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(Picked Up by [USS] Ringness [APD-100])

Picked Up by [USS] Ringness [APD-100]

When one of them, the [high-speed transport] USS Ringness, the APD-100, picked me up and the group on my raft, the other one the [USS] Register, APD-92, went on north and we discovered there was another raft north of us which we had suspected, and picked up that small group. We were never sighted by a plane.

The Ringness picked us up by radar. We had a 40 mm, empty ammunition can which I had spent a good deal of energy and time trying to get to, thinking it was an emergency ration, but we picked it up anyhow and saved it and she [Ringness] got a [radar] pip from this can. She picked us up [i.e., detected them] at only 4,046 yards, but she had not seen us visually at that distance, and the only reason she knew something was there was because of the radar pip. So it goes to show how difficult it is to seen anybody in the water, when you have a large ground swell, or a heavy ground swell.

She came along side and, as I say, picked us up. We were all able to crawl aboard on our own power. People were pretty well exhausted, I think more or less nervous exhaustion. I think we had lost probably about 15% of our weight and I was naturally so elated to get on the ship, as were the others that we didn't turn in at all. We were given something eat, ice cream, coffee, such as that. The doctor said, "You can eat all you want", which most of us did. We drank quite a bit of water. Nervous energy kept us going. I did sleep quite a bit that night and the next morning, let's see, that was the morning of the 3rd that we were picked up. We sort of lolled around all day of the 5th and we got into Palau on the 6th when we were put in the hospital.

The interesting point to me is that we should have been so far north of the large group of survivors which I will call the life preserver group, as those people, hundreds of them, had nothing at all except life preservers. Some of them didn't even have a life preserver. They had to share their's [sic] with one of the others. I have one or two officers who had only pneumatic life preservers, that managed to live in those for four days, which to me is very remarkable. I don't see how anybody could stay up that length of time.

To go into some detail of what I have been told conditions were in this life preserver group: first of all, I would like to give thanks to the Commander, Western Sea Frontier, who was able to put enough pressure on somebody to enable us to get our supply of kapok life preservers. We were unable to obtain any until about 48 hours from the time we [on the Indianapolis] were due to leave, and ComWestern Sea Frontier, himself, his office unearthed some someplace, and had we not had those, of course, we now know we would have saved almost nobody, but fortunately these were new and although I understand kapok is only supposed to hold up for about 64 hours, we know that these held up for as long as four days.

It's true that after about 48 hours the wearer had sunk low enough in the water so that if his head fell forward he would drown. Consequently, the people had to look out for one another. One tried to sleep while the other watched him. Very little sleeping was done the first 48 hours, but after that the people became so exhausted that they would drop off to sleep. There were apparently two groups of these survivors all in approximately the same position.

The reason I knew nothing about them was because we were apparently about seven to ten miles north of them. They were being carried southwest with the current, whereas we were being blown a little northeastward or else being just held against the current. So that is the reason, another reason, why when morning came [after the sinking], we could not see any of this survivor group which was south and, as I said before, we did not know of their existence until we saw planes and ships down south and then we knew that there must be somebody there.

There are all kinds of horrible stories that have come out of the experiences that this life preserver group had. They're very unpleasant. I hope none of the parents will ever know that their boy was in that group for some time and then could not keep up until help arrived, but for the record, we had two doctors in that group, the senior doctor and the junior doctor and a Chief Pharmacist's Mate who were all saved. They were, of course, topside administering aid to people aboard ship who had been injured prior to the ship rolling over and that is why they were apparently among the survivors.

The people who were in this group had mass hallucinations. One of the stories is that three or four people would swim away at dark and the next morning they'd come back and say, "Why, the Indianapolis didn't go down after all. She is just over there and we were on her all night. We got fresh milk, we got tomato juice, we got water." When they would tell these stories, immediately there would be a break from the group and these people would try to swim away in the direction in which they thought the Indianapolis was.

Another hallucination that they had was some of them said they had been on an island all night where they had coconut milk and were able to refresh themselves and after those stories were told people would then break away from the group.

It was in that way that so many people apparently died of exhaustion. Either that or else they drank salt water and went completely out of their head. One that comes in my mind particularly was Captain [Edward L.] Parke of the Marines. He was a very strong, athletic man, a young man, he just ki