Survivors of WWII ship disaster recall horror

March 25, 2001, Chicago Sun-Times

BY SCOTT FORNEK STAFF REPORTER

More than 50 years later, Gus Kay can still hear the screams.

They are echoes of the horrific sounds made by the men floating all around him in lifejackets as schools of killer sharks picked them off, one by one.

"I was between two guys," Kay said. "They took these guys up in the air, screaming and hollering. Have you ever heard a man scream?"

Kay, 74, an Elmwood Park retiree, is one of a handful of Chicago area survivors of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Torpedoed by a Japanese submarine July 30, 1945, the 10,000-ton cruiser went down in about 12 minutes.

About 900 of the 1,196 men aboard made it off the ship, but only 317 survived the five days they floated in the South Pacific waiting for rescue.

Kay, who was an 18-year-old seaman 1st class, started with a group of 129, all clinging to a floater net. By the time they were rescued, only seven were left.

"They drank the [salt] water--you can't drink the water--and they died," Kay said. "They died from heat exhaustion. They died from hallucinations. There was all kinds of death."

Kay and other local survivors are featured in Doug Stanton's new book In Harm's Way, due in bookstores April 4. It is not the first book on the nation's worst naval disaster, but the men who survived say it is one of the best.

"It tells you the stories of the men, and it brings out what happened," said Michael N. Kuryla Jr., a coxswain on the Indianapolis.

Kay, Kuryla and other local survivors agreed to share their memories of the horrors and heroism with the Chicago Sun-Times.

"It is something you don't forget," said Kuryla, 75, a retired public works director in west suburban Hillside. "It stays with you all the time."

Back then, Kuryla was 19. The ship had just stopped at the island of Tinian to drop off uranium for the first atomic bomb--a top-secret mission the men learned the nature of later. They were headed for the Philippines.

Kuryla had just finished his night watch, grabbed some coffee from below and come back up on top, where it was cooler. He kicked his shoes off and went to sleep on deck as the moon ducked in and out of the clouds.

Then, at 12:14 a.m., a pair of torpedoes hit the ship. The explosion sent Kuryla and his resting shipmates flying into the air.

As the ship listed, Kuryla cut lose some lifejackets and ran to a lower deck to free up lifeboats. The call to abandon ship came too late for him.

"I went down with the ship, and it just rolled over on its side, and then the deck was over my head," Kuryla said. "I pushed down from the deck with my hands and feet, and I started swimming, and she sucked me back."

Kuryla saw images of his parents, his kid brother, his five sisters and his home in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. He remembers saying an Act of Contrition before he blacked out.

When he came to, Kuryla was floating in the water, and just the stern of the ship was visible in the flickering moonlight. In seconds, only bubbles remained.

"I just don't know how the heck I got out from underneath there," he said. "To this day, I wonder about it."

Gunner's mate Robert M. McGuiggan, then 22, said crude oil leaking out of the ship made a slick 4 inches thick.

"I got out of the crude oil a bit, and there was a guy struggling," said McGuiggan, 78, a retired bricklayer who lives on the Northwest Side. "He said, `I can't swim. I can't swim.' He grabbed me like a vice."

McGuiggan said he calmed the man down, found him a rubber life belt, and they both swam for a group of men in the water.

Earl W. Riggins, then 20 and one of the 39 Marines on the ship, spent the first few hours on the water in a life raft with 11 other men--until they were forced off by three others who commandeered it.

"A .45 talks pretty loud," Riggins said.

Riggins, 76, now a retired farmer who lives near Downstate Champaign, refused to say much else about the incident. "There is no sense in causing any more trouble," he said.

The survivors wound up in different groups, eventually drifting miles apart. Some were in lifeboats or rafts. Others had only life vests.

Radio technician Jack Miner was floating in just a vest when he saw a dorsal fin cutting the surface his first day in the water.

"If I was not in the water already, I would have wet my pants," he said.

Riggins did not see a shark until the second day. But what he saw will always stick with him. He saw men torn to pieces. He said he could feel the roughness of the sharks' skin on his feet as the predators swam below him.

"But they never touched me--not with their teeth," he said.

McGuiggen remembers noticing the man next to him was not moving.

"I went to try to shake him, and he bottomed up," McGuiggen said. "A shark had bitten him in half."

Hallucinations also stalked the men, crazed by lack of water.

"Various guys said they had just swum down to their lockers where they had fresh orange juice--and I believed it," Miner said. "It was a mass hallucination in our group."

Miner, 75, now a retired business executive living in Northbrook, said that before his mind became clouded, he tried to keep his shipmates' morale up by telling them about an emergency call that went out in the ship's final minutes.

"We did get an SOS out," Miner said. "I was standing right beside the chief warrant officer who keyed this out. . . . I told them about the SOS message, and I was sure we would be found."

The Navy steadfastly has denied that any SOS went out--to Miner's anger. And the Navy never explained how the ship was not missed sooner. Eventually, the men were spotted by Lt. Chuck Gwinn, a bomber pilot Kuryla nicknamed "the angel."

Various ships rescued the different groups of survivors.

"That is the miracle of the whole thing--that we were found at all," Miner said. "The fact that we were spotted was a one-in-a-million chance."

Kuryla and McGuiggen are officers in a survivors association formed in 1960. They have fought to clear the name of their skipper, Capt. Charles McVay, who was court-martialed for losing his ship and committed suicide in 1968.

"He was a scapegoat," Kuryla said. "They tried to blame him."

At least 123 of the original 317 survivors are still known to be alive, including about half a dozen in the Chicago area.

"We're a tight group yet today," McGuiggen said. "We have a reunion every two years. We're going to have to do it a little different because we are getting down to the final numbers."

Some survived but took nightmares to their graves.

Former gunner's mate Chester J. Makaroff, who lived in southwest suburban Hickory Hills, was so troubled by his memories that he became an alcoholic and lost his real estate business, his widow and daughter said.

"He didn't talk about it much," said his daughter Donna Brunell, 51. "But when he was drunk, I can remember as a young child that he would sit there and . . . talk to himself: `I tried to help. I couldn't help.' "

Makaroff gave up drinking at age 50 and turned his life around, but the horrors haunted him until his death at age 75 in 1993.

"When my father was dying, he was still having nightmares, saying, `I tried to save them,' " Brunell said. "He was a very strong man. Of course, he would have had to be to survive what he did."

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 26, 2001

Answers

Something to give us perspective

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 26, 2001.

from the=BIBLE ''the last enemy to be destroyed is death'' THEN a =new heaven & new earth!!

amazing how OUR=FOCUS is on the [now] instead of=the END. we are ALL infected with[the sin of adam] the=[I] will be as GOD syndrome. what[I] want--what[I] think--how[I] think things should be! but it,s not=MY will be done----but-HIS will be done.

until[I] is dead--------men will die!!!!

there is another=WAY.-------we must ALL go the WAY of the=cross. JESUS/GOD=said'' I AM THE WAY.''

fight it-mock it-deny it---BUT you/we can,t=escape it. ~~~~~~~~SURRENDER------&-----live. philosophy & mortal-wisdom---are futile.HE IS LORD!!!!!

-- al-d (dogs@zianet.com), March 26, 2001.

Yes Al, it was all their fault.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 26, 2001.

I think the point Al is trying to make, Lars, is that although radio technician Jack Miner witnessed the chief warrant officer "key out" the SOS, perhaps damage caused by the torpedo prevented the signal from being transmitted. (Did I interpret that correctly, Al?)

I suppose it's possible that the navy "ignored" the SOS for reasons of maintaining the secrecy of the mission, but I really don't want to believe that.

Thanks for posting this, Lars. I'm looking for a good book and will keep my eye out for Doug Stanton's "In Harm's Way" when it comes out next month. (Hmm... On the other hand, I do a lot of my reading at the beach and am often in the water to cool off. Maybe a book about the Indianapolis disaster wouldn't be such a good idea after all.)

-- CD (costavike@hotmail.com), March 26, 2001.

no LARS, I never meant to imply it was[there] fault.

ALL men are subject to death-the so-called good & evil.

being a believer[in JESUS/GOD] is not a free pass to easy street. JESUS/GOD told believers''in this life you SHALL have=tribulation''[have had mucho] but HE went on to say>>fear not-for [I] have overcome the world[of death & fear] and so will HIS=CHILDREN!!-death is not the=end-it,s the beginning.

we ALL must put off this [body] of sin & death. grab hold of GODS=PROMISES & ''really=live''

-- al-d (dogs@zianet.com), March 26, 2001.