Indianapolis

The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man

By Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic

Marks’s Dumbo rode the swells enveloped in darkness that was remarkably complete. There was no moon. Thick clouds scudded in to blot out the stars. In the plane’s belly, men lolled against the bulkheads. Some moaned in pain. Others, out of their heads, babbled wild stories. The day after the sinking, one said, a landing craft had picked up thirty men away, leaving everyone else to die. Another man said a seaplane had landed on the water, picked up several survivors, and abandoned the rest.

Streaming a sea anchor from the bow to slow the plane’s drift, Marks let the Dumbo bob up and down in the hulking sea. He had hoped to use his landing lights and an Aldis lamp, a handheld light used to send Morse code, to continue looking for survivors. But the height of the swells made that impractical, and like the other Dumbo pilot who had picked up just one man, he feared running over men in the water.

In the rear of the plane, the crew thought they had run out of fresh water until a thorough search turned up a partially full water breaker in the radio compartment. Someone poured the water into a kettle and passed it up top, where a crew member picked his way carefully down the wing, rationing the precious liquid to four or five men at a time. The kettle was then passed below, refilled, and the process begun again. As the crewman on the wing took the last of the water down the line of men in the dark, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to figure out where in the line he had left off. He was surprised when, despite their misery, voice after voice in the darkness said the same thing: “I’ve had mine.”

Their honesty moved Marks deeply. Conduct like that is not indoctrinated through military training, he thought. It is learned at an early age, in Sunday school and in a home where honesty is a way of life.

Marks could hardly believe all that he had witnessed so far. Life rafts and flotsam attached to his plane, every container of supplies broken open, water and oil on the bulkheads inside and out, men strapped to the wing with parachute cord like so much vacation luggage on an automobile. It was a hell of a mess.

Time ticked toward midnight. The wind picked up, chilling the air.The crew had long since dispensed the last drop of water. Marks knew there were men in his plane near death. As the hours passed, he could hear them crying softly with thirst and pain.

(Vincent and Vladic 2018, 267-268)

References

Vincent, Lynn, and Sara Vladic. 2018. Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man. N.p.: Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 978-1-5011-3594-1