toti (12:52):
did.

Bill Toti (12:53):
35 of these guys end up coming to Hawaii, the youngest were in their 70s, standing with my crew. So that’s great, until the reception after the decommissioning ceremony these guys buttonhole me. It turns out that survivors had been trying without success for more than 50 years to exonerate their captain for the sinking of his ship. Commander Toti, you have an obligation as a captain of the USS Indianapolis. They argued that because I was a submarine captain, I was uniquely positioned to refute the 1945 charges that McVay was guilty of hazarding his ship.

The survivors also played the guilt card. I was the 10th and final captain of the submarine Indianapolis. You have a moral obligation. obligation to do something for the 10th and final captain of the cruiser Indianapolis. I owed it to my predecessor to help clear his good name. I didn’t know what I could do. The court-martial was… Once the decision to court-martial them happened, you’re captain, you’re culpable. There’s no gray areas about this, right? This isn’t civilian law here. Title 10 of the United States statutes and the responsibilities of a commanding officer of a naval vessel.

You’re responsible for everything that happens on that ship, whether you could have stopped it or not. The issue was, should they have brought it to court-martial? Once they do, there’s no choice but to convict. But what am I going to say? I had no choice but to accept their challenge. World War II heroes, these guys spend five days in the water. I’m going to say, oh, it’s too hard? Nothing’s too hard, right? I can’t do that. So I said, okay. And, you know, in truth, I was the submarine captain, right? I’m the first post-World War II submarine captain to look at the problem.

So go back to the court-martial record. He was convicted for hazarding his vessel by failing to zigzag. The only way to say this was an unfair conviction is that if I can demonstrate that by not zigzagging, he hadn’t hazarded his vessel. That’s the kind of logical flow, right? And in order to do that, you’ve got to prove that the torpedoes were going to hit no matter what. Well, that’s what the defense argued. And what can I do in 1999 different than what they did? Well, what I could do was computer modeling. So I was decommissioning my submarine, but I still had our torpedo computers.

So what I did was set up the zigzag patterns in my torpedo computers and just run what we call Monte Carlo analysis and run 100, 115 of these different zigzag patterns with the torpedo attack pattern that Hashimoto sent. And basically, I was able to demonstrate not hand-waving opinions, but quantitatively that to a probability of more than 95%, nothing would have made a difference. The salvo method of torpedo attack used by the I-58, as well as that used by every American submarine during the war, was designed precisely to defeat the zigzagging tactic.

And my analysis showed that the submarine’s attack method would have worked against the Indy in every conceivable zigzag scenario. Hence, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been zigzagging or not. One or more torpedoes would have hit. His ship would have met with the same fate. That’s the whole point of firing a spread of torpedoes. McVay was therefore truly innocent of hazarding his vessel. Having proven to myself that the Navy did indeed err in its conviction of McVay, I believed it was my duty to present this new evidence to the 1999 Navy to try to convince them that the 1945 Navy had made a mistake.

So, I published an article in 1999 in Naval Institute Proceedings magazine. That’s not the one that got me the author of the year award, interestingly. Unfortunately, by this time, there was a lot of extraneous and unhelpful noise in the ether. For example, in the late 1990s, a young boy began a campaign arguing that McVay had been scapegoated in 1945. More specifically, he purported that McVay was convicted so that attention would be drawn away from more senior folks who ran operations in the Pacific.

This effort was helpful to the extent that it brought the story to life for millions of Americans when the middle schooler’s campaign was covered on national television. Unfortunately, the boy didn’t have much evidence to back up his claims, and so it was quite easy for the Navy to dismiss them. I had real analysis proving McVay’s innocence, but it was drowned out by the preceding hubbub, and I didn’t know what to do with it. By chance, when I completed my tour as CO of Indy, I was transferred to the office of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, who then, serendipitously, was summoned to a Senate hearing to testify on the McVay affair.

At that point, I began to work behind the scenes to put actual evidence front and center in the argument to absolve McVay. And in 2000, Congress passed a resolution exonerating McVay. So, two sons. One was Charles Butler McVay IV, we called him Quattro for short, and the other one was Kimo McVay. He was gung-ho on making sure that this got done, but he dies of prostate cancer before I could tell him that I’d entered the exoneration language in his dad’s service record.

And in fact, the reason I entered the exoneration language is, once the exoneration passed Congress, President Clinton’s Secretary of the Navy, Danzig, refused to allow us to enter it in the service record. And the president didn’t care enough to order him to do it. So George W. Bush gets elected, new Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, The survivors start a letter-writing campaign. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to do this. And not only have you got to do this, but if Toti doesn’t tell us that it’s done, we’re not going to believe you lying Navy guys.

Some words to the effect, right? And so England actually didn’t know much about the story. England called me in, and I told him the story. And he said, it’s about a bunch of old men who want to be told that it’s not their fault their ship had sunk. And I said, hallelujah, somebody gets it. It’s fantastic. Yes.

Bill Toti (19:16):
And he said, do it.

Bill Toti (19:18):
And so we did. I got to enter the exoneration language.

Lee Habeeb (19:22):
The story of the exoneration of Captain McVay here on Our American Stories.