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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