Excerpt from In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But McCoy had faith in his ship. The Indy was a vessel on which he was proud to serve -- the honored flagship of the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which was under the command of Admiral Raymond Spruance. (When Spruance was aboard, Captain McVay's authority was automatically subordinate to the admiral's.) The Indy was a heavy cruiser, a fast thoroughbred of the sea, whose job it was to ran and gun enemy emplacements on land and blow enemy planes from the sky. She was a floating city, with her own water plant, laundry, tailor, butcher, bakery, dentist's office, photo lab, and enough weaponry to lay siege to downtown San Francisco.

The first time Private McCoy rounded the corner at the Mare Island navy yard and saw the Indy, he was awestruck. God, he thought, now that's a ship!

She towered 133 feet from her waterline to the tip of her radar antennae, called "bedsprings" because of their appearance, and she cast an alluring silhouette. McCoy couldn't help thinking that if she were a woman -- and sailors have traditionally thought of their ships as women -- she'd be wearing a gray dress cut low in the back and looking coyly over a cocked shoulder. But there was a saying about ships like the Indy: "She wears paint, but she carries powder" -- meaning gunpowder. Translation: she was not a lady to be trifled with.

Commissioned in 1932, she had been chosen by Roosevelt as his ship of state. He liked to stand at the stem on her wide fantail, above the massive, churning propellers, while smoking a cigar and watching the New York skyline drift by during a ceremonial review of America's naval fleet. From her deck, he also toured South America, docking in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, on a prewar "good neighbor" tour. (During the trip, Roosevelt dined on fresh venison and watched Laurel and Hardy's Our Relations on a movie screen painted on one of the ships bulkheads especially for the occasion.) The Indy trained at war exercises off the coast of Chile and became the flagship of the navy's scouting fleet. With her hull painted bone-white, her afterdecks spanned by sparkling awnings, an aura of luck and privilege had enveloped the ship.

McCoy loved to boast that at 610 feet long, she was the size of nearly two football fields, but she was smaller and nimbler than battleships, like the USS South Dakota, whose job it was to bomb enemy inshore installations with their gargantuan 14-inch guns. The Indy was bigger and better armed than destroyers, which hunted submarines with underwater sonar gear and provided at-sea security for ships like the Indianapolis. In battle formation, a cruiser flanked the more ponderous aircraft carriers and battleships and directed anti-aircraft fire at enemy planes, while the flotilla itself was prowled by vigilant destroyer escorts. Ever since the seventeenth century, navies had relied on ships that could strike quickly, raid enemy lines, draw fire, and then muster the speed to sail away before being sunk, leaving the heavy work of shore destruction to battleships. At her top speed of 32.75 knots, few ships, enemy or friendly, could keep up with the USS Indianapolis.

Yet, as McCoy understood, what a cruiser gives up for its astonishing speed is armor: the Indy was protected midships with only three to four inches of steel (battleships carried an average of thirteen inches), while her decks were laid with two inches. In her day, she had been the queen of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's naval fleet. But on this morning in July, she was considered old, past her prime. Newer cruisers were not as beautiful, but they were bigger, faster, and better armored.

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