By Bethany A. Monk
Assistant Editor

Harold Bray’s old watch, the one from his Navy days, sits in a case in his Benicia home next to some of his other war mementos. The watch’s crystal area is clouded over, covered in dark grays. It is more than 65 years old.

But age alone did not damage the watch. It was saturated in saltwater for five days in the summer of 1945 after Bray’s ship, the USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and he and more than a thousand others found themselves floating in the Pacific Ocean, awaiting rescue.

Now 83, Bray is one of just 317 U.S. sailors — of a crew of 1,196 — who survived the attack, which happened shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945 — 65 years ago Friday.

‘Glad to get a big ship’

Harold Bray will be in Indianapolis on Friday, attending the annual anniversary reunion of the USS Indianapolis Survivors Organization, of which he is chairman.

A native of Ironwood, Mich., Bray enlisted in the Navy in December 1944, when he was just 17. He completed basic training in Great Lakes, Ill., the following January.

After 16 weeks of boot camp, the young Bray got his orders to the Indianapolis, then undergoing repairs at Mare Island in Vallejo.

“She had taken a hit from a suicide bomb at Okinawa, but came all the way back to Vallejo under her own power after being patched up out there somewhere,” Bray wrote in a book by survivors of the attack, “USS Indianapolis (CA-35): Navy’s Worst Tragedy at Sea … 880 Men Died.”

“When I first saw her, I could not imagine anything that big and that heavy being able to float,” he wrote. Nonetheless, as Bray told The Herald on Monday, “I was glad to get a big ship.” He was assigned to the ship’s repair division.

The Indy, as sailors called her, was certainly not small. She measured about 610 feet, with a 66-foot breadth. First commissioned in November 1932, the Indianapolis experienced its first combat of World War II in the South Pacific in February 1942, and eventually became the flag ship for the Fifth Fleet.

It went on to see extensive combat, receiving 10 battle stars for action.

A hot, deadly night

On July 15, a month after Bray’s 18th birthday, he and the crew of the USS Indianapolis set sail from Mare Island. They unloaded some passengers at Pearl Harbor and were off to Guam. On July 28, they departed for the Philippines.

The night of July 30 was so hot, Bray recalls, “that the skipper let us sleep on the deck.” It may have been a fortunate decision.

As most of the crew slept, a Japanese submarine fired six torpedoes at the Indianapolis; two hit. The first tore a big chunk from the ship’s bow; the second “hit on the opposite side, on starboard.”

Bray remembers the ship shaking. He searched for his shoes, but saw them go over the side. He tried to make it to his battle station, but fire and smoke prevented him.

He made it through the quarterdeck, seeing that many of his shipmates were wounded and screaming. In the carpenter shop, where Bray found himself after running through the port hangar, he saw someone distributing lifejackets.

He got one and continued aft. “I got to one of the fantails and one of the sailors was hurt,” Bray said. “So I gave him my lifejacket.”

By then, the ship was on its side.

Bray was able to get another lifejacket. He took off on a sprint along the ship’s bow and jumped through the darkened sky into the deep black of the Philippine Sea.

Floating near the tortured ship, Bray happened upon a “crashnet,” a large, raft-like apparatus on which another sailor was sitting. “We started picking up other survivors. We picked up 150 guys,” he said. For all they knew, these were the only other survivors. “(But) there were two other groups (of survivors) unbeknownst to us.”

Gazing back at the Indy as she shuddered and stood on her bow, Bray saw his shipmates — “like ants on a stick” — leap from the sinking ship into the dark.

Wounded men may have survived the attack, but they now faced a worse fate: sharks.

“I had seen a lot of guys hurt pretty bad. Of course, the sharks showed up. Anyone who was hurt pretty bad didn’t last very long.”

Sharks got up close and personal with Bray, too, but none bothered him.

Waiting for rescue

As the sharks circled, the men waited. Overhead, airplanes flew by every day, Bray said. None came to their rescue. They most likely couldn’t see the sailors from that far away, he said.

By their third day in the water, many of the men had perished. Too many to count.

On the fourth day, Bray was hanging on the side of the crashnet when a sailor came floating by. Bray tried to save the man by tying him to the net. The next day, the man was nowhere to be seen.

The surviving sailors had no food or water. Some took to drinking the salt water, but this only made them sick, Bray said. “I must’ve listened in boot camp,” he said with a chuckle, explaining why he abstained from drinking the ocean water.

Hunger gnawed at him. “Eventually, your body starts eating itself.”

Then, five days after the Indy was sunk, Lt. Wilbur Gwinn, on patrol in a twin engine PV-1 Ventura, saw a stream of oil in the water. Soon he came upon men waving for help. He radioed for assistance.

By seaplane and by ship, help had arrived.

‘Never thought … about dying’

The Navy let the surviving sailors choose their next duty station; Bray chose Grosse Isle Naval Air Station near Detroit. On Aug. 6, 1946, he was honorably discharged.

The Indy’s captain, Charles Butler McVay III, survived and was court-martialed and convicted of “hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag,” according to Navy records. Bray said the court-martial “was all a political thing.”

McVay, who committed suicide in 1968, was exonerated by the Navy in 2001. “The Navy sent us out there and didn’t come looking for us,” Bray said, defending his captain.

Meanwhile, Bray and his shipmates received Purple Hearts.

Bray remembers his Navy days clear as spring water. On Monday, he showed off the old watch and recalled how, while clinging to raft, he used a string to tie the broken timepiece around his wrist.

The first torpedo had hit the Indianapolis at 12:14 a.m. on July 30. Bray’s watch stopped at 1 a.m. — the time it currently reads.

Even in the midst of such a harrowing experience, even during five days at sea, Harold Bray said he never lost hope. “I never thought once about dying. You’re 18, you don’t think about dying.”