If I remember correctly the ship had just delivered the A bomb to Tinian Island and was on its way home. What a horrible story. Hard to believe people send hate mail over these tragedies. Kimmel and Short got the same after they were pinned with responsibility for Pearl Harbor.
“If I remember correctly the ship had just delivered the A bomb to Tinian Island and was on its way home. What a horrible story. Hard to believe people send hate mail over these tragedies. Kimmel and Short got the same after they were pinned with responsibility for Pearl Harbor.”
USS Indianapolis delivered parts of the atomic bombs to 509th Composite Group (USAAF) on the island of Tinian; other parts were sent separately because the few people who knew about the Manhattan Project judged judged it too risky to send everything in the same shipment.
Then she steamed south to Guam where she awaited further orders. After a short delay she was ordered to the Philippines. Cruising at the sedate speed of some 17 knots, she crossed from one naval administrative region to the next. Rules governing ship’s-position reporting differed from one region to the next, and handoff of tracking her movement fell through the cracks in the bureaucratic muddle.
Not until survivors were found and rescued did USN begin to learn what happened. The cruiser’s loss had indeed been concealed from the general public under wartime censorship rules; only a couple days later, news of Japan’s imminent surrender was announced and censorship was lifted across the board. Together with a huge flood of other newsworthy items, the loss was immediately disclosed, and the armed forces quickly lost control of the story, which could not make them look anything except sneaky.
CAPT C B McVay III became the only USN officer to be convicted for “hazarding his vessel in wartime” (or some similar wording). The trial court took testimony from a wide range of individuals, including Mochitsura Hashimoto, captain of I-58, the Imperial Japanese submarine that torpedoed the Indianapolis.
Some indications exist in print, that FADM Ernest J King - CNO in WWII, widely acknowledged to be the grouchiest man ever to hold a US Naval commission - pursued the action against CAPT McVay in revenge against McVay’s father C B McVay II, who had reprimanded King circa 1930, when King had been a junior officer and McVay II was a USN admiral.
USN and Britain’s Royal Navy have a very long history of stepping quite hard on ship’s commanders (and higher rankers) who are perceived to have messed up, or merely accomplished their duty with insufficient verve. Results are spotty.
A couple books can provide more detail and context:
In Harm’s Way, Doug Stanton
Enola Gay, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts
At Dawn we Slept, Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein, and Katherine Dillon