After surviving the sinking of his own ship and four days adrift in that shark filled water alongside his men, the captain of the USS Indianapolis was dragged home and put on trial for it. Charles McVay is the only ship captain in the entire history of the United States Navy to be court-martialed for losing his vessel to an act of war. Not one other captain, in a war where hundreds of ships went down. Just him. And the way they did it was a disgrace that still turns your stomach eighty years later. Start with everything that was not his fault, because it was almost everything. He asked for a destroyer escort for the trip and was flatly told he did not need one. The Navy had intelligence that Japanese submarines were operating directly along the route they sent him down, and they never told him a word of it, because sharing it might have hinted that America had broken the enemy codes. Days earlier a ship had been torpedoed in the same waters. He was told none of that either. He was sent out blind, alone, unescorted, straight through a hunting ground, and nobody thought that was worth a warning. Then, after the sinking, came the failure that actually killed his men. His ship simply never arrived, and for four days not a single person in the Navy noticed or cared. There was a culture at the time of not tracking whether combat ships reached port. So while his crew died by the hundreds from thirst and exposure and sharks, the men whose job it was to notice they were missing did nothing at all. That delay, more than anything else, is why so few came home. And not one of those men was ever punished. So the Navy went looking for a scapegoat, one single person to pin an entire catastrophe on, and they chose the man who had already lost almost 900 of his own crew and nearly died with them. They charged him with failing to steer a zigzag course, as though weaving back and forth would have stopped two torpedoes fired at close range in the dark. The admiral in overall command had recommended against a court-martial entirely. He was overruled from the very top, by men who wanted this to go forward. Then they did the thing that should have ended the whole farce. They brought the commander of the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis across the ocean and put him on the witness stand to testify against an American naval officer. And even he, the enemy who fired the torpedoes, told them plainly that zigzagging would have made no difference whatsoever, that he had McVay lined up and would have sunk that ship no matter what course she was steering. American submarine experts said the same. It did not matter. They had already decided. They convicted him anyway. The verdict wrecked his career, but that was not the cruelest part. The cruelest part was the mail. For years afterward, letters came from the families of the men who died. Letters telling him he had murdered their sons. Letters saying they wished it had been him instead. One arrived around the holidays telling him what a merry Christmas the family would be having if only he had not killed their boy. He read them, year after year, a man already carrying the ghost of every sailor he had lost in that water. On November 6, 1968, he walked out onto the front steps of his home and ended his own life with his Navy revolver. In his other hand they found a little toy sailor, a good luck charm he had carried since he was a small boy. He was innocent. He was always innocent, and everyone who mattered knew it. The men who served under him, the ones who had floated in that ocean and watched their friends taken by sharks, never blamed him for one second. They spent the rest of their lives defending him. It took them decades of fighting, and in the end it took an eleven year old boy doing a school history project, tracking down survivors and digging up hundreds of documents, to finally shame the government into admitting the obvious. In 2000 Congress officially exonerated Charles McVay. The Navy cleared his record the next year. He had been dead for more than thirty years by the time they said the words his crew had been screaming the whole time. He never failed those men. The Navy failed them, and then it failed him too, and it let him carry the blame alone all the way to his grave.