Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
by Stephen Caldwell
Eugene Morgan escaped the USS Indianapolis and clung to a crowded raft while men died around him.
Eugene Morgan clung to a life raft in the Philippine Sea, his lower body submerged in the dark ocean. The raft was crowded with wounded sailors, leaving him and other survivors holding on around its edges. Oil coated his face, and the ship that had carried him across the Pacific had disappeared beneath the surface.
The 24-year-old boatswain’s mate had escaped the USS Indianapolis, torpedoed by a Japanese submarine shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945. All around him, men who had survived the sinking were dying while they waited.
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The cruiser had recently completed a secret mission, delivering components for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. After leaving Tinian and stopping at Guam, the Indianapolis headed toward Leyte in the Philippines. Two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 struck the cruiser. The hits ignited the fuel stores, and triggered a chain of explosions. The ship split in half. Within 12 minutes, it sank. Hundreds of men died before they could escape.
“It was almost midnight, and I was below, trying to sleep when the first torpedo hit,” Morgan later told high school students. “I was in my skivvies – what you young people would call your underwear.”
His comments appear in the book Remembrance by Ken Buckles.
“I was able to make it topside,” Morgan told the students. “The ship was sinking, and the captain ordered us to abandon ship. I jumped into the ocean, which was completely covered with oil that had spilled into the water from the explosions.”
The oil got into his eyes, nose, and mouth. The surface of the water was dotted with fires.
“The air was filled with the screams of wounded and dying sailors everywhere,” Morgan said.
He swam to one of the larger life rafts and clung to the sides. For four days, he endured the heat of the day and the cold after sunset. There was no fresh drinking water.
The ship in 1944
“I saw men lose their minds and go mad,” he said. “Some claimed they could see an island that they could swim to where there was food and water. So, they’d just swim away, never to be seen again.”
Others tried to dive down to the sunken Indianapolis and get inside for safety. Some drank seawater.
“It drove them crazy and they became violent. None of those who drank saltwater made it,” he said.
Of the 1,195 sailors and Marines aboard, only 316 survived the sinking and the days that followed. Exposure, dehydration, drowning, and shark attacks claimed men who had escaped the ship.
Help finally came after a patrol aircraft spotted survivors on August 2. The discovery brought other aircraft, including Lieutenant Adrian Marks’s PBY Catalina. Marks landed in the open sea, and his crew pulled men aboard. When the cabin was full, they secured others on the wings. The crew pulled 56 survivors from the water before a rescue ship arrived.
Morgan survived to return to Seattle and start a family. He became a firefighter. Years later, during an Oregon beach outing, he stopped short of the shoreline. He could not bring himself to follow the others toward the water, Buckles wrote.
Even so, Morgan had decided what he wanted to be done with his remains. He wanted his ashes to be scattered in the Philippine Sea.
Petty Officer 1st Class Jason Witty commits the ashes of his grandfather, Eugene Morgan, to the Philippine Sea during a ceremony aboard the USS Ohio. (courtesy photo)
“That’s where my shipmates are. I want to be with them,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. After his death at 87 in June 2008, his grandson, Machinist’s Mate First Class Jason Witty, sought permission to carry out that wish from the submarine USS Ohio. His request went up the chain of command and was approved.
The submarine surfaced for the ceremony that October. A eulogy written by another grandson was read, and a rifle detail fired a salute.
Standing at the side of the deck, Witty tipped a pitcher and released his grandfather’s ashes into the Philippine Sea, near the place where the Indianapolis went down.
Stephen Caldwell writes often for Soldier of Fortune.
