Only 317 lived. Good article here.

This was an event that was not widely reported due to the Trinity Test happening at the same time.

The US Navy's Aug. 15, 1945 news release on the loss of the USS Indianapolis (and ca. 880 lives) was indeed pushed to the newspaper back pages by a more notable news release.

However, the overshadowing news release was not the Aug. 7, 1945 news release of the July 16, 1945 Trinity Test, but the news of Japan's surrender released 7 PM, Aug. 14, 1945.

The loss of 879 lives in the July 30, 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis 66 years ago today certainly has many potential survival lessons, and there is voluminous documentation available (links appended) from the 317 survivors and their rescuers. You could easily spend the rest of the summer reading these accounts.

The event

About three hundred men perished during the sinking of the ship, which rolled over, then plunged, 12 minutes after being hit by two torpedoes. Another 579 perished before they could be rescued due to "battle wounds, drowning, predatory shark attacks, exposure to the elements, and lack of food and potable water." Although the ship was due in Leyte 12 hours after the attack, and three stations heard the radio distress call, no notice was taken. It was 3.5 days before Lt. Wilbur C. Gwinn, in a PV-1 Ventura plane on anti-submarine patrol, accidentally noticed some survivors at 11 AM on Aug. 2. Lt. Adrian Mark's PBY rescued 56 men on August 2, and the remainder of the 317 men saved were picked up on August 3rd by ships. No more survivors were found, though the destroyer Helm found and buried 28 bodies at sea. The search was called off August 8, 1945. The sinking of the Indianapolis was not announced until 8PM August 14, 1945 - one hour after announcing the Japanese had accepted surrender terms..

Signal Mirrors - Initial Failures

Of the numerous survival topics that could be addressed, I'll focus this post on my (extremely narrow) favorite topic - signal mirrors. Signal mirrors did not come off well in this event. A couple of survivors thought they had been helped by signal mirrors, but that doesn't seem to be corroborated by those they were signaling to. Yet Lt. Adrian Marks, the pilot of the PBY that picked up the first 56 men, with many air sea rescue and training missions to his credit, said that "The best aid was a mirror."

This is clearly a cautionary tale that signal mirrors are no panacea. Reading the accounts, there are several things that could have improved the men's odds, though they are hardly a guarantee:

• More signal mirrors (most men seemed not to have them, whereas current USCG issue is one/person)
• Issue of the 1944 retroreflective aimer signal mirrors vs. the 1943 rearsight aimer metal and ESM/1s that seemed present. USCG testing in 1944 found that scout planes saw 2.5 times as many flashes from the former vs. the latter.
• Training in using the signal mirrors (the Captain had none).
• Training pilots to recognize mirror flashes

It isn't that the men had no potential rescuers to signal to. The men floating in the water were overflown by many planes. Stanton says MacVay signaled with a metal signal mirror to a twin-engine bomber at 1PM the first day and a B-24 or B-29 at 3PM that day. {Note that the mirror MacVay describes is a glass "cross-in-glass" mirror: probably an ESM/1, but both types may have been present.) Newcomb reports that, while no planes were sighted Tuesday, 8 or 9 were sighted on Wednesday. MacVey's group signaled with two signal mirrors, but to no avail. Woody James reported that his (separate) group saw planes every day, and that some of the men floating in the water tried to attract them with mirrors, to no avail. MacVay says: "We knew now that these eight or nine planes that we saw and that we either during the day time flashed these signal mirrors, the emergency signal mirror at, nobody ever saw the mirror, us, or any of the Very stars."

Why not? MacVay makes these points:

• No one had reported the Indianapolis missing, so the pilots weren't looking for survivors
• The pilots may have been monitoring radar rather than visual
• They had not practiced with the signal mirrors
• It is hard to point a mirror in a bobbing raft
  

Practice: MacVay commented: "I would certainly make certain that the crew and the officers were familiar with all this material. They should actually see it opened up to know what's in it, to know how to use it rather than wait until the time you have to use it. The emergency signaling mirror is not an easy, not by any means an easy gadget to use. It takes quite a bit of ingenuity. I say this because I think I have normal intelligence, it took me about an hour and a half to two hours to chase this so-called reflected cross on your body around to see that it reflects back in the small cross in the back of the mirror and then you have to at the same time see a plane in that. It is not at all easy when you're going on a raft which is not a steady platform. I felt that after two days trying this I had at least mastered the technique and I felt certain that we were shining this thing directly on planes, but maybe were weren't. Certainly nobody saw the mirror or saw either on of the mirrors that we had with us, nor was any other group able to attract the attention of a plane with them. In fact, we could not attract planes with either the mirror in the daytime or with the Very stars at night."

They type of signal mirror MacVay describes is the subject of this WWII training film:


In USCG testing in 1944, machinists with 3 minutes of training averaged 8 flashes / 30 seconds from rafts in choppy water (not swells) to a scout plane 2 miles away (which was looking at and for them) with this type of mirror.

The signal mirrors had a chance. Despite MacVay's speculation that the air crews only used radar, they were supposed to be conducting visual search for submarines. Both the Navy report and the PBY pilot said that a visual watch was the norm. The Navy: "Investigation revealed that the planes were flying at altitudes which where considered the optimum for searching the area for enemy craft by search radar and visual lookout. Since, at this time and in this area, enemy craft were almost certain to be submarines, this was, in effect, an anti-submarine patrol. Planes were generally flying too high to see the Indianapolis survivors." (unless they were using signal mirrors - RAF). Lt. Adrian Marks said the altitude Wilbur Gwinn was flying for a radar search was 10,000 ft, and that his "natural" visual look angle would be seeing ocean five miles distant, the range at today's Coast Guard search documents quote as a suitable range to see a signal mirror flash. The author of "Fatal Voyage", who interviewed Gwinn, gives Gwinn's altitude as 3,000 ft, which should have been plenty low enough to see signal mirrors.

While the initial failure to get planes at 10,000 altitude to spot signal mirror flashes may have been aided by distance, once Gwinn, fixing his antenna, happened to look directly below (2 mile range), and spotted an oil slick, he dropped to 900 ft altitude and cruised along the oil slick.

Signal Mirrors and Gwinn: Unheralded success?

At this point, the survivors believed that Gwinn did see their mirror flashes. From page 348 of "Only 317 Survived", the survivor said he signaled with good geometry, as did at least two other mirrors, and the plane straightened, headed for them, and a crew member waved to them. Yet the accounts I've seen of what Gwinn saw was figures in the water. ("heads in the water", per "Fatal Voyage") Huh? If you are close enough to see a man's head in the water (and Gwinn supposedly counted 30), that man's mirror should be blinding you, but mirror flashes weren't mentioned. "Fatal Voyage" says Gwinn saw a first group of 30 heads, then another 30, then another 70. But no mirror flashes? It is possible (and I've seen this in modern news reports on rescues), that the mirror flashes were indeed effective, and what Gwinn homed in on, but simply weren't mentioned in his report. After all - flashes are ambiguous, figures in the water are not. At this point Atteberry (per "Fatal Voyage") piloted his Ventura over the area and did his own head count (still no mention of signal mirror flashes).

Signal Mirrors: Morse? I don't think so ...

After Gwinn spotted the survivors, he called for help. Survivor Harlan Twible reports that a boat full of rescue gear was dropped to them, but they found that the communication gear in the boat did not work. The PBY Catalina had flashed a Morse message to Twible asking who they were. Twible used the signal mirror to signal in Morse that they were from the Indianapolis. They replied to slow down - they couldn't read him. This I can well believe - just hitting a target with a handheld signal mirror is a challenge. I don't think I could reliably send Morse with a retroreflective aimer mirror (which could be what they dropped to Twible) from solid ground to a stationary target. And I have lots of experience with signal mirrors. From a rubber raft bobbing in the ocean to a moving plane? I doubt it. Per "Fatal Voyage", the PBY landed before Twible could try again, though one of Twible's accounts is that he retransmitted again, then the plane landed.

That's about all I've found about signal mirrors and the survivors of the Indianapolis. There's plenty of other survival material in the references below, though.

Websites

• Wikipedia: The Loss of the USS Indianapolis
• USS Indianapolis Survivors Site
• Discovery Channel: The Search for the USS Indianapolis
• USS Indianapolis Museum Site
• US Navy Press Release, 2/23/1946
• In Harms's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

Survivors' Accounts

• Recollections of Captain Charles B. McVay, III, USN, Commanding Officer of USS Indianapolis
• Recollections of Woody Eugene James
• Recollections of Harlan Twible
• Recollections of Robert Witzig
• More survivor's stories

Books

• Out of the Depths: A Survivor's Story of the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis
• In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors
• Only 317 survived!: USS Indianapolis (CA-35) : Navy's worst tragedy at sea--880 men died
• The Tragic Fate of the U.S.S. Indianapolis: The U.S. Navy's Worst Disaster at Sea
• Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the Navy's Greatest Sea Disaster
• Left for Dead: A Young Man's Search for Justice for the USS Indianapolis
• Fatal voyage: the sinking of the USS Indianapolis
• ALL THE DROWNED SAILORS : The story of the USS Indianapolis

A well done post with a lot of relevant information. Thank you for taking the time to put this all together.

Excellent job there, rafowell!

My mistake...I knew it was something big. Sorry.

Dangit, rafowell, for the 1,395th time: great post man! Much appreciated.

You are all welcome. You, (Glock-A-Roo) can take credit for drawing our attention to it. I'd actually read McVay's account a while back, but I learned a whole lot more yesterday. Note that extensive previews of many of the books on the Indianapolis are readable at the links I gave. A lot of information absent in early accounts came to light in the 1990s as a result of declassification, private reinvestigation of documents, and extensive interviews of survivors and their rescuers. Here are three more accounts readable online:

• Section on Indianapolis from "Bitter Victory" - click to expand
  
• Sunk, by the author of "In Harm's Way"
  
• Charles B. McVay III: Accountability

Glock

Thank you very much for the timely reminder.

I think of those poor men every year.

I sure hope our blue water survival training is a lot better than when I was on active duty.

Blake

www.outdoorquest.blogspot.com