By Sunday, August 5, 1945, there were only the dead left. Three hundred and twenty people had been rescued, the only survivors from the nearly twelve hundred crew members who had sailed from San Francisco on the USS Indianapolis three weeks earlier. The bodies remaining in the water were in such a state of decomposition that many weren’t more than skeletons and skin, barely held together by the straps of their life vests.
The USS Helm, one of the rescue and recovery ships, noted in its log that faces were impossible to recognize, and most of the remaining skin on the bodies was so bloated, lacerated, and bruised that the Helm’s medical crew could only peel what skin they could off the hands of the dead to take below deck and dehydrate -- the only way to get legible fingerprints. These partial, mangled markings were how many of the bodies were finally formally identified, cross-referenced with Naval intake forms. By the time the sun began to set that Sunday evening, the Helm had already hauled in 18 bodies. They would bring in ten more before ending their mission on account of darkness, but at 7:40PM, according to the ship’s record, they hauled up Body 19.
By Sunday, August 5, 1945, there were only the dead left.
Three hundred and twenty people had been rescued, the only survivors from the nearly twelve hundred crew members who had sailed from San Francisco on the USS Indianapolis three weeks earlier.
The bodies remaining in the water were in such a state of decomposition that many weren’t more than skeletons and skin, barely held together by the straps of their life vests.
The USS Helm, one of the rescue and recovery ships, noted in its log that faces were impossible to recognize, and most of the remaining skin on the bodies was so bloated, lacerated, and bruised that the Helm’s medical crew could only peel what skin they could off the hands of the dead to take below deck and dehydrate -- the only way to get legible fingerprints.
These partial, mangled markings were how many of the bodies were finally formally identified, cross-referenced with Naval intake forms.
By the time the sun began to set that Sunday evening, the Helm had already hauled in 18 bodies. They would bring in ten more before ending their mission on account of darkness, but at 7:40PM, according to the ship’s record, they hauled up Body 19.
Wednesday, July 30th, marks the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and, as it happens, June 20 marked the 50th anniversary of Jaws, the epochal blockbuster where Captain Quint gives his famous monologue about the sinking of the Indianapolis and its aftermath.
The speech is the crucial moment in the film -- Quint, the modern, Martha’s Vineyard Ahab, reveals the reasons behind his maniacal desire to kill the monster shark terrorizing the town.
Robert Shaw delivers the lines with such ghost story gravitas that it turns what could have been just a spectacular summer thriller into something more -- both human and mythic at the same time.
As much as the John Williams’ score or the special effects, the speech makes the movie.
Or, at least, it did for me, watching it for the first time with my dad, way too young, when I learned for the first time that his dad, my grandfather, had been a machinist mate third class on that very same Indianapolis.
Paul Virgil Nichols was born on March 26, 1920 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Bennie Virgil Nichols and Sylvia Marie Murphy Nichols.
He went to Bellevue Middle School, dropped out of high school after a year, worked as a messenger for Western Union, married young, and shipped out with the Navy in 1944.
He left behind his young wife, Vera Elizabeth Betts, and his two year old son, Dewey Julius Nichols, my uncle, though the family would reunite in California, when Paul returned on leave in spring, 1945.
But before then, for nearly a year, Paul served aboard the Indianapolis, all through the battles in the Marianas, Saipan, Guam, and Tinian.
In March of 1945, he was on board during the Battle of Okinawa, where the U.S. Navy suffered its heaviest casualties of the war, and where the Indianapolis was seriously damaged by a Kamikaze attack.
The ship returned to the Mare Island Navy Yard in San Francisco, where it stayed docked for three months, undergoing repairs.
At some point in those three reparative months, the biological process began that eventually produced my Dad, who was born nine months later on April 1, 1946, back in Memphis.
On July 16th, the Indianapolis set out for the Pacific theater with an secret mission. Unbeknownst to Paul and most of the crew, the ship had the components to build the world’s first atomic bomb on board, and its mission was to deliver that cargo safely to the assembly team on Tinian Island in the Philippines Sea.
Originally, the Navy had selected the USS Pensacola for the mission, but the Pensacola failed its sea trials, and so the mission fell to the Indianapolis.
So it goes.
The Indianapolis sailed without incident to Tinian, dropped off the bomb materials, and, mission complete, left for the island of Leyte on July 28, 1945. The radio logs show the ship proceeded unescorted by a direct route, sailing at 17 knots, under generally moderate seas and good visibility, for two days.
Then, at 12:05AM on July 30, two torpedoes struck the Indianapolis on its starboard side. A hundred sailors died instantly.
The ten ton ship went down in ten minutes, sinking three and half miles down to one of the deepest places on earth.
Another hundred sailors died in those ten minutes, scrambling to abandon ship. Dozens more died in the act of abandonment itself.
“Men were jumping off the stern, screaming as they dropped,” one survivor said. “They hit the blades (of the sinking ship’s still-spinning inboard propellers) and were thrown into the air. One minute they were dropping straight for the sea; the next, they were flying sideways, wailing as they flew out into the darkness.”
The surviving crew was 650 miles from where they had set out, 650 miles from where they were supposed to be, and, because of a bureaucratic error, no one knew it. It was barely 1AM. Some of the sailors made it off the ship only to drown, or to burn to death in the flaming slick caused by thousands of gallons of fuel oil that gushed from the burning vessel.
Of those that made it off the sinking ship and into the burning ocean, only three hundred twenty survived the full five days that passed before a plane finally spotted them on a routine flyover.
These final three hundred and twenty survivors were rescued on August 4, 1945. Four more then died in the hospital, leaving only 316 sailors who made it home.
On August 5, the rescue work turned fully into recovery.
Survivors recounted how, over the course of those gruesome five days in the water, some of the sailors had gone mad, attacking each other, pulling their shipmates underwater to drown them, or sometimes beating them to death, stabbing them, or, in one case, gouging their eyes out.
Maybe to get their life jackets. Maybe not. Maybe just because.
Most of them had started hallucinating after the first day, so some were killed because their crew mates thought they were hoarding fresh water, or had stolen their wallets, or were enemy spies.
Some committed suicide by slipping out of their life vests and drifting out into the 10,000 square foot open ocean surrounding them. Others had been so badly injured in the initial explosions they died from lack of medical attention to their broken bones, internal bleeding, or head trauma. Some started drinking the salt water, others went blind or starved.
Some, around two hundred, were eaten by sharks. Hundreds of makos, white-tips, tigers, and blues feasted on the floating prey, killing fifty men a day in frenzied bursts.
“As the water flashed with twisting tails and dorsal fins, the boys resolved to stay calm, clamping their hands over their ears against the erupting screams, but this resolve vanished when one of the boys was dragged through the water like a fisherman’s bobber tugged by a big catfish. The victim, clenched in the uplifted jaws of a shark, was pushed at waist level through the surf, screaming.”
My dad never expressed much interest in “Daddy Paul’s” story -- “that side of the family basically disowned us after the war“ -- and my sporadic research never yielded much new information beyond Quint’s speech.
That had felt like enough.
Until last year, I didn’t know whether Paul had been one of the hundred or so who died on board the ship, whether he might have actually been one of the four rescued who died later in the hospital, or if he’d been one of Captain Quint’s compatriots there in the water, fending off the sharks for days, hallucinating palm trees and ghost ships, sacrificing himself or slitting someone’s throat.
I’m sure part of me didn’t want to know.
But I got Covid in 2023, and something compelled me to once again get Doug Stanton’s definitive telling of the Indianapolis story, In Harm’s Way, from the library.
It was at least the third time I’d checked it out, and I’d never managed to even open it. But this time, feverish and bored, I finally plunged in.
(Let me now say: I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The story is even more incredible than the broad outlines suggest, and Stanton is a masterful storyteller. Obviously, it’s grim and horrific, but if you’ve handled reading about it so far, you’ll be fine. Or, you’ll be okay. Or, how about this -- you’ll survive.)
After I finished it, I reached out to Stanton, one of hundreds of relatives and curiosity-seekers who send him notes about the Indianapolis, I’m sure, and to my surprise he very kindly replied, putting me in touch with the Rick Stone and Family Charitable Foundation, who then sent me all the information they had on Paul Virgil Nichols.
*
That was December 2023, but I didn’t actually read the Stone report until April 2024, because their email had gone to my Ancestry.com junk folder.
In fact, I only found the report because I was combing through that cursed folder, trying to understand why I was still being charged $15 a month for a service I’d canceled over and over again.
But, lo, there in the automated nonsense, was “Nichols Family Report - USS Indianapolis - 671.”
On Sunday, August 5, 1945, at 7:40PM, the crew of the Helm hauled up Body Number 19. It had no dog tags, no service number, no name, so they peeled the skin off the hands, same as they had done with bodies one through 18.
The Helm’s medical staff then took the skin below deck to dehydrate and compare with the fingerprints from the naval records and intake forms.
The standard procedure, after the skin had been peeled off and taken away, was to attach 40mm shells to the body and to sink it.
For Body 19, as they were preparing this burial at sea, one of the Helm’s medical crew noticed something on the body’s left arm. It turned out, they wouldn’t have to wait for the ocean to leach away from the dead skin to know these remains were the body of Machinist Mate Third Class Paul Virgil Nichols from Memphis, Tennessee.
There on the left arm, preserved still after the explosion, the exposure, the sharks, the homicidal hallucinations, was a tattoo, a line drawing of a heart, like a child would draw.
There was a name at the center, pierced by an arrow.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb, assembled from the parts the Indianapolis delivered to Tinian Island, on Hiroshima, killing 118,000 people.
On Thursday, August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people.
On December 19, 1945, the Indianapolis captain, Charles McVay III, became the only captain in the history of the U.S. Navy to be court-martialed for losing his ship. He was convicted of “failing to zigzag in hostile waters.”
Leading up to and after the trial, according to author Timothy Maier:
“McVay repeatedly asked why it took five days to rescue his men. He never received an answer, though the Navy claimed for years that his SOS messages never were received because McVay was operating under radio silence. Declassified records now show the Navy lied. At least three SOS messages were received separately, but none were acted upon because one commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and a third thought it was a Japanese prank.”
On April 1, 1946, Virgil Maurice Nichols, my dad, was born in Memphis. On November 6, 1968, McVay killed himself.
On February 26, 1977, William Joss Nichols, my brother, was born.
On March 26, 1979, fifty-nine years to the day after Paul Virgil was born, I was, too.
*NB: All typos in this email are actually secret code
