Leonard Thomas Woods was born in 1918 in Wrightsville, Johnson County, Georgia. He was a Radio Technician Chief and Chief Petty Officer on the USS Indianapolis which was torpedoed and sunk on July 30 1945 off the Philippines.

He was married to Adah Melba Woods.

Woods is mentioned in the book In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of its Survivors by Doug Stanton:

“As the Indy Sank, distress signals giving her longitude and latitude positions were broadcast on frequencies monitored by ships at sea and onshore stations. Radioman JJ Moran had entered radio shack 1 after the torpedoing, and begun keying out messages. XRAY VICTOR MIKE LOVE, read one, WE HAVE BEEN HIT BY TORPEDOES. NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE,

It seemed doubtful that there was power enough to successfully transmit these pleas for help. Radio shack 1, normally used to send messages had borne the brunt of the second torpedo. The cables connecting the transmitters to the antennae high above the deck had been severed. Inside the shack the heavy radio equipment rocked in its stanchions. One of the transmitters weighing several hundred pounds tipped forward and crashed onto the deck.

Radio shack 2, located several hundred feet away near the stern, under the normal 2 smokestack, had remained up and running after the hit. All the lights were on, and the room was crowded with about fifteen radio crew members.

Radio technician Jack Miner, fresh from one year at Yale University, a green hand just two weeks aboard the Indy, had entered radio shack 2 shortly after the torpedoing to find his superior officer, chief radio electrician L. T. Woods, trying to improvise sending a signal on equipment that was normally meant only to receive one. Woods grabbed Miner by the shoulders and positioned him squarely in front of one of the transmitters. It was black and about as big as a refrigerator, and filled with hundreds of foot long vacuum tubes. Woods ordered Miner to warm up this transmitter then went to work on one nearby, which operated on another frequency.

One Miner had warmed up his equipment he watched as Woods found a solution to the problem. Sticking out from the front of Wood’s transmitter was a toggle resembling a light switch, and Woods realized that if he flipped it up and down he could send a series of binary signals, on-off, on-of, similar to the keying of the telegraph pad. Because the switch didn’t automatically spring back once it had been pressed down, Woods had to flip it in a staccato series of clicks.

Miner was amazed. He watched the red, hair-thin needled in the meter monitor jump with each flip of the toggle switch. This meant that power was circling through the transmitter and traveling from the cables to the antennae. Woods keyed for about two minutes, clicking out the SOS and the ship’s co-ordinates.

The crew was so intent on the work that they completely lost track of the ship’s increasingly starboard list. When Miner broke himself away from the red-needle trance, he realized that the radio shack was heeled on its side at a steep angle. He and Woods kept falling downward into the machinery. Miner knew that if the room tipped any more the two of them would be doing pushups against the bulkhead. Woods finally yelled, “Okay, abandon ship!”

No other mention of Woods was made in this book. Other accounts tell of the men in the sea discussing their belief that the SOS messages had been sent several times.

In another book, Indianapolis: The True Story of the Words Sea Disaster in US Naval History, the authors describe Woods as "absolutely tops. All the men revered him, both as a technical expert and surefooted leader. Woods exuded the quiet authority of a man much older than his twenty-six years."

The History Channel (https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-indianapolis-bombed) reports:

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sinks within minutes in shark-infested waters. Only 316 of the 1,196 men on board survived. However, the Indianapolis had already completed its major mission: the delivery of key components of the atomic bomb that would be dropped a week later at Hiroshima to Tinian Island in the South Pacific.

The Indianapolis made its delivery to Tinian Island on July 26, 1945. The mission was top secret and the ship’s crew was unaware of its cargo. After leaving Tinian, the Indianapolis sailed to the U.S. military’s Pacific headquarters at Guam and was given orders to meet the battleship USS Idaho at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Japan.

Shortly after midnight on July 30, halfway between Guam and Leyte Gulf, a Japanese sub blasted the Indianapolis, sparking an explosion that split the ship and caused it to sink in approximately 12 minutes, with about 300 men trapped inside. Another 900 went into the water, where many died from drowning, shark attacks, dehydration or injuries from the explosion. Help did not arrive until four days later, on August 2, when an anti-submarine plane on routine patrol happened upon the men and radioed for assistance.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, inflicting nearly 130,000 casualties and destroying more than 60 percent of the city. On August 9, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where casualties were estimated at over 66,000. Meanwhile, the U.S. government kept quiet about the Indianapolis tragedy until August 15 in order to guarantee that the news would be overshadowed by President Harry Truman’s announcement that Japan had surrendered.

More information about the USS Indianapolis is available at https://www.ussindianapolis.org

This story is part of the Stories Behind the Stars project (see www.storiesbehindthestars.org). This is a national effort of volunteers to write the stories of all 400,000+ of the US WWII fallen here on Fold3. Can you help write these stories? Related to this, there will be a smart phone app that will allow people to visit any war memorial or cemetery, scan the fallen's name and read his/her story.