The Tragic USS Indianapolis' Enduring Fascination
Note:
The last living survivor of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) sinking is Harold Bray. He turned 98 years old on June 15, 2025.
The Tragic Indy's Enduring Fascination
The story of the ill-fated Indianapolis and her sailors has been recounted in bestselling books, magazine articles, documentaries, and a docudrama.
By S. Scot Christenson
June 2016 Naval History Volume 30, Number 3.
The circumstances surrounding the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and its aftermath have fascinated and horrified the public for more than 70 years. This evolving saga has played out in the media through thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of magazine features, almost 30 books, and a dozen documentaries. After all, the story consists of not one but a series of tragedies that went unredeemed for decades. The events would be unbelievable if they weren’t true, but attempts to dramatize the captivating story of the ship for mass audiences have struggled. Events in the near-future may soon help write the final chapter of the history of the Indianapolis and allow for the entire story to be told.
In the Shadow of War’s End
News of the sinking of the “Indy” in 1945 received little immediate attention from the public when the Navy announced the disastrous loss of the Portland-class heavy cruiser. The official 25-word statement was released on 14 August, two weeks after the ship had been torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58. Even though the Indianapolis had suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent—every one of her 1,196 crewmen was dead, missing, or wounded—the news was overshadowed by President Harry S. Truman’s announcement that Japan had surrendered earlier that day. The nation was too busy celebrating to take much notice of the ordeal of the 317 surviving sailors who just a month prior had delivered crucial components of the atomic bomb that helped speed the end of the war.
When the euphoria of victory began to fade, the media as well as the families of the sailors forced the Navy to address questions about the Indianapolis. People demanded to know how a ship could possibly sink with such a great loss of life at the end of the war. The service had already secretly conducted a court of inquiry and issued letters of reprimand for negligence to Captain Charles Butler McVay III and two other officers. The court found that the captain’s failure to zigzag as he sailed the Indianapolis from Guam to the Philippines left the ship vulnerable to submarine attack. The court further cited him for not sending a distress message when the ship was sinking. The letter of reprimand probably should have been the end of McVay’s story, as far as the public was concerned.
But timing was not working in his favor. The end of the war meant the Navy could no longer use censorship to control media scrutiny. With reporters now dissecting the story of the Indianapolis and asking why sailors had been left adrift for days under horrific conditions before help arrived, the service needed to take action. None of the commanders of the hundreds of ships lost to enemy action during the war had been court-martialed because the Navy could not afford to lose experienced captains. However, peace meant that McVay was suddenly expendable. The Navy decided that he would be held responsible for losing the Indianapolis and court-martialed.
Not only did McVay have to face the humiliation of a court-martial that attracted national media coverage, he had to suffer the indignity of having the trial in the Washington Navy Yard, where his father had served as commandant decades earlier. Starting on 3 December 1945, the court began to hear evidence pertaining to the two charges for which he had already been reprimanded. In a surprise move, the commander of I-58, Mochitsura Hashimoto, testified at the proceedings. Whether the public believed McVay to be guilty or not, many were outraged that a Japanese officer who had so recently been an enemy was asked to testify against an American captain. Adding to the ignominy was that Hashimoto himself noted that he was being treated with more respect by the court than McVay was given. Despite the misgivings of the public, Hashimoto seemingly aided the captain by testifying that the Indianapolis was doomed whether she had zigzagged or not; the sub would have sunk the cruiser either way.
Favorable testimony from Hashimoto and the crew members of the Indianapolis was not enough to save McVay from conviction for negligence. The captain, who believed in the Navy’s principle of placing absolute accountability for a ship at sea on the commanding officer, quietly accepted the verdict. He could take a bit of solace in the court’s decision to remit all punishment. The end of the trial would cause the Indianapolis to fade both from newspapers and the public consciousness for a decade.
Reporters Revive Interest
In 1956 The Saturday Evening Post published an account of the sinking by Captain Lewis L. Haynes, the ship’s senior medical officer. Haynes gave an explicit account of the toll the harsh conditions took on the wounded sailors adrift at sea. He also described scenes of chaos as men became delusional and turned on one another. And, of course, there were the sharks. He recounted seeing dozens of bodies mutilated by them. The article shocked the magazine’s large readership and renewed interest in the tragedy.
Around the same time this article was published, Associated Press features editor Richard Newcomb began placing ads in newspapers requesting help contacting survivors of the tragedy. He managed to track down several former crew members who agreed to be interviewed about their experiences. Until then, survivors rarely even spoke to their families about their ordeal, let alone publicly or to a perceived outsider like Newcomb. However, once the survivors learned that the editor had been wounded in a kamikaze attack while serving as a naval war correspondent, the special affinity that sailors have with each other allowed for them to have frank and emotional conversations. Newcomb had even been assigned to a ship berthed next to the Indianapolis in San Francisco and watched her head to sea on her fatal deployment.
Along with his extensive research, Newcomb used the interviews to write the 1958 book Abandon Ship! Death of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the first major comprehensive account of the events and trial. It was also one of the first publications to challenge the conviction of McVay. The book spent 18 weeks on the bestseller list before being syndicated as a serial to newspapers throughout the country, significantly raising public awareness of the plight of the ship and her now-disgraced captain.
The newfound curiosity about the Indianapolis quickly resulted in the story becoming a staple of sensational men’s adventure magazines. Within the pages of these pulp publications featuring articles such as “New York Jungle: Inside Teen-Age Terrorland,” “Wife Traders’ Island Paradise,” and “Russia Can Bomb Us from Space,” readers could find “The Lonely Midnight Death of the Cruiser Indianapolis,” “The Cruiser that Turned Coffin,” and “Terror at Sea—Did the Navy Crucify Captain McVay?”
A couple of survivors who had read Abandon Ship! were moved by it and wanted to reunite with their former shipmates to share their experiences. They realized that many of the men would likely be battling to suppress their memories, so perhaps it would be best to remember together what they could not forget individually. Some thought it was a bad idea to dredge up such a painful past, but more than 150 of them traveled to their ship’s namesake city for the first reunion in 1960. Among those who made the trip was McVay.
The captain had been reluctant to attend because he feared confrontation by someone who still faulted him for the loss of ship and life. Families of some of the sailors who did not return sent him hate mail, and it was weighing on him. However, members of his old crew warmly welcomed him when he arrived at the airport. His appearance drew reporters who probably hoped that he would address the circumstance of his court-martial. Instead, McVay steered clear of the controversy by speaking at the dinner about his perspectives on U.S.-Soviet relations. Overall, it seemed to be an exceptionally positive event for McVay and the other survivors. It also occurred to the men of the Indianapolis that there needed to be a concerted effort to restore their captain’s reputation. It was the beginning of a long campaign to appeal to Congress and the Navy to reexamine the case.
The Indianapolis again drifted from public consciousness for several years until she was thrust back into the newspapers by another tragedy. Already affected by years of bearing the blame for the deaths of hundreds of sailors, McVay had grown increasingly despondent over the passing of members of his own family. In 1968 he ended his torment using his service sidearm.
In 1974 more misfortune would bring the Indianapolis media attention. While sailing from Hiroshima to Los Angeles with a cargo of automobiles, the Japanese freighter Kikuko Maru collided with another ship and killed 24 Korean crewmen. The captain of the freighter was arrested for negligence at sea. It was not long before the media realized that Mochitsura Hashimoto of the Kikuko Maru was the same man who had commanded the submarine responsible for sinking the Indianapolis. Forced to resign in disgrace, Hashimoto became a Shinto priest.
The circumstances surrounding the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and its aftermath have fascinated and horrified the public for more than 70 years. This evolving saga has played out in the media through thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of magazine features, almost 30 books, and a dozen documentaries. After all, the story consists of not one but a series of tragedies that went unredeemed for decades. The events would be unbelievable if they weren’t true, but attempts to dramatize the captivating story of the ship for mass audiences have struggled. Events in the near-future may soon help write the final chapter of the history of the Indianapolis and allow for the entire story to be told.
Jaws Mania
While many people became familiar with the story of the Indianapolis through these sporadic news stories, a cultural phenomenon in 1975 brought a new level of notoriety that no one could have predicted. As the first summer blockbuster and history’s highest-grossing film at that time, Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws introduced the saga to a wide-eyed global audience.
The haunting (albeit error-filled) soliloquy given by Robert Shaw in the role of Quint became an iconic movie scene, forever associating the ship with shark attacks.
Spielberg later revealed that he was unfamiliar with the history of the Indianapolis. A reference book used for the well known monologue by Robert Shaw as Quint, gives the incorrect date of the sinking of the ship. The actual date is July 30, 1945.
The book, Ordeal by Sea: The Tragedy of the U. S. S. Indianapolis
by Thomas Helm, was not fact checked, and the date is given as June 29, 1945.
Exoneration for McVay?
It was not the screen but the stage that would first dramatize the tragedy of the Indianapolis and court-martial of her captain. Premiering in March 1981 at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, John B. Ferzacca’s full-length play The Failure to Zigzag mixed fictional scenes with dialogue taken from the trial’s transcripts. The play received favorable reviews.
For his 1982 book All the Drowned Sailors, former Marine Raymond B. Lech obtained dozens of previously classified documents that he used to outline his stance that the sinking of the Indianapolis was due to the incompetence of Navy leadership and that McVay had been the victim of a conspiracy to cover up the mistakes. Journalist Dan Kurzman conducted dozens of interviews and uncovered additional documents for his 1990 book, Fatal Voyage, to further the notion that McVay had been a scapegoat.
It was perhaps the combination of the evidence provided within the two books as well as their commercial success that gave traction to the decades-old campaign to vindicate McVay. The constant appeals to Congress by the survivors and their supporters finally resulted in a response in 1991. At the behest of the House Armed Services Committee, the Navy agreed to review the circumstances surrounding McVay’s court-martial to determine whether it should be officially reopened. The rising hopes for those wanting to see McVay’s record cleared were quickly deflated when the Navy dismissed the request.
Public interest in the Indianapolis received a substantial boost in 1996 when sixth-grader Hunter Scott got involved in the campaign to exonerate McVay. Working on a project about the ship for National History Day had inspired Scott to learn the truth. After gathering materials and interviewing survivors, he began lobbying Congress to again reconsider the case. The 12-year-old wrote about his efforts in Naval History (“Timeline to Justice,” August 1998, pp. 47–49), and other media could not resist a story about a schoolboy joining a group of World War II veterans in a crusade for justice. The campaign began receiving national attention.
The October 1999 Proceedings article “The Sinking of the Indy & Responsibility of Command” by Commander William J. Toti brought further scrutiny to the Navy’s handling of McVay. Toti, the former commander of the attack submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697), outlined the weaknesses in the charges against McVay and criticized the Navy for falling back on feeble arguments in subsequent investigations. He contended that the conviction may have been legally correct but was not just.
In 2000 the dogged determination of the survivors, Kurzman, Scott, and a host of others was rewarded when Congress passed a resolution attached to a defense authorization bill that exonerated McVay and recommended that the crew of the Indianapolis be awarded a Navy Unit Commendation. However, it was a nonbinding “sense of Congress” resolution that did not expunge the conviction from McVay’s record. The Navy still held fast to its position that the conviction was final and there was no legal authority to overturn it. The service also maintained that it decided who earned Unit Commendations, not Congress. In 2001 the Navy reversed its decision and announced McVay’s record would indeed be modified to exonerate him and that the crew would receive the Unit Commendation.
The Indy Continues to Captivate
In 2007 the Discovery Channel broadcast a docudrama about the Indianapolis crew’s struggle in the open water titled Ocean of Fear. The program aired during the channel’s annual Shark Week, which was appropriate since the crew had spent the better part of a week among the sharks.
The last living survivor of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) sinking is Harold Bray. He turned 98 years old on June 15, 2025.
The Tragic Indy's Enduring Fascination
The story of the ill-fated Indianapolis and her sailors has been recounted in bestselling books, magazine articles, documentaries, and a docudrama.
By S. Scot Christenson
June 2016 Naval History Volume 30, Number 3.
The circumstances surrounding the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and its aftermath have fascinated and horrified the public for more than 70 years. This evolving saga has played out in the media through thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of magazine features, almost 30 books, and a dozen documentaries. After all, the story consists of not one but a series of tragedies that went unredeemed for decades. The events would be unbelievable if they weren’t true, but attempts to dramatize the captivating story of the ship for mass audiences have struggled. Events in the near-future may soon help write the final chapter of the history of the Indianapolis and allow for the entire story to be told.
In the Shadow of War’s End
News of the sinking of the “Indy” in 1945 received little immediate attention from the public when the Navy announced the disastrous loss of the Portland-class heavy cruiser. The official 25-word statement was released on 14 August, two weeks after the ship had been torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58. Even though the Indianapolis had suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent—every one of her 1,196 crewmen was dead, missing, or wounded—the news was overshadowed by President Harry S. Truman’s announcement that Japan had surrendered earlier that day. The nation was too busy celebrating to take much notice of the ordeal of the 317 surviving sailors who just a month prior had delivered crucial components of the atomic bomb that helped speed the end of the war.
When the euphoria of victory began to fade, the media as well as the families of the sailors forced the Navy to address questions about the Indianapolis. People demanded to know how a ship could possibly sink with such a great loss of life at the end of the war. The service had already secretly conducted a court of inquiry and issued letters of reprimand for negligence to Captain Charles Butler McVay III and two other officers. The court found that the captain’s failure to zigzag as he sailed the Indianapolis from Guam to the Philippines left the ship vulnerable to submarine attack. The court further cited him for not sending a distress message when the ship was sinking. The letter of reprimand probably should have been the end of McVay’s story, as far as the public was concerned.
But timing was not working in his favor. The end of the war meant the Navy could no longer use censorship to control media scrutiny. With reporters now dissecting the story of the Indianapolis and asking why sailors had been left adrift for days under horrific conditions before help arrived, the service needed to take action. None of the commanders of the hundreds of ships lost to enemy action during the war had been court-martialed because the Navy could not afford to lose experienced captains. However, peace meant that McVay was suddenly expendable. The Navy decided that he would be held responsible for losing the Indianapolis and court-martialed.
Not only did McVay have to face the humiliation of a court-martial that attracted national media coverage, he had to suffer the indignity of having the trial in the Washington Navy Yard, where his father had served as commandant decades earlier. Starting on 3 December 1945, the court began to hear evidence pertaining to the two charges for which he had already been reprimanded. In a surprise move, the commander of I-58, Mochitsura Hashimoto, testified at the proceedings. Whether the public believed McVay to be guilty or not, many were outraged that a Japanese officer who had so recently been an enemy was asked to testify against an American captain. Adding to the ignominy was that Hashimoto himself noted that he was being treated with more respect by the court than McVay was given. Despite the misgivings of the public, Hashimoto seemingly aided the captain by testifying that the Indianapolis was doomed whether she had zigzagged or not; the sub would have sunk the cruiser either way.
Favorable testimony from Hashimoto and the crew members of the Indianapolis was not enough to save McVay from conviction for negligence. The captain, who believed in the Navy’s principle of placing absolute accountability for a ship at sea on the commanding officer, quietly accepted the verdict. He could take a bit of solace in the court’s decision to remit all punishment. The end of the trial would cause the Indianapolis to fade both from newspapers and the public consciousness for a decade.
Reporters Revive Interest
In 1956 The Saturday Evening Post published an account of the sinking by Captain Lewis L. Haynes, the ship’s senior medical officer. Haynes gave an explicit account of the toll the harsh conditions took on the wounded sailors adrift at sea. He also described scenes of chaos as men became delusional and turned on one another. And, of course, there were the sharks. He recounted seeing dozens of bodies mutilated by them. The article shocked the magazine’s large readership and renewed interest in the tragedy.
Around the same time this article was published, Associated Press features editor Richard Newcomb began placing ads in newspapers requesting help contacting survivors of the tragedy. He managed to track down several former crew members who agreed to be interviewed about their experiences. Until then, survivors rarely even spoke to their families about their ordeal, let alone publicly or to a perceived outsider like Newcomb. However, once the survivors learned that the editor had been wounded in a kamikaze attack while serving as a naval war correspondent, the special affinity that sailors have with each other allowed for them to have frank and emotional conversations. Newcomb had even been assigned to a ship berthed next to the Indianapolis in San Francisco and watched her head to sea on her fatal deployment.
Along with his extensive research, Newcomb used the interviews to write the 1958 book Abandon Ship! Death of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the first major comprehensive account of the events and trial. It was also one of the first publications to challenge the conviction of McVay. The book spent 18 weeks on the bestseller list before being syndicated as a serial to newspapers throughout the country, significantly raising public awareness of the plight of the ship and her now-disgraced captain.
The newfound curiosity about the Indianapolis quickly resulted in the story becoming a staple of sensational men’s adventure magazines. Within the pages of these pulp publications featuring articles such as “New York Jungle: Inside Teen-Age Terrorland,” “Wife Traders’ Island Paradise,” and “Russia Can Bomb Us from Space,” readers could find “The Lonely Midnight Death of the Cruiser Indianapolis,” “The Cruiser that Turned Coffin,” and “Terror at Sea—Did the Navy Crucify Captain McVay?”
A couple of survivors who had read Abandon Ship! were moved by it and wanted to reunite with their former shipmates to share their experiences. They realized that many of the men would likely be battling to suppress their memories, so perhaps it would be best to remember together what they could not forget individually. Some thought it was a bad idea to dredge up such a painful past, but more than 150 of them traveled to their ship’s namesake city for the first reunion in 1960. Among those who made the trip was McVay.
The captain had been reluctant to attend because he feared confrontation by someone who still faulted him for the loss of ship and life. Families of some of the sailors who did not return sent him hate mail, and it was weighing on him. However, members of his old crew warmly welcomed him when he arrived at the airport. His appearance drew reporters who probably hoped that he would address the circumstance of his court-martial. Instead, McVay steered clear of the controversy by speaking at the dinner about his perspectives on U.S.-Soviet relations. Overall, it seemed to be an exceptionally positive event for McVay and the other survivors. It also occurred to the men of the Indianapolis that there needed to be a concerted effort to restore their captain’s reputation. It was the beginning of a long campaign to appeal to Congress and the Navy to reexamine the case.
The Indianapolis again drifted from public consciousness for several years until she was thrust back into the newspapers by another tragedy. Already affected by years of bearing the blame for the deaths of hundreds of sailors, McVay had grown increasingly despondent over the passing of members of his own family. In 1968 he ended his torment using his service sidearm.
In 1974 more misfortune would bring the Indianapolis media attention. While sailing from Hiroshima to Los Angeles with a cargo of automobiles, the Japanese freighter Kikuko Maru collided with another ship and killed 24 Korean crewmen. The captain of the freighter was arrested for negligence at sea. It was not long before the media realized that Mochitsura Hashimoto of the Kikuko Maru was the same man who had commanded the submarine responsible for sinking the Indianapolis. Forced to resign in disgrace, Hashimoto became a Shinto priest.
The circumstances surrounding the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and its aftermath have fascinated and horrified the public for more than 70 years. This evolving saga has played out in the media through thousands of newspaper articles, hundreds of magazine features, almost 30 books, and a dozen documentaries. After all, the story consists of not one but a series of tragedies that went unredeemed for decades. The events would be unbelievable if they weren’t true, but attempts to dramatize the captivating story of the ship for mass audiences have struggled. Events in the near-future may soon help write the final chapter of the history of the Indianapolis and allow for the entire story to be told.
Jaws Mania
While many people became familiar with the story of the Indianapolis through these sporadic news stories, a cultural phenomenon in 1975 brought a new level of notoriety that no one could have predicted. As the first summer blockbuster and history’s highest-grossing film at that time, Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws introduced the saga to a wide-eyed global audience.
The haunting (albeit error-filled) soliloquy given by Robert Shaw in the role of Quint became an iconic movie scene, forever associating the ship with shark attacks.
Spielberg later revealed that he was unfamiliar with the history of the Indianapolis. A reference book used for the well known monologue by Robert Shaw as Quint, gives the incorrect date of the sinking of the ship. The actual date is July 30, 1945.
The book, Ordeal by Sea: The Tragedy of the U. S. S. Indianapolis
by Thomas Helm, was not fact checked, and the date is given as June 29, 1945.
Exoneration for McVay?
It was not the screen but the stage that would first dramatize the tragedy of the Indianapolis and court-martial of her captain. Premiering in March 1981 at the Indiana Repertory Theatre, John B. Ferzacca’s full-length play The Failure to Zigzag mixed fictional scenes with dialogue taken from the trial’s transcripts. The play received favorable reviews.
For his 1982 book All the Drowned Sailors, former Marine Raymond B. Lech obtained dozens of previously classified documents that he used to outline his stance that the sinking of the Indianapolis was due to the incompetence of Navy leadership and that McVay had been the victim of a conspiracy to cover up the mistakes. Journalist Dan Kurzman conducted dozens of interviews and uncovered additional documents for his 1990 book, Fatal Voyage, to further the notion that McVay had been a scapegoat.
It was perhaps the combination of the evidence provided within the two books as well as their commercial success that gave traction to the decades-old campaign to vindicate McVay. The constant appeals to Congress by the survivors and their supporters finally resulted in a response in 1991. At the behest of the House Armed Services Committee, the Navy agreed to review the circumstances surrounding McVay’s court-martial to determine whether it should be officially reopened. The rising hopes for those wanting to see McVay’s record cleared were quickly deflated when the Navy dismissed the request.
Public interest in the Indianapolis received a substantial boost in 1996 when sixth-grader Hunter Scott got involved in the campaign to exonerate McVay. Working on a project about the ship for National History Day had inspired Scott to learn the truth. After gathering materials and interviewing survivors, he began lobbying Congress to again reconsider the case. The 12-year-old wrote about his efforts in Naval History (“Timeline to Justice,” August 1998, pp. 47–49), and other media could not resist a story about a schoolboy joining a group of World War II veterans in a crusade for justice. The campaign began receiving national attention.
The October 1999 Proceedings article “The Sinking of the Indy & Responsibility of Command” by Commander William J. Toti brought further scrutiny to the Navy’s handling of McVay. Toti, the former commander of the attack submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697), outlined the weaknesses in the charges against McVay and criticized the Navy for falling back on feeble arguments in subsequent investigations. He contended that the conviction may have been legally correct but was not just.
In 2000 the dogged determination of the survivors, Kurzman, Scott, and a host of others was rewarded when Congress passed a resolution attached to a defense authorization bill that exonerated McVay and recommended that the crew of the Indianapolis be awarded a Navy Unit Commendation. However, it was a nonbinding “sense of Congress” resolution that did not expunge the conviction from McVay’s record. The Navy still held fast to its position that the conviction was final and there was no legal authority to overturn it. The service also maintained that it decided who earned Unit Commendations, not Congress. In 2001 the Navy reversed its decision and announced McVay’s record would indeed be modified to exonerate him and that the crew would receive the Unit Commendation.
The Indy Continues to Captivate
In 2007 the Discovery Channel broadcast a docudrama about the Indianapolis crew’s struggle in the open water titled Ocean of Fear. The program aired during the channel’s annual Shark Week, which was appropriate since the crew had spent the better part of a week among the sharks.
70-79