TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY
I have an incredible story for you this morning. Ultimately it has to do with the true nature of forgiveness. It’s just that it takes a somewhat circuitous route to get there. Thus, I invite you to sit back – get comfortable – and encounter one of the most startling stories to come out of World War II. It’s a story that probably should have made front-page news, yet somehow it failed to do so. Listen closely just the same.
At 4:00 a.m. on July 16th, 1945, Hunters Point Dock in San Francisco, California is a quiet, deserted place, and it strikes many of the crew of the USS Indianapolis as odd. Usually Hunters Point Dock harbors some 15 ships, but tonight it’s like a graveyard. The Indianapolis is a heavy cruiser designed to bombard enemy placements on land and blow enemy aircraft out of the sky. She’s 610 feet long – a floating city with enough weaponry to lay siege to San Francisco. She’d been at Mare Island Naval Yard for two months for repairs. Four days earlier, however, this respite had been abruptly terminated by orders that the Indianapolis set sail immediately.
From out of the fog, two army trucks thunder to a stop, and a detachment of armed Marines steps out. The canvas flaps at the rear of the trucks are parted to reveal a black metal canister and a large wooden crate. A cable from a crane aboard the Indianapolis snakes down above the crate – which is secured with straps, lifted skyward, and set upon the hangar deck. The crate is then placed under strict guard by the Marine detachment.
The canister, meanwhile, is taken aboard by two sailors, who carry it up the gangway suspended from a metal pole. It’s secured to the deck in Admiral Raymond Spruance’s cabin, then padlocked. (The Admiral is in Guam, planning the invasion of Japan.) Accompanying the canister are Major Robert Furman and Captain James Nolan who introduce themselves as artillery officers. In reality, Nolan is a radiologist and Furman is an engineer engaged in top-secret weapons development.
The captain of the ship gives the order to get the Indianapolis under way. At about the same time, on an expanse of desert in New Mexico, a tremendous flash fills the morning sky. It’s an explosion of staggering magnitude and the aftershock knocks men off their feet five miles away. It’s the first explosion of an atomic device in the history of the world.
Inside the crate sit the integral components of the atomic bomb known as Little Boy. Packed in the canister in the admiral’s cabin is a large quantity of uranium-235, totaling half the fissile material available to the United States at the time. In three weeks, the bomb will be dropped on Hiroshima. At 8:00 a.m. the captain of the Indianapolis clears the harbor and sails past the Golden Gate Bridge into the nuclear age.
The Indianapolis sails from San Francisco to Tinian Island in the Philippine Sea – a journey of 6214 miles. After unloading their precious cargo, they sail toward Guam, about 140 miles away, to receive more routing orders. They’re told to sail from the Marianas Frontier to the Philippine Frontier. The captain is told that conditions along his proposed route are normal, even though Japanese submarines are known to be in the area. In fact, three days earlier, the USS Underbill had been sunk by a torpedo, killing 119 men. On July 28th, the USS Indianapolis sets sail into a sea the captain thinks he understands.
Sixty feet below the surface of the Pacific, in the submarine I-58, Lieutenant-Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, the son of a Shinto priest, frets. Incredibly, during his four years at sea, he has yet to sink an enemy ship. He’s erected a shrine aboard the sub and he prays to it for his luck to change.
Suddenly, about 10,000 yards away, Lieutenant-Commander Hashimoto sees something up ahead – a blur on the horizon. He can’t believe his luck! He orders the sub to attack depth and creeps ahead at a quiet three knots. He’s studying the approaching vessel through the periscope, but he can’t make out what type of ship she is. Realizing a kill shot will be difficult from head on, Hashimoto swings the sub around and falls into position to meet the ship broadside. From this angle, he can see that it’s a warship – a huge one. It’s the Indianapolis, headed for the Philippine Frontier.
One eye pressed to the rubber cup of the periscope, he gives the order to fire. Each torpedo carries 1210 pounds of explosive – enough firepower to level a six-story building – and Hashimoto releases six of them, at three second intervals, in a widening fan of white lines.
While the torpedoes race toward the Indianapolis, her crewmen are playing poker, reading paperback novels, making coffee and sleeping. Marine Private Giles McCoy – remember that name – Marine Private Giles McCoy, only 19 years old, is guarding two prisoners down in the brig.
At about 12:02 a.m., the first torpedo blows an estimated 65 feet of the bow skyward. The explosion sends a plume of water lit from within by red streamers of flame 150 feet into the air, showering the men on deck with foaming sea water, fuel oil, and burning shrapnel. A second torpedo hits below the waterline and careens through a powder magazine and a tank filled with thousands of gallons of fuel. This explosion is massive. The Indianapolis seems to pause for a moment, like a huge beast struck between the eyes, and then she continues plowing ahead at 12 knots. With her bow gone, she begins scooping up seawater by the ton. Already, 100 men are probably dead and the Indianapolis is listing to starboard. She has very little time left and those aboard have even less time in which to decide their fate.
The captain gives the order to abandon ship. As many as 500 men are massing at the port rail near the stern, and they begin jumping, screaming as they drop 30 feet into the sea. The ship’s angle is now lifting propellers Number 3 and Number 4 out of the water – and Number 3 is still running. Some of the men drop into the massive, spindling blades and are cut to ribbons.
After jumping, the men are scattered in a jagged line that will eventually stretch for 20 miles. A vast, poisonous blanket of black fuel oil pours from the ship’s ruptured hull and spreads across the water. It coats and clogs the men’s eyes, ears and mouths – eating away at the sensitive membranes. As they drift, many of them are in shock, and nothing is visible of their blackened faces except the whites of their eyes.
As the Indianapolis sinks, distress signals are sent. These messages are sent out repeatedly by two men in a pair of radio rooms filling with smoke. Somebody – somewhere – should be receiving them. In fact, four U.S. vessels will receive S.O.S. messages from the Indianapolis, and none of them will take any conclusive action to determine their accuracy. That’s because Japanese forces, hoping to draw out helpless rescue vessels, have regularly broadcast bogus distress signals. Thus, no one comes to help.
Marine Private Giles McCoy – remember him? – desperately attempts to swim away from the ship. As the 10,000 ton Indianapolis sinks completely, it lets out one last tremendous explosion. McCoy gets sucked under water and blacks out. He comes to moments later as he feels himself rushing back toward the surface. He’s caught in a giant air bubble that eventually lifts him three feet out of the water. He returns to a dismal world of screaming men.
Coughing up seawater, Giles McCoy makes his way toward a life raft. A body drifts out of the darkness toward him. McCoy can’t tell who it is, but he pulls the man close and cuts off his life vest. The corpse sinks beneath the waves and is gone.
As Private McCoy stares into the darkness, he spots something on the horizon. He thinks it’s a rescue ship. He pulls out his pistol and fires two shots in the air. Then he realizes he’s not looking at a rescue ship. It’s the Japanese sub, prowling the kill zone. Throughout the war, it’s been the practice among Japanese sub commanders to machine-gun a sunken ship’s survivors. The sub circles the area for half an hour, but when the risk of being discovered by a destroyer seems too great, the I-58 takes off. Assuming he has sunk the ship, Lieutenant-Commander Hashimoto orders up a celebratory meal of boiled eels and potatoes for his crew. Little does he know that in seven day’s time, the members of his family will be vaporized by a new kind of weapon…a new kind of weapon called the atomic bomb.
The crew of the Indianapolis who remain alive are convinced that rescue can only be a day or two away. At 10:00 a.m. the following morning, they unexpectedly drift free of the oil slick and beneath them the ocean lights up like an enormous green room. The relief from the stinging oil is instant. But then the sharks arrive in frenzied schools.
“You know how a bobber on a catfish line floats on the surface above the bait and runs when a fish hits?” Seaman John Bullard will later recall. “The last time I saw this one fellow, his head was running like a bobber. A shark had hit him.” Of the men adrift in life vests, those who thrash end up dying, and those who play dead survive.
Subtler forces are also taking their toll. At this near-equatorial latitude, the Pacific is a steady 84 degrees – warm by most ocean standards – but still cool enough to induce hypothermia. Dehydration and dementia are also setting in. Then men start to hallucinate.
On Thursday, August 2nd – four days after the Indianapolis was sunk – a 24-year-old Navy pilot accidentally discovers the remaining crew. Rescue vessels are sent. Out of a crew of over 1200, only 321 men survived.
The following week, the Enola Gay drops Little Boy on Hiroshima and 120,000 people are annihilated. President Truman later steps into the Rose Garden to announce the surrender of Japan. The effect is simple: Either by design or by happenstance, the Indianapolis disaster is buried under the headlines announcing America’s victory.
Remember Marine Private Giles McCoy? He became a physician to dedicate his life to something good. In Hawaii, in 1990, on the 49th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he met Lieutenant-Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Hashimoto, of course, commanded the sub that sank the Indianapolis. Through an interpreter, Dr. McCoy managed to say to Hashimoto, “I forgive you.”
Hashimoto replied, “Well, I forgive you, too.”
“Forgive me for what?” shot back Dr. McCoy.
“Tell Dr. McCoy,” Hashimoto answered through his interpreter, “that I came from Japan to be with him, to pray with him for the losses I caused on the Indianapolis. And I ask him to pray with me for the losses I suffered at Hiroshima, because I lost my whole family in the bombing.”
There are two sides to every story, aren’t there? Forgiveness is a two-way street. Let us keep that in mind when we finally find ourselves big enough to forgive our transgressors. For its altogether possible that they have suffered just as much as we have. Amen.
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