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[[newspaper clipping]] WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 1995 ^[[The News-Sentinel Page 1]] END OF THE WAR SHIP'S SURVIVORS LIVED ON HOPE But no one knew the USS Indianapolis was missing [[image - color photograph of Donald Beaty holding two black and white photographs of the USS Indianapolis and the ship's crew]] [[photograph credit]] By BRIAN TOMBAUGH of The News-Sentinel [[/photograph credit]] [[caption]]Fort Wayne resident Donald Beaty was one of 316 men who lived to tell the grisly tale of the torpedoing and sinking of the USS Indianapolis, 50 years ago today. He holds a photo of the ship and a group picture of the survivors.[[/caption]] [[image - black and white photograph of Nancy Nall]] [[caption]] Nancy Nall Telling Tales[[/caption]] Fifty years ago today, in the waning days of World War II, Donald Beaty was a Hoosier boy far from home in the South Pacific, serving on a ship with a Hoosier name - the USS Indianapolis. Beaty didn't know the war was about to end, although it had moved a comfortable distance away from the Indianapolis' position. So far away, in fact, that Beaty certainly didn't know, or even suspect, that he and his ship were sailing into the worst U.S. naval disaster in history. The torpedoing and sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and the subsequent ordeal suffered by the 316 men who survived, has been grist for six books, on play, several television documentaries, a made-for-TV movie and an upcoming theatrical release, "Fatal Voyage." Many Americans might remember the story best from Robert Shaw's dramatic (and, unfortunately, somewhat inaccurate) monologue about the catastrophe in the movie "Jaws." Next week, the Indianapolis' fate will be remembered again, at the dedication of an official memorial in its namesake city. Fort Wayne's Donald Beaty will attend with his family. So will about 150 of the remaining survivors, as well as families of the 880 men who didn't survive the sinking and its terrible aftermath. This is what they will remember. *** The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis begins in San Francisco, The 610-foot heavy cruiser and its crew of 1,196 men had seen plenty of action with the Fifth Fleet in the course of the Pacific war; Beaty had fought in eight engagements in the two years he'd been stationed abroad. But the ship had never been gravely threatened until a Japanese kamikaze pilot flew a suicide mission into the ship's fantail during the battle of Okinawa. The attack ruined two of the ship's four propellers and sent the Indianapolis into a San Francisco dry dock for repairs. When the crew returned from a brief leave and prepared for a new voyage, "they loaded this box," recalled Beaty. "It was no bigger than that davenport. But is had a Marine guard on it 24 hours a day." No one knew what was in the box, although ship scuttlebutt had it the Indianapolis was carrying "a secret weapon," Beaty added. "I couldn't imagine what kind of secret weapon might fit in a box that small. If anyone had told me it was an atomic bomb, I wouldn't have had any idea what they were talking about." See SURVIVORS, Page 6A ^[[166]] [[advertisement]] COMING UP Two special sections on the end of World War II. [[image -black & white photograph of an atomic bomb blast]] Friday, Aug. 4: Hiroshima & Nagasaki [[line]] Friday, Sept. 1: The surrender of Japan [[/newspaper clipping]] [[end page]] [[start page]] END OF THE WAR: THE USS INDIANAPOLIS [[line]] SURVIVORS: They lived on hope they'd be found From Page 1A It was a secret weapon, and it was an atomic bomb, or at least the parts for one. The uranium and detonators for Little Boy, to be exact, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima a few weeks later. The Indianapolis received orders to sail for Tinian Island, near Guam, on the morning of July 16 - hours after the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated at Los Alamos, N.M. Speed was of the essence; there would be no three- or four-day shakedown cruise typically taken after a major repair. The Indianapolis cast off at 8 a.m. Beaty recalls a speedy by uneventful voyage to Tinian, with one brief stop at Pearl Harbor for fuel and supplies. the mysterious box was off-loaded and the Indianapolis continued on to Guam. There the crew was given orders to meet the rest of the fleet at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines for gunnery practice; the sailors were anticipating a far different end game for this war. "We thought we were going to be invading Japan," Beaty said. The Indianapolis set out for Leyte under fairly relaxed security. "The war was hundreds of miles away," Beaty recalled. "These were considered relatively safe waters. We were traveling without an escort." Heavy cruisers like the Indianapolis didn't carry underwater sounding gear, relying on destroyers for that sort of protection. But even though there had been a few reports of enemy submarine sightings in the vicinity of the ship's route, they were fairly indefinite, and no one took them very seriously. The fleet command decided it would be safe for the cruiser to make the run to Leyte alone. And so it was that the Indianapolis happened to be steaming across the South Pacific between Guam and the Philippines on the night of July 29 just before midnight. It was a hot night, and most of the ship's main deck hatches and ventilation ducts were open for comfort. This would not be normal procedure for travel in dangerous waters, Beaty said, but again, they had no reason to believe they were in any particular danger. But they were. More than five miles away, they'd been spotted by the Japanese submarine I-58, commanded by Mochitsura Hashimoto, a man who knew the war was limping to a close, a denouement that would leave him without a single confirmed kill to his credit. The son of a Shinto priest, Hashimoto had been praying for an enemy craft to cross his path; he wanted a sinking to offer the emperor. His prayers were answered. The submarine dove while Hashimoto waited for the Indianapolis to come closer. Consulting with his officers, he determined he very likely had a battleship in his sights - a prize indeed. As it came within range, he fired six torpedoes in a fan pattern at the Indianapolis. Beaty had just gone on his watch topside, on the boat deck. He and another sailor were manning the radar shack when they heard two explosions, one right after another. "I thought it had to be something in the boiler room," Beaty said, so convinced was he that the ship was far from its enemy. Then he ventured to the rail and looked over the side, and saw, "a hole big enough to drive a truck through." The Indianapolis started listing "almost immediately," and Beaty and his crewmate went directly to a life jacket station, where other crew members were already passing out jackets. He then headed for the ship's high side, but found the list was so p ronounced that he couldn't make it: "I saw men hanging on the life lines, but it was so steep I couldn't get to them." The ship had been mortally wounded by two of Hashimoto's torpedoes, one striking the bow and the other near a powder magazine and fuel oil bunker. This triggered an explosion that knocked out the ship's electrical power and set off secondary explosions and fires. The ship's forward speed continued, though, sending tons of seawater in through the holes in the hull. With so many hatches and ducts open, the ship filled with water in minutes. Without electricity, without communications, burning and in chaos, the Indianapolis began to founder. No "abandon ship" order was given ship-wide, but officers began ordering men near them to do so. Beaty didn't hear one; he decision for him was exquisitely simple. As he struggled to reach the ship's high side, "I turned around, and there was the ocean. I just slipped into the water." He began to swim frantically through the debris around the ship. A ship the length of two football fields doesn't slip gently beneath the waves; the smokestacks create a whirlpool to suck in the lone swimmer, and Beaty wanted to be as far as possible from the cruiser when she finally went down. "I looked back, and she rolled on her side," he remembered. "I could still see men clutching the rail, silhouetted against the sk. And then she rolled over. The bow went down first, and I could see the screws. The last thing I saw of it was the fantail." It was right around midnight. The Indianapolis had sunk in less than half an hour. Between 350 and 400 men went down with the ship, an estimated 880 spilled into the water, some horribly burned or wounded. Beaty was unscathed. "We ended up in groups," he said. "I was in a group of about 300, I'd estimate. The first thing we did was order everyone to be quiet, because sometimes the sub would surface next to you and you'd be machine-gunned." Indeed, Hashimoto's crew looked for survivors, but found none and left the area. The next order of business was to put the worst of the wounded - the bleeders - onto the handful of lifeboats that they were able to free from the Indianapolis in the chaos. "We didn't want anyone bleeding into the water, because of the sharks," he said. "But there were only three or four boats in our group." The rest of the men floated free or clung to "floater nets" - 20-foot square nets rimmed with cork. When the sun came up Monday morning, the group organized. They had no water, and only a few tins of biscuits. Their group had a doctor and a dentist, and a few radio operators who said they thought they might have gotten a distress signal off, although they weren't sure. They didn't even know how many of them there were; the survivors were spread over several miles of ocean and from the vantage point of the waterline, in the rising and falling ocean, they could only see the area immediately around them. There was nothing to do but wait. Rescue would surely come soon, the men thought, but they were wrong. No distress signal had been received. An encoded message sent by Hashimoto to his command, claiming credit for the sinking, was intercepted, analyzed and dismissed as an attempt to find out the position of a ship by goading the Americans into "proving" it was unharmed. Continued on Page 7A -> [[advertisement]] Paralegal Open House Monday August 7th, 7:00 p.m. * Comprehensive Evening Program * Internship Program and Ongoing Placement Assistance * Taught By Experienced Attorneys * Financing Available if Qualified * Classes Held Locally at: Concordia Theological Seminary Call: 1-800-624-3933 For Reservations or Free Brochure American Institute for Paralegal Studies, Inc. 17515 W. Nine Mile Rd., Suite. 225 Southfield, MI 48075 This institution is regulated by: The Indiana Comission on Proprietary Education, 301 West Washington St., Rm. 201, Indianapolis, IN 48204, toll free number: 1-800-227-5695 or 317-232-1320. [/advertisement]]
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