Abandoned Ship.(Review)

In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton (Holt, 333 pp., $25)

John Erskine's famous essay, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent," was first articulated as his 1913 Phi Beta Kappa address at Amherst College. A year earlier, the Titanic had gone down off Nova Scotia with enormous loss of life, and Erskine had much on his mind the complacency of Capt. Edward Smith, who-despite multiple iceberg warnings-had sailed his ship at night into the ice field at 22.5 knots.

Erskine's essay also comes to mind in connection with Pearl Harbor, and with the loss of the USS Indianapolis, which occurred almost at the war's end. Both disasters resulted from the Navy's failure to be intelligent, in Erskine's sense. The title of Gordon Prange's fine book about Pearl Harbor epitomizes the first: At Dawn We Slept. Doug Stanton's In Harm's Way, thoroughly researched and beautifully written, tells the horrifying story of the Indianapolis. In both disasters, individual mental sloth and the Navy's organizational dysfunction led to the tragic and shameful results.

Commissioned in 1932, the Indianapolis was a formidable cruiser during the Second World War. It had been Franklin Roosevelt's favorite warship, and now was the flagship of Adm. Raymond Spruance, victor at Midway, the triumph well characterized by John Keegan as "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare."

The Indianapolis, under the authority of Capt. Charles McVay, had the top-secret job of carrying components of the Hiroshima bomb from San Francisco to Tinian, where the bomb would be loaded onto the Enola Gay. (The bomb was called "Little Boy"; the Nagasaki bomb was called "Fat Man." As Stanton explains, the bombs were originally named for Roosevelt and Churchill, "Thin Man" and "Fat Man." But a change in design made the thin-man name inappropriate.)

After leaving the "gadget," as the scientists called it, at Tinian, the Indianapolis headed for Leyte in the Philippines, where it was scheduled for gunnery practice preparatory to the expected invasion of Japan.

On July 30, 1945, the Indianapolis was cruising, unescorted, west of Guam when two torpedoes struck it, sinking the ship in a few minutes. An estimated 300 men were killed by the blasts or entombed below. About 900 went into the Pacific. There they floated for four and a half days, clinging to rafts and nets, swimming in life jackets, without food or water, scorched by a relentless tropical sun and savagely attacked by hundreds of sharks. Only 321 survived; of these, some died later in the hospital.