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 - Review

I first learned of the horrific tragedy that befell the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, like so many others of my generation, via the memorable and chilling speech that was delivered by Quint (Robert Shaw) in Jaws. 

As hypnotic and vivid as that speech is, it contains two glaring inaccuracies. One can be forgiven and waved away. The other, not so much...

First is the matter of there being no distress signal sent. While the damage those torpedoes did to the Indianapolis was massive and catastrophic, an SOS signal was sent out before she sank. But this SOS did not contain the ship's identification or her position. Because all shipboard communication was non-operational, thanks to the damage sustained. By the time the distress message that did contain that vital information was ready, time had run out. So it's a forgivable inaccuracy. Because there is no way for Quint know this. 

The second, and somewhat unforgivable, inaccuracy is Quint getting the date wrong. The U.S.S. Indianapolis did not sink on June 29, 1945. She sank just after midnight, in the witching hour of July 30, 1945. Now if Quint had slurred July 29 instead of June 29, I might be more forgiving of the error. But an entire month? No soap.

I remembered the second time the story of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis pinging my pop culture radar as having happened sometime in the very late 1970s. 1978 or 79, maybe. But a quick bit of internet research clarified that it would have been in 1981 when Dean W. Ballenger's novel Terror at Sea caught my eye while browsing the book section of our local Gemco.

As intriguing and enticing as the lurid ad copy and cover illustration for the book were, I decided to give it a pass. No idea why. Because that book looks to have been 100% within my reading wheelhouse at the time. I was pounding down books like The Rats and The Spiders at that time. Jaws was (and is) my favorite movie of all time. I should have read this. Really.

But I did watch the telefilm Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, when it debuted on September 29, 1991.

San Francisco Examiner - September 29, 1991

While my expectations were shaped by the images invoked by Quint's Indianapolis speech, the film did give me a broader understanding of what really happened and the injustice that followed. But there was only so much that a made-for-television movie was capable of showing and exploring, given its time constraints and budgetary limitations. 

I knew important details and events were glossed over, or overlooked, or had to be condensed or discarded for reasons of either narrative cohesion and/or brevity, or minimizing monetary expense. That the modest size of the average television screen could not capture or communicate the scope of this disaster. How can you fit miles and miles of ocean and nearly one thousand men into a single framed shot? Only so much of the gruesome ravages from the sinking and exposure, not to mention the shark attacks themselves, could get past the network censors. I knew there was far more to the story and the suffering than what was shown.

There were several other books about the sinking of the Indianapolis that I did not know about, prior to reading this particular work. Abandon Ship by Richard Newcomb, All the Drowned Sailors by Raymond Lech, In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton, Out of the Depths by survivor Ed Harrell, and Only 317 Survived, a collection of first person accounts of the disaster, edited by Mary Lou Murphy. All of which, including Terror at Sea, have been added to my to be read wish list.

Although I doubt that those books are capable of offering the kind of tearful catharsis that Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic's book Indianapolis does. Because none of them will contain what this one has, a sense of closure.

The narrative is comprised of three sections bookended by the ship's creation and the discovery of its final resting place, some 18,000 feet beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea, on August 19, 2017.

Section one reveals that the ship's historical significance and importance extends well beyond its legendary final mission. Section two details the harrowing, horrifying, and torturous hell the survivors endured over the course of four excruciating days. Until one group was spotted by the crew of a Lockheed PV-1 Ventura doing a routine sector search for enemy craft.

One rescuer considered the odds of the survivors being spotted at all to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one in a billion. "It would take sunlight hitting at that exact spot for them to distinguish the black slick from the hundreds of miles of dark blue ocean that surrounded it." [Pg. 256]

But it is the book's third and final section that is the most heartbreaking. Here Vincent and Vladic's coverage of Captain Charles B. McVay's wrongful court-martial, to cover the gross oversights and communication breakdowns that were responsible for the disaster, coupled with examples of the venomous hatred that was poured upon him by grieving families of the dead, are examined with a meticulous eye that makes the pain and injustice of what happened palpable and, more importantly, understandable.

All of which makes the eventual, although always seemingly uncertain, exoneration of Captain McVay so cathartic to read. I admit that I got a tad misty-eyed while reading those closing pages.

Then to end with the ship's remains being discovered. It just felt right. I doubt there could ever be a better 'big picture' overview and dissection of the worst sea disaster in U.S. Naval History than this.