Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History...
(Simon & Schuster, $28)
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945 has been a disaster long clouded by controversy, said Terry Hartle in CSMonitor.com. Just days after delivering the uranium that soon would be used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the flagship of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet was torpedoed in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945. Most of the 1,196 men on board survived the sinking only to die in the shark-infested waters before rescue crews arrived four days later. Seeking to assign blame for the deadliest sea disaster in the service’s history, the Navy hastily court-martialed the ship’s captain, despite evidence that the fault lay higher up. Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic’s new best-seller is “as complete an account of this tragic tale as we are likely to have.”
“There’s enough in this tale for several movies,” said Jacqueline Cutler in the New York Daily News. The Indianapolis had won critical engagements at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but when the ship was sent on its final delivery mission, the officers and crew were kept in the dark about the nature of their special cargo; one sailor joked that it could be Douglas MacArthur’s toilet paper. Navy intelligence failed to warn the ship of the risk of submarine attack after the delivery, and when the Indianapolis was torn open by two Japanese torpedoes, no immediate help was sent, said Tony Perry in the Los Angeles Times. Among the hundreds of men who surfaced, acts of bravery were common. But there were also hallucinations, murders, cannibalism, even rape. The sharks arrived early, and by day four, the dead far outnumbered the 316 who lived. As the authors write, “It became almost impossible to move around without having to shoulder through shoals of corpses.”
The final third of Vincent and Vladic’s remarkable book eviscerates the Navy’s case against the ship’s commanding officer, said Ben Wilson in The Times (U.K.). At his court-martial, Charles McVay was found guilty of failing to zigzag—even though the commander of the Japanese sub had testified that zigzagging wouldn’t have helped. McVay, dogged by guilt, eventually committed suicide. But history buffs later took up his cause—including an 11-yearold boy who learned of the Indianapolis through the movie Jaws, contacted every survivor, and built a case that helped win McVay a posthumous exoneration in 2000. You expect such denouements in the movies. This book offers as many twists and turns, but it’s also “naval history writing of the highest order.”