Unearthed!: The USS Indianapolis

Today, the U.S.S. Indianapolis is most known for its crew’s horrifying wait for rescue after being torpedoed following a secret mission at the end of World War II. But the ship’s history goes back much farther than that.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. It is
time to kick off Unearthed season on the show. A
lot of people's favorite season, the things people tell us

(00:23):
are their favorites are pretty much Halloween and Unearthed, So
as is as we do every year and now also
once in the summer, we're going to spend a couple
of upcoming episodes recapping things that were either literally or
figuratively unearthed in but as has also happened a few
times in the past, we've got a big one that's

(00:43):
related to a historical event that we have not covered
on the show before. Over the last few years, we've
gotten requests to talk about the USS Indianapolis from Margaret Brandy, Sarah, Shawn, Heidi,
and Craig among I am sure other people. If you
have ever seen jaw Oz, you have heard of this.

(01:04):
So this is part of our Unearthed series this year
because a team led by Microsoft co founder Paul Allen
actually located the wreckage of the Indianapolis this year, after
which point we got so many media emails about it
there were a lot people, huh. So. Today, the U S.
S Indianapolis is most known for its cruise horrifying wait

(01:28):
for rescue after being torpedoed following a secret mission at
the end of World War Two, but the ship's history
goes back much farther than that. It started out as
a peacetime vessel before being active in the Pacific for
much of the war, participating in multiple combat engagements and
earning ten Battle Stars before its destruction. All the way

(01:49):
back in the U. S. Department of the Navy decided
that it's thirty five cruiser would be named the USS Indianapolis.
The New York Ship Building Company laid its keel and Camden,
New Jersey, on marcht one, ninety then construction of the
Portland class heavy cruiser continued into ninety one. It was
launched on November seven of that year and then officially

(02:12):
commissioned at Philadelphia Navy Yard on November fifteenth, nineteen thirty two.
During its years of peacetime service, the USS Indianapolis was
an important ship in the U. S. Naval Fleet. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt selected it as his Ship of State
in nineteen thirty three, using it for maritime travel and
diplomatic visits throughout his time in office, including his nineteen

(02:35):
thirty six Good Neighbor cruise to South America. In addition
to the President, the ship was frequently host to dignitaries, royalty,
and other high profile visitors, and it became the flagship
of the scouting force. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on
December seven one, the Indianapolis was at Johnson Atoll also

(02:56):
known as Kalama at All conducting bombarding exercises, so it
escaped the destruction of so much of the rest of
the fleet at Pearl Harbor and then joined the unsuccessful
effort to try to hunt down the Japanese attack force.
With the US at war, the Indianapolis continued to operate
in the Pacific, starting in the frigid waters off the

(03:16):
coast of Alaska as part of the Aleutian Islands Campaign.
Apart from returns to port for overhauls and refitting, the
Indianapolis spent most of its time in the North Pacific
and saw combat several times, including sinking the Japanese transport
okagan Na Maru on February nineteenth ninety three. After another refitting.

(03:37):
Later in nineteen forty three, the Indianapolis was named flagship
of the Fifth Fleet and moved to Hawaii. The ship
again saw reputed combat in the Pacific, now in the
much warmer waters of the South Pacific, headed towards Japan.
This included being part of the Battle of the Philippine
Sea in nineteen forty four, which was nicknamed the Marianas

(03:57):
Turkey Shoot because of the number of Japanese playings that
were shot down around the Marianna's islands during that time.
At the beginning of nineteen forty five, the Indianapolis became
part of the task force that attacked Japan's outlying islands,
participating in numerous assaults from January through March, including providing
support and cover for strikes on Iwajima, qu Shu, Hanshu,

(04:20):
and Okinowa. On March thirty one, ninety five, the Indianapolis
was hit by a Kama Kazi plane and heavily damaged.
Nine men were killed and about thirty injured in the attack,
but the ship was able to return to Mayor Island
Naval Shipyard northeast of San Francisco under its own power.
That arrived at the shipyard in late April while in

(04:42):
dry dock at Mayor Island, the Indianapolis again, in addition
to the repairs, underwent refitting and updates. At this point,
the United States was nearing completion of the atomic bombs
that would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. A crew of scientists and researchers were already
on Tinnian Island in the Northern Mariana Islands doing the

(05:04):
final work. There's more on the development of the atomic
bomb in our past two parter on Luis Alvarez, who
was on board one of the aircraft escorting the Inola
Gay when the bomb was dropped and was at this
point on Tinnian Island. There were still bomb components on
the US mainland that needed to be taken to Tinnian Island.
This included the firing mechanism and nuclear material for the

(05:26):
bomb code named Little Boy, which would be dropped on
the Japanese city of Hiroshiva on August. This made the
Indianapolis is time in dry docks somewhat conveniently timed. With
an accelerated repair schedule, the Indianapolis could pick up the
components as cargo and deliver them to Tinnyan Island without
the Navy needing to recall another ship from combat to

(05:48):
make that trip. The firing mechanism was packed in a
fifteen foot or four and a half meter crate, which
was bolted to the hangar deck and transit. The uranium
two thirty five new lear material was packed into two
separate leadline containers weighing hundreds of pounds. These were secured
to the deck and the admiral's quarters. Two scientists also

(06:10):
came aboard for the mission, disguised as artillery officers. The Captain,
Charles B. McVeigh the third knew they were on a
secret mission that was critical to the war effort, but
he did not know what was actually in those containers.
The same was true of the ship's crew, and this
led to a lot of ridiculous rumors about what they
were carrying in those large, heavy containers with expensive luxuries

(06:32):
for General MacArthur, including a crate of scented toilet paper
as one of the running themes Or series. The Indianapolis
stayed close to its maximum speed of thirty two knots
while on this delivery mission, it actually broke a speed
record that still stands for a ship of its type today.
In the process of doing that, they arrived at Tennian

(06:53):
Island on July, delivered that critical cargo, and then headed
south to Guam to receive new orders. Two days later,
the Indianapolis left Guam headed to the Late Gulf to
rendezvous with the U. S. S Idaho, where the two
ships were to undergo gun to repractice. And while there
were men on board the Indianapolis who had been with
the ship for most of the war, more than a

(07:15):
quarter of the crew had turned over while in dry
dock at Mayor Island. Overwhelmingly these were inexperienced new recruits
in their late teens, and because of the ship's accelerated
repair schedule, their training time in San Francisco had also
been cut short. So Captain McVeigh was really focused on
getting to Laity quickly and efficiently to give his crew

(07:38):
as much as much training time as possible. After all,
they had no idea that they had just delivered necessary
components for one of the two bombs that would be
credited with ending the war. Everyone aboard the Indianapolis was
working under the understanding that they were getting ready for
a full scale land invasion of Japan. McVeigh wanted them

(07:58):
to have enough training to be able to succeed at
that invasion. There's a lack of consensus about whether McVeigh
asked for a destroyer escort when he left Guam. According
to some accounts, he did, but was denied because the
Navy didn't think there were Japanese threats along that route.
But according to others, McVeigh himself didn't believe there was
a threat, so he did not request an escort. But

(08:21):
either way, the Indianapolis proceeded toward late alone. There was
a Japanese submarine along the route that the Indianapolis was taking,
the I fifty eight, which fired a spread of six
torpedoes at the Indianapolis just after midnight on July nine.
At least two of them hit, it's commonly reported as too,
but it is possible that there were other hits, and

(08:43):
we'll talk more about what happened after the ship was
torpedoed after a quick sponsor break, when two torpedoes struck
the USS Indianapolis on July the result was immediate and stating,
and the words of Captain McVeigh quote at approximately five

(09:03):
minutes after midnight, I was thrown from my emergency cabin
bunk on the bridge by a very violent explosion, followed
shortly thereafter by another explosion. I went to the bridge
and noticed in my emergency cabin and chart house that
there was quite a bit of accurate white smoke. I
couldn't see anything for just a few moments. The captain
thought they might stay afloat from his position on the bridge,

(09:27):
they had only a slight list, and it seemed reasonably
similar to what they'd survived with the kamikaze attack. But
the executive officer, Commander Joseph Flynn, surveyed the scene and
told the captain it was clear the ship was going down.
One of the torpedoes had destroyed part of the ship's bow,
the other had hit near a powder magazine and bunkers

(09:49):
that held fuel oil. Apart from this colossal damage, the
ship's power and communication systems were down. There was no
way to broadcast an announcement to abandoned ship or to
reach the engine room with an order to stop the engines.
So the captain gave the order to pass the word
to abandon ship, which had to be done from man
to man. McVeigh had also asked the navigator to confirm

(10:12):
that a distress signal had been sent. Having not heard
back from him, the captain tried to go to the
radio room to double check personally, but as he did,
the ship suddenly listed to ninety degrees and began to
sink so rapidly that there was no possible way to
get there. It's still unclear exactly what happened with that
distress signal. Survivors who were in the radio room have

(10:35):
insisted that according to their gauges, a signal did leave
the ship, but no message was ever received. One hypothesis
is that an s OS did go out, but that
the signal was so short before communication failed that anyone
hearing it concluded that it was just some kind of
interference or an errant transmission. About twelve minutes after being hit,

(10:56):
the USS Indianapolis sunk. About three dread men had been
killed immediately or otherwise went down with the ship, but
of the one thousand, one nine sailors and marines on board,
the vast majority, between eight and nine hundred were able
to evacuate before the ship went down, since the ship
was still moving as it sank and men were still

(11:17):
escaping the whole time it was going down. Survivors were
spread over miles and miles of water. The ship's destruction
left a slick of fuel oil on the water. It
burned the eyes of the men who landed in it
or came up through it, and it caused vomiting and
anyone who swallowed it. And because it spread so far

(11:37):
across the surface of the water, it was nearly impossible
to get away from for anybody who was caught in it.
Captain McVeigh and a handful of other men were relatively fortunate.
They wound up in the water close to a few
life rafts, some of them capsized that they were able
to use, but most of the emergency supplies above aboard
the rafts were gone or ruined, so match is and

(12:00):
first aid kits had been packed in paraffin infused cardboard
that disintegrated, and most of the drinking water was no
longer podible because the containers were leaky and seawater had
gotten in. The men did, however, have a few cans
of spam, a couple of signal mirrors, and some signaling flares.
Most of the other men, though, were in a much

(12:21):
worse situation. They had virtually no food or water, apart
from a few supply cans and emergency rations that were
either taken off the ship or found among the very
few life rafts that had deployed. They had no way
to protect themselves from the heat or the sun. There
was little to nothing that could be done to treat
injuries that were incurred in the blast or the evacuation.

(12:43):
Many of the men had no life jackets or belts,
and even for those who did, nearly all of them
were kapok jackets that were only really designed to work
for about forty eight hours, and after that they became
water logged and they didn't have enough buoyancy to keep
a person's head above water. The belts were new a matic,
so they didn't have that issue, but they had another problem.
If they slipped too far down on a person's body,

(13:06):
they could basically force them to flip over with their
head under water, and it became a constant effort simply
to stay afloat. For the first couple of days, the
men tried to work together and protect each other as
best they could, forming groups trying to rescue whether survivors
they saw and using things like cargo netting and rope
to try to group themselves together, but as time went on,

(13:28):
conditions got progressively worse. Eight to ten foot swells meant
that the various groups of survivors couldn't see or reach
one another. People by themselves often didn't know there was
someone else not far away in the swells, and it
was physically exhausting to be in all of that. Men
who became desperate from thirst drink sea water, which made
their dehydration rapidly worse. Hundreds of men died due to dehydration,

(13:53):
salt poisoning, injury, exposure, and drowning. Dehydrated, exhausted, traumatize men
also started experiencing hallucinations, swimming away from the group because
they believed that they saw an island, or attacking their
fellows because they thought they were enemy combatants. And the
thing that has become most anonymous with the USS Indianapolis sharks.

(14:17):
For McVeigh and his group in the life raft, these
were mainly a nuisance. They had an undamaged fishing kit,
but a large shark kept scaring away any fish that
they might catch with it. For the men in life
jackets who were floating in the water. The sharks became
both a threat and a terror. The sharks mainly fed
on the dead and dying, but they were easily visible

(14:39):
through the clear water by day, and then they brushed
past the submerged parts of men's bodies by night. Survivors
would go on to describe being surrounded by fins in
the water, or seeing other men's life jackets suddenly submerged,
with parts of their bodies resurfacing later, or of hearing sudden,
blood curdling screams nearby or in the distance. Captain Lewis L. Haines,

(15:03):
chief medical officer, was with one of the larger groups
who were floating in the water and tried to render
aid to the other men, even though he had no
supplies or medicines to do it with. At first, he
also collected the dog tags of all the men who died,
but eventually he just had more of them than he
could possibly hold. When the U. S s. Indianapolis didn't

(15:24):
arrive at late he is scheduled on July one, it
wasn't noted as missing. Its name was removed from the
arrivals board, and the next shift didn't realize that it
hadn't actually arrived. Meanwhile, the surviving men spent days in
the water, at first praying and holding onto hope that
their s O S had been received, and then thinking

(15:46):
surely the Navy would come looking for them when they
didn't show up at late on time. But since no
one realized the Indianapolis was missing, no one was searching.
The survivors of the U. S S. Indianapolis were spotted
only by coincidence. On August two, nineteen, well over a
hundred hours after the ship had gone down. By chance,

(16:08):
Lieutenant Wilbert Chuck Gwyn, flying on a routine patrol, looked
down from his plane and spotted something unusual in the water.
He flew lower to investigate and saw wreckage and survivors
scattered along a huge stretch of ocean. Gwyn radioed back
to base and Lieutenant Adrian Marks was dispatched aboard a
p By flying boat, a seaplane capable of landing on water.

(16:32):
He wasn't supposed to land a plane in the open sea,
but when he saw the men in the water, he did,
ultimately pulling fifty six men aboard, including loading them onto
the wings to get as many out of the water
as possible. Sadly, there were men so desperate to get
to the plane that they exhausted themselves on the way
and drowned. Marx had also flown over the U. S.

(16:54):
S Cecil Jade Doyle on the way to where Gwen
had reported spotting these survivors, and he radioed the Stroyer
to notify them of what he was doing. The Doyle
came to the survivor's aid, becoming the first of eleven
ships to be part of the searchain rescue effort. The
captain and his group were picked up by the USS
Ringness Because of the swells in the sea, they had

(17:15):
no idea there were any other survivors until later. They
didn't know anything about Gwin's spotting them or the flying
boat rescue. The ships that came to the rescue deployed
landing craft to pull men out of the water. Those
who were able also clung to rope ladders on the
sides of ships and were pulled aboard. Overwhelmingly, due the

(17:36):
combination of hunger, dehydration, and all that time in the water,
they just could not stand. Those who had to be
lifted aboard had to be pulled by their life jackets
because their skin and flesh were so damaged. At that
point the men being rescued had been in the water
for four and a half days. Fuel oil had to

(17:56):
be carefully removed from their skin and hair, and for
many of them, their oil soaked and salt laden clothes
had to be cut off of them. And the end
of the roughly eight hundred fifty men who went into
the water when the Indianapolis when the Indianapolis sank, only
three hundred seventeen survived. You'll also see this number as
three hundred six team including in official Navy records. This

(18:19):
is apparently a discrepancy that has gone on for decades.
The reason is reportedly that radio Technicians second Class Clarence
William Donner was incorrectly reported as deceased, but survived survivors
were taken to bases in the Philippines before being sent
on to Guam by plane and aboard the hospital ship Tranquility.

(18:40):
More ships returned to the area on August four, but
no one else was found alive. The few bodies that
were recovered were buried at sea. We'll talk more about
the aftermath of this disaster and the discovery of the
wreckage this year. After one more quick sponsor break. The

(19:02):
survivors of the U. S. S. Indianapolis were allowed to
write letters home from blom, although, as is the usual
case in wartime correspondence, their letters were censored. They were
also told to write as though nothing had happened to
the Indianapolis. There was no announcement that the ship had
been destroyed or notification of the families of the deceased
for weeks. On August six, the Anola Gate dropped the

(19:26):
atomic bomb assembled using the components delivered by the U. S. S. Indianapolis,
on Hiroshima, Japan. On August nine, the US dropped a
second bomb on the city of Nagasaki. Japan announced its
unconditional surrender on August fourteen. Only then was the destruction
of the Indianapolis made public, and families were finally notified

(19:47):
of their loved ones deaths. By that point, an inquiry
and to the cause of the disaster, which was the
greatest loss of life at sea in US naval history,
had already begun. Captain Charles Butler McVeigh the third was
court martialed. He was acquitted of a charge of failing
to issue a timely order to abandon ship but he

(20:08):
was found guilty of failing to zigzag. It was a
standard procedure to steer the ship in an evasive zigzag
course in waters where a submarine attack was likely. McVeigh
had done so during the day, but he had stopped
at night due to weather conditions because he needed to
conserve fuel to reach late he on schedule while also
zig zagging, he would have needed to travel at a

(20:30):
faster speed that just wasn't fuel efficient. He basically had
contradictory orders here to simultaneously zigzag and conserve fuel, and
it like it wasn't possible to do both of those
things at the same time. This court martial was highly publicized,
and it included the testimony of Motasura Hashimoto, captain of

(20:52):
the who said that it would not have mattered if
the Indianapolis had zigzagged, he would have hit the ship anyway.
This court martial all was and continues to be highly controversial. Overwhelmingly,
survivors of the U s s Indianapolis have maintained that
McVeigh was a good man and a good captain and
that he had done nothing wrong, arguing that it was

(21:13):
within his discretion not to zigzag, that night, McVeigh had
also continued to act as captain for the handful of
men that were with him in the life rafts, bolstering
their morale, rationing their food, and signaling any planes that
they saw with mirrors and flares. He also sent letters
to the families of his eight hundred seventy nine deceased crew.
In September of n and other circumstances, McVeigh might have

(21:38):
faced a letter of reprimand, and it's still not fully
clear why the Navy instead pursued a widely covered court martial.
One of the hypotheses that it came down to someone's
personal grudge against mcveigh's father, who was also career military.
Regardless though, even though McVeigh was not punished, the fact
that he was found guilty meant that in the eye

(22:00):
as of many people, especially the family members of men
who did not survive, it was his fault and he
should carry all of the blame. To be clear, Captain
McVeigh was ultimately responsible for the safety of this ship.
This was his job. He knew this and accepted it,
and he didn't try to deflect the blame or pass
the buck. He took full responsibility. For the decision not

(22:22):
to zigzag, but simultaneously, the Navy didn't show that same
level of accountability in return, for many years pinning the
entire disaster on the failure to zigzag, even though that
did not at all explain the more than four days
that survivors were left waiting in the water. There's also
been ongoing speculation about whether the Navy did or did

(22:45):
not know that there was likely to be a Japanese
sub between Quam and Laity, whether they withheld that information
from McVeigh if they did know, and whether the secrecy
of their mission contributed to the breakdown in communication in
reporting the ship missing. Captain Charles B. McVeigh retired in
nineteen forty nine and was promoted to rear admiral, although

(23:06):
he was never given command of another ship. On November six,
nineteen sixty eight, he took his own life. In October
of two thousand, Congress passed a resolution that McVeigh should
be exonerated for the loss of the Indianapolis, which was
signed by President Bill Clinton, and two thousand one a
memo was placed in his personnel file absolving him of blame.

(23:28):
This action by Congress took place After years of advocacy
by survivors of the Indianapolis and their families, then thirteen
year old Hunter Scott came to the public's attention after
doing a school history project on the Indianapolis, which became
something of a viral news story. Also involved was Commander
William J. Tody, who commanded a submarine called the USS Indianapolis.

(23:51):
When the submarine Indianapolis was decommissioned, Tody invited the survivors
of the cruiser Indianapolis to attend the ceremony, since they
had not been able to decommission their own ship. Tody
became an advocate for clearing mcveigh's name. Commander Muchit. Sara
Hashimoto also wrote to the head of the Senate Armed
Services Committee during all of this, saying, quote, our people's

(24:14):
have forgiven each other for that terrible war. Perhaps it
is time your people's forgave Captain McVeigh for the humiliation
of his unjust conviction. Although there are still questions and
criticisms of how the Navy handled the aftermath of the
Indianapolis is Sinking, especially in regard to Captain McVeigh. After
the ship's lass, it did adjust procedures for ship escorts,

(24:37):
life saving equipment and reporting procedures to try to prevent
something similar from ever happening again, which brings us to
why this is in our Unearthed series. On augusteen, it
was announced but a civilian research team had located the
wreck of the U S S Indianapolis. Although this is
a civilian project, historians from the Naval History and Heritage Command,

(25:00):
Washington d C were involved as well. Leading, as we
said at the top of the show, was Paul G. Allen,
who co founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and has put
a chunk of his resulting wealth into various philanthropic efforts.
The discovery was made from Allen's research vessel, the RV Petrol.
It's a two hundred and fifty foot that's seventy six

(25:20):
vessel capable of diving to a depth of six thousand meters.
It's a little more than nineteen thousand feet, and the
researchers aboard the Petrol found the ship in water about
five thousand, five or eighteen thousand feet deep. Often the
discovery of wreckage like this takes some time to authenticate,

(25:40):
but in this case, the wreckage has been protected from
sunlight and it's in a spot on the seafloor that
doesn't have a lot of current, so it is incredibly
well preserved. There is very little marine growth or corrosion
on the surface of the ship. The number thirty five,
remember this was the thirty fifth cruiser, is clearly visible
on the hull, and supply boxes are still legible and

(26:03):
visibly marked with the USS Indianapolis. Paul Allen's team wasn't
at all the first to look for the ship. One
reason that earlier efforts had failed was that they were
looking in the wrong place. Although Allied intelligence did recover
a transmission from the Japanese submarine I fifty eight confirming
the kill, that message didn't specify what ship had been sunk,

(26:25):
and the Allies didn't recover information saying exactly where. Commander
Mochusura Hashimoto also destroyed his records before surrendering at the
end of the war. So initial searches for the wreckage
we're working off the idea of where the ship would
have been along Convoy Root Petty if it was traveling
exactly on that route, which was what it was following

(26:48):
from Guam to Laity, and also exactly on schedule, but
as it turns out it wasn't. It was slightly off
the convoy route and slightly ahead of schedule. Both of
these were well within the captin's discretion, and as we
discussed earlier, he was trying to make good time for
Laity for training purposes for his crew. This new information
about the Indianapolis position is a recent discovery in the

(27:13):
Naval History and Heritage Command decided to review the case
of the Indianapolis to see if any new information came
to light and to make sure the Navy's and the
public's understanding of the disaster was accurate. This review uncovered
a Memorial Day blog post John Murdick did about his father,
Francis G. Murdick. John Murdick told the story of his

(27:35):
father having been stationed on a tank landing ship or
LST that passed by the Indianapolis before it was sunk,
and how thankful he was that his father's ship hadn't
met the same fate. Historians followed the bread crumb from
Francis G. Murdick to the LST he was stationed on
to the l S. T. S Log, and although the
log did not mention the Indianapolis directly, it did include

(27:59):
a lot of other day to about where it was
and what it was doing, along with weather and sea conditions,
and so they cross referenced this with an oral history
from Captain Charles B. McVeigh which was already on the
record in which he mentioned communicating with an LST in
the hours before the torpedo attack. So by cross referencing
this data and the LST log and the LST's log

(28:21):
with mcveigh's description, historians figured out a more precise location
for where the ship had probably gone down. Allen and
others then put that information to use in their searches
and the press releases about this discovery. They actually alluded
to a project by National Geographic when it turned out
to be Paul Allen who found it. UH twenty two

(28:43):
survivors of the Indianapolis were still living as of August
when that discovery was announced. Reactions from survivors and their
families were really pretty mixed. Captain William J. Tody, speaking
for the survivors, said, quote to a man, they have
longed for the day when their ship would be found,
solving their final mystery. But there are family members of

(29:03):
men who died who were also quoted as saying that
this discovery was quite painful and they had actually hoped
it would never be found. At this point, the side
of the wreck is considered to be a military grave site,
so its exact location was reported only to the Navy,
and any exploration and survey of the site has to
be done without disturbing it. There is a lot of

(29:25):
footage from the wreckage that you can watch online, including
a PBS special called USS Indianapolis Live from the Deep,
and we will link to that in our show notes.
There's also a documentary called USS Indianapolis The Legacy that's
pretty much all interviews with survivors and their families and
the family members of the deceased. If you are interested

(29:46):
in this, it is highly worth watching, and I will
say parts of it are devastating. Uh So watching this
with your handkerchief and just be ready for the emotional
bring tissues. I watched it at my desk. UM, do
you have listener meal that maybe won't make people cry?
I mean, I have listener mail, but it is about

(30:08):
um one of the disasters that we've talked about recently,
which is the abber Van disaster. It's a clarification though,
and not additional sadness about that disaster. This is from Alison,
and Allison said, Hi, Tracy and Holly. Thanks, thank you
for your podcasts. I always enjoyed listening, whether the topic
is completely new to me or something I knew about already.
I just listened to your podcast on the abber Van disaster.

(30:30):
I appreciate you making this known to a wide audience,
as it seems not that well known even in the UK.
I hadn't heard of it until last year's anniversary, and
I grew up in the Midlands and visited South Wales
often as a kid. I just wanted to clarify something
from the episode this. It is probably phrasing and something
you already knew, but at the beginning of the episode
you spoke about the history of coal mining in Wales

(30:50):
and sort of implied that the Welsh government was doing
things nationalizing the industry, et cetera. In fact, there was
no Welsh government at the time. Wales was and is
part of the UK A and was then completely governed
by the UK or England, depending on your point of view.
Welsh MP's were elected but took their seats in Parliament
in London. The process of devolution of powers didn't start

(31:11):
properly until the nineties. That's probably added to the general
distrust communities had for the government and organizations like the
National Coal Board, which were all English. Writing this email
as an english person who thinks of herself as British
makes me think about national identities and stuff that I
can't really articulate. A Welsh person would know better than me,
but I think this is an important distinction to make.

(31:32):
Thanks again for all your work, Allison. Thank you, Alison.
I absolutely could have been more clear with that than
I was. UM. So much of the research that I
was looking at was focused so specifically on the uh,
the coal industry in Wales and not elsewhere in Britain
that uh, it did not occur to me to clarify

(31:53):
that for fix who might not realize. So thank you again, Allison.
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(32:14):
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(32:35):
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