It is a tribute to "Abandon Ship" that fully 43 years after its first appearance this work has been reprinted and marketed for a new generation. For nearly half a century Richard Newcomb's straightforward account of the sinking of the Indianapolis served as a rallying point for the four hundred American sailors who survived nearly a week of terrible exposure in the South Pacific, as well as for a small but determined group of supporters and politicians who have maintained that the U.S. Navy's inquiry into the matter was nothing more than scapegoating and administrative whitewash.
It did not hurt the book nor the cause of the Indianapolis survivors that Hollywood later told the story in dramatic fashion. In the 1975 movie thriller "Jaws," the salty shark hunter Quint reveals to his crew during a late night bender that he himself was a survivor of the torpedo attack that forced 1100 American sailors into the tropical waters of the South Pacific. Typical of the bad luck that has dogged the Indianapolis for years, Quint's cinematic narrative is rife with errors: most of the sailors died of exposure, not shark attack; the Indianapolis had already completed its mission of delivering the atomic bomb to Tinian at the time of its demise; and the ungodly delay in rescue operations was not due to security concerns, as Quint believed, but rather to communications and operations snafus.
Newcomb's original account of the sinking of the Indianapolis is drama enough. The Indianapolis had completed the delivery of the two atomic bombs to the island of Tinian and was en route to Leyte for routine training when it was cut in half by two simultaneous suicide torpedo strikes launched from a Japanese submarine. The ship sank within fifteen minutes, but under existing naval policy, its failure to reach Leyte was not noted for five days, delaying the dispatch of search and rescue craft and causing hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Perhaps because of these operational flaws in its command structure, naval inquiry not surprisingly shifted attention to the twin questions of whether the commander had demonstrated negligence in not taking evasive actions and later in failing to issue an "abandon ship" command.
Newcomb, working with material then available, is unequivocal in his judgment that the Navy's sanctions against Commander Charles B. McVay and other officers were politically motivated and brutally unfair. It is hard to imagine that the U.S. Navy actually procured the commander of the Japanese submarine to testify against McVay. Newcomb suggests that the visibility of the ship's atomic mission, as well as the tragedy's proximity to V-J Day, may have been precipitating factors in these unusual disciplinary proceedings. He portrays McVay as a competent officer whose very conservatism would make him an unlikely candidate to veer from the standard operations book for unnecessary risk.
The injustice of the Indianapolis tragedy-the excessive loss of life and the misplacing of blame-emerged from time to time into the public consciousness for some years after the book's 1958 appearance. McVay, a stoic man, committed suicide in 1968. In the late 1990's investigative reporter Peter Maas stumbled upon the Indianapolis story while researching another naval tragedy. By this time Newcomb was retired in Florida, but Maas discovered that his book was revered by the 160 or so Indianapolis survivors still alive. In the reissue of this book in 2001, Maas adds both a new introduction and a lengthy chapter summarizing his own examination of declassified documents and a new congressional investigation that concluded in October 2000. He notes ruefully that even at this late date the Navy lobbied the Senate for a sanitized resolution that in essence exonerated both McVay and the Navy.
"Abandon Ship" is a gripping tale. Aside from the fact that Newcomb has [at times awkwardly] included the name, rank, and history of just about everyone on the ship, the story moves at a compelling clip. It is a tribute to the author's fairness that the reader is compelled to weigh conflicting evidence in the matter of weather conditions, available intelligence, and navigational options available to McVay. Maas, not surprisingly, reflects a more rough and tumble contemporary journalistic style than his genteel predecessor, but there are no ugly fault lines in the text. Neither investigator fully penetrates naval or congressional skullduggery, in 1958 or 2000, but both do their best to force some measure of public accountability. One cannot read the book today without thoughts of September 11, 2001. "Abandon Ship" is a sad reminder that not every national tragedy has been met with the equanimity that becomes America.
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Reviews with images
My father was a survivor!
A harrowing ordeal with negative implications on our government that court-martialled a fine and innocent man.
Top reviews from other countries
Michael McDonagh
... much about the court case not enough about the poor guys in the water
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2014