Just finished reading the book “In Harms Way” and couldn’t recommend it more. An event that happened so close to the end of the war that it was buried at the time by the bigger news of Japan’s surtonder and by the navy itself (who later inaccurately blamed it all on Captain Mcvay—-it took to 2000 for congress to exonerate him. But the story needs to be told to honor those who died and relive the heroics of those few that survived.
The ship was the USS Indianapolis. It had just delivered parts of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in Tinian when it was on its way (unescorted) to Leyete to prepare for the invasion of the japan mainland when 2 jap torpedoes took the ship down in a remarkable 12 minutes.
No distress signal was ever picked up. No one realized it was missing for 4 days until a PV Ventura on patrol randomly spotted it. Rescue took another day.
Of 1,195 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 890 faced some of the harshest conditions imaginable as they literally floated in the middle of the pacific (most were injured from the blast and were without any rafts and just bobbed up and down in the water ). Sharks surrounded the groups at all times and killed several hundred of the crew marking it the largest shark attack in human history. Add to it dehydration (there was zero fresh water) and salt water poising and the soldiers literally started hullixinating and even started attacking each other and killing themselves . They went crazy.
In the end of the 1195 crewman only 316 survived. The sinking of Indianapolis resulted in the greatest single loss of life at sea from a single ship in the history of the US Navy.
It wasn’t until the famous below scene in the movie Jaws that most of the American public learned of the story.
Highly recommend the book and YouTube videos of survivors.
The ship was the USS Indianapolis. It had just delivered parts of the Hiroshima atomic bomb in Tinian when it was on its way (unescorted) to Leyete to prepare for the invasion of the japan mainland when 2 jap torpedoes took the ship down in a remarkable 12 minutes.
No distress signal was ever picked up. No one realized it was missing for 4 days until a PV Ventura on patrol randomly spotted it. Rescue took another day.
Of 1,195 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remaining 890 faced some of the harshest conditions imaginable as they literally floated in the middle of the pacific (most were injured from the blast and were without any rafts and just bobbed up and down in the water ). Sharks surrounded the groups at all times and killed several hundred of the crew marking it the largest shark attack in human history. Add to it dehydration (there was zero fresh water) and salt water poising and the soldiers literally started hullixinating and even started attacking each other and killing themselves . They went crazy.
In the end of the 1195 crewman only 316 survived. The sinking of Indianapolis resulted in the greatest single loss of life at sea from a single ship in the history of the US Navy.
It wasn’t until the famous below scene in the movie Jaws that most of the American public learned of the story.
Highly recommend the book and YouTube videos of survivors.
