The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [240]
FIELD MARSHAL SHUNROKU HATA
By a freak of fate, Hiroshima’s senior military commander survives the bomb’s blast, while most of his command, including nearly all of his senior officers, are killed by the obliteration of Hiroshima Castle. Despite his fiery rhetoric, he accepts his army’s defeat, an unusual move for a senior military official, and surrenders to American occupation forces in late August 1945. He is tried as a war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Asian version of the Nuremberg court. Found guilty, he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Hata makes very little defense of his actions, and later his captors feel he has shown sufficient remorse to atone for his crimes, and is thus granted parole in 1955. He dies seven years later, at age eighty-two.
HIDEKI TOJO
He consolidates his power throughout the war, amassing control of most of the Japanese government, even under the ultimate authority of the emperor, for whom Tojo has little private respect. Officially he is prime minister as well as chief of the Imperial General Staff, positions that give him virtually dictatorial power. But reaping the rewards for success also means accepting responsibility for failure, and when the Americans make their successful drive into the Mariana Islands chain, Tojo admits that his efforts have failed. On July 18, 1944, he resigns his position, and is never again an active force in Japanese politics or the war. Three weeks after the Japanese surrender, he attempts suicide, but fails at that as well. He is arrested by American agents and is tried as a war criminal before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which declares him guilty and sentences him to death. In his defense, he claims that he was merely following the orders given to him by the emperor, a claim no one takes seriously. He is hanged on December 23, 1948, at age sixty-four. Tojo is interred at Japan’s revered Yasukuni Shrine, which creates considerable controversy that continues to this day.
THE AMERICANS
USS INDIANAPOLIS
After delivering the two technicians and the key components of the first atomic bomb, the heavy cruiser leaves Tinian for Leyte, in the Philippines, to rendezvous with the gathering fleet that will participate in the planned invasion of Japan. The mission of the cruiser has been so secret that she is unescorted both to and from Tinian, and thus sails alone through shipping lanes that the Japanese know well. Shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945, the ship is struck by two torpedoes, fired by the Japanese submarine I-58. She rolls over to starboard, and sinks in twelve minutes. Of the 1,196 crewmen, nearly three hundred are killed within those twelve minutes. The remainder go into the water. With few life vests or rafts to cling to, the nine hundred men begin an ordeal that subjects them to hypothermia, death from injuries, and madness. But there is one more ordeal they must suffer, which begins with their first sunrise: the relentless assault from swarms of sharks.
On August 2, midway through their third day in the water, the survivors are spotted by an American Ventura bomber, on a routine anti-submarine patrol. The pilot notifies his base at Peleliu, where a navy PBY Catalina flying boat is dispatched. Against orders, the flying boat lands near the men, trying vainly to rescue as many as can be retrieved from the water, men who are continuously being attacked by sharks. The nearest ship, the destroyer USS Cecil Doyle, diverts to the scene and rescues those who remain alive. Only 317 survive the ordeal. It is the greatest disaster at sea in the navy’s history.
Because of the secrecy of their mission, there is no search made for the ship, since no one at Leyte knows just when to expect the ship to arrive. The captain of the Indianapolis, Charles McVay, is one of the survivors, and in December 1945, in what seems to many to be the navy’s search for a scapegoat, McVay is court-martialed for