Rating: 
Summary: The Indianapolis's Last, Fatal Voyage
Review: The author, Richard F. Newcomb, has obviously spent many countless hours researching this event and interviewing the survivors. He did a great job trying to make this book come alive.
This book describes many aspects of this incident such as the time before and after the actual sinking of the Indianapolis. I found it interesting that the author gives you a little history on Captain Charles McVay and even on the Japanese submarine commander.Abandon Ship! talks about what the men had to go through after the sinking of the great ship in the Pacific. At the end, Newcomb includes the Court Marshal of Captain Charles McVay. Overall I think this is a great book that makes history come alive. I really got in to this book and I would highly recommend reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Indianapolis's Last, Fatal Voyage
Review: The author, Richard F. Newcomb, has obviously spent many countless hours researching this event and interviewing the survivors. He did a great job trying to make this book come alive.
This book describes many aspects of this incident such as the time before and after the actual sinking of the Indianapolis. I found it interesting that the author gives you a little history on Captain Charles McVay and even on the Japanese submarine commander. Abandon Ship! talks about what the men had to go through after the sinking of the great ship in the Pacific. At the end, Newcomb includes the Court Marshal of Captain Charles McVay. Overall I think this is a great book that makes history come alive. I really got in to this book and I would highly recommend reading this book.
Rating: 
Summary: True account of a Terrible Tragedy
Review: The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, is a sad memoire of senseless loss of life during war time. The first half of this book goes into details about the ship itself, the crew and even the frame of mind of the enemy submarines captain that torpedoed the Indianapolis. The hours and days that following the sinking were documented on the pages as well as statements made by survivors. The second half of the book recounts the proceedings of the court martial of the Indianapolis' Captain, McVay. So many things went wrong ,from the search and rescue,to the speed of the sinking and the inability of officers to call for "abandon ship". Of the 800 some odd men that made it off the ship, only slightly more than 300 survived the ordeal, which is what the book is here to explain. A good narative with shocking revelations, it's a fast and easy read.
Rating:
Summary: Searing, poignant, and a pageturner
Review: This account of the loss of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945, is a book that will tear you apart. I had an overwhelming sense of empathy as the author takes us thru the awful ordeal that 1196 souls (not, for pity's sake, 8000, as an earlier review has it) on the ship went thru when the torpedoes struck just after midnight on that fateful day, just two weeks before the war ended. While close to a thousand survived the sinking, only 316 survived the ordeal that followed before rescue. Chills went up my spine as I rejoiced with those suffering men when it fianlly became clear that they would be rescued. This book cannot be read dry-eyed, and you will remember it long after other reading you have done has faded from memory. (The book lists the survivors. I wish that the publisher had added a list of the non-survivors, tho I have noticed there is a website with a complete list of the men aboard that fateful and horrendous night.) This is as compelling an account as I have read for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: This book fails to deliver what could have been a riveting account of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. The writing is flat, numerous scenes and military references lack detail or explanation, and other passages are tedious and overloaded with superfluous information. First published in 1958, Abandon Ship! reads more like a straightforward recap than it does an engrossing account of one of our country's saddest military disasters. For a more interesting account of the sinking of the ship and its aftermath, try Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding chronicle of a U.S. Navy blunder
Review: This book tells the story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the tradgedy that befell its crew. Largely due to Navy blunders, the ship was sent out unescorted and was torpedoed by a Japanese sub. Many men were killed, not only in the initial attack but due to sharks. It was only sheer luck that a Navy plane happened to find the remainder of the crew. By that time, only about 300 men out of 1,200 survived the hellish experience. Trying to get a scapegoat for its own stupidity, the U.S. Navy court-martialed the captain of the ill-fated ship. This book is a great chronicle of a story so strange that Hollywood couldn't have come up with it. Read it and understand what it was like to go down on a ship and wonder if you'll ever be rescued.
Rating:
Summary: page turner! (as far as p. 169 :)
Review: This is a wonderful story, brilliantly told, insofar as the tragedy of the Indianapolis is concerned. No wonder Peter Maas (author of another martime spellbinder, The Terrible Hours) was drawn to it. But just as the Maas book began to sag a bit after the Squalus crew was rescued, this one droops altogether. My advice is to read as far as page 169, when the story at sea is done, and skip the bit about the court-martial and what followed. The problem, I think, is that Richard Newcomb (like the Navy) was trying to find a scapegoat. Surely a cruiser can't sink and leave 800 men in the water undiscovered for five days? That's what the U.S. public asked in 1945, and it's what Newcomb asked in 1958 when he wrote this book, and of course in our post-Vietnam wariness of the military it's what we're supposed to think today. But drek happens. If anyone was guilty, it was the port personnel on Guam who didn't assign a destroyer escort to the Indianapolis. This doesn't seem to occur to anyone, least of all the Navy. But absent an escort, in time of war, with enemy submarines about, the Navy's procedure for routing combat ships was the right one. Too bad the Indianapolis proved that it wouldn't work under every possible circumstance, and that the disaster happened in the last week of the war.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Historical Account...
Review: This is an outstanding historical account of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. One of the finest naval non-fiction books I've ever read. Based on the facts surrounding a story that the navy would have rather not had made public. If you're a war, naval or historical buff, you need to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Historical Account...
Review: This is an outstanding historical account of the tragedy of the USS Indianapolis. One of the finest naval non-fiction books I've ever read. Based on the facts surrounding a story that the navy would have rather not had made public. If you're a war, naval or historical buff, you need to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: compelling tale of tragedy at sea, bureacratic blunders
Review: What an awesome story! I very rarely read anything with military themes, but on a lark I picked up a copy of Abandon Ship! during a trip to the local public library, thinking I'd try it, but I probably wouldn't make it through the entire book. On the contrary, once I started the book, I couldn't put it down until I had read every word, including the afterward and the appendices, lingering over the roster of survivors. The book is a gripping and troubling tale of the loss of the USS Indianapolis to Japanese torpedos at the end of WWII, the Navy's failure to make any attempt to rescue the crewmembers for over four days, and the Navy's subsequent efforts to place all the blame for the incident on the shoulders of the Indianapolis's Commanding Officer, Charles McVay III, in order to avoid revealing the many blunders and oversights that led to the sinking and the grossly delinquent rescue effort (drunken officers ignoring SOS calls, failure to inform McVay of submarine threats, failure to track ship movement . . .) I was apalled that certain Navy brass would be so nonchalant about the Indianapolis's situation and that certain Navy brass compromise all integrity by punishing McVay for a trumped-up nonsense charge of failure to steer a zigzag course, in order to keep their own naval records unblemished. Even more unthinkable is the fact that the Navy called an unwilling but necessarily cooperative Commander Hashimoto, the captain of the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis, to testify against McVay at his courtmartial. The book ultimately hints that the courtmartial of Captain McVay was an act of Admiral King, who was using the courtmartial of McVay to seek revenge against McVay's father, Admiral Charles McVay II, who had formally reprimanded King for an incident involving bringing women into unauthorized spaces when King was a junior officer under the senior McVay's command. As an added bonus, the 2001 edition of the book contains a foreward and afterword that discuss the efforts of Hunter Scott, a schoolboy who took on the task of exonerating Captain McVay as a school history project aftrer hearing about the incident in the movie Jaws. I recommend this highly to anyone who thinks that miltary brass always does the right thing. Many do, but the handful that do not can cause one to lose all faith in the system. Fortunately, a young schoolboy was able to vindicate Captain McVay four decades after the incident.
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