♪ next on american history tv, we hear about the world war ii goal when -- and tragic story of the uss indianapolis, which after it was torpedoed by a japanese submarine on july 30, 1945. the ship had just completed a secret mission, delivering parts used in the atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima, japan. speaking at the national archives in washington dc are lynn vincent and sara vladic, co-authors of "indianapolis: the true story of the worst sea disaster in u.s. naval history and the fifty-year fight to exonerate an innocent man." >> i often refer to the stories in the national archives. we are not just a storehouse to billions of pages and miles of films that hold stories of our past. .

in these records, you can discover human lives and how the great and small events of history change them. today, we will hear the stories of the men who sailed the uss indianapolis during world war ii. the cruiser sinking in july, 1945, just weeks before japan's surrender in the war was the worst sea disaster in history. it can also help unravel mysteries even decades after the events took place. last summer's identification of the location of the wreck of the indianapolis was aided by historians discovering a log landing craft had seen the indianapolis the night before she sank. just this month, the navy was able to settle the question about the number of survivors because of research done in the records housed in our facility and our national personal records center in st. louis. some stories are easily told. others take 73 years to come to light. by preserving the records of our

ensure the building blocks of our stories will be available now and far into the future. lynn vincent, a u.s. navy veteran, is a number one new york times best-selling author of 11 nonfiction books, the best-known titles are "kind of different" and "heaven is for real." a veteran journalist and author of more than a thousand articles , they have been cited before the u.s. supreme court. sara vladic, and acclaim maker is one of , the world's leading experts on the uss indianapolis, having become upset with the story at the age of 13. over the next two decades, she met and interviewed 108 of the ships' survivors and in 2016 released an award-winning documentary film of the

disaster, "uss indianapolis: the legacy." the official journal of the u.s. navy, and appeared as an expert commentator on the uss indianapolis, live from the deep, which explored the ships ' records. the book is also listed on the new york times bestseller list. so, before they come to the stage, we are going to see a short film. if you will roll the film now. [video clip] ♪ >> i started into the navy when i was 16. >> i saw the flag raised. >> they showed us the atomic bomb. >> the 30th of july, we were hit by two torpedoes from a submarine. [explosion] next thing i know the ship is , coming right out from under me. >> i never did know how to swim and the navy never taught me how to swim.

they came across your legs like that. >> it was chaos. >> we couldn't understand why we weren't rescued. >> the guys decided, hell, we are going to die. >> on that fourth day, i said i hear planes. we began to splash water and yell and began to pray. everything and seemingly it got to a point where had he gone any further, he would have gone over but you know what he did, he made a dive. >> how did i make it with nothing to eat, no water to drink, no sleep for five nights? the lord was with me. >> if somebody wrote this up as fiction, nobody would believe it happened. >> people don't realize the politics in the armed forces. >> all the headlines were about the captain. he was court-martialed. >> many heads should have rolled before they ever got to the captain. >> the story has never been told.

those that want to remember, don't want to recall. it is too much. i think it ought to be told. sara: i would like to start this talk with a question. by a show of hands who first learned of the story of indianapolis by watching "jaws?" >> raise them high. what about other sources? news, a show, the of hands? all right. who hadn't heard about it until maybe the last week or two? if you. a few. . i heard about it when i was 13 years old and was watching a documentary with my father. it was about the pacific war and the story of the indianapolis was reduced to a single line, which was it was a ship that carried the bomb and was sunk.

i thought there has to be more to it than that. so i went to the library. at that time, there was no google. my dad told me to go look it up. i think it was the grolier ityclopedia that had it and was not in any major book. there is very little to be found about it. i kept looking and found some stuff but i thought somebody's got to tell this story someday. i thought by the time i was old enough to do it someone else would have done it. i graduated college from pepperdine and no one had heard about it, no one was talking about it, it still had not been made. that is when i decided to look for the survivors of the indianapolis and that is when ask jeeves was around. [laughter] dating myself. jeeves said there was paul murphy and mary lou murphy, the chairman and secretary of the survivors organization. so i called them up. they invited me to a reunion and

i said i would love to meet you and talk to you, so they invited me to the reunion. that was the first time i was able to meet some of the indianapolis survivors. it was a big year. it was the year a lot of things happened with the captain's record and we will talk about that more this afternoon. it was a ceremonial year, there were a lot of events and it was the first time i talked to these men and got to know them and they invited me to come back. over the next couple of years, i got to know them and their families. over a denny's breakfast a couple of years later, i was a poor just graduated college student, and they said we want you to be our storyteller. you don't say no to that. when a world war ii veteran says they want you to be there their storyteller, you go to task. you do the work. at the time, i wanted to make a movie. i wanted to write a screenplay and i needed to interview these men in order to do the story.

i thought you cannot tell it unless you talk to the people who lived it. i started doing interviews in 2005 and wrote a screenplay. they said this is the test thing best thing we have seen since brothers," but it needs to be based on a book. i don't know how to write a book. so i asked friends and family, do you know anyone who knows how to write a book? screenplays are very different, by the way. [laughter] it ended up being my mother-in-law. i was introduced to lynn vincent, who at the time had a few bestsellers, so it was very intimidating and i did not want to mess it up. so i called her, hoping she would give me some advice. i emailed her first. i said can you call me i just need five minutes. she just had a couple of books come out -- "heaven is for real" and "same kind of different as me."

i was very intimidated but she gave me five-minute supper time and that was our first phone call. lynn: what she did not know when she called was that i'm a navy veteran, number one. number two, i'm an investigative journalist before i transitioned to books and number three, i had literally been praying for an iconic world war ii story to write. there are world war ii stories that are as iconic as indianapolis, but none that are more so. when she called me, i was like god is answering my prayer. but all she wants is advice, what am i going to do? i did not want to jump on her and forced myself on her. but after a few conversations, we agreed to team up and we had our first meeting. sara: i like to tell the story of the first meeting. it kind of sets the tone for this. as i mentioned earlier, she had andten "heaven is for real"

sam "same kind of different as were very christian stories and we had only spoken on the phone and i thought i was looking for the woman in a sweater vest carrying a bible. [laughter] and she showed up on a harley. [laughter] and i knew from that point it would be a good working relationship and it was. from the beginning, it has been a blessing, has been an incredible experience. i'm going to say for both of us. [laughter] lynn: not only great writing partners, but great friends. we have been eating our way across the southeast. we have been having a good time. sara: go ahead. ynn: i was going to say that sometimes we get asked, there have been other books written about indianapolis. what's new? what are you going to do that's different? one of the things i like to say

is there have been worthy books about indianapolis. the first was the 1959 by richard newcomb. he was the first journalist to realize this was first of all a horrible tragedy, really a bookend to pearl harbor in terms of one began the war and the other ended the war. second, he was the first to ay,lize that captain mcv the skipper of indianapolis had , suffered a grave injustice. that triggered the survivors reunion. the first time they got together in indianapolis, the city, was in 1960. 30 years or so later, another reporter, an iron chinned journalist of the old school wrote another book. you have to remember that archives and records continue to be classified. some things had been declassified by the time he wrote his book, but not everything, including the ultra program, which was the most highly classified intelligence

program of the war. there remain things that were not revealed, and i'm going to talk a little bit about the archives in a moment. then doug stanton wrote a book called "in harms way" that recalled the horrific experiences of the survivors. about 80% of it took place in water. how many of you have read that? what we tried to do was help people realize the indianapolis is much more than a sinking story. it has been recognized as a sinking story, a short story. how any of you every year on shark week, they roll out the indianapolis as the worst shark attack in history? indianapolis was so much more than a shark story or a sinking story.

she is the ship from whose depths strategized and plotted out the pacific war. you could argue she was one of the most important vessels in the pacific war. we tried to bring that out for readers. would you like to talk about some other things that we did? sara: one of the things we tried to do was to go back to the original source material. there were quite a few other ofks and 70 years interpretation and the fish got bigger. back toy wanted to go primary sources and we went to the archives. we went to college park and spent a lot of time there. we wanted to stay there forever until he kicked us out. [laughter] if they let us have a sleeping bag in there, we would have stayed.

lynn: i would have. sara: we spent an incredible amount of time there. we went to the naval war college, the library of congress, and we were able to interview survivors, the rescue crew, and the families of those who were lost at sea in order to really tell the firsthand accounts of what took place, not only during the sinking, but in service to the country. remember these are 16, 17, kids commanding -- well, not commanding -- but running these vessels. they were participating in these battles. those perspectives of firsthand accounts, they were viewing distance from these, witnessing what was happening at this time. we wanted to go back to that. we also went back to the letters, the correspondence wives orusbands and

girlfriends because they were writing back and forth from the ship. there was a gentleman named earl henry and he was a dentist on board the ship. in marchefore okinawa 1945, okinawa was invaded and the, because he struck the indianapolis. nine men were killed and they went into dry docks to repair this and that was the first domino that sent the ship into the mission of carrying components for the atomic bomb. so when the ship was in dry dock, this gentleman went home and visited his wife who is very pregnant at the time. he was able to spend a little time with her. three days after he was recalled back to the ship when his leave ended, earl junior was born.

there is a letter between earl able towife and he was receive some pictures where they delivered components of the bomb. they were preparing for the invasion of japan. he received photographs of a earl who was born prematurely and ran around carrying the ship showing everyone about how excited he was about his brand-new son. those kinds of things we like to incorporate into the story and the firsthand account. we wanted to get you to know these men in the ways we were privileged to in the years of interviews. it is a look through the lens of these men at what was taking place in 1945 all the way through exonerating the captain. lynn: speaking of the bomb mission, one of the things sara mentioned, was when she heard of the indianapolis, it was reduced

to just a line in a documentary and we found that to be true of books as well. it's the ship that carried components of the atomic bomb. but no one told that story. that was strange to us because it was the most highly classified mission of the war. when we were here in the city we found the private papers of a man named robert furman who was an army major and it just so happened that major furman was the chief intelligence officer for the entire manhattan project and he had run around europe trying to track down the state of german atomic science because the scientists on the american side were really worried the germans were going to beat the united states and being able to deploy an operational atomic bomb during the war. so in his records were these handwritten accounts, day by day, moment by moment of transporting the atomic bomb, the components of the atomic

bomb aboard uss indianapolis. so we see that mission in our book both from his perspective, not just as an army officer, but how he got to know the army officers and navy officers on the indianapolis, but also from the perspective of the men. the many components of the atomic bomb were carried in two cylindrical canisters which were very heavy because of them one carried uranium, which at that time among the heaviest of natural elements. major furman and his partner captain james nolan secretly and nonchalantly had this carried into their quarters and meanwhile, they made a big deal out of this automobile sized crate that they secured in the aircraft hangar aboard indianapolis. what they were trying to do was avert the attention of the crew. the crew knew that something really secret was happening and

didn't know what it was. major furman and captain nolan decided they would make a big production and post a marine guard around this crate to divert the crew's attention. tell them what the crew did. sara: these are teenagers and their curiosity led them to betting. bets on what was being transported in this entire's crate. it was everything from rita haworth's undergarments to scented toilet paper for general macarthur. [laughter] none of them guessed what was actually in the crate. another part of the book that we bring into the story is the japanese perspective. we have the journals and notes of the admiral he was in charge of the kamikaze program. his letters and the letters of

the young kamikaze pilots who ultimately committed suicide in honor of their emperor. in addition to that, we have the home front. i have here and audience, jim alger junior, his father served aboard the indianapolis and he has an incredible story and his family has an incredible story -- spoiler alert -- he survived. when he came home, he married a japanese woman. we had the incredible privilege of interviewing their family in that she, at the time, was in school learning and preparing about the invasion of japan and what they would be called to do. training these young students to fight with sticks for the invasion. there perspective of the atomic bomb and how happy they were it ended the war. after the war, flash forward a couple of years, james belcher

ries this lovely young woman and they have a family together. the healing that came from that, that story on the homefront and that perspective, that's another part we include that is a personal experience and perspective of how the indianapolis and what took place in world war ii carried on through present day. lynn: the story continues after the rescue. the rescue is tremendously exciting, especially for people like jim belcher. jim, will you stand up, please? jim's father survived. [applause] for those of you who raised your hands who said you have just only recently heard the story, i mentioned indianapolis and sara mentioned the kamikazi attack. no one aboard the ship knew what

was in the crates. they made a speed run to pearl harbor, 74.5 hours. that is a record that still stands for that class of ship. they went to finian island in the northern marianas. they arrived on july 26 and that is when earl henry received the photograph of the child he would never meet. four days later, they set out on a routine mission. in those days, at that time of the war, it was considered the backwater of the war. it was considered the rear. the navy did not send an escort ship with indianapolis. in those days, cruisers did not have any underwater detection so

they were usually accompanied by destroyers or destroyer escorts to protect against enemy submarines. they did not send an escort with though theay even navy had intelligence that a group of four attack submarines was heading down to this facility. they were determined to sink as many american ships as they could because they knew the war was almost other and one way or another japan was going to be on the losing side. onew minutes after midnight july 1945, which was a few hours ago -- sara: this week. lieutenant commander mochitsura hashimoto encountered the indianapolis and fired a spread of six torpedoes. two of them hit the annapolis. indianapolis.

one of them blew the bow mostly off the ship and the second one hit indianapolis mid ship. about 300 of the crew of 1195 men went down with the ship, including, we believe lieutenant commander henry, the dentist, and about 900 men made it into the water alive. they stayed there for five nights and four days. which we can explain in a moment why that happened. but after those five nights and four days, only 316 men survived. they are rescued beginning on august 2, 1945. afterwards, the navy has to decide who to pin this on and what they decide is to court-martial the captain, captain mcvay, even though they did not give him the proper intelligence, even though they did not give him an escort ship. one of the things we did a fresh was to examine the primary

source documents for the court-martial of captain mcvay. without 73 years of interpretation, and because of the national archives, we believe we found what we believe is the smoking gun as to why captain mcvay's court-martial was rushed ahead. because of the primary sources in the national archives we found the court-martial and persecution of mcvay was worse than we thought. then comes a fifty-year year effort to exonerate the captain. that effort was led by the survivors themselves and a young boy who learned about indianapolis and talked about it for his school history project and brought much attention to the story in the late 1990's, 50 years after the fact. then the third person who was critical to helping exonerate captain mcvay was the captain of the indianapolis and we

are lucky enough to have captain bill tody with us today. [applause] sara: we mentioned "in harm's way" that was written in 2001. when that was written, none of the exoneration had really happened. it was underway, but there was not a conclusion by the time doug wrote his book, so we had the privilege to tell the story of what takes place between 1998 -- well, from 1960 when the earnest effort began all the way through 1998 where it really started to take ground. then into present day, where they did exonerate captain mcvay in 2001. but that was a huge effort by bill tody and senator warner,

senator bob smith, a lot of back and forth. it was not smooth sailing. forgive the pun. [laughter] it was an effort by many to get to this point where the captain's name could be cleared. lynn: talk about back-and-forth it was decades of fighting , because every time an exoneration effort would be mounted, the navy would push back and say this court-martial was legally justified. that went on decade after decade. first the survivors and then captain mcvay's son, they wrote to president reagan and vice president bush. each time they were told the court-martial is legally sound. number two, president's don't have the ability to overturn a navy court-martial. so those letters happened in the 1980's. in the 1990's, remember i told

you about dan kurtzman. he found what he considered another smoking gun. that was also in the national archives. he found a letter which indicated even the navy new captain mcvay was convicted on what they called a super technical charge. then in the 1990's, here came hunter scott, the 11-year-old boy who started to correspond with survivors and a man many of you are familiar with got involved in the exoneration effort. how many of you have heard of joe scarborough? he's on msnbc. at that time, he was a congressman from florida and happened to be in hunter's district. he put hunter's sixth grade history project on display in his congressional office in the first district in florida, and that gathered a whole bunch of attention because it was made for tv. i see some young men up there. how old are you guys? 10? seven.

hunter was only 11 when he started this. he began to write to the survivors and, congressman scarborough got wind of it, and the next thing you knew hunter scott was all over tv. 1997 or 1996 all the way through he was everywhere. 1999. he was on the tom brokaw nightly news. he was on david letterman. the magazine years ago called george magazine. they named this 11-year-old boy one of the 20 most interesting men in politics. [laughter] it was made for tv -- young boy helps elderly survivors in their exoneration quest. still, when the exoneration quest reached congress, the navy still pushed back and pushed back.

this gentleman here, captain bill tody, did a little back behind the scenes stuff to finally help everything go through. as did, ironically, lieutenant commander mochitsura hashimoto. even after the senate armed services committee in 1999, senator john warner would not put the resolution to exonerate captain mcvay on the floor. senator rob smith was saying please take it to a vote. senator warner would always say , the navy decided this. the navy decided this case ago and keep deciding it. wroten't until hashimoto a letter to senator war -- senator warner saying, can't we take this terrible burden off captain? it wasn't his fault. can't we put this aside and free this man and his family from this burden of all these years? senator warner got this letter

in the mail and he was so astonished that he called senator smith and said, you have to come see this. after receiving that letter, senator warner took the resolution to a vote and the exoneration of captain mcvay was finally passed. sara: that is just a small part of what's in the book. [laughter] we really wanted to get into all of these perspectives and tie the narrative together with first-hand experiences so that you can see all of this as though you were living it. you get to know the survivors, you get to know bill tody, and you get to know the belcher family, the glen morgan family, you go on a journey with them as they experience this terrible thing they went through in the water, but then how they fought back and claimed justice for their captain 50 years later.

it is more than a history telling. it's more than facts and dates. it's an experience and we hope that you get to know these men and this crew like we did. lynn: so i want to open up to questions. are there any questions -- not only questions for us, but questions for captain tody. we warned him we were going to do this. maybe we told you too much. [laughter] yes, there are microphones on the side. >> hi, can you hear me? my name is aiden jones and i'm a lawyer here in washington. i fit in a very strange category in that i didn't hear about this story until the day after

father's day this year, even though i was at navy officer during vietnam. not only that, i was a damage control assistant on a destroyer escort. i survived a serious fire. we would not have survived if we did not had it on the way back from refresher training rather than the way to its. -- rather than the way to it. so this book means a lot to me. i was curious about your navy background and experience and how much this played into the story. lynn: i was enlisted. i was an air traffic controller, which is a technical rating. i actually had to rely on captain tody a lot to take me to sea because when i served in the navy, women were not allowed on ships and all air traffic controllers served on aircraft carriers. but i knew the language of the

navy and knew the culture of the navy. in terms of, for example, one of the biggest places my navy experience helped was in the rumors that an sos had been sent from indianapolis and ignored by the navy and covered up by multiple parties at multiple stations and just being familiar with the culture of the navy, after looking into it and analyzing it, that cover-up didn't really stand. it did not make sense. not only did no one have anything to gain by that, but also the number of records that , would have to have been falsified for that to happen was just insurmountable. it just didn't make sense that there was some kind of conspiracy to cover up an sos. another place that came into play, my navy experience came into play, had to do with the

national archives. that is that there was a subsiding about 700 miles ahead of the indianapolis' path had been surmised to perhaps be i 58, the ship that sank indianapolis ultimately. it had also been said by some respected historians that maybe that submarine didn't really exist. then there were some people who covered the submarine sighting to one extent or another, but none of the previous authors had been navy veterans. it just occurred to me one day, why don't we look at the logs? we were able to find the ship logs and not only that, but because of nathaniel patch, an archivist at the college park branch of the national archives who should wear a big s and a cape, he said, why don't we look at their reports, the submarine

warfare reports? he dug that up for us and we were astonished. captain tody was astonished to find these detailed records of 15 separate attacks on this enemy submarine that was in the path of indianapolis. what we found was not only that the navy failed to inform indianapolis of the attack submarines, but they also knew of another submarine directly in her path and failed to inform of that one as well. >> i left a few things out and this is more a statement and a thanks. i said i didn't hear about this until the day after father's day when my daughter, a senior editor at mcmillan, but was at simon & schuster, and she heard about the book. i had not heard anything about the book. it was actually an advanced copy

she somehow got ahold of and sent me for father's day. but i'm so thankful you made this story public. and one thing that is new about your book is the coverage of the court-martial and how horrific and unfair it was. one reason it did not come out and see the light of day is because there was a cover-up. it's really terrible what happened to the captain and what he had to suffer as a result of all of this. so i thank you for telling this story. i know you are going to go to politics and pose this story at the wharf tonight. they weren't originally going to offer you a place to speak, initially, when i first asked my daughter's friend there about it. subsequently learned it.

i am hoping it is getting good coverage. it certainly deserves it. it is an incredible story. as an attorney and still trial attorney but not very much anymore, to read about the court-martial and how difficult the attorney defending the captain was, how difficult his position was, how little time he had to prepare, how little evidence he had to prepare a defense, it makes the story even doubly, triply horrible. so thank you for getting it out there and i hope it is very successful in reaching people not only so they can understand how these things can happen, we can understand why the cover-up occurred, it was the end of the war and they didn't want to talk about this, particularly since

it was the biggest sinking and loss-of-life the navy has ever had. it is not even close. so thank you and i guess that's all i want to say and -- when i was little, i remember watching these victory at sea movies and documentaries, you would have never seen anything about the indianapolis in any of that. i don't know whether there was any footage at any point but it certainly was not a story they wanted to tell at the time. >> the dentist, when that contact was established, how hard was that? sara: it started initially with the survivors organization. a lot of the family members were very connected and i was able to

meet families of the lost at sea, such as the dentist and his family. now it is more of the indianapolis crew reunion. more of the lost at sea families came and they all had letters. it was a matter of many, many road trips with my husband going all over the country, interviewing, reading letters, collecting information. beyond that, it was spending time in the archives, going beyond just the story itself. everyone had mentioned, what other ships were in the water at that time? they still had their war damage reports. they had their ship logs and deck logs and those ships were not sunk at the end of world war ii, so the records existed. we would go into those and say, what do they see at this time? what was the temperature over here? that kind of thing. as well as the japanese.

it was one step by one step by one step and we would be just before a deadline, every time, and someone would call or we would find a record and it would be a game changer. it would be friday afternoon at 4:00 and we would get a call from the son of the prosecuting attorney of mcvay's court-martial, he would say, i have this box of my father's stuff. the book is due monday morning at 8:00. he is in d.c. and we are in san diego. but he's here. so we said, bill, can you go to this guy's house and look at this box of stuff from 1945? and there were incredible, game changing notes in there. we get a call from bill, stop the presses. [laughter] so we spent the weekend and he sent us notes and pictures. this kept happening and happening.

our efforts have been blessed incredibly from the beginning. we prayed and we asked for things to be revealed to us that had not been told before. help us tell the story, help us tell the whole true story of the indianapolis and her legacy. and that is kind of how things happen. we did a lot of work, but -- lynn: a lot of providence. >> thank you. >> thank you very much for coming and speaking and telling this story. the thing i really find amazing about the story is that it was untold for so long. it makes you wonder the other great stories that are out there that are untold. with that, because we have the opportunity here, i want to ask captain tody a question about your experience. having worked in a bureaucracy,

i'm a former air force officer, so i understand probably some of the pushback or experience you had to go through and maybe some of the potential backlash from your involvement over something you are passionate about. can you talk about that and if you experienced any negative repercussions from your involvement in this whole situation? >> i will admit there was a great deal of vigorous debate. mostly from the legal folks in the navy. people hear things the way they want to hear it and over the decades, i would say while the survivors were trying to fight for the exoneration of the captain, none of them are lawyers and none of them really knew how to frame the arguments in ways that would not raise

antibodies within the judge advocate general and the navy. so all they had to do was raise one issue that could prove to be untrue and the entire argument would fall apart and we would get set back for years. what i would try to do is find a solution that didn't require the navy to admit the court-martial was defective. i thought it was a win/win. the lawyers could be happy because they did not have to declare the proceedings were improper and we could all admit the outcome was not just. the problem is lawyers didn't even want to agree to that. the navy lawyers. we made no progress taking that approach behind the scenes. work with congress

surreptitiously and bypass a lot of that to get the congress off top dead center to make a move. lynn: surreptitiously is a good word. >> can i ask a follow-up real quick? the reluctance of the navy to even admit that the court-martial was unjust, even with the evidence and documentation and as time passes, we start to learn more , but why was that there? was it monetary or simply a pride thing that the system couldn't be wrong because of its wrong, what else does that mean? >> it was expressed in plain english that if the navy admitted any any culpability or failure, people might sue the navy. families might sue the navy over what happened over the cover-up

and mental anguish. it seemed to be a red herring, a canard. i had no moral problems fighting that point of view. what we ended up doing is take a moral approach rather than a legal approach to get things moving. >> a quick question. senator warner's prior service as secretary of the navy, did that ever come up in any of the discussions in terms of his initial reluctance? lynn: that was one of the concerns senator smith had. at the time, senator warner was the chairman of the armed services committee and senator bob smith served on that committee along with other names people would recognize such as joe lieberman. this is what happens when you are 55.

[laughter] those other guys. there was a concern because senator warner served as secretary of the navy and had had the opportunity to rule on this before and had declined to do so, would he do so now? i think it was because of the relationship between smith and warner that warner eventually agreed to have the hearing at all. i can't get into senator warner's head and i don't know if bill can, but it's possible that senator warner could have said to himself, we can have these hearings all day long and i can then just not take it to the senate floor and then i've done my due diligence. that's sort of exactly what happened until lieutenant commander hashimoto wrote that letter and that tipped it over the top. >> i want to commend the

captain. there's another famous naval officer who wrote "run silent, run deep" who also wrote a book called "scapegoat," which is his attempt to exonerate people at pearl harbor, which did not go forward, but again, to the captain for his efforts and success moving forward. >> i actually knew the captain because of my -- most submariners revered him. i reached out to him when i started working this issue. he wrote the forward to commander hashimoto's book called "sunk." the forward of that book, i think it was written in 1953. there's a chapter devoted to the indianapolis sinking and he wrote the forward to that book. we had spoken about that years before. when i started getting involved

in mcvay's exoneration, i got a letter where he strongly supported the exoneration of mcvay. thank you. >> one more question. >> something was going to be held up there. 's accounter hashimoto of submarine issues in world war ii, which he was critical. >> my question is following up youre records, did some of research information, for example, the box of the son of the prosecutor, does that information and up in the archives? where does that information end up, does the next researcher have it? do some of that end up in the permanent records here? sara: we have been talking with a few locations. in addition to 170 hours of

transcribed interviews, we have these records we collected, so there are a couple of sources. one of them being the indiana historical society and a few other branches, possibly the archives, to make sure they are accessible to the public. [applause] lynn: we've been given the hook. sara: thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> you are watching american history tv, 48 hours of programming every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. reel america, an author and historian discusses previously classified films from

the u.s. national archives documenting the aftermath of the atomic bombs. here is a preview. there was a blinding flash, then a deafening explosion. oshima was a, here scene of -- hiroshima was instantly -- there was nothing left but row wins, nothing standing to hinder a full view of the city. days of therst hiroshima andg of nagasaki three days later, the leading japanese newsreel team said one or more -- sent one or more cameramen to the two cities and they shot footage of the aftermath, not just buildings, but survivors and victims told

the whole story. this footage was shipped back to tokyo, where it was soon suppressed by the american occupation when they arrived in early september. andnews team tried again several elite people to hiro shima and nagasaki and shot footage for the next month and when americans arrived in nagasaki, the footage was seized . the japanese, since they had been there before the americans and had historic footage that showed medical effects as well as physical effects, the americans ordered them to continue their work but under american supervision. so the japanese went back to work, they shot more footage, they were then ordered to edit

and narrate a documentary, which they did, two hours and 40 minutes. but under american supervision, they finished the documentary and it was seized by the american military and basically suppressed for decades until the late 1960's. >> the children can see the atomic bomb in the distance. it was once the industrial exhibition hall. now it is the only shall -- shell left. all children make their way to the children's monument in the park. erected after the death of someone who died from leukemia 10 years after. cranesldren bring paper

as offerings to the monument. this young woman was a friend. they would have been the same age if he had lived. sadako has already become a legend in japan. he is the anne frank of your oshima -- of hiroshima. he was one of hundreds of young people to suffer such a fate. he became a symbol for them all. her outstretched arms, she holds a golden crane. >> learn more about the effects of the atomic bombs on japanese citizens tonight at 10:00 eastern, 7:00 pacific on american history tv. next, an oral history

interview with joan trumpauer mulholland. she recalls taking part in the 1961 freedom rides, attending tougaloo college, and serving at the mississippi state penitentiary with other activists. this interview is part of a project on the civil rights movement initiated by congress in 2009, conducted by the smithsonian national museum of african-american history and culture, the american full like -- american folklife center. joan: i was born in washington, d.c. and raised in arlington, virginia, basically a mile down the road in apartments, which at that point was the only place in northern virginia that would rent to jews. this was the early 1940's, folks had come from new york, looking for government