Lost at Sea

Sept. 30, 2016

A Mackinaw City fudge shop owner might have offered a clue to unlock a decades-old mystery.

Somewhere thousands of miles out on the Pacific Ocean, in miles-deep water, rests the USS Indianapolis, a World War II cruiser Japanese torpedoes sank in an event that marks the largest single loss of life in U.S. Navy history.

The location of the ship has been unknown since it went down on July 30, 1945, but a clue recently surfaced that could put researchers steps closer to finding her at the bottom of the ocean.

That clue came from an unlikely source in northern Michigan: a blog post written John Murdick, co-owner of Aaron Murdick’s Fudge in Mackinaw City.

“SHARKS TOOK THE REST”

Murdick penned the blog post on a lark in May 2015 — he said he wanted to write something to celebrate the memory of his father’s service during World War II.

“It was Memorial Day, and it was just my way of honoring my dad and all of the service people,” Murdick said.

The 63-year-old’s father, Francis Murdick, had passed away five years earlier at the age of 83.

Many times over the years, he’d told his son the remarkable story of the loss of the USS Indianapolis, recounting how, as a young serviceman, he’d seen the ship only hours before.

Murdick remembers that his father’s story especially resonated in 1975, when he saw the classic film Jaws at the movie theater in Charlevoix. One of the characters, Quint, portrayed by Robert Shaw, played an Indianapolis survivor who hauntingly described what had happened.

“1,100 men went into the water, 316 come out,” Quint breathlessly told his companions aboard the Orca. “The sharks took the rest.”

Murdick loved to hear his father tell the story of his encounter with the Indianapolis, and when he decided to tell it once more on his blog, he didn’t expect much of a response, really.

For Murdick, the significance of the story was that his father and his fellow sailors served aboard a small vessel, called a Landing Ship, Tank, or an LST, and that they had marveled at the size of the Indianapolis at it passed.

“They were three or four hours out, sailing west in their little LST when up from behind them came the ‘Grand Grey Lady,’ the USS Indianapolis, sailing west herself,” Murdick wrote in the post. “She passed them easily and soon was gone from sight. My dad and his buddies lamented about how great it would be to be on a Cruiser like the Indianapolis.”

It was a good thing for them they weren’t.

A CLUE LOST FOR YEARS

Murdick’s dad, like so many World War II vets, didn’t like to talk a lot about the war. While Francis Murdick told the story of the Indianapolis a few times, he didn’t necessarily relish the chance. In fact, Murdick said his dad once had an opportunity to relay the story to an author who was chronicling remembrances of the war by people in northern Michigan, but Francis wasn’t interested.

Nonetheless, Murdick thought his dad would have liked the short blog post he wrote.

He never suspected there was a nugget of information in that telling that would spark the interest of U.S. Navy researchers.

“It’s too bad he isn’t around to see that something he knew about was integral to them trying to pinpoint the location of the ship,” Murdick said. “It was just a story. It’s not like the Navy was putting out any feelers, like, ‘Who was on an LST on such-and-such a date?’” The blog post sat static for months. A couple of people thanked Murdick for the sentiment.

And then earlier this year, Murdick got a call. Something in that blog post, the caller said, might hold a clue to the location of the Indianapolis.

Murdick said he was delighted, and he encouraged the caller to dig in to his dad’s service record if it meant researchers could better zero in the location of the Indianapolis.

“I said, ‘Look up my dad’s record and all of that kind of thing, by all means,’” he said.

“‘That was just a story my dad told.’”

ANOTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

Dr. Richard Hulver, the historian at the Navel History and Heritage Command who found Murdick’s blog post, said he had been trying for months to figure out the name of the LST that had passed the Indianapolis in the hours before she sank.

It seemed to be the one strand of the mystery that, despite years of investigation, no one had unravelled.

In an oral history taken two months after the loss of the Indianapolis, her captain, Charles McVay, said he had passed an LST 11 hours before his ship was torpedoed.

If the identity of the LST could be discovered, Hulver knew, it might be possible to determine its location when it met the Indianapolis. If so, that would enable researchers to better triangulate the likely location of the lost ship on the ocean floor.

But it seemed that information was lost to history.

There were over 1,000 LSTs sailing for the Allies in World War II. Hulver said he could find no clues about the identity of the one that had actually passed the Indianapolis.

“That’s one of the things there wasn’t an answer to, and that’s one of the things, I sort of made that my mission,” Hulver said.

When the archives appeared fruitless, he turned to Google.

“It was kind of an act of desperation, really,” Hulver said.

He searched for the identify of the LST using different keywords, hoping some snippet of information would pop up. And then around Christmas of 2015, there it was, six or seven pages into a search: Murdick’s blog.

“I was really trying to find a piece of that puzzle, and that’s where that blog really helped me out,” Hulver said.

It was information that Hulver could take back to National Personnel Records Center to find the name of the LST that Francis Murdick had served on that day. In the records, Hulver found the name of the ship, USS LST-779, and he took that to the National Archives to retrieve a copy of the LST’s deck log. With that, he was able to determine where the encounter took place.

The previous estimated location of the Indianapolis was based on the survivors who floated in the water for five days before they were picked up, which basically meant researchers had to guess at the ship’s location.

IN HARM’S WAY

The sinking of the Indianapolis was an epic tragedy.

Of the 1,196 men on board, only 316 survived. Those who survived floated for five days before rescuers arrived. The rest were lost to the ocean, dehydration or sharks.

The fate of the Indianapolis was a tragedy of errors that cascaded one on top of another.

It had been a busy summer for the ship.

After participating in attacks on Iwo Jima and Tokyo, it was severely damaged by a kamikaze attack in the invasion of Okinawa. Its last mission was the delivery of components of one of the nuclear bombs to an advanced base on Tinian Island. Because that was a top secret mission, so was the ship’s location.

That meant the people who would have been looking after the ship were not paying attention, the people who were supposed to notice when the ship failed to arrive in port at its scheduled time didn’t notice, and a boat that was sent out to search for the Indianapolis was called back by a senior officer.

Doug Stanton, a Traverse City author who wrote a bestselling book about the tragedy, In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis, said a monumental series of unfortunate events led to the ship’s horrific end.

Stanton was scheduled to accompany an expedition, sponsored by National Geographic, to search for the wreckage last June, but the endeavor was called off. That search was to take place before the new information about the LST location was realized.

Stanton said it would be a huge event if the ship were discovered.

“It’s a graveyard like the Titanic, and it’s the wreckage of the worst disaster at sea in American naval history,” Stanton said.

Stanton said he doesn’t know how much closer the new information will put searchers to the wreckage, so many miles deep in the ocean.

A DEEP RESTING PLACE

Hulver said the Indianapolis will be hard to find even in light of the new data, but he believes it’s important merely to have a better idea of where the ship lies.

“The biggest thing is how deep it is,” Hulver said. “It’s in some of the deepest water on earth — we’re talking about over three miles down.”

Depending on where the ship landed, it could be on a flat floor surrounded by a debris field, or to could be hidden in a trench.

Hulver believes it’s more likely that the Indianapolis will someday be found thanks to the new information, but the Navy doesn’t currently have plans to look for it.

“We have been working with different entities and looking into perhaps one day doing a search,” said LTJG Chloe Morgan, a spokeswoman for the NHHC.

Scot Christenson, communications manager for the U.S. Naval Institute, said National Geographic is still trying to organize a search, but expeditions take a lot of money and planning.

The new information, along with advances in search technology, means there is a “very good” chance that the Indianapolis will be found, Christenson said.

“Based on the info generated by that blog post, the new data point shifts the search box by about 30 miles from previous expeditions,” Christenson said. “Attempts to find the wreck in 2001 and 2005 were unsuccessful because we now know that they were searching in the wrong area.”

Hulver said it’s not every day that an offhand comment on a blog leads to a breakthrough in a historical mystery, though the chance of that happening in recent years has gone up as more and more people go online.

“More and more, with the way that everything is linked together through the Internet, the chances of this are better,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting to find the solution to this on a fudge shop blog though.”