Presentation Date: May 22, 2003
Adolfo Al Celaya USN Sailor
* Crewmember of the famous Cruiser USS Indianapolis, * Bombardment of Iwo Jima--witnessed flag-raising at Mt. Suribachi, * Bombardment of Okinawa--witnessed and survived direct kamikaze hit, * Sprinted from Mare Island to Tinian, Marianas to deliver the Atomic Bomb, * Torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarine I-58 night of 29-30 July 1945 * Born in Florence, AZ
* Enlisted in USN June 1944
* Crewmember of the famous Cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35)
* Steamed for Pacific Theater late December 1944
* Bombardment of Iwo Jima--witnessed flag-raising @ Mt. Suribachi
* Bombardment of Okinawa--witnessed and survived direct kamikaze hit
* ADM Raymond A. Spruance on-board (his Flagship) when kamikaze struck
* Returned to Mare Island, SF for battle-damage repair, then:
* Sprinted from Mare Island to Tinian, Marianas to deliver the Atomic Bomb
* Torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarine I-58 night of 29-30 July 1945
* One of only 316 survivors from crew of 1,196!
* Starred as All-State Basketball Player and State Championship of Arizona
* Founder and still-active Owner of Celaya & Son Heating & Air Conditioning, S.C.
Surviving the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis, CA-35
“Finally I did find one of the rafts and grabbed ahold of the side. There were people on the top of it and they were trying to keep you away from it. I never had a life jacket while I was in the water.”
CA-35, the USS Indianapolis, a fast, pre-war heavy cruiser, holds a distinctive place in history. The ship delivered the first atomic bombs to Tinian and then was dealt a terrible blow when it was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The cruiser’s absence wasn’t noticed by the US Navy and the surviving crew suffered in the open sea for nearly five days. One of the survivors was Al Celaya, who spoke to the Golden Gate Wing about his experiences with the Indianapolis nearly sixty years ago. Celaya grew up in Florence, Arizona, about 30 miles way from another young man who gained fame in the final, gruesome months of the Pacific War - - Ira Hayes, one of the five Marines immortalized in the flag raising on Mt. Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima.
Al’s wartime path was to join the US Navy, and he enlisted in June, 1944. After training, he was assigned as a fireman aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis, which steamed in December, 1944 for the bombardment of Iwo Jima. From a distance, Al saw the famous flag raising atop Mt. Suribachi. Four months later, on April 1, 1945, while watching the bombardment of Okinawa, Al was on the port, aft side of the ship with a friend, when a kamikaze struck the Indy . “When we were walking... we saw this plane coming down and he looked up and said, ‘Hey, that looks like a suicide plane.’ And I said, ‘It sure does.’ And it came over and hit right on the other side (starboard) from where we were. He said, ‘Boy, we’re pretty lucky.’” The Indianapolis returned under her own steam to Mare Island, in the east San Francisco Bay for repairs. Then, the ship was prepared for her fateful mission.
Sprinting - - San Francisco to the Marianas “The bombs were loaded up at Hunter’s Point, not Mare island,” says Celaya. They had a pool going when they put the boxes up on top, four Marines on each end with a rifle. “Everybody started asking, ‘What do you think that is?’ You put a dollar into the pool, and I put down I thought it was furniture for one of the admirals. Some of the guys said it was nighties for their wives or something like that. But nobody thought it was a bomb or anything like that.
“It took nine days to get down to Tinian to take the atomic bomb. In those days, it was supposed to be one of the fastest ships... We had no knowledge of the bomb going off. We were all in the water when they dropped the atomic bomb. When we were in the hospital in the Philippines, we did receive a letter from President Truman recognizing us as the crew that took the bomb out.” On the night of July 29-30, 1945, having off-loaded the atomic bombs on Tinian, the fast cruiser was steaming to Leyte via Guam, to make preparations for the expected invasion of Kyushu.
The temperature below decks on that summer night was about 110-115 degrees. Al says to escape the sweltering heat, he had come topside, near the floatplane hangar, where the atomic bombs had been stowed for their transport. There were another 400 or so sailors bedded down there, most of them stripped down to their skivvies and laying on top of their Navy blankets.
Al says that despite the heat even on the deck, he was under his blanket. “In Arizona when I was a kid, during the summer you had to sleep outside, and mostly because of the mosquitoes you always had to cover yourself up. So when I was in the Navy and we slept up on the top deck, I put one Navy blanket on the hardwood deck and then covered myself up with the other blanket. All the sailors thought I was crazy... but that’s the way I was brought up.”
Lurking below the darkened water, Japanese submarine I-58 launched six deadly Long Lance torpedoes. Two of the torpedoes hit the Indianapolis - - the first explosion tearing the bow off the warship. The second exploding torpedo exploded amidship only three or four seconds later, ripping open the boiler room and touching off powder in the magazine for the cruiser’s 8-inch guns. “I was right at the quarter deck where the explosion came up. I guess it had hit the magazine... as I hit the floor from the first explosion, the next one hit and I went up again.”
Except for his face to allow him to breathe, Al says he was covered with his blanket, and that’s what protected him from the blast. “Everybody, I think, that was on the quarterdeck where the explosion was, was on fire. There was fire all over. I didn’t have any eyebrows and I had burns on my hands and my legs, but otherwise my blanket was all on fire. That was the only thing that saved me.” When the Indianapolis listed, Celaya says he was on the higher side, about two stories from the water’s dark surface. Not many life vests, much less rafts or lifeboats, went into the water because the ship went down rapidly, disappearing beneath the waves in all of twelve minutes.
“I had a friend there, Santos Pena, and I told Santos I don’t have a life jacket. I’ve got to go back and get mine, in the bottom of the ship. He said, ‘Don’t go because this thing is listing pretty bad. Jump with me, and I’ll take care of you.’ “I did jump with him, and I started swimming out. All I had was my skivvy shirt. Nothing else. My pants and everything else was gone. I started looking around and swam around for 15 minutes. Finally I did find one of the rafts and grabbed ahold of the side. There were people on the top of it and they were trying to keep you away from it. I never had a life jacket while I was in the water. “The group I was in was about 120 sailors strong. We ended up with about sixty to seventy,” Al recalls.
The crew of the Indy spent the next four and half days afloat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, exposed to the sun and saltwater, without food or water, and the targets of sharks which swirled up from the depths, mostly attacking the men on the fringes of the survival groups.
One of the unforgettable impressions Al had during the ordeal was the sound of sharks attacking men - - “The holler when the sharks were attacking. One of the sailors... that scream that stays with you at all times. You never get away from that.” When the sharks weren’t around, the sailors were plagued by constant thirst. At first the lack of water was a discomfort, but it would steadily grow to become a critical factor to sanity and survival of the men in the water.
“I would get the water, put it in my mouth and then spit it right out. A lot of these sailors wouldn’t do that,” remembers Celaya. In the more than four days the survivors, in large groups and small, bobbed in the sea without protection from the elements, hallucinations set in, followed for many sailors by insanity and death.
The Indianapolis survivors were discovered by the pilot of a PV-1 Ventura patrol plane. Chuck Gwinn, who hailed from San Martin, California, was seeking enemy submarines on the morning of August 2. He had also been tasked to test out a new antenna for Loran navigation.
At about 11 am, when the antenna malfunctioned, Gwinn had stepped from the cockpit back to the rear of the PV-1 to jury-rig another weight to the trailing wire antenna. Looking down to the blue water below, he noticed an oil slick. Thinking the slick could possibly have come from a damaged Japanese sub, he followed the oil to the north, and prepared depth charges. Instead, Gwinn and his crew spotted dozens of heads bobbing in the water. Then he saw more bobbing heads - - in all, four groups of oil covered men in the water.
Word of the drifting sailors was radioed back to Peleliu. By mid afternoon, a PBY flying boat was on its way, its crew braving destruction by rolling seas to land and pull a few sailors onboard. By nightfall a high speed destroyer transport (APD) with spotlights and LCVPs, and four destroyers were on station, rescuing the few men who had not perished. Of the 1,196 sailors and officers aboard the Indianapolis when she left Tinian, an estimated 300 were killed the night the torpedoes struck. Of the nearly 900 who were in the water after the ship went down, only 316 were plucked from the sea in the rescue. A month later, Celaya was put on the transport ship Hollandia to return to the States. Unfortunately, what should have been a safe voyage home instead proved additional hardship for Al, when he was singled out of the 300 plus Indianapolis survivors for a work detail to move heavy crates.
“I only weighted about 120 pounds at the time. They were putting us to lift up heavy boxes... “One of the officers... this my own officer that was on the Indianapolis... reprimanded me. They gave me five days of bread and water. And this is 30 days after they’d picked me up off the ocean. When they put me off in San Diego, they had already put me for two days in the brig and they took me into the barracks and let me have breakfast. Then they came back and told me the Navy had made a mistake... and said you’ve got to start your five days of bread and water again. So they gave me seven days altogether.” Because the officer who reprimanded Celaya still goes to Indianapolis survivor reunions, Al chooses to not attend the gatherings. When he was discharged from the Navy, Al continued his schooling, after facing a major challenge in his hometown and the second biggest battle of his life - - a battle with alcohol, which ultimately Al won .
“I had a coach that picked me out from a bar. I was in a bar all of the time, 18 years old, and one of the customers came over and said, ‘You know you’re serving a minor over here. He’s only 18.’ The bartender looked over, and I had my uniform on. He said, ‘Anybody who comes in here with a uniform on, is going to get served.‘ I was in the bar every day for almost a month, mostly because I wasn’t a drinking man... But when I went back home I lived with my Dad by myself. One of the nights I was sweating really bad and my mattress was going up and down like I was in the ocean. When I got up I tried to go to sleep and I couldn’t. My dad always had liquor. So I took a couple of shots of liquor and I went to sleep like a baby.”
Alcohol became Al’s only escape into sleep from the searing memories of the Indianapolis tragedy. Fortunately, the basketball coach at his high school and four of Al’s friends saved him, by hauling Al out of the bar. “If he hadn’t have come around, I’d be dead. Because I don’t think I would have left the bottle.”
Celaya was no newcomer to the game of basketball, having started playing the game at the age of ten. Now, with the Navy and the war behind him, Al was starting at center on his high school basketball team. The 5’9” veteran was part of a six man team which won the Arizona State Basketball Championship in 1946, and earned Al honors as an All State basketball player.
In the sixty years since the fateful, final voyage of the USS Indianapolis , more of the story has unfolded - -
*Captain Charles McVay was court-martialed and convicted of “hazarding his ship by failing to zig-zag.” McVay committed suicide in 1968. Thirty-two years later, McVay was exonerated by a Congressional amendment, after survivors learned a Florida middle school student named Hunter Scott had researched and written a report about the ordeal of the Indianapolis.
* During the December, 1945 court-martial of Captain McVay, Mochitsura Hashimoto, commander of the IJN submarine I-58 testified that it didn’t matter if the Indy had been zig-zagging to throw off the aiming of any enemy torpedoes that July night. He said the I-58s Long Lances would have hit home anyway. A highly decorated USN sub captain also testified to the ineffectiveness of the zigzagging maneuver.
* On July 24th, 1945 a Navy escort destroyer, the Underhill, had been sunk by ramming a IJN midget submarine, called a kaiten. Of the Underhill’s crew, 112 were lost and another 109 rescued by the 15 ship convoy in which the escort was steaming from Okinawa to Leyte. Word of that action had never reached the Captain of the Indianapolis.
Since the Indianapolis had no sonar to detect submarines, Al questions whether Captain McVay should have even set off from Tinian without a destroyer escort.
In 1966 the man who was the ‘guardian angel’ to the crew of the Indianapolis came again into Al’s life, this time on a very personal level. Celaya had been throwing away all the newsletters he received from the Indianapolis Survivors’ Organization. But before one of the newsletters went out to the curb, Al’s mother spotted it and read about somebody associated with the Indianapolis who was living in San Jose. When she encouraged Al to contact the man, Al finally called... and met the pilot who, 21 years earlier, had first discovered the floating sailors.
Chuck Gwynn was working for a school district in east San Jose. Gwynn and Celaya became very good friends, until Chuck passed away from cancer. Gwynn had been speaking to schools about the Indianapolis, and when he could no longer give those talks, he passed the baton to Al.
Over the years, Al continues to battle the effects of having come so close to death in the Pacific. He’s told doctors at the VA hospital he still has problems of waking up from sleep every sixty to ninety minutes.
Today, as the founder of Celaya & Son Heating & Air Conditioning, Al remains busy as the owner... in very much of a hands-on role. He is now one of only 100 remaining survivors of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.