
Caption | Staged photograph taken during the court martial trial of US Navy Captain Charles McVay. Former Japanese submarine I-58 commander Mochitsura Hashimoto is seen using a chart, Washington DC, 13 Dec 1945. ww2dbase | |||||||
Photographer | Byron Rollins | |||||||
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Photos at Same Place | Washington DC, United States | |||||||
Added By | David Stubblebine | |||||||
Added Date | 9 Jan 2021 | |||||||
This photograph has been scaled down; full resolution photograph is available here (1,440 by 1,080 pixels). |
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9 Jun 2021 07:29:28 PM
Captain Charles B. McVay III had been the commanding officer of the cruiser USS Indianapolis on 30 Jul 1945 when she was torpedoed and sunk by Commander Hashimoto’s submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea. For the only time in US Navy history before or since, Captain McVay was court martialed for the loss of his ship in combat. He was charged with hazarding his ship by failing to zig-zag. The prosecutors went so far as to bring Commander Hashimoto from Japan to Washington to testify. Hashimoto testified that it did not matter whether Indianapolis had been zig-zagging or not, he would have been able to sink the ship either way, but McVay was convicted nevertheless. It took years for the truth to be admitted that it had been the Navy’s multiple failures that hazarded the ship and literally left the crew to the sharks. The trial of Captain McVay had been a cover-up for those failures. It took an actual Act of Congress in 2000 to formally exonerate Captain McVay, but unfortunately that came 32 years after he had taken his own life.
From left: Captain Thomas J. Ryan, judge advocate (prosecutor); Captain John P. Cady, defense counsel; Mochitsura Hashimoto; Francis Eastlake, Naval intelligence Japanese expert; and Rear Admiral Wilder D. Balse, court president.