08/20/2019
Please read about this American hero and apart of the title industry
The following story is about Frankfort’s Adrian Marks, a World War II Navy pilot who disobeyed orders and landed his seaplane in the Pacific and pulled 56 stranded crew members of the sunken U.S.S. Indianapolis onboard and stayed there all night to await the rescue ship’s arrival to ensure the remaining 260 survivors made it out of the water alive, too.
Remembering Hoosier Adrian Marks — a Brave, Beloved American Hero
By Janis Thornton
Quiet and unassuming, Adrian Marks was a beloved member of his Frankfort community when he died in 1998 at the age of 81. Like most men of his generation, he proudly served his country during World War II. And like many of the veterans who had seen action, he had a story that he rarely told. Marks’s story, however, was a spellbinding, first person account of one of the war’s most harrowing incidents, and it had to be told. It also explained why more than 300 men, who had benefitted from his quick thinking, sound judgment and courage, called Adrian Marks an American hero for the rest of their lives.
The story began the afternoon of Thursday, August 2, 1945, when 28-year-old U.S. Navy pilot Lieutenant Adrian Marks, a native of Ladoga, Indiana, was dispatched to an area in the Pacific, midway between the Philippines and Guam, where several hours earlier, another pilot on an anti-submarine patrol spotted scores of men thrashing about in the sea. The Navy was unaware that the men were all who remained of the 1,200-man crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis that had delivered atomic bombs intended for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither did the Navy know that four days before, on Monday, July 30, 1945, the ship had been torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine. The drowning Indianapolis had taken some 400 of its crew down with it, while the other 800, most of them equipped with little more than life jackets and rafts, leapt into the water.
Because of bureaucratic slip ups, the Navy recorded no distress signals; nor did it realize the ship was missing. By Thursday, August 2, after enduring four days in the shark-infested water, all but about 300 of the crewmen had perished. Those who managed to stay alive suffered terribly from hallucinations, injuries, sunburn, dehydration, and shark attacks. That was the day the pilot noticed men bobbing in the water and, although uncertain whether they were friend or foe, radioed his base to report the finding.
Marks heard the badly garbled call and took off for the site with his eight-man crew in a PBY-5a Catalina seaplane ahead of the destroyer es**rt, the U.S.S. Cecil J. Doyle, that had been dispatched. Upon spotting hundreds of men in the sea, Marks cruised over them at a low altitude and immediately realized the “heartbreaking decisions” he faced.
“We couldn’t rescue everyone,” he recalled at a 1994 reunion of survivors. “There were men in life rafts and swimming with life preservers scattered throughout an area of about fifty square miles. They were in really bad shape. They had been through a lot.”
After assessing the situation, Marks disregarded Navy regulations and made a daring landing on the rough sea, maneuvering through twelve-foot swells. He radioed back to the base for immediate emergency help, but the message never got to the commanding officer.
“Some moron who took the message sat on it and didn’t give it to the commander,” he told a crowd at the ’94 reunion. “It still burns me up.”
Marks and his crew started pulling men onboard, concentrating on the single swimmers who had become separated from the main body of survivors. He believed, as he would later explain, that men clustered together stood a better chance of surviving in the water because they could look after one another. When the plane’s fuselage was full, they carried men onto the wings and tied them in place with parachute cord. Responding to shouts for help, two of Marks’s men volunteered to go out in a rubber boat. They saved two more. In all, Marks and his crew rescued 56 survivors.
Marks maintained a relative calm and instilled optimism through the night awaiting the U.S.S. Cecil J. Doyle, which arrived a few hours later and loaded everyone onboard. In all, 316 members of the U.S.S. Indianapolis’s crew lived through the ordeal, thanks largely to Marks’s courageous leadership.
Twelve days after the rescue, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, thus ending World War II.
Marks had graduated from Northwestern University and Indiana University Law School before the war. After the war, he joined his wife, Elta, in Frankfort, where he opened a law practice, specializing in real estate titles and deeds.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Pacific Fleet’s Commander-in-Chief, presented Marks with the Air Medal for his actions. Through the succeeding years, Marks attended many of the U.S.S. Indianapolis survivor reunions and often was the featured guest speaker. He said he never forgot the tragedy at sea, nor the men who perished, nor the men he saved.
In return, the survivors and their families never forgot Lieutenant Adrian Marks, the man who had given them their lives.
Upon learning of Marks’s passing on March 7, 1998, Paul J. Murphy, chairman of the survivors group, was quoted by the Associated Press.
“Thank God for him,” Murphy said of Marks. “He was loved by all the survivors.”
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NOTE: I have permission from the Clinton County Historical Society to use this photograph of Adrian Marks.
