The Tragedy Of The U.S.S. Indianapolis

There are many great and famous stories about battles and courage that went on during World War Two. One of the lesser known tragedies occured on July 30th, 1945 in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The USS Indianapolis was a nearly 10,000 ton heavy battle cruiser that just weeks prior to her sinking had just come out of a naval shipyard having been re-fitted and repaired after suffering damage doing battle with the Japanese. She has just delivered the Atomic Bomb to a B-25 bomber base in the Pacific (The actual bomb in fact the The Enola Gay would drop on Hiroshima on August 6th) and had turned around and started steaming for the Phillippines. On the night of July 30th at just a little bit past midnight a Japanese submarine launched two torpedoes straight for the middle of her hull. Once they exploded they set off a chain reaction with some of the munitions that were on board and the ensuing secondary explosions and fire nearly severed the ship in half. She had a crew of 1200 and within the first minutes of the attack the fire and explosions had killed about 300 on board. The captain ordered the ship to be abandoned at this point and nearly 900 men all jumped overboard and began swimming away from the burning wreck. The ship had completely sunk undernearth the waves in a little over ten minutes leaving all the crew bobbing on the waves in the middle of the night in total darkness. The distress flares that the crew had sent out just after the beginning of the attack were ignored by the U.S. Navy. They were thinking that it was perhaps some kind of Japanese trick to lure them in for an ambush as sea. As daylight rose the next morning an even more tragic turn for the worse takes place. The waters they were sunk in were shark infested and the first of the swarm of sharks that would soon appear was spotted by some of the crew for the first time. Because of the ignored distress flares nobody was coming to rescue them yet so they were stuck in the water for days. Finally on August 2nd, 1945 an overhead recon flight spotted the men in the ocean and a massive rescue operation was launched. In the four days between the sinking of the ship and the rescue launch out of the 900 men that jumped into the water after the Indianapolis was sunk less than 300 made it out of the water alive after the sharks were done with them.