Posted on 08/06/2005 6:02:01 PM PDT by Coleus
This is the 60th anniversary. On May 8, 1945, the United States celebrated Victory in Europe. On Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress taking off from the island of Tinian, leveled Hiroshima with the world's first uranium bomb. On Aug. 14, 1945, came Victory over Japan Day.
This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the sinking of the heavy cruiser that transported parts for the atomic bomb to Tinian, the USS Indianapolis. Few knew then what happened - or why - to the Indianapolis, a flagship in the Fifth Fleet and veteran of the attack on Iwo Jima.
Bill Van Wilpe knew, at least the part about what happened. But he didn't tell anyone for years. He didn't tell his friends, not even his parents when he returned home to Wanaque. They died never knowing their son's part in the rescue of the Indianapolis' crew members, who fell to sea when their ship was torpedoed and sunk on July 30, 1945, only to experience one of the most gruesome shark feeding frenzies in history.
There are two parts to Bill Van Wilpe's story. The second is about the medal for heroism from the Navy and Marine Corps that Van Wilpe, at age 79, finally received last month. Perhaps it would be better to start with the first part.
Claimed by the Navy
Van Wilpe was a strapping kid. In Butler High School, the 6-foot-3, 230-pound student was a football star. He also was a member of the debate club. And, as his friend Warren Hagstrom, now the mayor of Wanaque, remembers him, Van Wilpe ranked either third or fourth academically in his high school class.
"I don't know about that, but I was up there," Van Wilpe said recently during a visit to his home away from home, the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall on Ringwood Avenue in Wanaque.
He dropped out of school during his senior year. It was 1944. "The minute we played the last football game, that was it," he said. "That was the thing to do. There were 20- or 30-some others from the class already in the service, and I had four uncles in, too."
Van Wilpe planned to attend the Merchant Marine Academy, but when the draft board found out he had dropped out of school, it directed him to the Marine Corps. He was intercepted, though, by a naval officer.
"He looked at me. There were three of us from Wanaque going from the draft place to the Marine office. And he said, 'You're gonna be a gunner's mate.' So I went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and I was a gunner's mate."
It wasn't hard to figure out why the Navy claimed him: 5-inch, .38-caliber shells had to be hand-loaded into a ship's main guns, and each shell weighed 54 pounds. To this day, Van Wilpe's shoulder still hurts.
After six months at Great Lakes, he was sent to Orange, Texas, to join the crew of the USS Bassett, a brand-new destroyer. The shakedown cruise was to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and then it was through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor. The Bassett was attached to the Seventh Fleet, which was working north of Australia and was derisively known as "MacArthur's Navy" because it was detailed mainly to support Gen. Douglas MacArthur's island invasions.
On August 2nd, 1945, the Bassett was alone on submarine patrol in the Pacific somewhere between Leyte Gulf and Tinian. The ship got a report that a 20-mile oil slick had been spotted from an airplane.
The first ship to reach the slick was the USS Cecil Doyle. The Bassett arrived second, in the early morning of Aug. 3. Crew members from both ships saw partially eaten, oil-covered men clinging to flotsam. They didn't know that, four days earlier, a Japanese submarine had torpedoed the unescorted Indianapolis, knocking out its radio, and that the ship had sunk 12 minutes later.
"We sent out four LCVP boats, usually called Higgins boats," Van Wilpe said of the Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel vessels. "The little guys manned them. The first boat found survivors. When it returned, they had a hard time in the high waves moving them onto our fantail. I wasn't doing anything. I helped."
Helped, that is, by diving into the sea to transfer the mostly helpless survivors.
"Some of the guys were complaining that they were missing part of their calf or thigh, but they were hallucinating, so we didn't know," he said.
Many were, in fact, missing body parts because they had been bitten off by sharks. Of the Indianapolis' 1,196 crewmen, almost 900 survived the torpedo attack. Out of those men, however, only 317 remained after four days adrift at sea; most of those who didn't were eaten.
"I didn't know there were sharks then," Van Wilpe said. "If I had, that might have caused some extra thoughts. But there were plenty of sharks around. How any of the men lived, I don't know. But I never saw a shark that night."
Rescue overshadowed
Van Wilpe came out of the water as the boats left to pick up more survivors, then went back in - and stayed in - until the job was finished. The Bassett picked up 159 of the Indianapolis' crew; on their way back to the Philippines, two of its survivors died. Van Wilpe was not aware of the additional deaths: Worn out after working all night in the ocean, he said, he was given a pill that knocked him out for 30 hours.
A few days later came Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. "I didn't get any medals because I wasn't there long enough, thanks to Harry Truman dropping those couple of Easter eggs," Van Wilpe quipped.
In 1946, he returned home. He said nothing about the Indianapolis.
Nationally, what happened to the Indianapolis was overshadowed by the atomic bombs and V-J Day. The reasons behind what happened to the Indianapolis were covered up by top Navy officials intent on finding a scapegoat. The ship's captain, Charles Butler McVay III, was eventually court-martialed and convicted for failing to zigzag his ship, a standard anti-submarine defense tactic.
However, that failed to explain why the Navy never warned McVay that there was Japanese submarine activity in the area.
It never explained that many captains - probably most - did not zigzag unless they knew Japanese submarines were around. It never explained why the Navy "lost" the Indianapolis - never notified anyone it was missing for those four days.
The coverup continued for years, despite the 879 crew deaths, a huge casualty figure that, by comparison, is more than half of the nearly 1,600 U.S. troops killed in Iraq since March 2003.
In the meantime, Van Wilpe got a job, and when it moved south he got another, handling maintenance in the Wanaque school district. In 1958, he began working at the brand new Lakeland High School. When he heard that the school librarian was interested in the Indianapolis, Van Wilpe brought him "Abandon Ship!" - a book that had been printed the previous year. Van Wilpe hadn't read it, but thought the librarian could use it.
The librarian noticed Van Wilpe's name in the text.
Other books followed. During the later part of the century the story of the Indianapolis was retold often.
It was mentioned in the movie "Jaws;" and eventually Congress and President Bill Clinton exonerated McVay (long after his 1968 suicide). In fact it wasn't until the 1990s that word spread in Wanaque that Van Wilpe had, whether he knew it or not, defied shark-infested waters to rescue some of the Indianapolis' crew.
Honored for service
Mayor Warren Hagstrom has said he twice tried to get Congress to honor Van Wilpe with a medal, and failed. When asked to try a third time, he advised seeking the help of Thomas Balunis, a Wanaque councilman. Hagstrom credits Balunis and the district's new congressman, Scott Garrett. Balunis pressed the case to Garrett, R-Sussex, who arranged for the medal and presented it to Van Wilpe last month.
Van Wilpe, who never married and retired long ago, spends his days volunteering at the Wanaque VFW, where he was twice named commander. He also helps with maintenance at the local cemetery, two blocks from the VFW. His great-grandfather, Col. William Bishop, who served in the Union Army in |the Civil War, is buried there, along with several other fam-|ily members.
Although he walks with a cane because of arthritis, Van Wilpe received his high school diploma a few years back from Gov. Christie Whitman; about 200 veterans from around the state who dropped out of high school to fight in the war also graduated that day.
When asked what has happened since he received his Navy and Marine medal for heroism, Van Wilpe quipped: "I ran out of thank-you cards. I'm looking for a way to use birthday cards, crossing out the 'birthday.'Ÿ"
But when the subject turned to why he never told anybody about the Indianapolis, Van Wilpe, all trace of humor gone, answered: "When my friends found out, I caught hell. But sometimes it's easier to forget stuff than it is to remember it, if you know what I mean."
for later
Bump
I was just thinking about the Indy today, what with all of the annual Hiroshima hubbub.
Bad scene. Captain McVay was crucified, even after the Japanese submarine captain was hauled into court and testified that it wouldn't have made much difference if the Indianapolis had been zig-zagging.
Thanks. Quite a story to say the least.
One of the most gruesome and heartbreaking stories of WWII.
The fact that this court marshall even took place always seemed to me to show contempt for decency on the part of Admiral King and James Forestall. Both could have put an end to it. I think it is a blot on Nimitz record who also should have found a way to intervene and stop it.
I was a tiny cog in the Navy machine and have always been a supporter of the Navy. My son in an Ensign JG today and quite likes it. I still have friends that made the Navy a career choice. So, I am a fan.
In the Indianapolis fiasco, which only became a fiasco after the war ended, the Navy clothed itself in dishonor.
Read the book "In Harm's Way" by Doug Stanton. It is excellent.
Snippy and Sam, FYI.
I met a veteran of this ship in an airport once ... he was wearing a ball cap w/ the logo. I sat down and chatted with him, and he was quite surprised I knew anything about the story.
This story has ALWAYS astounded me, b/c somehow, the Navy so fantastically screwed up. I would love to know just why they felt they had to scapegoat the captain...
Thanks for the story...
The USS Indianapolis sinking was the most gruesome event that I ever read about concerning WW II. It was truly horrible.
The USS Indianapolis Survivors org has several fundraisers. Whenever I see them, I buy an autographed something or other for hubby. I read "Only 317 Survived," the book I bought him. The survivors tell their stories in their own words. The stories are horrific. God bless him for helping rescue those poor souls.
http://www.ussindianapolis.org/
I read that King had a grudge against McVey because of McVey's father disciplining him. I may have that wrong. It is from memory (many Navy books). The Navy was disgraceful in letting the captain be humiliated, in fact, letting the enemy sub commander testify!
The battleship accident of recent memory was another disgrace.
Then there was Pearl Harbor, with two scapegoats.
Our Navy is great, but I wonder about those incidents.
Bull Halsey had a number of blunders to his name, real disasters based on his rash judgment or no judgment. He was not court martialed.
One was chasing Jap battleships when he was in charge of defending the landing. Leyte Gulf.
Another one was the loss of life during a huge storm. I think the Navy held that against him although I am not aware of all the details. I believe we lost as many during that storm as we did with the Indianapolis.
WWII was a pretty horrendous naval war. It was Salamis and Jutlands and Trafalgar and Mobile and a dozen other catastrophic events rolled into a cataclysm except exponentially larger and in an area unimaginably vast. I suspect there were a good many events just as gruesome but without the notoriety.
The real travesty of the Indianapolis sinking was the Navy holding attempting to crucify McVay for it.
I read the same somewhere. I have never been an Ernest King fan. I thought he was a petty man. I don't think this incident was the only example.
Our Navy is great, but I wonder about those incidents.
I believe the Navy is similar to any bureaucracy with a similar mission. On the one hand it provides an opportunity for human beings to assume a greatness, sort of a blending of meanness and greatness as Bruce Catton said about the Civil War.
On the other hand it allows some particularly small men who have a penchant for politics to ascend to positions that their talent and temperament simply don't justify.
All too true.
King was called The Blowtorch. His daughter said he had only one mood - furious.
First heard about this tragic story watching JAWS all those years ago. The description of events by Quinn was one of the most engrossing and captivating moments of an overall great movie.
Yea, me too, good ol' captain quint.
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