He was really no more than a boy grown tall when he left school to join the Navy, a broad-shouldered redheaded farm boy with a wide grin and the accent of one born and bred in the red clay knobs.  Before he left he married his school sweetheart.

Now, on this day of joy for a world so long at war, his family had received one of the dreaded telegrams edged in black:

Regretfully we inform you. . .

He had been assigned to INDIANAPOLIS.

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INDIANAPOLIS was not reported as overdue to her destination following the disaster.  The men who had abandoned ship were left adrift for eighty-four hours before Navy pilots on routine patrol spotted them from the air.

In those eighty-four hours some of them died of wounds and burns sustained when the ship exploded in mighty fireballs.  Others succumbed to exhaustion, dehydration and sunburn.  They were the lucky ones.

Blood in the water attracted predators more deadly than the Japanese:  sharks.

Sharks took many.

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In his later years, the grownup nine-year-old could not recall whether the family ever knew the circumstances of their sailor's death:  if he died as the ship died, if he died of shock and wounds, if the merciless sun and lack of drinkable water dried his insides out beyond endurance, or if he was taken by a cold-eyed killer who spotted an easy meal in the water.

The tombstone bearing his name in the family plot is a cenotaph.  It marks no actual grave.

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A disaster like INDIANAPOLIS, coming at the very end of the war, with more men lost in a single incident than in any other involving an American warship, requires explanation.  She was no ordinary ship, having once been the flagship of one of the Pacific theater's legendary naval commanders, Admiral Raymond Spruance.  Not to mention the role she had played in ending the war, with that top secret dangerous dash for Tinian with the components of the Hiroshima bomb.

As it transpired, there was more than enough blame to go around.  I mistakenly wrote earlier that INDIANAPOLIS went down without being able to broadcast a distress call; later, it would be revealed that, in the two minutes before she went down, her radio operators had managed to send out three SOS signals.  One was ignored by a drunken commander ashore; a second by an officer who had, for whatever reason, given orders that he was not to be disturbed, for any reason short of the Apocalypse, during the crucial period; a third was dismissed as a Japanese prank.

On August 2nd, a pair of Navy pilots spotted the survivors of INDIANAPOLIS below them while on routine patrol.  Most were kept afloat by lifejackets (the so-called "Mae Wests" of the era), although some were aboard the few life rafts that had been able to launch in the precious seconds after the explosion.  The Navy pilots immediately summoned help from surface craft and air units alike, and over the next five days three hundred sixteen men were located and rescued, some having floated quite a distance from the wreck site.

As it happened, among the survivors was the man who would bear the blame for failures all up and down the chain of command:  Captain Charles Butler McVay III, Annapolis graduate (class of 1920) and decorated naval hero.  Wounded himself, McVay nevertheless raised hell over why it took so many days for rescue operations to commence for his men.

His answer came in the form of a court-martial, in November 1945.  The Navy command, quite simply, lied about many things.  They found McVay guilty of what amounted to dereliction of duty:  he had failed to move his ship in the zigzag pattern designed to confound attempts by submarines to launch torpedoes.  That he had never been notified of Japanese submarine activity in the area and in fact had orders to take evasive action at his discretion based on observation was waved aside.  Moreover, the survivors and other personnel testified that visibility on July 30 was not good, poor conditions for spotting subs; yet the Navy claimed the exact opposite.  The ship itself, with no anti-sub equipment, was denied the customary destroyer escort.  Even the commander of the sub whose torpedoes sank INDIANAPOLIS testified on McVay's behalf, giving the lie to the Navy's contentions.

For the sins of others, McVay was convicted and reprimanded.  Although he would eventually be promoted to rear admiral, his career was effectively ruined.

And worse was to come.

to be continued

 

 

After surviving a kamikaze attack on March 31, 1945, and spending some three months in drydock for repairs, the heavy cruiser USS INDIANAPOLIS was ready to return to the war in the Pacific.

And what a return it was.  Unknown to most of the 1196 men aboard, INDIANAPOLIS carried, when she left San Francisco in July, the deadliest cargo any warship had ever carried:  the main assembly of "Little Boy", the atomic bomb that would lay waste to Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, changing the rules of war and one-upmanship forever.

Most of the crew of INDIANAPOLIS would never know what happened to Hiroshima.  Their cargo was offloaded at its destination--Tinian, in the Marianas Islands--on July 26, and their orders called for them to return to operations in the Philippines.  Unaccountably, the ship was not given the customary destroyer escort; nor was her captain warned of Japanese submarine activity in the area through which she would sail.

On July 30, INDIANAPOLIS was fatally wounded by Japanese torpedoes, fired by submarines.  Some four hundred of her crew died with her; of the eight hundred who managed to abandon ship, only three hundred sixteen would be picked up alive.

So precipitous was her sinking that she never managed even to send out a distress call.

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So say the the history books.  But for me, the story of USS INDIANAPOLIS will forever begin in mid-August, with a nine-year-old boy dawdling on his way to school.

He was the only surviving child of a loveless second marriage, the baby of the family, more than a little spoiled, and he did not like school.  This was not because he was unintelligent or even especially lazy; he would rather be in the woods with his dog, honing the skills that would one day make him an army sharpshooter.  Moreover, he was not blessed with the most inspiring teacher in the world; the one at the little one-room country school he attended was the stereotypical old maid schoolmarm, unsuited by both temperament and education for the profession she had chosen.

August in the knobs is generally hot and dry and dusty.  On some days, thunderheads will pile up seventy thousand feet in the air and produce awesome rumbles of thunder and lethal lightning, but never a drop of rain; on others, the sky will remain a cloudless, unsettlingly brassy blue, and the road in front of you will fool you with mirages of pools of water and heat rising in visible waves from dirt, gravel or asphalt.

He never said which kind of day this one was:  only that he hoped that just maybe, in honor of the great news that had broken upon the world that morning, the teacher would dismiss school early.  Word had come that at long last, the war that had begun, for the United States, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, was over, with the surrender of the Empire of Japan following a second atomic bomb drop on Nagasaki.

He got to school, finally, a little after eight thirty, expecting to hear a joyous hubbub.  Instead, everything was deathly quiet, except for the muffled sobbing of some of the "big girls" up front.

He slipped into a seat at the back of the room and in a whisper asked a friend what was wrong.  And that was when he learned that one of the older boys from the school, away in the war, was dead.

to be continued

We have two very big bushes of these in the yard. One is over by the fence, the other in the ninety degree angle of porch and front wall outside Mom's room. They open part of the day, attracting bumblebees mostly, who buzz drunkenly as they collect nectar. This comes in colors ranging from white to a rich dark silky true purple, but this shade, a sort of amethyst, is my favorite.

There is something extraordinarily calming even in images of trees and water. One can imagine that, save for the rustle of wind and ruffle of waves, there is silence.

I am attracted to these images at the moment because I have, rather belatedly, realized that I am in the midst of a fit of anxiety and depression the likes of which I have not had in several years, and to which I have a genetic predisposition. At best I'm weepy; at worst I feel like retreating somewhere, say to the middle of this island, and just sitting until I feel like myself again.

Bear with me.

One reason folklorists are so fond of arranging stories under categories they call “motifs” is that very seldom does a folktale stand on its own: it will almost always have variants, sometimes based on geography, usually the same story with different details.

A similar story to the one about Micah Rood’s apples is retold by the North Carolina journalist and collector of folklore John Harden in his second book, TAR HEEL GHOSTS (1954). A sort of companion volume to THE DEVIL’S TRAMPING GROUND AND OTHER NORTH CAROLINA MYSTERY STORIES, it consists strictly of ghost stories from North Carolina. The one we’re concerned with comes, Harden says, from Mecklenburg County, sometime in the post Civil War period.

Dr. Simmons (the name Harden gives the protagonist) cared for only three things in life: his rural medical practice, his orchard, and above all else his beautiful young daughter, Susanne. Left a widower when his daughter was about seven, he never remarried; he shared a country home with Susanne and a housekeeper called Aunt Mary. As Susanne grew older, the doctor’s love for his daughter seemed to take an obsessive turn: he would allow her to have friends for overnight visits, but she was never allowed to return them; if she wanted to go shopping, he took her to town in their buggy and refused to let her out of his sight; when she started college, she was only allowed to go as a day student and was driven to and from school by Aunt Mary’s son, Tom. Aunt Mary was heard to speculate that the reason the doctor was so possessive of his daughter was that she was the spittin’ image of her late mother. Nowadays we would speculate in other directions, especially when we learn about the end of Susanne’s one love affair.

When Susanne was about nineteen, she met a young man at a weekend house party she had somehow persuaded her father to allow her to attend. His name was George; he was smitten at first sight, and he courted the equally smitten Susanne assiduously. However, all hell broke loose when he made bold to ask Dr. Simmons for Susanne’s hand in marriage; George walked out the front door after an acrimonious conversation with the doctor—and vanished into thin air.

The doctor, of course, maintained that the young man had never cared for Susanne at all and had simply if cruelly broken off their relationship without a word; Susanne believed no such thing. As many a heartbroken young woman has done down through the ages, she shut herself up in her room and , when she did come out, refused to speak to her father at all. The doctor, meanwhile, went mad in the best Micah Rood tradition; he gave up his medical practice altogether and spent most of his time staring out over his now-neglected orchard. He was standing at that window when he dropped dead of a heart attack.

Aunt Mary remained to care for an increasingly frail and listless Susanne—and to keep the doctor’s dreadful secret. Aunt Mary knew what had happened to George, for she had stumbled into a settling patch under the most prized of all the doctor’s apple trees, a Golden Delicious, and knew it for a grave. As if that were not enough, forever after the fruit from that tree had streaks and blobs of red in its silky white pulp, like drops of blood.

Susanne only outlived her father by some fifteen years, dying of her broken heart in her mid-thirties. She left the house and orchard to Aunt Mary. One of the first things Aunt Mary did after she inherited the house was to have the Golden Delicious tree cut down. She said it obstructed the view, and anyway had not been producing good apples of late.

Curiously enough, the stump left of the great tree looked an awful lot like a tombstone.