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Dear Doug Collins

USS Indianapolis and Capt. Charles B. McVay III: The Captain Convicted for a Sinking He Did Not Cause

Charles McVay did the hardest thing a captain can do: he stayed with his ship, got his surviving men into the water, and then wrote personally to the families of the 879 who did not come home. His reward was to be the only American captain of the Second World War convicted for losing his ship to the enemy — on a charge the enemy commander himself testified should not have stood. This page is the documented record of what USS Indianapolis did, what was done to her captain afterward, and what, fifty-five years later, was finally — and only partly — undone.

The service and the promise

USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was a Portland-class heavy cruiser with a record few ships could match. She had served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ship of state and as the flagship of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, and she earned ten battle stars fighting across the Pacific. In March 1945, off Okinawa, a kamikaze crashed into her; she made Mare Island under her own power, was repaired, and sailed again in July with a crew in which roughly a quarter of the men were new — many of them fresh recruits rushed through drills on the way back to war.

Her captain was Charles Butler McVay III, who had taken command in November 1944 and led her through Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was a career officer and the son of an admiral. By every account in the record — including the Navy’s own later histories — he was a respected, decorated commanding officer, and his men, the ones who survived him in the water, would spend the rest of their lives saying so in the only forum left to them: a fifty-year campaign to clear his name.

The promise made to a ship’s company runs in both directions. The captain answers for his ship — absolutely, and McVay never disputed that; pulled from his raft after nearly eighty-two hours at sea, he immediately reported the fact his prosecutors would use against him, that his ship had not been zigzagging when she was hit, and he refused, in the proceedings that followed, to shift that responsibility onto his officer of the deck. In return, the institution owes the captain a fair accounting: the whole record, the same standard applied to everyone, and blame fixed where the causes actually lie. What follows is how completely that second half failed — and how long it took the men of the Indianapolis to force a partial correction.

What happened

On July 26, 1945, Indianapolis arrived at Tinian in the Northern Marianas and delivered her secret cargo: components of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. Neither McVay nor his crew knew what they had carried. The top-secret mission was complete. What followed — this matters, because later retellings have blurred it — was a routine transit: to Guam, then on to Leyte in the Philippines, where the ship was to train and resume her role as Spruance’s flagship.

At Guam, the routing picture McVay was given was reassuring. As the U.S. Naval Institute’s account records, the operations officer reported to him before departure that the risk of submarine attack on his route was “negligible.” The ship sailed unescorted, without antisubmarine detection equipment, on Convoy Route Peddie. She departed Guam on the morning of July 28, 1945, with 1,195 men aboard. Her orders left zigzagging — the standard evasive steering pattern — to her captain’s discretion, weather permitting. That night of July 29–30, exercising that discretion, McVay ceased zigzagging.

Just before and after midnight, the Japanese submarine I-58, commanded by Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, maneuvered undetected into attack position and fired a spread of six torpedoes. Two struck Indianapolis’s forward starboard side, at 0003 and 0004 on July 30, 1945. Power and internal communications failed. McVay at first refused to abandon ship; at about 0012, on his executive officer’s recommendation, he gave the order, passed by word of mouth in the darkness. He made his way toward the radio room to be sure a distress call was going out, and was swept overboard as the ship rolled over and sank — about twelve minutes after the first torpedo struck. About 300 men went down with the ship; some 900 went into the water, in groups that drifted as far as twenty miles apart.

Two failures then compounded the sinking, and neither of them was McVay’s. The first concerns the distress call. His radiomen did key an SOS — that much the survivors in the radio rooms attested. But the Naval History and Heritage Command’s historian Richard Hulver, reviewing the record, concluded that damage and lost power likely kept the signal from ever getting out, and that the Navy’s own investigation found no corroborating contemporary evidence that any station received it. Claims that shore stations received the call and ignored it surfaced years later and were investigated; none could be corroborated. This page will not repeat the more dramatic version, because the documented one is damning enough. The second failure needs no embellishment at all: Pacific Fleet Directive 10CL-45 provided that the arrival of combatant vessels did not need to be reported, and port officials read that silence to cover non-arrivals too. Indianapolis failed to appear at Leyte, and no one reported her overdue. No search was mounted. The survivors — McVay among them, commanding a small group on rafts — were found by chance on August 2, when a Navy patrol pilot, Lieutenant Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, spotted an oil slick while adjusting an antenna, and looked down to see men waving.

The arithmetic of the disaster was argued over for seventy-three years — 1,195 or 1,196 aboard, 316 or 317 survivors — until, in 2018, NHHC historian Richard Hulver and filmmaker Sara Vladic published the definitive accounting: 1,195 men were aboard; 316 survived; 879 lives were lost, in the attack, in the water, or after rescue. The discrepancy traced to a single sailor, Clarence Donnor, who had left the ship before she sailed but was carried on the reconstructed crew list as a survivor. The Navy’s 1945 survivor figure — 316 — had been right all along. It remains the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.

What the institution did afterward

A court of inquiry recommended in September 1945 that McVay be court-martialed, on two grounds: failing to zigzag, and taking too long to order abandon ship. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, his commander in chief, disagreed in substance — he called the failure to zigzag “an error in judgment” and recommended a letter of reprimand. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and Admiral Ernest King overrode him. McVay was tried by a general court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard from December 3 to 19, 1945.

The trial produced the proceeding’s defining moment. The prosecution brought Commander Hashimoto — the man who had sunk the ship — across the Pacific to testify against her captain. Instead, Hashimoto testified that zigzagging would have made no difference: given his position and the conditions, he would have sunk Indianapolis regardless of her course. The court convicted anyway. On December 19, 1945, McVay was acquitted of failing to order abandon ship in a timely manner, and convicted of hazarding his ship through negligence by failing to order a zigzag course. He was, as the Naval Institute records, the only U.S. Navy commander convicted for losing his ship to enemy action in the Second World War — out of the hundreds of American ships lost. The sentence was loss of one hundred numbers in his temporary grade of captain and one hundred in his permanent grade of commander. The court itself unanimously recommended clemency, and in February 1946 Forrestal remitted the sentence and McVay was restored to active duty. The conviction was not remitted. It stood.

The asymmetry around him is part of the record. The failures that had actually left 900 men unmissed for days — the routing decisions, the unreported non-arrival — were answered, in the published accounts of the proceedings, with letters of reprimand or admonition for four other officers. Only the captain was convicted of a crime. McVay never held a sea command again. His decorated record entitled him to a “tombstone promotion” to rear admiral when he retired in 1949, but as NHHC’s history notes, he preferred for the rest of his life to be called “Captain.”

What he did with the years is also in the record. In September 1945, before his trial, McVay had personally signed the letters notifying the families of his 879 dead — a stack of condolence letters nearly a foot tall, in Hulver’s phrase — and he answered the letters that came back, including the desperate and the angry. And the angry kept coming. The Naval Institute records that he received hate mail every Christmas for the rest of his life from families of men who had died on the Indy. He kept the letters. On November 6, 1968, at his home in Litchfield, Connecticut, Charles McVay, age seventy, took his own life; accounts of that day record that he was in uniform, with a toy sailor from his boyhood in his hand. NHHC’s historian is careful, and this page will be too: his motivations can never be fully known. But the institution that convicted him had left him carrying, alone and in public, a blame its own senior admiral had called an error in judgment — and the survivors who knew the whole story spent the next three decades trying to take it off his name.

Where it stands now

The fight was carried, above all, by the survivors. The men of the USS Indianapolis Survivors Organization — who had regarded their captain, in their own words, as “not guilty of anything except the fortune or misfortune of war” — campaigned for decades, through rebuff after rebuff. McVay’s son, Kimo McVay, worked the case for most of his life. In February 1998, at the decommissioning of the submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697), a survivor asked that boat’s captain, William J. Toti, to take up the cause; Toti did, and became the campaign’s inside champion. Commander Hashimoto himself joined it: in a 1999 letter to Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the man who fired the torpedoes wrote: “Our peoples have forgiven each other for that terrible war, perhaps it is time your peoples forgave Captain McVay for the humiliation of his unjust conviction.”

The case finally broke open through a schoolboy. Hunter Scott, a Pensacola sixth-grader, built a National History Day project on the sinking, interviewed nearly 150 survivors, reviewed some 800 documents, and concluded the captain had been wronged. His congressman, Representative Joe Scarborough, carried the cause in the House. On September 14, 1999, Scott — fourteen years old — testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee alongside the survivors, holding McVay’s Naval Academy dog tag. A year later, Congress acted. Section 545 of the Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (Public Law 106-398), signed by President Bill Clinton on October 30, 2000, declared it the sense of Congress that the American people should recognize McVay’s “lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the U.S.S. Indianapolis,” and that, because exculpatory information had not been available to the court-martial board, “Captain McVay’s military record should now reflect that he is exonerated for the loss of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and so many of her crew.” The same section directed that the ship and her final crew receive a Navy Unit Commendation, which was presented in 2001.

One step remained, and it fell to a new Secretary of the Navy. On July 11, 2001, Secretary Gordon England directed that the congressional exoneration be placed in McVay’s personnel record — Toti, by his own later account, performed the entry — affirming McVay’s “lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the USS Indianapolis.” Kimo McVay had died on June 29, twelve days earlier, still waiting for it. England’s spokesman was candid about the limits of the act: the Secretary had no legal authority to overturn the findings of the court-martial or remove it from the record. The exoneration went into the file alongside the conviction, not instead of it. The honors that followed were real: on July 30, 2020, the seventy-fifth anniversary, the crew of the Indianapolis was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal. And the ship herself had been found: on August 19, 2017, a team led by Paul G. Allen aboard the research vessel Petrel, guided by Hulver’s archival research, located the wreck more than 18,000 feet down in the Philippine Sea — a protected war grave, where she remains. As of 2026, one man of the 316 is still living: Harold Bray of Benicia, California, the last survivor, who turned ninety-nine that June.

The ledger

The McVay case is this section’s “exonerated on paper, never cleared in law” exhibit: Congress declared him blameless, the Navy filed the declaration — and the 1945 conviction is still in the record underneath it. What the survivors won was enormous. It was not everything they asked for.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera was rolling in the Philippine Sea in 1945. What the record has instead is the survivors in their own words — recorded late, and in one case by the last man left — the survivors’ own documentary about the fight to clear their captain, and the wreck, found at last in 2017. A note on framing: the popular telling of this story runs to the sharks. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s historians record that most of the men who died in the water died of wounds, dehydration, and drowning; this page’s captions follow the record, not the legend. Six films:

In a survivor's own words. Marine Edgar Harrell, who lived through the sinking and the four days that followed, tells the whole story himself — the mission, the torpedoes, the rescue. (Memoirs of WWII oral-history series.)

The last survivor. Harold Bray of Benicia, California — the final living man of the 316 — remembers his shipmates and the ship he joined two weeks before she sailed. (KTVU FOX 2, San Francisco.)

The survivors' own film. The trailer for Sara Vladic's USS Indianapolis: The Legacy (2016), told entirely by the men who lived it — including their fifty-year fight to exonerate Captain McVay. (Films by Serendipity.)

The search, by PBS. PBS's preview of USS Indianapolis: The Final Chapter (2019), the documentary of the scientific search that found the wreck three and a half miles down. (PBS.)

First look at the wreck. TODAY's 2017 report from the discovery: the first images of Indianapolis on the floor of the Philippine Sea, seventy-two years after she went down. (TODAY / NBC.)

Three shipmates, on the record. Survivors Art Leenerman, Earl Riggins, and Don McCall — three Central Illinois men who served together — tell their story for Illinois Public Media's World War II Stories project. (Illinois Public Media.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.