A Santa Ana man and his former shipmates mark the 56th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.

August 18, 2001

Story by TOM BERG Photos by MICHAEL KITADA The Orange County Register

SANTA ANA -- Six days a week, the homeless look for Jacob Greenwald's car at the corner of Grand and Warner avenues. He parks, opens the doors and lets people take what food they need.

But not this week. He is with old friends who also know hardship.

The 83-year-old man who now feeds the hungry once survived five days without a bite of food, without a drink of water, floating in the ocean - surrounded by sharks.

Nine hundred of his colleagues died. But Greenwald, who never learned to swim, survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945.

And this week, he is reliving those five days at a biannual reunion in Indianapolis, Ind.

"There's a red marble monument here with our names on it - one side of those who died, and the other side all who survived - we're going there, like we always do," Greenwald said this week by phone.

They'll also meet Gen. Paul Tibbets, the man who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

'I didn't even get my hair wet,' he says Tibbets was invited because the Indianapolis' last mission was to deliver material for the bomb to the island of Tinian.

"I remember seeing two sailors carry a big, oh, it kind of looked like a bucket on a big rod between them," Greenwald said. "I understand that was the fissionable material."

The crew of 1,200 men was heading home, without an escort, when a Japanese submarine fired two torpedoes into the Indianapolis just after midnight.

The jolt knocked Greenwald out of his bunk. By the time he found a life jacket and put it on, the bow was under water.

"I was right there at the fantail, right on the end of the ship," he said.

The man who couldn't swim clutched the rail. Just 12 minutes after the 10,000-ton, 610-foot heavy cruiser was hit, it was about to submerge.

"I slid down the side onto the rudder," Greenwald said. "Then I kind of hopped into the water. I didn't even get my hair wet."

That night in the dark, 900 men gathered in five large groups in the oily water. Five days later, when rescue ships finally arrived, only 316 were alive. The rest drowned, starved or were eaten by sharks.

Greenwald found himself in a group of about 130 men. Sometimes other men led prayers. Sometimes he did. If an injured man died, they'd remove his life jacket and save it for when other jackets got waterlogged.

'Those who swam away were eaten' by sharks

The circling fins appeared the first day, but men would kick the water and shout to scare them off.

"It wasn't any problem until after about the third day," Greenwald said. "People started hallucinating without food and water. Those who swam away were eaten. You could hear them when the sharks took them. You'd hear the guy scream."

On the fourth day, a plane dropped several two-man rubber rafts over his group. That led to Greenwald's first hallucination.

He and another sailor believed there was a motor on the raft, and they took turns trying to start it.

"We would pull it and nothing happened. Then the other person would hit you on the shoulder and say, 'Come on you so-and-so, let me do it.' We went back and forth I don't how many times."

By the time Greenwald was rescued on the fifth day, his legs were covered with open sores.

He and his comrades were taken to Guam for 38 days.

"I got to make one telephone call," Greenwald said, " I called my wife, and one of the first things she told me was, 'Honey, I'm pregnant!'"

They named the child Gary, and today he is the pastor of Eagle's Nest Ministries, which is where Greenwald - the man who survived five days without food or water - volunteers to feed the hungry six days a week.

-- (news@to.me), August 18, 2001

Answers

One of the great tragedies of WWII.

Because of the highly secret nature of the Indianapolis' mission (and also a paperwork screw-up), the Navy was slow to realise that the ship was overdue to be in port, thus wasting several days of search and rescue efforts. Nobody realised the ship was even missing while these poor men battled for their lives. Also, the captain was railroaded by the Naval Dept afterward for not zig-zagging his boat to avoid enemy torpedoes....cannot recall at the moment why the captain chose not to zig-zag, but the Navy needed a scapegoat and the buck stops at the captain of a ship.

The first I had ever heard of Indianapolis was when I first saw the movie "Jaws". Quint, the shark hunter, "was" a survivor of the Indianapolis.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), August 18, 2001.

I think a little boy led the effort to get the court martial reversed for the captain of that ship?

-- helen (failing@RAM.memory), August 18, 2001.

The reason the ship was not zig-zagging was that earlier it had been in heavy fog. The captain later committed suicide. Unfortunately, he never knew that his name was later cleared. A home-schooled student took this incident for a research project and was instrumental in moving the .gov to take action in clearing the captain's name, not too long ago. Sorry I can't remember the names.

regards,

Garryowen

-- Garryowen (anon@spamproblems.gag), August 18, 2001.

After Pearl Harbor no shipboard commander was safe from Navy scapegoating.

Unk, after delivering the bomb to Tinian then ordered to Guam the Indy was ordered to Leyte w/o escort. Nobody told Leyte command she was coming so nobody missed her when she got late. No radar or sonar on them old swaybacks and you shouldn't leave one alone. McVey was hung.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), August 19, 2001.