In Harm's Way

I recently finished reading the book In Harm's Way, about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis which resulted in the Navy's greatest at-sea loss of life. It happened in late July 1945, during the closing days of WWII. The atomic bomb had been successfully tested in the desert, and the Indianapolis was chosen as the ship to transport the components of Little Boy to the island of Tinian in the Pacific. The mission was highly secret, and almost no one on board knew about it. After arriving at Tinian, the Indy sailed from Guam and from there proceeded to Leyte in the Philippines. Halfway there she was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese sub, leaving close to 900 men floating in the water. Despite sending out distress signals before going down, nobody was aware of the sinking. The men were in the water for over four days before being spotted by a routine patrol. During that time, they had been steadily dying from drowning, shark attacks, dehydration, etc. By the time the rescue effort had been completed, only 317 were still alive.

The disaster was not widely known due to the overwhelming news of the atomic bombs and the surrender of Japan. The Navy, however, needed a scapegoat and found one in Captain McVay, who was court-martialed and convicted of hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag. Sadly, for the rest of his life McVay received hate-mail from families of men who had died in the sinking, and the guilt weighed so heavily upon him that he committed suicide. In 2000, he was posthumously exonerated by an act of Congress.