Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesThursday, July 30
From the desk
Start with 1945: USS Indianapolis had just delivered the atomic bomb's uranium to Tinian when I-58's torpedoes caught her unescorted after 11 pm. Twelve minutes to sink, four days adrift, and only 316 of 1,195 men came home. Also worth your time: 1971's Apollo 15, where David Scott hand-flew the lunar module past a drifting autopilot and then took the first rover for a drive across Hadley Rille canyon. Nixon's tapes ruling that same date in 1974 turned a legal argument into a countdown.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1945Featured · This day in history
A submarine finds Indianapolis in the dark, unescorted; the cruiser is gone in twelve minutes
Days earlier, USS Indianapolis had raced across the Pacific at 29 knots carrying enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, then delivered it to Tinian and sailed on toward Leyte without an escort. Just after 11 pm on July 29, 1945, Lt. Cdr. Mochitsura Hashimoto's submarine I-58 fired six torpedoes into the cruiser's starboard side, mistaking her for a battleship. Indianapolis rolled and sank in twelve minutes, taking roughly 300 men down with her. The remaining 890 spent four days in open water before rescue, and only 316 of the original 1,195 crew survived.
Indianapolis had just finished the mission that made the atomic bombing of Japan possible, hauling Little Boy's uranium core across the Pacific faster than any ship in the fleet. Her sinking, still the worst single loss of life in U.S. naval history, forced the Navy to confront how a cruiser carrying the most valuable secret cargo of the war had sailed without escort, and left Captain McVay court-martialed in a case the Navy did not formally clear until decades later.
Did you know
QHow fast did Indianapolis actually travel on her uranium run to Tinian?
She averaged 29 knots for the entire crossing from San Francisco, an extraordinary sustained speed for a heavy cruiser in 1945 and a pace the Navy pushed deliberately, since the uranium discs locked in Captain McVay's own quarters were needed on Tinian as fast as steel and fuel could get them there. She left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard within hours of the Trinity test flash over New Mexico on July 16, and reached Tinian by July 26, a ten-day run that outpaced almost anything else moving across the Pacific that summer.
QWhat did the Japanese submarine crew think they had actually sunk?
Lt. Cdr. Hashimoto and his crew logged their kill as an Idaho-class battleship, not a cruiser. Indianapolis was a Portland-class heavy cruiser, considerably smaller than the battleship I-58's crew believed they had destroyed. The misidentification stood in Japanese records for the rest of the war, and Hashimoto himself never realized the actual size and identity of the ship he sank until much later.
QHow were the sailors finally recognized for what they endured?
More than seventy years after the sinking, the surviving crew of Indianapolis, along with those who died, were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on December 20, 2018, one of the highest civilian honors Congress can bestow. The recognition came a year after searchers had already located the wreck itself, closing out two long-delayed reckonings with the same ship in the space of twelve months.
The Daily Record · free by email
Tomorrow's edition in your inbox — one story, one quote, the flag.
1956government
Eisenhower signs the words already stamped on coins into the law itself
By the summer of 1956, "In God We Trust" had already been circulating on American coins for two years, a phrase familiar to anyone who'd handled pocket change. On July 30, the 84th Congress sent H.J. Res. 396 to the White House, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into Public Law 85-851. The single sentence did one specific thing: it made "In God We Trust" the official national motto of the United States, on the statute books rather than just the mint's.
The motto joined "E Pluribus Unum" as a second national phrase, but this one carried an explicit religious claim written into federal law during the Cold War, when Congress was drawing sharp lines against officially atheist communism. It remains the motto today, printed on every bill and coin, and it still surfaces in First Amendment disputes over religion's place in government.
Did you know
QWhy did the phrase appear on coins nearly a century before it became law?
Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase pushed to add "In God We Trust" to U.S. coins during the Civil War, when the outcome of the war, and the nation itself, was genuinely uncertain. The phrase reflected a wartime instinct to invoke divine backing at a moment of national peril, and it stuck on coinage for generations before anyone made it official by statute. By the time Eisenhower signed H.J. Res. 396 in 1956, the phrase had already outlasted the war that inspired it by nearly a century.
QWhat happened to paper currency just one year before the motto became official?
In 1955, a year before Eisenhower signed the motto into law, Congress ordered "In God We Trust" added to all U.S. paper currency for the first time. Until then the phrase had lived mainly on coins. That change meant that by the time the 1956 law made the phrase the official national motto, it was already printed on every denomination of American paper money in circulation, not just loose change.
QHow did courts later treat legal challenges to the motto?
Federal courts have repeatedly heard challenges arguing the motto violates the separation of church and state, and have just as repeatedly rejected them, classifying the phrase as a form of ceremonial deism rather than a religious endorsement. Congress did not let the matter rest with the 1956 law either: it passed a fresh resolution in 2011 reaffirming "In God We Trust" as the national motto, more than half a century after Eisenhower's signature.
1971exploration
Scott lands Falcon by hand at Hadley Rille; astronauts get a car on the Moon
By 1971, three Apollo crews had already reached the Moon, and NASA wanted more than footprints and flags. Apollo 15 launched July 26 from Kennedy Space Center as the first "J mission," built for a longer stay and deeper science. On July 30, David Scott hand-flew the Lunar Module Falcon to a landing near Hadley Rille after the automatic guidance drifted south of the target, while Alfred Worden orbited above in the Command Module Endeavour. Scott and James Irwin then spent four moonwalks, 18 and a half hours total, driving the first Lunar Roving Vehicle across a landscape Scott had chosen for its "spirit of exploration."
Apollo 15 pushed American spaceflight past survival and into fieldwork. The rover, the extended stay, and the geology training with Caltech's Lee Silver turned NASA from a program proving it could reach the Moon into one capable of studying it, a shift that shaped how Americans would later justify the cost of exploration in scientific rather than symbolic terms.
Did you know
QWhy did NASA let the Apollo 15 crew skip quarantine after splashdown?
By the time Apollo 15 splashed down on August 7, 1971, NASA had already sent three previous crews to the lunar surface and found no evidence of hazardous lunar organisms in returned samples. Scott, Worden, and Irwin became the first Apollo crew released from the post-flight quarantine that had confined every earlier Moon crew, including the Apollo 11 astronauts, to weeks of isolation after splashdown. The decision reflected growing confidence that the Moon carried nothing to bring home.
QWhat did the plaque on the Lunar Roving Vehicle actually say?
Bolted to the rover Scott and Irwin drove across Hadley Rille was a small plaque reading, "Man's First Wheels on the Moon, Delivered by Falcon, July 30, 1971." It marked the debut of the battery-powered vehicle that let the astronauts range far beyond what earlier crews could reach on foot. The rover turned lunar exploration from a walk around the landing site into something closer to a road trip across an alien valley.
QHow far from Earth was Alfred Worden when he stepped outside his spacecraft?
On the trip home, Alfred Worden left the Command Module Endeavour to retrieve film canisters from the service module's SIM bay, becoming the first person to perform a spacewalk in deep space rather than in orbit around Earth or the Moon. He floated roughly 200,000 miles from home, with nothing but blackness and a distant Earth in view. He later called it "a pretty unique experience," a considerable understatement for the loneliest walk in NASA's history.
