The Indianapolis got hit by a kamikaze plane at Okinawa and so we limped back and took on repairs and we lost nine men. And we took on repairs and then we crippled on back to [the] United States and then from then on is whenever the history of the Indianapolis unfolds. After we were repaired at Vallejo, Calif., why they put us down at Hunter's Point, San Francisco, which was the jumping off point for things going overseas and ships going overseas. And we took on board the main components of the atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and on Nagaski. And of course none of us knew what was on there, none of us knew what was in the crates, but these were two great big large crates and they took two of our airplanes, our observation planes, off of our catapults. And they put this big crate in the hangar deck on the port side.

Indianapolis had 39 marines on board that did security duty and particular guard duty and orderly duty for Capt. (Charles) McVay and even at times for Adm. (Raymond) Spruance because that was his flagship. The marines did a 24-hour-a-day watch in the hangar deck and would allow no one that wasn't authorized to even come in and look at the box. And so we made the speed run from there to Tinian where we dropped the atomic bombs off and they later were put on the Enola Gay and went over and it was dropped on Hiroshima.

From there we went to Guam and we were preparing for the invasion of Japan. And so we went from Guam to Leyte and without an escort, which was unheard of back in World War II times, 'cause no combat ship and definitely no flagship like the Indianapolis was ever allowed to travel through dangerous waters without a destroyer escort for the submarine detection. Indianapolis had no detection device on it.

Well halfway between Guam and Leyte, why the I-58 was on its killer patrol to try to stop anything moving across this area. And so he spotted the Indianapolis at night and before he spotted us the clouds were so thick you couldn't hardly see your hand in front of your face. And then they parted and then that's when he observed the Indianapolis and thought we were a big battleship. So he planned his attack on us and as he set up his firing plan, why he fired six torpedoes at us and he had three kaitens on board. Kaitens are suicide torpedoes that men operate and Japanese used them as well as the kamikaze planes that attacked the combat ships.

And so he fanned out six torpedoes and two of them hit us. One blew off about 50, 60 feet of the bow and the other one hit amidships right below the quarter deck. And the second torpedo knocked out all controls. And of course the first torpedo [had] taken out the bow of the ship. The ship was moving at 17 knots and so it kept picking up, scooping up water. And then it ignited internally. A lot of the men that escaped into the water died of burns and all. Dr. (Lewis) Haynes was one of our senior medical doctor[s] and he survived the Indianapolis, and he was badly burned on his hands and feet as well as a lot of other men.

Now I was on duty in the brig. We had two of our cooks got into trouble on shore, and they had a 10-day captain's court-martial and so they were serving their 10 days time in the brig. And so the Marines have to guard them 24 hours a day so you go four on, four off. Well I changed the watch about a half-hour before my original time. And just long enough I guess for my Marine buddy to get from the brig all the way into the Marine compartment when the second torpedo hit. And the brig is in the very aftermost part of the ship -- we call it the fantail. And it was three decks below and so whenever the ship was struck by the torpedoes, all controls went out -- that means all lights, all communication. And so I was thrown to the deck and all bunks were piled on top of me, like all the men in the berthing compartment.

And so I dug myself out from underneath all the debris the sleeping bunks and I got my two men loose. And I turned on the battle lantern -- which is a battery-operated lantern -- the only light we had in the compartment. And I had the two men, two prisoners, help me lift bunks off of other men to let them escape and get up and go up the hatch. And then all of a sudden the ship kept listing and then word was passed down that they were going to close and dog the hatch.

Sunken Tomb
Well you had to go up from below decks, we were three decks below. And you had to go topside through hatches that only one man at a time could go through the hatch. Well we were right below the chief's quarters and so one of the chief's hollered down to clear the compartment as best we could because he was going to dog the hatch. And that meant that he was going to close it and put a metal pin in there where nobody could open it and watertight the compartment. Well, my prisoners left me real quick, and I wound up being about the third or fourth last man out of the compartment that I recall.

And I still can recall guys screaming and hollering down there that had broken legs and broken arms and such and it bothers me today, even after, even though I'm 75 years old. But I still think of it because that wound up being the tomb of those men and there was nothing I could do about it. I did everything I could to try to free as many of them as I could. Then we fought and got topside. Well when I got topside I was on my own and so I went to my battle station, which was on the boat deck, and that's forward of the 8-inch turret.

Well by the time I got there the ship had listed so badly that I walked up the side of the 8-inch turret. And when I got climbed up through the wires and all and got to my battle station, the ship was laying on its side and the bow was already gone and the quarter deck was already underwater. And so I got on the side of the ship and I just walked down the ship and got to the keel and slid on in.

And as I swam away I kept thinking of being taken down with the ship cause I was so close to it. And I remember looking back, and I can see the ship looked like it was going to fall on me. It was going down bow first and I could still see the screws turning and I could still see men jumping off of the fantail that had waited too long. And I saw them hitting the screws, ' cause the moon had come out where it was pretty well light. And so I kept swimming hard and then all of a sudden something pulled me down. And I guess I went down with the suction.

But then I was told like a lot of the other fellows -- later on while I was going on I hooked onto a big air bubble that was coming up from the Indianapolis and so then they took me topside, took me upward and I did have a life jacket hooked over my arm but I didn't have a chance to put it on. So after I got up and I got the life jacket on my body, why then I looked back and there was nothing but a great big mountain of foam, just white foam where the Indianapolis was.

And I could feel in my belly, I could feel explosions under the water where the Indianapolis was exploding as it was sinking. And I could feel the concussions hit me in the groin and in my abdomen.

Oil and Saltwater
But then I met a group, a fairly large group of men, but couldn't tell what it was. And then the sky got real dark again -- it got blackened over -- and so we stayed out there floating with all of them for about three hours, and I decided I heard some guys hollering that they had a piece of a life raft and that they couldn't come over to us. And so I decided I was going to swim to the raft. And that's what I did. And I had to swim through the oil. We had about 2, 3 inches of oil on the water. And you swallowed that and saltwater and as I got there the guys grabbed me by my hair and held onto me and I know I got real sick. I was vomiting and throwing up all this oil.

And so after I kind of settled down and got myself back together again why a couple hours, probably an hour, an hour and a half after that, we saw silhouettes and it looked like a destroyer. And several of the other guys all saw it too.

And so I thought, well we got attacked by a destroyer and he sunk us, 'cause the submarine was so big. I couldn't believe that the submarine was that big and it even had an observation plane on it cause a lot of people don't know that. So I took my .45 out and I fired two rounds at the object, hoping they would hear it or see my flash. But they did not and then they disappeared in the darkness.

And so then our ordeal went on and we started through the ordeal of trying to survive the sinking. And we started in our group of 17 men and as the end came there was five of us left. And three of them were unconscious and of course we had them tied together so that their faces wouldn't drop in the water and they'd [not] drown.

And so as the days went on, you know we felt that normally when a ship had sunk that we would be rescued within 48 hours. Well after 48 hours went by everybody started giving up hope. And of course we had no water and no food. And so the men just started losing their control. They went out of their mind and they would hallucinate and say they saw the Indianapolis still down below and go down and get a drink of water. And so we lost a lot of men that way.

And then as the third day came on everybody started giving up. It was much easier to die than it was to fight and stay alive. And so the people started giving up, even though we begged the men with families and such to hang on and don't give up. But even in our own minds we knew that we weren't going to be rescued -- that they had just lost us at sea.

Beacon of Hope
And so into the fourth day why I gave up and so I tried to clean the oil off my body and prepare it for God and hope that he would accept me. And made my final prayers and promises and so forth and hoped that the sharks wouldn't eat me up and that I would just die and sink down below. Well then as the evening came on the three men that we had tied together, we were trying to keep them out of the water so they wouldn't drown and we saw lights. Graham Claytor who was the skipper of the Cecil Doyle, a destroyer was the first one onto the scene. And he put his whale boats down and he picked up men and then he picked up Dr. Haynes and then he found out just how bad we were and how long we'd been out there in the water.

And so he very courageously took his 24-inch search light and pointed it up to the clouds and, and turned it on. And so it became a beacon of hope for all of us. And that was the first that I knew that we had a chance to be taken out of the water and like I said that was the evening of the fourth day. And we tried to revive the men with us and tell them, you know, "Don't give up. Don't die. You know we've got help coming after us."

And how we were found was so accidental. If you read the history of the Indianapolis, you'll see that I guess God had his hand in it. Because Chuck Gwinn with a land-based plane, he had a twin engine Ventura and he was flying over the area and he had treading wire, antenna problem and it was punching a hole in his fuselage. So he opened his bomb bay doors up and he was on his belly cranking it in by hand and he looked down and saw the oil slick and dove down, thought it was a crippled sub and dove down and readied his bombs to drop it on the submarine. And as he got closer he saw all the sharks and all the men. And so he knew that, man, that was a big disaster here cause there was men everywhere, bodies everywhere.

And so he very quickly, without even coding, he made the announcement back to his home base that they needed help out there, that they had men everywhere and sharks were all around them. And so that instituted the rescue mission. And then, like I said, Graham Claytor, he didn't even wait for orders. He just turned off on his direction going to the Philippines and just came on into our sector.

And then they sent other vessels out to pick us up. And they had a PBY with Adrian Marks in it, which was one of the most courageous of all of them. Adrian got permission through his crew to go on and do an open sea landing. Well, we were constantly in seas anywhere from 10- to 12-foot seas. And so that's a lot of swells. And so he landed his PBY, which was a landing craft, a watercraft. And he landed between swells and successfully made it and then he taxied around and it was getting dark but he was taxiing around trying to pick up men and he picked up little small groups and left the big groups together. And when he finally got a total on all the men that he had picked up, he picked up 56 men.

Well if you've ever been on PBY there's no way that a PBY can hold 56 men. So he punched holes in his wings and he tied the men with parachute shrouds to keep them from sliding into the water. And he filled his fuselage completely. And so he kept them on all that night and because he couldn't take them off during the dark and so he waited until daylight and then he transferred his 56 men to the Doyle. And then he naturally had to sink his aircraft because there was, it could not , you know, become airborne again, but that saved 56 men.

And then in our group where we were at, we could see on the fifth day we could see all the aircraft and all the ships in the area and they went around from daylight all the way around to the afternoon. And about 2 or 3 in the afternoon they left our area where we couldn't see them anymore. And so we knew we had been overlooked and, since there were only two of us that were conscious, a guy by the name of Bob Brundage and myself. And we both were crying and we got lost and you know that they couldn't find us. And then a lone PBY, as I found out later on, he was headed back to Pelileu and he was running out of fuel and so he was down low over the water heading back home. He went right over the top of us and so he saw us and then he dropped a Clark antenna -- and the Ringness, the USS Ringness, which was an APD, which had already just a few hours earlier picked up Capt. McVay and his group, and was headed back to Pelileu -- the PBY radioed Capt. Myer on the Ringness and so he broke off and came over and picked the five of us up. And as we calculated we probably were the last of the men taken out of the sea. And we had sharks swimming around us.

And I remember two of the guys dove into the water and they came up and they saw the sharks and boy, they beat it right back to the ship. And then two more dove in and then they came and cut us apart, 'cause I had all our faces tied together so that we wouldn't drop our face in the water and drown. And so they cut us loose and then they took us aboard the ship and then we headed back to Pelileu where they put us in the hospital and a group of us went sun blind. I was one of them.

And you could see a light, but you couldn't discern anybody. And I thought, "Oh boy, I'm blind." And then all of a sudden some of the men in the ward started screaming, "I'm blind! I'm blind!." I thought, "Oh hell, I'm not by myself." And so a doctor came in and made the announcement to all of us that we were sun blind and that in two or three days it would clear up and it did.

And then after that they put us aboard the hospital ship Tranquillity and they took us back to Guam where all the survivors wound up in the Base 18 hospital on Guam. Now some of the men, from the Bassett -- that picked up 151 men ... Well they were flown back to Guam and we all got together at the base hospital there on Guam.

Well during that time I recuperated fairly quick and Capt. McVay came through and he was wanting to check on his men 'cause he was a very conscientious commanding officer and then he saw that I was up and around and he said, "McCoy, you all right?" And I said, "Yes sir." And he said, "Would you want to drive a jeep for me?" And I said, "Yes sir." And so I went and checked out some khaki pants and shirts and just went and checked out a jeep for him. And so I had to drive him around up to CINCPAC, which was the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet. It was up on top of a mountain there on Guam and it was Adm. (Raymond) Spruance's headquarters and that's where they were conducting a hearing on the loss of the Indianapolis.

And so McVay naturally had to be there to give his part of the loss of his ship. And so in driving back and forth up there I had to sit and wait quite a while, whenever I would drop him off at the headquarters. Well, I had saltwater ulcers all over my bottom and they were caused from the phosphorous in the water. And they were little hard sores that would break and bleed and sting and all. And so anyhow, I had them all over my hind end and, and I was so worried because my bouncing around in that jeep. Those jeeps have hard seats and bouncing around in that jeep I kept breaking them loose. And I was worried about bleeding through my underwear and into the khakis and having to stand at attention up there at CINCPAC and having somebody look at my back end and think I was shot with a shotgun. So I had a male corpsman there in my ward to patch me up real good so I didn't bleed through to my khakis.

But, anyhow, after we went through this and I know in bringing Capt. McVay back down -- he had quarters down in Guam, in Laguna -- why he never confided in me cause I was Marine Pfc., but he told me a couple of times, "Man," he said, "I think they're out to get me." He said, "I think they're going to try to nail this loss of this ship on me." And that was really the unfolding of his unjust court-martial. Now, I'm trying not to jump around. Anyhow, we all recuperated and we got back to the states.

You know my feelings about the Navy Department's failure or lack of concern regarding the clearing of Capt. McVay's court-martial and the injustice of being the only commander of a combat vessel to be court-martialed for the loss of his ship due to enemy action in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Clearing McVay's Name
Now you know I have fought this since 1960 to 1995 to get his court-martial cleared. And that was the years that I was the head of the survivor's organization. And you won't believe the types of correspondence I received. Not only from the Navy Department defending their decision on the court-martial but also from President Ford's office. (And one of the Navy admirals) answered me by saying the loss of the I>Indianapolis was no different than any other ship lost during the action in World War II.

Now that response was so dishonoring to the men that were lost on the Indianapolis and a disgrace to all of us and the near 900 of good American men that were lost during the sinking. Then, like I told you, normally when a combat vessel is lost at sea, the shipwrecked crew has spent probably no more than 48 hours or much less floating in the water.

Well, because of the Navy's improper directives, you know they had a directive -- and the Navy lives by directives -- the Navy had a directive that you did not report the arrival of a combat vessel in a port during combat or during war time. And I can understand that. But they didn't make another directive that you must follow up on the nonarrival of a combat vessel, which they didn't do. Everybody just forgot about us. And so the Indianapolis was lost. And, like I told you before, they were discovered accidentally by Chuck Gwinn and his PB Ventura. And other than that if we'd have gone another day or two there, it would have been the biggest mystery of the history of the Navy because none of us would have been alive to tell the story.

And whenever we look at this, you know the full-scale rescue came on in the fifth day, and the men had already fatigued you know they had their minds had been blown. They were dehydrated, tongues were swollen and sticking out of their mouths. And they were just finished. And, and so we know that there wouldn't have been much chance for any of us to be remaining alive in another day or two.

So I'm going to go into this part of it. I said this to an admiral when I had a Senate hearing recently up in Washington, D.C. I wanted to let him know what a combat veteran really is. A combat veteran is a person who puts his life on the line for his country, for the freedom, for the justice and the honor that it represents. And Capt. McVay was that kind of a combat veteran, just like the rest of us even though he died, he killed himself in 1968, and he was tormented all those years. He was accused of this thing, which was, was very wrong. He was a combat veteran and his honor was at stake.

And that's why the men of the Indianapolis are fighting so hard to exonerate him and get him cleared and have the Navy apologize, court-martialing just to use him as a scapegoat. Because my honest thoughts of why the Navy Department is so reluctant to admit they did an injustice to Capt. McVay -- humiliating him. McVay as a scapegoat -- politically they to this day do not want to embarrass the Navy or admit that the officers of the court-martial did not carry out a proper hearing for Capt. McVay. Mostly they were politically under pressure from Secretary (James) Forrestal, who was the secretary of the Navy at the time and President Truman, and who wanted to blame someone other than the Navy for losing track of the Indianapolis and the 900 needlessly lost lives.

Now, some of this was triggered by a man who lost a son on the Indianapolis, the man, the ensign that took his life jacket off and was swimming to the PBY and then disappeared. And his father was so embittered with Capt. McVay that he wanted to blame him for the death of his son and he had a lot of political clout. And so he pulled all of his things and got things going ...

If the survivors were taken from the sea within 48 hours, at least to my mind 70 percent of the crew would have survived. And that's a heck of a lot you know because we went from 1,200 down to 300 of us making it. And so 70 percent would have been a big percentage of us.

And to answer the question why the survivors have fought for so long to clear the captain's name or restore his honor, it's what I told you about a combat veteran. And I really strongly believe that that's what a combat veteran is and not just a combat veteran in World War II, but combat veterans in Korea and Vietnam and all the wars that we've had to fight. You know those are combat veterans.

And again I repeat from a letter I sent to Adm. Nance of the Navy Department. I informed him that the crew of the Indianapolis would forever haunt the Navy until they recognize the injustice that has been done to our captain and his ship's crew ... those who have died and those who still are living and I really believe this. I believe that we are back to haunt him, and I've tried during the years that I was in charge of the survivor's group to remind them of the Indianapolis, 'cause I promised them and I promised the men that we lost on the Indianapolis.