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(Got on a Potato Crate)

Got on a Potato Crate

Something bumped into me, it was a potato crate and I got astride of that with some more debris which I had under my right arm and I considered myself pretty well off and in a few minutes, a few seconds later I would say, two life rafts came by. They apparently had been released from the ship when she went down, or had been torn loose as one was on top of the other.

I crawled on these two life rafts. I couldn't find any paddles or anything whatsoever on them, and I yelled back at the people who I heard yell and we picked up three others, pulled them on the raft. That was all that we saw, or all that we heard. There were two of them, two youngsters, that were pretty well filled up with salt water and oil and I placed them on one of the rafts by themselves, and a quartermaster by the name of Alert and I took the other raft. We secured the two rafts together, and nothing that I remember happened that night. I guess everybody was pretty well exhausted. These two boys that were on the other raft didn't move all night and I thought probably they had died, but they pulled through perfectly all right, about 36 hours later.

The next morning, at daybreak, we ran across another raft and a floater net with five men on the raft, a Machinist Mate, First Class, by the name of Malden and four others that were of inferior ratings. We secured their raft to ours and also the floater net, so that we had then three rafts, a floater and nine people.

When I got light, I had discovered why I could not find anything on the rafts, they had fallen into the water upside down, and I didn't know that anything was secured on the other side. We did manage to get from the three rafts, two good paddles. Most of the gratings had been broken from the explosion. We had nothing left on the raft, except one canvas bag in which we found a Very [flare] pistol and 12 Very cartridges.

We had the covered impregnated matches, that is covered with a cardboard impregnated material which had soaked through during the night. Consequently, all the matches were useless. Also, our first aid kit was made of the same material. It's cardboard with a paraffin impregnation, I believe, that had almost disintegrated. Consequently, anything that was soluble in the first aid kit such as the sulfathiazole and the sulfanilamide tablets and crystals--they had disintegrated. We did have some bandage which was wet; we did have the tubes of ointment which came in useful later, small tubes, and some morphine styrettes [small injection units of narcotic painkiller for the seriously wounded] which, fortunately, we did not have to use because nobody was badly hurt in our group.

The next morning, as I say, we took stock of what we had and found the material that I spoke of in this canvas bag. We had nothing else, except the two canoe paddles. The water breakers, things of that nature had all been blown loose from the raft. That morning I saw two other rafts in the distance. I did not know how many people were on these rafts, but we could see them when we got up on the crest of a wave and when they got up on the crest of a wave. One raft was about 1,500 yards from us[;] there was somebody on there calling for help.

Well, we were all so exhausted the first day we could not even make an attempt to get over to him. The other raft was way off in the distance and apparently nobody on that seemed to be in any difficulty.

We all supposed that small group were the sole survivors of the Indianapolis. We thought we probably had about 25 or 30 people. I was the only officer in the group and naturally I told them what they should do.

We managed some time during Monday to pick up a water breaker with three gallons of water in it; it apparently had been cracked because I tasted the water and it was unpalatable. It was salty. The other people in the group, however, did not know that this water could not be used. I told them that we had the water, I would give it to them when it became absolutely necessary that they have a drink.

Well, it so happened that during the 107 hours we were on the raft, nobody ever asked for a drink. I didn't think it was possible to get along without water, but I discovered you can do it very easily. I understand after the fifth day, it becomes more difficult.

We picked up an emergency ration can which was excellent. It's beautifully packed, has a double tin tip which would prevent any water getting into it. It had a number of cans of spam, the Hormel spam [a canned loaf of precooked processed meat]. It's a salty spam, but it is not dry as the usual thing that you get aboard ship, and it is very palatable. We had a number of those cans, I've forgotten the exact number now. We also had the usual tins of malted milk tablets and the tins of biscuits. Everything packed in the emergency ration tin is packed in an air-tight and water- tight container inside. So whoever did that job, did a very fine one.

I looked over the material that we had, the food stuffs, and told the people that I would open one Hormel tin per day. I contains 12 ounces and we would divide that evenly, and I also figured out each person could have two biscuits and two malted milk tablets, which I knew would last us about ten days.

On Tuesday I decided that we would try to paddle over and try to pick up this other raft, since this man had been calling to us. We thought he was injured. We could see him quite plainly, we were about 1,500 yards away. So we took the two canoe paddles and paddled the three rafts by alternating shifts of two people paddling at half hour intervals. It took us four and a half hours to reach this other raft which we secured to the ones we were with, and there was nothing wrong with the youngster except that he was by himself and as misery loves company, he wanted somebody to talk to. He had spent two nights and a day by himself and he was a little fed up with this. So we put him in the tail end of our group and we then had the four rafts, one floater net and only ten people.

I knew that there was one other raft, as I said, in the vicinity, because I could see it every now and again. It was quite a ways off. I knew that we could reach it, if necessary, but this four hour and a half paddle that we had made, the people were so exhausted from that , I decided that except in a case of dire necessity we would not put forth the effort to get to this other raft. Also we had worn blisters on our hands and it was quite evident that every abrasion, or cut, or blister that you had on your body was going to develop into a very nasty salt water ulcer. The thing to do was to try to keep as still as you could and preserve your strength. We talked to this other youngster who we brought over and he knew of no other people that were in the water, so that further convinced us, although it seemed impossible, that there was nobody that had survived other than this very small group.

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(Got on a Potato Crate)