Yesterday, October 13th, the United States Navy celebrated its 243rd birthday (the Navy was established by an act of the Second Continental Congress on October 13, 1775). I am proud to have served in the Navy for 9 years (6 years active duty, 3 years reserve duty). Indeed, the lessons on leadership that I learned during my time in the Navy have remained with me to this day. I have always firmly believed that you can find a lesson in just about every experience or story, and one of the most compelling stories in the 243 year history of the Navy involved a ship named after my hometown.
I have always had a particular fascination with the USS Indianapolis. CA-35, or the "Indy" as she was affectionately known as to her crew was a heavy cruiser that was first commissioned in 1932 and served as the flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance for the United States Fifth Fleet during World War II. The story of the Indianapolis doesn't end well. When I was young, I was always fascinated by Navy ships - I can remember the first time my family and I visited the USS Alabama in Mobile (a World War II battleship that is now a museum). I asked my father if there had been a battleship named after the state of Indiana. The answer was yes, which then prompted a question about what happened to the USS Indiana after the war (she was sold for scrap, though her prow now sits at Memorial Stadium on the campus of Indiana University). Well, that wasn't particularly interesting to me then, but the story that I heard next has captivated me for my entire life.
My father told me about the USS Indianapolis and how she delivered the first atomic bomb ("Little Boy" - the one that was later dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan) from Pearl Harbor to the island of Tinian on July 26, 1945. Shortly after completing that top secret mission, after a brief interlude in Guam, the ship sailed towards Japan to rejoin the Fifth Fleet and was sunk by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945. For a number of reasons, no distress signals were sent and no one noticed that the ship was past due. The Navy didn't know that she had been sunk, so the ship's survivors drifted in the water for three and a half days before being spotted, miraculously, by a Navy PV-1 Ventura flown by LT Chuck Gwinn. The story of the survivors is particularly harrowing - in addition to the injuries that they sustained during the torpedo attack, these brave men fought dehydration, hypothermia, sunburn, and shark attacks. The survivors' story is retold in an iconic scene in the 1975 movie, Jaws by one of the main characters, Quint, played memorably by the actor Robert Shaw.
There are a number of great books about the survivors of the USS Indianapolis - I just finished the latest, Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. Shortly after the survivors were rescued, the Navy conducted a board of inquiry and court martial of the Indy's Commanding Officer, CAPT Charles McVay III. McVay was found guilty (wrongly in my opinion) and left the Navy shortly after the war ended. He never forgave himself and eventually committed suicide in 1968. Vincent and Vladic detail the story of how the ship was sunk, why it took so long to rescue the survivors, and how many of the survivors fought to restore CAPT McVay's good name. Interestingly enough, it took a sixth-grade student from Florida named Hunter Scott, who researched the story for a school history project, working with another Navy Captain, CAPT William Toti, the last commanding officer of the SSN-697 (the USS Indianapolis, a nuclear powered attack submarine) and several of the survivors to petition Congress to exonerate McVay more than 50 years after the incident.
The tale of the USS Indianapolis is a tragic one, but it is also an amazing story of survival and uncommon valor, as well as a story of resilience, commitment, persistence, and in the end, loyalty. Happy 243rd Birthday to the United States Navy!
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