Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the Navy's Greatest Sea Disaster

As a teenager in the early sixties I caddied for Charlie McVay frequently at the Litchfield Country Club, in Litchfield, CT. We thought then that we knew the story of the sinking of the Indianapolis, and we thought then that we knew the man who had been held responsible for the tragic loss of life, hours before the end of World War II. But it wasn't until Richard Newcomb's Abandon Ship! that any of us who knew McVay were able to understand the Admiral's profound pathos. The military's bungling, its cover-up, its stonewalling, its court martial of an innocent man, culminating in its gross miscarriage of justice, are more often the stuff of fiction. But it wasn't fiction, and Newcomb gives us every damning detail to prove it. Peter Maas provides an afterward showing how McVay was eventually exonerated, 32 years too late to save the the Indianapolis' last victim, my old friend, Admiral McVay, who shot himself to escape his grief. Abandon Ship! is for anyone who values truth, and who is engaged by tragedy.

What an awesome story! I very rarely read anything with military themes, but on a lark I picked up a copy of Abandon Ship! during a trip to the local public library, thinking I'd try it, but I probably wouldn't make it through the entire book. On the contrary, once I started the book, I couldn't put it down until I had read every word, including the afterward and the appendices, lingering over the roster of survivors. The book is a gripping and troubling tale of the loss of the USS Indianapolis to Japanese torpedos at the end of WWII, the Navy's failure to make any attempt to rescue the crewmembers for over four days, and the Navy's subsequent efforts to place all the blame for the incident on the shoulders of the Indianapolis's Commanding Officer, Charles McVay III, in order to avoid revealing the many blunders and oversights that led to the sinking and the grossly delinquent rescue effort (drunken officers ignoring SOS calls, failure to inform McVay of submarine threats, failure to track ship movement . . .) I was apalled that certain Navy brass would be so nonchalant about the Indianapolis's situation and that certain Navy brass compromise all integrity by punishing McVay for a trumped-up nonsense charge of failure to steer a zigzag course, in order to keep their own naval records unblemished. Even more unthinkable is the fact that the Navy called an unwilling but necessarily cooperative Commander Hashimoto, the captain of the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis, to testify against McVay at his courtmartial. The book ultimately hints that the courtmartial of Captain McVay was an act of Admiral King, who was using the courtmartial of McVay to seek revenge against McVay's father, Admiral Charles McVay II, who had formally reprimanded King for an incident involving bringing women into unauthorized spaces when King was a junior officer under the senior McVay's command. As an added bonus, the 2001 edition of the book contains a foreward and afterword that discuss the efforts of Hunter Scott, a schoolboy who took on the task of exonerating Captain McVay as a school history project aftrer hearing about the incident in the movie Jaws. I recommend this highly to anyone who thinks that miltary brass always does the right thing. Many do, but the handful that do not can cause one to lose all faith in the system. Fortunately, a young schoolboy was able to vindicate Captain McVay four decades after the incident.

At the back of this book is the list of men that survived not only the sinking of The Indianapolis on July 31st 1945, but also the days of suffering that followed. 316 men survived, which represents 26.4% of the crew. All the survivors agree that the majority of the crew safely evacuated the ship. If the number that reached the water was 850, only 37.1% survived the four and one half days they spent in the water. The men who survived, and how they and the tragedy were treated are the subject of this book, "Abandon Ship", by Mr. Richard F Newcomb.The survivors represented 40 of the then 48 States of The Nation. It is not much of a stretch to say that the nearly three fourths of the men that died would complete the list of 48 States, Native American Reservations, and possibly other locales as well. As this is the largest loss of life from a single ship, it may also be unique in that families in every single State were affected, I don't know this, I am making a presumption. I have often read of this ship when the subject of its cargo was raised. For this book, and the men that died and lived, what it carried is meaningless relative to their ordeal. To use this issue to glorify or to denigrate the sacrifice of these men is equally obscene, and misses the point.This is a book about human nature at its most brilliant, and its most pathetic. It is a story of a crusade that survivors carried on until the spring of 2000, the story of a 9th Grader who was integral to their efforts, and the bureaucracy that lobbied 55 years after the sinking to minimize any blame they deserved. The part of the Navy that is obsessive about placing blame as far from the top as possible appears to still be in working order. A few years ago a gun turret exploded on a battleship with loss of life, who was to blame, the easiest scapegoat they could find.I mean no disrespect to The Navy as a branch of armed forces that have defended us for hundreds of years. This is not about the "Navy" the institution; this is about the Navy as headed by insecure, politically paranoid, career bureaucrats. You will read of a four and one half day length of torture that is nearly unimaginable. Hundreds of men, many wounded, with virtually no food or water, and sharks and other flesh-eating creatures sharing their space. Reading about men, who wore life preservers that slowly drowned as the 48-hour useful life of the device ran out, is painful. What follows is even worse.The moronic policies, the preoccupation with placing blame on the most irrelevant of players, and the 55 year odyssey to clear the Captain's and the crew's name, is nauseating at its best. That after half a century the Navy was still more concerned with its history than the truth, is whatever comes after nauseating.The Captain took his own life in 1968 about an hour from where I write. The Navy had so vilified him that the letters accusing him of murder that continued for decades must have become too much. Only 134 of the original c

This account of the loss of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945, is a book that will tear you apart. I had an overwhelming sense of empathy as the author takes us thru the awful ordeal that 1196 souls (not, for pity's sake, 8000, as an earlier review has it) on the ship went thru when the torpedoes struck just after midnight on that fateful day, just two weeks before the war ended. While close to a thousand survived the sinking, only 316 survived the ordeal that followed before rescue. Chills went up my spine as I rejoiced with those suffering men when it fianlly became clear that they would be rescued. This book cannot be read dry-eyed, and you will remember it long after other reading you have done has faded from memory. (The book lists the survivors. I wish that the publisher had added a list of the non-survivors, tho I have noticed there is a website with a complete list of the men aboard that fateful and horrendous night.) This is as compelling an account as I have read for a long time.

It is amazing that after each of its disasters the military hirearchy immediately looks for a scapegoat. We have seen this time after time and it seems to be standard procedeure for our military leaders. This book is in the realm of the Kimmel writings, it is the story of a disaster and the search for and conviction of a scapegoat. Those responsible never seem to be taken to task. In this instance an Admiral with a personal vendetta against the accused's father, and a former hero of a submarine disaster who withheld information that would have prevented this catastrophe. This is a must reading for those who believe that justice must be served. It is too bad that the recognition of this event and its aftermath have come so late. It is too bad that the Naval Department still refuses to recognize fully the injustice that it did to a true war hero and his family. It is a superb book.