Why did the Capt. of the USS Indianapolis take his own life?

Question

Why did the Capt. of the USS Indianapolis take his own life?

Answer 1

Remembering the USS Indianapolis

By: Dawn Caminiti 11/14/2003

Earlier this week people around town and across the state and the country gathered to pay tribute to veterans on Veterans Day, Nov. 11. It is a day to honor the men and women who fought for the freedoms of this country.

But for one boy in Florida, a single fall day each year wasn't enough to honor the men who had become heroes to him. Instead, Hunter Scott spent the better part of his early teenage years working to right a wrong committed against the captain of the USS Indianapolis: Charles B. McVay.

Captain McVay committed suicide at his Litchfield area home Nov. 6, 1968, decades before Mr. Scott began a quest to clear his name. But the story of the USS Indianapolis, the incredible ordeal of its 317 survivors and the unjust treatment of its captain lives on in Pete Nelson's book "Left for Dead," appropriately released on Veterans Day this year.

The sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the ship on a secret mission that was delivering an atomic bomb to Tinian Delady-the military move that reputedly ended World War II- was overshadowed by Japan's surrender. The ship was struck by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine (the I-58) just after 12 a.m. Aug. 1 and went down two weeks before the war ended. Almost 900 men died as a result.

Captain McVay, along with 316 other survivors, spent four days in shark-infested waters waiting to be rescued.

Mr. Nelson's book describes Captain McVay's last moments on the ship: "Captain McVay was walking upright on the side of his ship as the bow went under, and a wave of water came and washed him into the sea. He swam. He watched as the fantail rose 200 feet in the air. He saw his men jump, and he watched them fall to their deaths. A man falling 100 feet into water might as well be landing on concrete. The Indianapolis paused a moment, then slipped into the sea, straight down, picking up speed, with another two miles to fall before she reached the bottom. Men covered in fuel oil wiped their eyes to look for their ship, but there wasn't a ship anymore. They kept looking, but there was only the darkness, the black sky and the endless sea.

"It took twelve minutes. Shorter than halftime at a football game, but enough time to kill about 300 men and put the rest in the water, roughly 880 men scattered 600 miles west of Guam, 550 miles east of Leyte and 250 miles north of Palau Islands, the closest land."

Hundreds of men in the water died from burns, shark attacks, exposure to the sun and salt water, hypothermia and dehydration. Many suffered delusions, believing the ship was still afloat or that there was an island in the distance with hula girls offering cool drinks, according to Mr. Nelson.

By the time the remaining survivors were spotted on Aug.3 and rescued the next day, only 317 men remained.

In December following the end of the war, the Navy court-marshaled Captain McVay and found him guilty of failing to follow a zigzag course-a maneuver used to evade torpedo attacks from the enemy-and putting the ship in harm's way.

Captain McVay spent the last 23 years of his life tormented by the grief of losing his ship and the hundreds of men who perished with it before he killed himself on Nov. 6, 1968.

In his book, Mr. Nelson wrote: "The gardener had found the body in the front yard. The bullet had entered McVay's skull on the right side. His .38-caliber service revolver was in his right hand. He held his house keys in his left hand. Attached to the key chain was a small toy sailor, a gift he received as a boy that he'd carried as a good-luck charm. He died a few hours later in the hospital."

Survivors of the tragedy worked unsuccessfully to clear their captain's name, even after they received news of his suicide.

In 1996, Hunter Scott, only 11 at the time, made the sinking of the USS Indianapolis the subject of his history project and began the historical crusade to bring honor back to Captain McVay and his ship.

He sent letters to the 154 remaining survivors and, through research and interviews, he was able to piece together the events that led to the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. As the story unfolded, the injustice done to Captain McVay became more apparent. What started as a history project for school, became a mission to clear the name of Captain McVay. He worked with survivors and Captain McVay's children to collect more information.

Honolulu resident Kimo Wilder McVay is Captain McVay's son. Kimo McVay has worked for many years to reverse the court martial judgement, and has credited the young Florida student for his hard work to reverse the decision.

In 1998, Mr. Scott joined forces with Representatives Julia Carson from Indiana and Joe Scarborough from Florida, as well as lobbyist Mike Monroney. Together, they began constructing legislation that would declare the court-marshal was "not morally sustainable" and that McVay's conviction was a "miscarriage of justice."

The resolutions passed in the Senate and House in October 2000. The following April, the U.S. Navy announced it would offer the crew of the USS Indianapolis a Navy Unit Citation.

In a written statement issued in 1998 regarding the investigation of Charles McVay, Congressman Neil Abercrombie reportedly said, "Captain McVay was the victim of a serious injustice. Looking back from the perspective of 53 years, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he was singled out as a scapegoat. The failure to warn him of the presence of enemy submarines in the area and the failure to launch an immediate search as soon as the ship was overdue tend to bear this out. Charles McVay was an honorable and capable officer. Anyone who doubts it only has to ask the Indianapolis survivors. Captain McVay deserved better from his country. So do his family and the sailors who lived through this tragedy."

Along with the fascinating and heartbreaking story of the Indianapolis and her crew, the book contains photographs of crew members and the ship, as well as young Hunter Scott at the USS Indianapolis memorial and with veterans who survived the attack. T

he book is published by Random House Books, and is available online at www.randomhouse.com/teens, or in bookstores.



©The Litchfield Enquirer 2008

Answer 2

hello. I do not know why, except that he had delivered the Atom bombs for 'dropping' onto Japan, that ended WW2. a personal crisis, he had. good luck with knowing.

Answer 3

There is a book on the Indianapolis but I can't recall its title.  The ship was torpedoed and many of the crew spent days in the water and were killed by sharks.  the captain was blamed under the CYA rule, it seems.

But he took it without complaint.  He made the mistake of marrying a socially prominent woman who used him as a trophy but treated him in a demoralizing way, according to the book.  The captain had lost out to the two things he had depended on for respect.  You have to be good to become a Navy captain.

    The book is in the true crime genra.   the Indianapolis tragedy is mentioned in the first Jaws movie.

Answer 4

Captain McVay

A 1920 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Charles Butler McVay III was a career naval officer with an exemplary record whose father, Admiral Charles Butler McVay II, had once commanded the Navy's Asiatic Fleet in the early 1900s. Before taking command of the Indianapolis in November 1944, Captain McVay was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the combined chiefs of staff in Washington, the Allies' highest intelligence unit.

The USS Indianapolis had just completed a Top Secret mission, delivering parts of the "Little Boy" atom bomb that was later to be dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. She was en route to the Phillipines On July 30, 1945 when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine at 14 minutes past midnight.

An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; 900 were cast into the ocean. Because of the Top Secret classification of the mission, no distress signal was made from the doomed vessel and no search party sent.

As the men regrouped into clutches of around 100 - 150, they knew they were in trouble. Though the water temperature in that part of the South Pacific was relatively warm (around 72 degrees Fahrenheit), they had no food, no fresh water, and few had life preservers. The sun was hot and soon caused painful sunburns. At night, the air temp dropped into the 50s. A survivor later wrote:

"So the day passed, night came and it was cold. IT WAS COLD. The next mornin the sun come up and warmed things up and then it got unbearably hot so you start praying for the sun to go down so you can cool off again."

So the men were cold, sunburned and waterlogged. Then the sharks arrived. On morning of day two the sharks attacked the men from below; men who were getting tired and sagging under the surface were their targets. The sailor's screams grew more and more frequent over the next days as hypothermia, hyperthemia and sunburn overcame them. Some had started drinking seawater and hallucinating that the ship was still ok - they swam down to it to get fresh water and were attacked.

To add to the men's frustration and misery, planes had been flying over the region every day. Not one had spotted them until day four when a seaplane pilot looked down in time to see a huge oil slick. On his second flyby (with bomb bay doors open and ready to drop depth charges in case of enemy craft) he saw the survivors. He called his home base and set in motion one of the largest rescues in Naval history.

It took a week for the total search area to be combed and for crews to be identified. By the time the rescue was done, all but 321 men had lost their lives.

Captain Charles McVay was court-martialed for "hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag". The Navy even brought Mochitsura Hashimoto, the commander of the Japanese sub that fired the torpedoes, to testify against McVay. Though Hashimoto swore that he would have sunk the ship whether or not the Indianapolis had taken action, Captain McVay was convicted. In 1968 he committed suicide.

In 1976, the movie Jaws brought the USS Indianapolis back in the news. In the film, the student (Richard Dreyfuss), the sheriff (Roy Scheider) and Captain Quint (Robert Shaw), a gruff old sea dog, had this monologue based on the disaster:

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin' back, from the island of Tinian Delady, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer.

You know, you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. Well, we didn't know. `Cause our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like `ol squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo.

And the idea was, the shark would go for nearest man and then he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces.

Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, bosom's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist

Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He'd a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

For years, the Indianapolis' survivors have sought to clear Captain McVay's name. There have been letters and publicity urging the conviction be expunged from his record.

On November 24, 1999, less than a year before his own death, Mochitsura Hashimoto wrote a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

I hear that your legislature is considering resolutions which would clear the name of the late Charles Butler McVay III, captain of the USS Indianapolis which was sunk on July 30, 1945, by torpedoes fired from the submarine which was under my command.

I do not understand why Captain McVay was court-martialed. I do not understand why he was convicted on the charge of hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag because I would have been able to launch a successful torpedo attack against his ship whether it had been zigzagging or not.

I have met many of your brave men who survived the sinking of the Indianapolis. I would like to join them in urging that your national legislature clear their captain's name.

Our peoples have forgiven each other for that terrible war and its consequences. Perhaps it is time your peoples forgave Captain McVay for the humiliation of his unjust conviction.

Mochitsura Hashimoto

former captain of I-58

Japanese Navy at WWII

On July 13, 2001, thanks to the hard work of the families and survivors of the disaster, Captain McVay's record was finally amended to exonerate him for the loss of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the lives of those who perished as a result of her sinking.