The Navy had bungled many things regarding the Indianapolis and knew it: It denied McVay the escort he’d requested for protection while traveling through enemy waters; it did not respond to any of the distress signals sent from the Indy that listed her coordinates in the final moments of her sinking (the Navy has since disputed receiving any distress signals, though multiple servicemen claimed to have received them); it did not recognize or report that the Indy had not arrived at Leyte when she was scheduled to; and it had provided McVay with an incomplete intelligence report in the first place — withholding the vital information it had come by through a top-secret code-breaking program that confirmed enemy submarine activity along the route the Indy would be taking to Leyte.
To prevent such blunders from getting out and possibly overshadowing the triumphant news of the likely ending of the war (the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima just two days after the survivors were rescued with “This one is for the Boys of the Indianapolis” written on its side), the Navy ordered a news blackout about the incident once the survivors were sequestered and convalescing on a nearby island.
In Washington, the Navy had already begun preparing for a court inquiry as requested by Adm. Chester Nimitz. Nimitz’s inquiry requested an investigation of the cause of the sinking, the culpability of any servicemen involved, and how the survivors had been discovered entirely by accident after the base at Leyte did not report the ship as missing.
In the end, a few servicemen were reprimanded for their respective roles in not recognizing the Indy’s absence, but only McVay would be taken to trial and charged for the sinking of the ship once he arrived back on American soil.
The Navy all but spelled out its reasons for doing so in a letter its judge advocate general sent officials at the time: “Full justification for ordering the trial … springs from the fact that this case is of vital interest not only to the families of those who lost their lives, but also to the public at large.”
In other words, “the Navy needed someone to blame for what the New York Times had already called ‘one of the darkest pages of our naval history,’ ” said Doug Stanton, author of “In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors.”