Stealing Trinity

Foreword

For most, it was another day in a long war. Yet as a precursor to human tragedy, July 16, 1945, was a day without parallel.

The leading event came shortly before dawn, in the sparse desert of central New Mexico. In an instant that would irretrievably change the course of the world, a brilliant, searing explosion tore through the sky, turning night into day, sand into glass, and skeptics into believers. It was the worlds first atomic blast, code named Trinity.

On that very same morning, two ships slipped from port and headed into the vast Pacific Ocean. To the east, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis steamed under San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, her task to deliver vital components of another atomic weapon — code named Little Boy — to the tiny island of Tinian in the South Pacific. To the west, a Japanese Imperial Navy submarine, designated I-58, also set sail. Her mission, ostensibly, was that of routine patrol, if there could be such a thing in time of war.

In a fashion, both ships would find success. Crossing the Pacific in record time, Indianapolis made her critical delivery, then steamed off to rejoin the fleet. And at the stroke of midnight on July 29, I-58 surfaced to find Indianapolis dead in her sights.

I-58s captain later claimed to have been astonished at his good fortune. Fortune or not, the results of the encounter have been well documented. Indianapolis took two torpedoes, and went down in twelve minutes. Of the ship s complement of 1,196, only 316 delirious seamen were eventually rescued.

At the end of the war, a court of inquiry investigated the disaster. Questions outnumbered answers, but a few were notably confounding. With the U. S. Navy swarming around the Japanese mainland, why had I-58 traveled over a thousand miles south in search of targets? Was it merely a cruel stroke of fate that Indianapolis was lost in the vicinity of Challenger Deep, the deepest abyss in all the world's oceans?

But perhaps the most vexing question arose from the testimony of one group of survivors. They asserted, to a man, that a short time after Indianapolis's demise, the silhouette of a ship appeared on the near horizon. One sailor went so far as to fire his sidearm in an effort to attract attention. On studying all evidence, the court strongly doubted that they had seen I-58 — she had remained submerged for nearly an hour after the attack. In the end, the court was entirely unable to account for the presence of a third vessel, and the matter was summarily dumped into the "unexplainable" category.

This much is known.