(actually torpedoed and sunk July 30, 1945, but not announced until President Truman reported Japan's surrender on August 14)
Cruiser Sunk, 1,196 Casualties; Took Atom Bomb Cargo to Guam
Special to The New York Times
Washington, Aug. 14--The American heavy cruiser Indianapolis was sunk by enemy action in the Philippine Sea with 1,196 casualties, every man aboard, the Navy announced today.
The 9,950-ton ship left San Francisco on July 16 on a special high-speed run to deliver essential atomic bomb materials to Guam. The cargo was delivered. The cruiser was lost after having left Guam.
The sinking, which took one of the Navy's heaviest tolls of lives since Pearl Harbor, was disclosed a few minutes before President Truman announced Japan's surrender.
Casualties included five Navy dead, including one officer; 845 Navy missing, including sixty-three officers; 307 Navy wounded, including fifteen officers; thirty Marine missing, including two officers, and nine enlisted Marine wounded. Next of kin have been notified.
The skipper, Capt. Charles B. McVay 3d, 47, of Washington, was wounded.
The Navy Department also reported for the first time that in a previous action on March 31 the Indianapolis, flagship of the Fifth Fleet, was damaged by a suicide plane off Okinawa. She had been at the Mare Island, Calif., Navy Yard for repairs just before she left on her last mission.
In that attack, Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, commander of the Fifth Fleet, was aboard but escaped injury. He had just completed a week of attacks on the Japanese home islands and was directing a pre-invasion bombardment of Okinawa beach defenses.
A Kamikaze [suicide] pilot, emerging from a cloud 2,500 feet up just after dawn, power- dived for the flagship's bridge. Piercing 20-mm. anti-aircraft fire, the flier released his bomb about twenty-five feet above the deck and crashed his plane on the port side of the deck aft.
The bomb went through the deck armor, ripped through a table around which several men were breakfasting, shot through the crew's living quarters and the fuel tanks and exploded in the water after having passed through the bottom of the ship.
The concussion blew two holes in the cruiser's bottom. Nine men sleeping in a compartment were killed and several others in the mess hall injured.
The ship, though crippled, remained watertight except for the damaged area. Leaving the formation, she headed for a home port and repairs. Admiral Spruance and his staff transferred to another ship.
The Indianapolis, a 10,000-ton "treaty ship" authorized by the Congress in 1929, was commissioned in 1932 in Philadelphia. She had a colorful career before the war, having been host twice to President Roosevelt. Aboard the Indianapolis, former Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson made his inspection tour of the Pacific in 1933.
At the time of Pearl Harbor the Indianapolis was carrying out simulated bombardment of Johnston Island, 500 miles south of Hawaii. Her first combat was in the Battle of Bougainville.
After that the ship followed the Pacific war into every area and traveled with fast carrier task forces that struck Tokyo.
In only three or four other ship losses has the Navy in this war suffered more casualties than in the sinking of the Indianapolis. The Arizona, hit by the Japanese in the Pearl Harbor attack, which precipitated the war, was lost with more than 2,000 casualties, 1,104 of them dead. The carrier Franklin was seriously damaged off the Japanese coast last spring with 1,072 casualties--341 dead, 431 missing and 300 wounded. The cruiser Houston, which "vanished" in the costly Java Sea battle in 1942, is believed to have had a complement of more than 800 men aboard.
Twin Blasts Consume Ship By Wireless to The New York Times
Peleliu, Palau Islands, Aug. 5 (Delayed)--After a tremendous double explosion, believed caused by one or two torpedoes fired by an undetected Japanese submarine in a moonlit sea, the Indianapolis sank within fifteen minutes near Peleliu just past midnight July 30 [East Longitude date].
The 315 survivors were picked up 100 hours and more later after an unparalleled battle with the sea in which the only armor for most of the men were kapok lifejackets and courage. At least 200 lost the battle and drowned, some insane from exhaustion and the effects of sea water, sun and thirst. The remainder went down with the ship.
The ship's commander, Captain McVay, son of a retired admiral, was saved by one of the rescue vessels summoned to the scene when a Navy plane on routine anti-submarine patrol happened to sight some of the men in the water three and a half days after the ship had gone down. Captain McVay was one of the fortunate few in a life raft; the vessel sank so rapidly that only six rafts were released in time.
The Indianapolis was traveling without escort. This had been her frequent practice, and the men aboard were in the habit of saying to each other, three-fourths in jest, that "some day she was going to get it."
And "Get it she did," a haggard survivor, his skin blotched with the great running scabs of "immersion ulcers," remarked grimly today.
Planes, Ships Scour Area
Once the rapidly dwindling parties of survivors were sighted kicking and waving frantically to attract attention in the glassy sea, every plane and every ship available in the vicinity was ordered immediately to the scene.
The planes were loaded with rafts and other life-saving gear, medical kits, food and water, which they tumbled from their bomb bays.
One seaplane landed on the water, which by then had become rough with heavy swells, and taxied among the men who had no rafts, picking up fifty-six. Some of these men were so badly burned, both by the explosion in the ship and by the sun, that when helped aboard the plane the seared flesh on their arms shredded away in their rescuers' hands.
Besides injuries suffered aboard ship in the enormous blast, some of the men had pneumonia, some were afflicted with temporary blindness caused by the intolerable glare of sun on water, against which they had no protection until their eyelids were cemented together by gummy secretion.
A great many of those not on rafts had hallucinations, in which they imagined they were drinking cool water or milk--hallucinations from which they emerged to find they had actually been drinking seawater, which caused further discomfort, insanity and often death.
Many men participated in a weird mass delusion that the hull of the Indianapolis and its cool drinking fountains were just beneath them under the water and slipped from their life jackets after having fought off clear-headed companions who tried forcibly to dissuade them, dived and were seen no more.
Others, returning from solitary exploration of the empty sea, seriously reported mythical islands where hospitable Seabees or, frequently, beautiful native girls, poured tomato juice. At this dozens would swim off joyously to the never-never land--and not return.
Contributing to the horrid torture of the thirst-maddened men in the water was the frequent sight--and this was not imaginary--of planes on search or transport missions. Although some of the aircraft passed close, the preoccupied pilots and crews did not notice the wildly gesticulating specks in that immensity of blue water.
Once there were blinking lights, as if two ships were signaling each other. At these, and at a clearly visible night-flying planes on other occasions, the despairing swimmers flashed what lights they had, and Captain McVay in his raft fired Very rockets that lit the sky. But only the swollen red eyes of the men in the water saw.
The Indianapolis had just completed a record run from Mare Island when she set out from Hawaii.
Overdue 60 Hours
By Wireless to The New York Times
Guam, Aug. 14--It was learned today that a court of inquiry had been convened to investigate the loss of the Indianapolis which was sixty hours overdue at Leyte before rescued survivors revealed that the ship had been sunk.
