Captain, Once a Scapegoat, Is Absolved
By DAVID STOUTJULY 14, 2001
Fifty-six years after the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis in one of the most horrific events in American naval history, the ship's captain has won a measure of vindication.
The Indianapolis sank about 12 minutes after it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on the night of July 29, 1945. About 300 of its crewmen were dead within minutes. Some 900 other men, including the captain, Charles B. McVay III, leaped into the sea.
Floating in the Pacific Ocean under a broiling sun, delirious from thirst, nearly 600 died over the next four days. Many were killed by sharks. By the time a patrol plane found them, just more than 300 were still alive. One was Captain McVay, who was court-martialed soon after the war and found guilty of endangering his vessel by failing to steer a zigzag course to avoid torpedoes.
Captain McVay was stripped of some seniority, although Navy Secretary James Forrestal lifted the sentence because of Captain McVay's bravery in combat before the sinking. He was promoted to rear admiral upon his retirement in 1949. But he never really recovered from his ordeal, and he shot himself to death in 1968.
Many people, including survivors of the Indianapolis, have defended him over the years. They say that just before it was torpedoed, the cruiser had carried a top-secret cargo -- the final components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
The cruiser left its cargo on Tinian, an island in the Western Pacific, and was on its way to the Philippines when it was attacked. Captain McVay's defenders note that he had been given discretion -- not ordered -- to steer a zigzag course and had done so for a time, and that he had been advised there was little threat of enemy submarines.
Some historians, citing documents declassified years later, have attributed the slowness of the rescue to the secrecy surrounding the atomic bomb mission. Some have suggested, too, that senior Navy officers knew there might have been a Japanese submarine in the area but did not warn the cruiser out of fear of disclosing that the Navy had broken Japan's naval codes.
Senator Robert C. Smith, Republican of New Hampshire, whose father was killed in a Navy plane crash near the end of the war, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, who formerly headed the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushed for an exoneration of Captain McVay. Congress passed a resolution absolving him last fall.
This week, Navy Secretary Gordon R. England ordered that a memorandum reflecting the Congressional resolution be put into Captain McVay's file. (Technically, the Navy itself is powerless to nullify the court-martial findings, Mr. England said in a letter to Senator Smith.)
Giles McCoy, a survivor of the Indianapolis, told The Associated Press that Captain McVay ''was not guilty of anything except the fortune or misfortune of war.''
One of Captain McVay's defenders was Mochitsura Hashimoto, commander of the Japanese submarine that attacked the Indianapolis. He testified at the court-martial that the torpedoes would have found their mark even if the Indianapolis had been zigzagging.
On Nov. 24, 1999, a year before his death, Mr. Hashimoto wrote to Senator Warner.
''Our peoples have forgiven each other for that terrible war,'' he said. ''Perhaps it is time your peoples forgave Captain McVay for the humiliation of his unjust conviction.''
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