The Last Bad Day

Survivors of the USS Indianapolis spent days bobbing in the sea, enduring sharks, blistering sun, and dehydration. How they conducted themselves in the water and afterward is an affirmation of life.

- Doug Stanton

Each summer, as Lake Michigan finally begins to warm, I think of the men of the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis and the worst disaster at sea in U.S. naval history. I go down to the lake and I wonder: How would I have survived what they experienced?

I don’t know the answer, but it’s the asking of the question that helps me recalibrate what could be called my moral compass.

On July 30, 1945, just over a month before the end of the war, the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. It sank in 12 minutes. Of the 1,195 men on board, only 316 were alive when help arrived four days later. Headlines of the disaster deeply disturbed Americans: How could this have happened so close to the war’s end?

Today, only 12 of those men are still living, and each July they meet in Indianapolis for a reunion, as they have periodically since 1960, to gather around memories of shipmates who were lost at sea and those survivors who have recently passed away.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about 16 million Americans served in World War II, and of those, about 497,000 are with us today, in our neighborhoods, at our grocery stores, and at family gatherings. Around 350 are dying each day, meaning that sometime within this generation, all will be deceased.

I suspect that we’ll feel, then, that the 20th century has truly ended.

We’ll no longer be able to walk up to the gentleman we spy on our way to the dairy case, who is wearing a hat bearing the insignia of a World War II unit, and shake the hand of someone who fought Hitler.