On the day of July 29, which was a Sunday, we were standing our regular watches and I had the 8 at night to midnight watch. Through unknown circumstances we were not relieved on time so Lt. Clinton, my watch mate, decided that he would go down and roust out our reliefs. He did that and I never saw Lt. Clinton again. The reliefs finally showed up and I turned the watch over to them. Told them about the speed of the ship, the weather, conditions of the guns and the conditions of the manning and went to the side of the tub and threw my leg over the side ready to go on down. At that time, I heard this terrible noise and at the same time felt a tear at my side. I fell down. I put my hand down and felt wetness at my side. However, I didn't have time at that particular time to think too much about myself. I went down and ran to the quarterdeck where I was supposed to go to receive orders from the executive officer as to what should be done. He told me to go amidships, take the men to the high side.

By the time I got amidships the high side was only, was almost vertical, the low side was only about a foot out of the water. It became evident as soon as I got there that we were going to have to abandon ship. So I yelled, "Abandon Ship!" Nobody did. Everyone held on for dear life. The most important thing to them was to stay at this home that they knew rather than go into that forbidding water.

I then yelled, "Follow me!" and I worked myself down the deck, which was now almost vertical and let myself into the water and started swimming away. About 10 feet out I realized that these men had never abandoned ship, probably never had any reason to know what to do and I yelled, "Swim away, swim away. The ship will sink, suck you down". And they did and we swam away as fast as we could. And about 100 yards out I looked back and there was my home going down by the bow, just like a movie. It couldn't have been better if it were made in some back lot of a movie studio.

"Count Off"
It wasn't too long before I realized that we had a lot of problems on our hands. Everybody was scared to death. None of us had ever abandoned ship probably. No one really knew what to do. But being a junior officer, I decided that I had better wait and let a senior officer take over. In about 10 minutes or 15 minutes time I realized that there were no senior officers so I immediately gave orders to tell the people what they should do and should not do. We discovered that we had some life nets and these were unfurled and we had four rafts and these were filled with people. At daybreak I decided that everyone had to tie himself to the life nets or if we didn't survive as a unit, we would not survive at all. This was apparent. These frightened boys and they were only boys -- most of them were 18 and 19 years of age -- were looking for leadership. Due to the fact that I was the only officer present, I thought then I decided I'd better give the orders.

As dawn broke, I decided again that these men should know that something was being done, so I yelled, "Count off," and there was a deathly silence. Then gunner Horner, who was in our group, spoke up. [He] said, "You heard the officer. 'One!'" We counted off and we had 325 in our group. I then reorganized the group to put the most heavily wounded people into the rafts and the rest of the people had to be attached to the life nets. It wasn't long before wounds and delirium would take over and the men would cut themselves loose and float away from us. And we would have to go after them. We tried to retrieve as many as we could the first day. We still had quite a bit of energy and our life jackets were still good. The life jackets I knew were only supposed to last for three days, but that gave us plenty of time to hope that somebody would come and rescue us.

"Let us Pray"
Toward nightfall of the first day it became evident to me that no one had seen us. No one had heard us and no alarms had been received by those on shore. No planes had showed up, no ships had shown up and this started to frighten the men. They started to question whether or not this was the fact.

I then decided that we had to get their minds off of what they were thinking and I said, "Let us pray." And I became the chaplain of the group. And I led the men in prayer and it was a most solemn sight to see these men who just a few minutes before had been scared and frightened to death, place themselves in the hands of the Lord. And we prayed and when the prayers were over the men had quieted. The first night didn't bring any great surprises, but the second day did.

It wasn't too late in the second day, after daybreak, when the first sharks arrived. Again this brought unbelievable fear into our group. None of us had ever fought sharks. All of us knew that sharks were not man's best friend. During the morning, several people drifted away from the nets. They'd cut themselves loose and we noticed that, I noticed that these were the men that were attacked the most. These were the men that the sharks took first. I then decided that we had to have a shark watch and I asked everybody to participate in it. And we set up a watch and I asked that as soon as anyone saw a shark to scream shark and then we would all kick and scream -- try to create commotion and dishevel the sharks. We did this from that day on. We always had a shark watch; we always had people watching for sharks.

This continued for several days. We had men dying of wounds. We had men dying of dehydration. We had men dying of saltwater. I attempted to convey to the people in the water the fact that the best thing we could do would be to stick together, not drink any water and help each other. We were very successful at doing this. We went into the water with 325 people and we came out with about 171.

Greatness ... in these Men
There was a remarkable thing that these men had done. I had seen bravery that I had never seen before and have never seen since. I saw greatness in these men that's hard to describe. While they themselves were dying they were helping others. I saw men holding up other men while they themselves were sinking lower and lower as far as life was concerned. This greatness that I had seen left an impression on me for the rest of my life.

In the fourth day we saw the planes come in, a plane come in, piloted by Chuck Gwinn. He made a pass over us and went around and came back in again. We later found that he was coming in for a bombing run when all of a sudden his men noticed that there were people in the water. This was not a Japanese submarine. He wiggled his flaps and let us know that he had seen us. He didn't know whether we were friend or foe. He just knew that we were in trouble.

It was at that time I'm sure that he notified the base that the 17-mile long oil slick was in the water and in the slick were men in trouble. The Navy reacted immediately. They sent out a Catalina flying boat, which was a godsend to us. It came over and flashed a message to us. And I read the message -- having studied Morse code at the Naval Academy, I could read it very well. Then along came another four-engine plane, and it dropped a lifeboat. And in the lifeboat there was communication gear. Unfortunately it didn't work, so I had the gunner who was now in the boat hand me the mirror and I flashed the messages to the Catalina. Answering the question that they asked prior to that time. I told them that we were the USS Indianapolis and I told them we had been in the water in excess of four days.

The captain of the Catalina flew around and decided that he couldn't let us stay in the water with those sharks eating our people up. So Adrian Marks and his crew decided they'd try to land the Catalina, which was a very precarious thing to do -- to land a Catalina in open sea was almost a disaster in itself. By the grace of God he was able to land the plane and his crew members started taking in anybody that they could reach. As I recall they were able to eventually take about 55 or 60 people on board by punching holes in the fabrics of the wing -- or both of the wings -- and giving men something to grab onto.

Naturally this whole thing also created a problem for me because everybody wanted to get in that plane and get out of the reach of those sharks. So I immediately told everyone that anyone who broke loose would be court-martialed when we got ashore. This had the effect of letting these people know that we were still in the United States Navy and not too many did break loose.

This was not the first time that a ship had been sunk in the Pacific or in the Atlantic but never had there been such a horrendous loss of people as we had.

Before nightfall the Basset and the Doyle and other rescue vessels showed up. The Doyle flashed its lights in to the sky and really showed us the bravery of its captain and its crew because they were making themselves sitting targets for submarines. But it let us know that they had seen us and they were coming.

I was picked up eventually by the Basset. The men could not lift me out of the water -- they were in a lifeboat. I was just too heavy and so I just hung on as the boat pulled us over to the Basset. At this time I was so low in the water I had just about an inch of leeway before the water would have been at my mouth to the sea.

We were waterlogged, not only in person but in our life belts [and] life jackets. The men cut me out of the kapok life jacket that I had and carried me up. And I reported to the officer of the deck that we were the crew of the USS Indianapolis. They then took me below and put me into a bunk. Soon a doctor and corpsman came up to me and started cutting away my clothing and trying to find out where the blood was coming from. They found out and the doctor said, "You're lucky it went in the front and went out the back. I don't think it hit anything of any importance or you wouldn't be here." They then gave me some life-giving plasma and I went to sleep.

When I awakened I realized that the trauma was over. I got up and tried to walk and fell down. I just wasn't strong enough to do anything at that time. I had dropped in weight from 155 pounds of hard muscle to a 129-pound weakling. The Basset took us out to Simara and we went into a Naval Hospital for recovery. And after we had recovered we were flown to Guam and they had a court of inquiry to inquire as to the circumstances surrounding the ship. And we testified at that time -- and I have copies of my written testimony -- about the very dark night and what had happened.

McVay's Court-Martial
We spent our time on Guam and Simara, finally getting our bodies back into some sort of shape and we were then put on the jeep carrier and returned to the United States. We all got 30 days leave and at the end of the leave I was assigned to the naval gun factory in Washington, D.C. And this amazed me because one thing I did know was the 5-inch 38 gun. And here I was being asked to sit in on this course, which was a drag. I eventually found out the reason I was there was not to take the course but someplace to stay. I was there for the court martial of my captain, Capt. Charles B. McVay III.

It seems that Ernie (Fleet Adm. Ernest) King had to do something to get the people of the United States' mind away from this 880 people that had been lost in the largest loss of life, the biggest calamity in U.S. Navy history. Our ship and its crew and its captain were an embarrassment that the Navy could not get over. To take the heat off of the Navy, Adm. King convened a kangaroo court to court-martial Capt. McVay.

They had to have charges. King's staff dreamed up two charges, one that the captain hadn't given the order to abandon ship. The other was that he hazarded his ship by not zigzagging. The captain didn't need to give the order to abandon ship because another officer and I had given those orders. We were officers on watch. The zigzagging charge was spurious. When (a senator) inquired of the vice chief of naval operations at the Senate hearing last year, as to whether or not the captain would have been court-martialed if we hadn't been sunk for not zigzagging, the Navy answered that he wouldn't have been.

So it became quite evident that this was a cover-up. The record of the court-martial is well known to everyone. The captain was court-martialed, and he was court-martialed not for losing 880 people or for the loss of the ship. He was court-martialed for not zigzagging. If the Navy court-martialed every captain who didn't zigzag at one time or another there wouldn't have been a captain in the Navy with a clear record.

I put the Navy and the captain and the court-martial and the experience behind me after I returned to civilian life in 1948. When I found that I could no longer meet the Navy's physical requirements, I went into the reserve and served in that. I put this out of my mind, never talked about it or became involved in discussions about it. I did not join the survivors' organization until 1989. In 1989, Dan Kurzman, the author of Fatal Voyage, called me and asked if he could interview me. I said no, I didn't allow anyone to interview me about the Indianapolis and that was in my past. I did not want to bring anybody into my former life.

He said, "But I have some information that would be of interest to you. I know why and how your captain was court-martialed." I then said, "Well, Mr. Kurzman, sometime when you're in Florida, call me and we'll get together and I'll be glad to talk with you." He said, "Mr. Twible, I will be down there tomorrow." That was the beginning of my involvement in trying to clear the name of Capt. Charles B. McVay III.

I knew the source of the problem now. Now it was up to me to do whatever I could to clear this wonderful man's name. From that time on until the present day I have been working along with all of the remaining survivors of the Indianapolis to get the captain's name cleared. We are now at the threshold of success. Two bills have been passed by the House and the Senate and attached to the defense authorization bill, which will clear the captain's name. It is our desire to see this done before the end of our lives. We have about 100 men left and I can't think of anything more satisfying to any of them than to know that their captain had finally been exonerated.

I still love the Navy, even though I couldn't finish my career there. However, the training that I received at the Naval Academy and those five days in the water made every other decision I have ever made in life possible to make. What other decision would I ever make in life that would be as great as that decision to ask those young men to follow me into the water? We went into the water as younger men. I was 23. But we came out much older men. We were stronger, we were more vibrant than we had ever been.