Oldest USS Indianapolis Survivor Passes Away
The oldest survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, Tom Goff, passed away Monday, Sept. 17 at age 100. Goff succumbed to complications from a stroke the previous week.
A native of Glenville, West Virginia, Goff was the fourth child in a farming family of ten. In 1943 he was 36 years old — too old to be drafted — but Goff enlisted and went to war anyway. Twice the age of the men with whom he served on the Indianapolis, Goff was nicknamed “Pappy.”
After surviving the July 30, 1945 sinking of his ship and the subsequent five days in the open seas, Goff came home and settled in Ohio with his third wife.
The chairman of the USS Indianapolis Survivors Organization, Giles McCoy, 82, said, “Everytime we had a reunion, we would introduce Tom as our oldest survivor, and he would stand up there and not know what to say. He was a good man. The kind of man you and I would like to sit and talk with.”
One of his daughters, Bobbie Swinehart said, “Everybody felt he was definitely a hero with what he’d been through. He felt he did his job; that was what he was supposed to do.”
WWII, Tom Goff, USS Indianapolis
October 28th, 2007 at 9:30 am
You have a nice site. If you are interested in personal letters, I just started a blog which includes my father’s letters from Shanghai and will include some when he was captured on Corregidor.
January 7th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Nice article. My dad use to tell me war stories. The USS Indianapolis was always one of the saddest.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I didn’t learn about the USS Indianapolis until seeing the movie Jaws. Robert Shaw’s recollection in the movie was bone chilling to say the least. Nice site you have here.