War & History

War & History This page will present Items of History from a War perspective up to the present. Tactics, strategy, weapons, inventions, the science and people involved.

From the mechanisms of war to the motivation and circumstances surrounding the event and conduct. This page will present Items of History from a War perspective. From the mechanisms of war to the motivation and circumstances surrounding the advent and conduct. Tactics, strategy, weapons and inventions, science and the people involved. What happened, to who, with what and when.

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09/15/2026

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In December 1945, the United States Navy flew in the Japanese submarine commander who had sunk the Indianapolis to testify at the court martial of her own captain. It was the only time in the war an American captain was convicted for losing his ship to enemy action.

Yet the officer who fired the torpedoes did not deliver the prosecution's case. Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, commanding the submarine I-58, told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference. He would have sunk her regardless. American submarine officers testified to the same conclusion.

The Indianapolis had carried eleven hundred and ninety five men. Eight hundred and seventy nine died, most of them in the water over four days. Captain Charles McVay was convicted anyway. He took his own life in 1968. A schoolboy named Hunter Scott later interviewed nearly one hundred and fifty survivors for a history project and forced the case back open. In 1999, Hashimoto — by then an elderly Shinto priest in Kyoto — wrote to the United States Senate asking that America forgive McVay as his own people had. Congress exonerated McVay in October 2000.

Hashimoto died before the president signed it.

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