San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Benicia man recalls horror of WWII ship loss
Harold Bray talks slowly and carefully. He hesitates sometimes as a man will do when he reaches the age of 96. He sits in a chair in the living room of his home in Benicia talking about a wartime experience others would rather forget. He is one of a kind, the last survivor of the sinking of the Indianapolis, one of the greatest disasters in the history of the U.S. Navy.
It’s a remarkable story of war, death, survival and building a new life in the years that followed. Bray, who served as a Benicia police officer after the war, is one of the last of a generation that is passing away. Earlier this month, the Benicia Community Foundation unveiled a 7-foot-high bronze statue of Bray as he was when he was a young sailor. It will be the centerpiece of a monument to be installed in Benicia on Dec. 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“He is a hometown hero’’ said Nancy Herrera, co-chair of the foundation’s Harold Bray Project.
The story of the loss of the ship is part of Navy legend. The Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser that had participated in 10 Pacific battles, was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58 in the last weeks of World War II. Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, the ship was hit by two torpedoes and sank in only 12 minutes.
About 300 of the crew of 1,195 were killed or drowned when the ship sank — and the rest — nearly 900 men — were left adrift in the Pacific Ocean without food or water for four days and five nights.
Some died of their wounds. Some went mad, some were killed by sharks. Through errors or incompetence, the Navy did not know that the ship had been lost or that there were survivors. “They weren’t looking for us,” Bray said. “They only discovered us by accident.’’ Only 316 men survived. Over time, the others died. He’s the last one.
The experience left its mark on Bray. “I can still hear the guys yelling and screaming,’’ he said.
Harold Bray grew up in a small town on the upper peninsula in Michigan, a wintry kind of place that was his world as a boy. He was just a kid when Pearl Harbor was attacked and barely a young man when he joined the Navy at 17. “All my buddies were going,” he said. “I had to beg my father to sign so I could join.’’
After boot camp, he was sent to California, first to Camp Stoneman in Contra Costa County and then to Mare Island in Vallejo where he was assigned to the Indianapolis, then under repair at the Navy yard.
Two things impressed him: California — “I was in heaven. All that sunshine” — and the ship — “I had never seen anything that big before. She was 610 feet long.”
After repairs, the Indianapolis sailed to San Francisco and at Hunters Point loaded a large, mysterious crate. “Did I see it? Sure. I helped load it. We put it on the quarterdeck,” Bray said. “Nobody knew what was in it.’’
In fact it was the components and some uranium for the atomic bomb called “Little Boy,’’ which was dropped on Hiroshima Aug 6, 1945.
The Indianapolis sailed out of the Golden Gate and into history on July 17 on a top secret mission first to Pearl Harbor and then to Tinian island, where the bomb parts were unloaded. The ship went to Guam and then headed for the Philippines. “That whole trip was my first sea voyage,” Bray said. He smiled a small smile. “And my last.’’
That last night aboard
was unbearably hot. “I was sleeping on deck,’’ Bray said. He didn’t know what hit the ship. ‘I thought maybe we blew a boiler or something,’’ he said. But he could see the ship was going to sink. ‘Over the side, in all that floating oil,’’ he said.
He slowed a bit when talking about the ordeal that followed. He said he and about 18 others held on to a kind of net with cork floats. They had life jackets but after a while, they lost floatation.
They were drifting. Four days, five nights. There was no drinking water. “We were all kids, you know 17-18-19. Strong. At that age you think you will never die. There was one guy, I forget his name, maybe he was 30 or so. He kept saying ‘don’t drink the salt water. Don’t drink it.’ But some did and went
crazy. They said they saw islands and wanted us to swim to them. Some did and never came back.
“There were sharks. They went after the wounded guys. I got brushed once, too. One shark hit me in the chest but I pushed him away. He had a lower jaw like iron, but he went away. He didn’t come back,’’ Bray said. He paused for a second. ‘And I’m here.’’
In the end only seven or eight of that 18-man group were left.
The sailors could see planes flying over but they were too high. On the fourth day a Navy patrol plane flew lower. “We all yelled and waved,’’ Bray said. ‘But he kept going, and then he turned and came back. He wiggled his wings,’’ Bray waved his arms a bit: ‘Like that.’’
They were rescued, taken to the Philippines, told not to discuss the sinking and reassigned. Bray got shoreside duty and stayed in the Navy for a while then, impressed by what he had seen in 1945, moved to California.
“I always wanted to be a cop,’’ he said, so when he moved to Benicia he joined the police reserve, then the regular police force. ‘I was a real cop.’’
That is another, entirely different story, and Bray becomes a little more animated when he tells it.
“We had only five or six guys,’’ he said, ‘and only one police car.’’
That was long ago when Benicia was a small town, a much different town. “There must have been 20 bars downtown,’’ he said, ‘Our biggest job was breaking up bar fights on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes we’d have to throw a guy in jail to sleep it off and let him go in the morning.’
When he retired after 28 or so years as a police officer, Bray had the respect of the whole town.
So when they dedicated the statue Bray was more than the last survivor of a war. “The people all applauded,” said Stephanie Bray, his wife. “He was the star.”