Ahhhhhh!!! Don't get me started on this topic! I wrote a paper on the Indy while an undergrad in college that investigated both the sinking and Captain Charles McVay's court-martial. I also interviewed the remarkable Hunter Scott, the young man who campaigned to exonerate McVay and succeeded, at least de facto.

Here, slightly amended, is part of an email I recently wrote to a gentleman curious about the case:

It is, of course, literally impossible to know the hearts of those who judged Charles McVay, but there is at least a trail of circumstantial evidence pointing towards malevolence. The failure of those supposed to be "in the know" to understand that the Indianapolis was coming was a gigantic blunder of the kind bloated bureaucracies so often make, and they responded, I think, in typical fashion. For example, they released news of the sinking on the same day as the Japanese surrender -- thus overshadowing it in the papers. One of the men on the court of inquiry was Oliver Naquin's boss -- Naquin being the man who had failed to alert McVay to the presence of submarines along his route and to provide him with an escort (there may be a partial exoneration for the Navy regarding the escort: they were in dreadfully short supply). This man did not recuse himself from the case.

Meanwhile, Admiral Ernest King -- whose name would be naturally tarnished by association with this tragedy -- concluded that the evidence did not merit a court-martial, then reversed himself the same day (possibly under pressure from President Truman, who was friends with the father of one of the Indy's drowned seamen). King ordered a court-martial before the court of inquiry could complete its findings, and McVay's Naval-appointed attorney was Captain John P. Cady, a man who had failed the bar examination and was not even particularly interested in becoming a lawyer. King was also able to choose the jury that would judge McVay, and the members of that jury depended on him for promotions.

On the other end of things, prosecutor Thomas J. Ryan tried unsuccessfully to coerce an Indy seaman into signing an untrue statement alleging that McVay had not properly ordered an "abandon ship." The Navy called in Mochitsura Hashimoto, the commander of the Japanese sub that sunk the Indy, to testify against McVay: Hashimoto told an interviewer many years later of his opinion that the court-martial was a railroading, and related that his testimony had been repeatedly mistranslated and his subsequent objections ignored (Hashimoto knew enough English to recognize this).

Many of the survivors also flatly contradicted the Navy's claim that it had been a moonlit night (thus calling for zigzagging), and both Hashimoto and a highly-decorated veteran named Glynn Donaho testified that zigzagging would have made no difference in securing the Indy's safety. Hunter Scott -- the young man who got McVay exonerated, at least de facto -- later found out that the Indy had gotten an SOS off (the Navy said no such thing had occurred), and one veteran told Scott that a uniformed Navy man had stormed aboard his vessel (which received an SOS and could have rescued the Indy, but did not) and ripped out the page containing the SOS reception from the vessel's logbook.

I should note that I was originally skeptical of Scott's claims when I first saw him on television discussing the matter; this quickly changed when I became acquainted with the evidence of the case. Scott -- who is a very religious young man and once headed his high school's Young Republicans group -- told me himself that he felt he was on a mission from God to exonerate McVay (he said this before noting with bemusement that he had echoed the Blues Brothers). I've read the transcripts from the Congressional hearings and I can tell you that Scott and the survivors absolutely obliterated the Navy's case for keeping McVay's conviction official, and this was after the Navy spokesmen had been through a "murder board" designed to throw every conceivable question at them. Some of the senators present actually switched sides during the hearing. The official Navy spokesman -- a guy brilliant enough to have received a mathematics degree from Cambridge -- was reduced to sputtering incoherence, and Scott felt obliged to politely approach him after the hearing ended and hand him a stack of documents.

Incidentally, Scott is now at UNC-Chapel Hill and is in the Navy ROTC program -- I just hope they're not singling him out for punishment too often!

We're grown-ups now, just differently-stressed ones.
If a non-atomic WW III were to break out, (difficut to imagine, but...), after three years of combat and total national effort, we'd take the news of another 1,200 casualties just as well as they did in '45.

Which is why comparing Iraq to WW II is absurd. The conflicts have nothing in common except that Americans died. Oh, and that America and the UK won.

Captain McVay of the Indianapolis was very badly treated by the Navy, and by the American public.
He was court-martialled for losing his ship, because he wasn't zig-zagging, (a common maneuver of the day, thought to decrease the odds of getting torpedoed), even though the commander of the Japanese sub that did in the Indianapolis would later testify that zig-zagging wouldn't have made any difference in this case.
Captain McVay is the only commander in US Navy history to be court-martialled for losing his ship in combat.
Capt. McVay would receive thousands of letters from relatives of those who died under his command, as well as from ill-wishers, condemning him.
He committed suicide years later, in '69.

Thanks to Messrs Herdegen & Murphy for their detail, and again showing how easy it is to learn on this blog.

Bruce, there's a recent book out about the Indianapolis.

Edward Schaffer, gunner's mate died on it. Stayed at his post.

He didn't want to go. He told the family during his last R&R that he felt he wasn't going to come back. They didn't believe him.

My dad was a child and remembers him in his uniform.

I got my dad the book and it was a hard read for him.

McVay's son, Kimo, who also fought to clear his father's name, died last year. Out here, at least, you won't hear anything negative about McVay.

There was also the reverse case -- USS Queenfish sank the Awa Maru on April 1, 1945, although the ship was supposed to be a cartel vessel. Queenfish's skipper did not get the notice to avoid the Awa Maru.

Thing is, the Japanese had violated the cartel and, although the Queenfish couldn't have known that either, it was a legitimate target.

The US Navy treated the Queenfish commander badly, though not quite as badly as McVay; and the Japanese still are taught that the sinking of the Awa Maru is among the many victimizations they had to suffer from us.

Screw 'em.