Fifty-Five Years Later
By Don Campbell

APRA HARBOR, Guam, Aug. 9 — Less than three weeks before the end of World War II, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left this port to prepare for the invasion of Japan. She never saw land again. Now, 55 years later, four crew mates from Indy's final cruise have returned to the Pacific to join deep-sea explorers as they look for the wreck of their ship.

"She was a good-looking ship," recalls veteran Paul Murphy. "Nice lines — a 'clipper' bow. And she was fast! It was an honor to serve aboard Indy."

Paul Murphy, Woody James, Mike Kuryla and L.D. Cox were among the lucky ones on Indy's final trip. They survived the Japanese torpedo attack that sent the warship to the bottom of the ocean, and they lived through four and a half hellish days adrift in treacherous waters. Of the 1,196 men onboard, only 316 survived.

"I lost a lot of friends, good friends. I lost my best friend down there," reflects Mike Kuryla. "We were just kids back then, 17, 18. Some of the guys were fresh out of boot camp on their very first cruise."

At 75, Mike doesn't look like a kid anymore, none of the vets do; but all covet the chance to be on-site if the Indianapolis is found.

Leading the search effort is underwater explorer Curt Newport. Two months ago, Newport came here to scan the bottom of the Philippine Sea for any trace of the Indianapolis. The results were both promising and frustrating.

For that first phase of the search, Newport analyzed records from the ship's final voyage and identified a target area two and a half days west of Guam. He planned to spend 10 days scouring more than 600 square miles of open ocean, some of it nearly 4 miles deep. His primary tool was a deep-water "sidescan" sonar sled strung at the end of miles of cable on a high-speed hydraulic winch. Four days into the search the winch failed, stopping the operation dead in its tracks.

"Nothing like this is ever cut and dry," says Newport. "I mean, we're sending these incredibly sensitive machines down way deep and then trying to keep them a precise distance off the bottom at the end of 4 or 5 miles of cable. It takes a lot more than luck to find what you're looking for."

The searchers, backed by the Discovery Channel, which is filming a documentary, will not touch or disturb the sunken ship or its artifacts should they find the Indianapolis, Newport said. Last summer, Newport led the Discovery-funded trip that found and recovered astronaut Gus Grissom's lost Liberty Bell 7 space capsule in the Atlantic.

The Indianapolis is thought to lie somewhere at the heart of an underwater mountain range, with peaks and valleys that can rise and fall some 9,000 feet. "You have to be able to reel in cable pretty fast out there or else you're going to 'fly' the sled straight into a mountainside," warns Newport. "When that winch crapped out, we were dead in the water."

That was the bad news. The good news was that the sonar had already yielded some promising contacts. At the heart of the search area, nearly 10,000 feet down, the team identified signs of a potential debris field — and a large, hard target, 300 to 400 feet long. The blurred vision of the sonar records show an object with long, straight lines, too regular and too hard to be a geologic formation, and clear acoustic "shadows" — all findings that suggest a large, man-made, metallic object: a shipwreck, perhaps. While the Indianapolis was 610 feet long, it may have broken up upon sinking.

Further analysis and a return visit to the site with a new winch reinforced Newport's conviction that he has possibly located wreckage of the Indianapolis. But, he cautions, "there's no way to say for sure until we get cameras down there and we see battleship gray."

That's why he has returned to Guam with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipped with a high-definition video camera and accompanied by four survivors who served aboard the Indianapolis and can identify the ship on sight.

As the ROV scours the ocean bottom, images of what its cameras are filming will be viewed on monitors aboard our search vessel. "I can't tell you what I'm gonna do when I see that ship again," sighs L.D., a colorful Texan with a round face, a big heart and a tale for every situation. "I may just have to cry."

"I want to see my locker," Woody says, lightening the mood. "I left five bottles of the best Scotch in there."

"Five bottles! I hope you're planning on sharing that," teases L.D.

To see Indy again, the team will have to sail three days out of Guam, send the ROV to the bottom of the Pacific and hope that the tantalizing sonar echoes are indeed shadows of the broken warship. After several last-minute mechanical adjustments onshore, the searchers set sail today. Their plan is to be in position to search for the Indianapolis this weekend with the ROV and underwater cameras.

Memorial Service
Last Saturday, at sunset on Guam's Asan Point, where the National Park Service maintains a memorial to the thousands who fought and died during the war in the Pacific, the Indianapolis was remembered. A Navy color guard in dress whites approached the flagpole that rises from what was once a bloody beachhead. Glowing in the sunset, the Stars and Stripes fluttered slowly into the outstretched hands of a young sailor. Standing close by were the four aging men who were also once young sailors in service to their country.

The flag was folded, reverentially, and handed to Adm. Tom Fellin, the commander of U.S. naval forces here in the Marianas, who turned to the four veterans. In a few quiet words, Fellin expressed gratitude and respect for these representatives of the 316 men who survived the sinking of the Indianapolis and their 880 crew mates lost in the sea. Then he handed the flag to L.D. Cox.

Later, the four survivors agreed that they would like to see the flag carried down by the ROV to rest with the wreck of their ship. But first, Curt Newport will have to prove that he has indeed found Indy's remains.