Veterans Day: USS Indianapolis Survivor
SIXTY FIVE YEARS AGO: FIVE DAYS OF HORROR JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT ON JULY 30, 1945, THE USS INDIANAPOLIS, HEADED FROM GUAM TO THE PHILIPPINES, WAS HIT BY JAPANESE TORPEDOES AND SANK WITHIN MINUTES. CAST INTO THE SEA, SOME 800 MEN WERE BELIEVED TO HAVE SURVIVED THE TORPEDOES. ONLY 316 WOULD SURVIVE THE SHARKS AND SUN AND SALT WATER. HERE, ONE OF THEM TELLS HIS STORY.
A version of this was originally written for The Virginian Pilot on July 29, 1995 by Kerry Dougherty.
Felton James Outland, Sr. passed away February 12, 2016.
Felton J. Outland has never read a book about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II.
He's seen almost nothing that Hollywood has made of one of the ugliest episodes in U.S. Naval history.
When people talk about the horror, the sharks, the madness, he turns away.
F.J. Outland was there.
Sitting in the cool kitchen of his farmhouse off Route 158, struggling with the 50-year-old memories that haunt him, Outland finally breaks his silence.
With a sob.
”I dreamt of watermelon,” says the 69-year-old North Carolina farmer, rubbing tears from his weatherbeaten face with a handkerchief. “We swore when we got rescued we'd eat a whole ice-cold watermelon. It would taste real good and take care of the thirst too.”
Rescue was a long time coming for the Indianapolis survivors. Five days. Longer than they ever could have dreamed when the heavy cruiser was sunk by Japanese torpedoes just after midnight on July 30, 1945.
The ship went down with 1,196 men on board. Most accounts say at least 800 men were alive the next morning.
But only 316 survived the sharks, the scorching sun and salt water - just two weeks before the end of the war.
Four days earlier, on July 26, the ship had unloaded top-secret cargo - the hardware for the atom bomb - on the island of Tinian. The Indy, as she was affectionately called by her crew, was heading for the Philippine island of Leyte when it was hit.
Some say the ship went down in 15 minutes. Others say 12. No distress signal from the vessel was received.
Outland was a 19-year-old seaman first class, working the midnight watch. He had just come on duty and was standing on deck beside the ship's 40-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. The night was sweltering, like so many others that summer in the South Pacific.
Men below were having trouble sleeping in the heat. Many were in their skivvies, or less.
An explosion interrupted the muggy night. Then another. Then chaos.
”I knew we'd been hit,” Outland says. “I knew it was bad right away.”
Fifty years later, Outland is still thankful he was dressed when the ship sunk. Not out of modesty: The clothes, and most importantly the hat he had tucked in his pocket, protected him from the sun which beat down relentlessly on the dwindling band of survivors as they bobbed in the ocean near the equator day after day.
Outland's kitchen table narrative is interrupted by long swallows of ice water as the gray-haired grandfather of nine composes himself.
”If I had known how bad we'd been hit I would have jumped overboard,” he says, running his fingers through thick hair.
There was no time. The ship went under and Outland and the rest of the crew with it.
The young farmer's son from North Carolina was sucked down with the ship. When he popped to the surface he was in a giant, thick oil slick. It was dark. Men were screaming in the night. Everyone was grabbing for debris. Miraculously, Outland found a small raft.
Outland immediately began retching and vomiting. He had swallowed so much salt water and oil that he was violently nauseous. His head and body were coated with thick, black fuel.
But his ordeal had just begun. Already he was dehydrated from being sick, and he wouldn't have a sip of water for five more days.
Eventually four other men were on his raft, three of them barely conscious.
”The raft was no bigger than this table,” Outland says, getting up to refill his glass from the kitchen tap. “It wasn't long enough for you to stretch out, that's for sure. We found (water) kegs on the raft but they were empty. Bone dry.”
Most of the crew members were floating in the water wearing life jackets. In the days that followed, their skin would wear away from chafing, their bodies would be covered with ulcers and jellyfish stings. All of the survivors would suffer from a thirst that drove some insane.
The men began drifting apart and were spread over about 15 miles by the time rescuers came.
All five men on Outland's raft survived. Outland spent his time with the other lucid man - Marine Pvt. 1st Class Giles McCoy from Boonville, Mo.
”It wasn't a raft like you imagine,” Outland explains. “It was basswood and canvas and it rode real low in the water.’
”Every day it sunk a little lower. By the end we were chest-deep in water. And the sharks were every-where.”
”They were gray sharks, about 12 or 15 feet long,” he recalls. “We could hit the sharks with our paddles.”
At first the men expected to be rescued at daybreak on July 30. When they weren't, they had faith the Navy would begin looking for them when they missed their port call at Leyte on July 31.
The Navy never missed them.
Outland says planes passed overhead as they drifted. But from 20,000 feet the men and their tiny rafts were invisible.
As thirst and sun drove some swimmers mad, many took off their lifevests and dove toward bottom, thinking they could find the Indy and her reserves of fresh water. Others swam for shore. Some made the fatal mistake of gulping salt water.
The sharks fed on others.
During the heat of the day the men on Outland's raft would fill his hat with water and dump it on their heads. They resisted the powerful temptation to drink out of the Pacific.
At night, when the air temperature plummeted, the men slid into the water to warm up. There they floated till daybreak when they struggled back into the raft. They had nothing to do but drift and wait, first for rescue, then for death.
They waited until Aug. 3 when they were accidentally found by a routine Navy patrol plane. Through a fog of thirst and sun and hunger and exhaustion, Outland remembers seeing the low-flying planes and ships rescuing survivors in the distance.
Then there was silence and he and his compatriots assumed they had been missed.
But a ship appeared: the destroyer transport USS Ringness. Its crew hauled the three injured men on board. McCoy and Outland were the final men rescued from the sinking of the Indianapolis.
The bomb the Indianapolis had helped deliver was dropped on Japan three days later. On Aug. 14 the Japanese surrendered. The Navy Department held the news of the sinking of the Indianapolis until the 14th. The loss of 880 American lives became a mere postscript to the news of the end of the war.
The Navy conducted a court of inquiry within a week of the sinking. The results, which document the blunders which let the ship disappear unnoticed, were kept secret until the early 1980s.
Many of the survivors are still angry, including F.J. Outland.
”I'm lucky to be here, boy,” he says, voice cracking with emotion.
By all appearances, he's had a good life since he came back to Gates County to farm. Outland married his wife, Viola, in 1948, a year after they met on a blind date. They have four children: Felton Jr., 43; Ed, 41; Teresa, 39 and Cheryl, 34. They have a prosperous farm, a gracious house filled with photos of their children and grandchildren.
But the Indianapolis tragedy looms large in the Outland family.
”They tried to cover it up,” he says, eyes filling with tears again. “Then they made Capt. (Charles Butler) McVay the scapegoat.”
”They court-martialed McVay, and even brought in that Japanese submarine commander who sunk us to testify at his court-martial.”
McVay became the sinking's last casualty. In November 1968, 23 years after the Indianapolis sunk and he was court-martialed for “hazarding the ship,” the captain shot himself in the head.
But bad timing and an effort to keep the affair quiet ensured that the American public would never know a great deal about the incident. Even the families of Indy survivors were unaware of the horror.
”No one knew about the Indianapolis. All we could think of was the war was finally over,” says Viola Outland, patting her husband's arm. “We were together a long time before F.J. ever told me about it. And then just a little at a time.”
”I'm the one who reads the books and articles about it,” she says, smiling. “I tell F.J. what's in there. He can't read them.”
Outland, she says, has never been able to speak of the incident with his children and grandchildren.
Yet every five years since 1960, Viola and F.J. have traveled to Indianapolis for a reunion of survivors. This year is a big one - the 50th anniversary of the sinking. A memorial to the men of the Indy will be dedicated.
”There's a tremendous bond among the survivors,” explains his wife. “They all have trouble talking. They all tear up when they're together.”
It's been 50 years, yet Outland says those five days at sea are his most vivid memories.
Certainly the hardest to talk about.
Standing in his driveway, gazing out over 800 lush acres of cotton baking in the sun, Outland clears his throat. There is something else he wants to say.
”I just want to make something clear,” Outland croaks, looking away. He can't talk. He needs another swig of water.
”I don't want you to make me a hero,” he says, crying quietly. “I've had these 50 years. I got married, had children, lived to see my grand-children.”
”The heroes were the boys who didn't have these years. The boys who died out there.”
USS Indianapolis (CA-35) is shown off the Mare Island Navy Yard, in Northern California, July 10, 1945, after her final overhaul and repair of combat damage. The photo was taken before the ship delivered atomic bomb components to Tinian and just 20 days before she was sunk by a Japanese submarine. (U.S. Navy Photo/RELEASED)
