The USS Indianapolis — Torpedoed in secret, abandoned to the sharks
Summary
Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, under Captain Charles B. McVay III, was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea, between Guam and Leyte. The ship rolled over and sank in about twelve minutes. Of the 1,195 men aboard, roughly 300 went down with the cruiser; close to 890 entered the open Pacific with few rafts, little water and almost no organized survival gear. By the time the survivors were found by chance four days later, only 316 were still alive. Around 880 men died — the greatest single-ship loss of life in U.S. Navy history.
The disaster had two distinct phases, and the second was the deadlier. Many men survived the sinking only to die slowly in the water from exposure, dehydration, drinking seawater, wounds and the despair that drove some to swim off or slip from their lifejackets. Schools of sharks, primarily oceanic whitetips, gathered around the drifting groups and fed on the dead and the living; estimates of shark deaths range from a few dozen to more than a hundred, though most men were killed by the sea and the sun rather than by teeth. No distress signal was acted upon, and the ship's overdue arrival at Leyte went unnoticed for days. The survivors were spotted only by accident, by a patrol pilot who happened to look down.
The Indianapolis is remembered for the secrecy that surrounded her and the injustice that followed her. Days earlier she had carried components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian on a mission so classified that her loss was tangled in silence. Captain McVay was court-martialed in December 1945 — the only U.S. captain so tried for losing a ship to enemy action in the war — and convicted of failing to zigzag, on testimony from the very submarine commander who had sunk him that it would have made no difference. McVay took his own life in 1968. He was formally exonerated by Congress and the Navy in 2000–2001, more than fifty years too late for him.
Timeline
The secret sailing
By the summer of 1945 the Indianapolis was a veteran of the Pacific war, flagship of the Fifth Fleet and recently repaired after a kamikaze strike off Okinawa. Her final mission, however, was unlike any before it. On 16 July she left San Francisco carrying the uranium core and firing components of the first atomic bomb to be used in war, bound for the airbase on Tinian from which the Hiroshima strike would be launched. The cargo was so secret that few aboard understood what they guarded; speed was paramount, and she made the crossing at record pace, delivering her cargo on 26 July.
What followed was administrative rather than dramatic, and it was fatal. Routed onward toward Leyte for training, the cruiser sailed from Guam on 28 July alone, without a destroyer escort, on a course that crossed waters where a Japanese submarine was known to be operating. The decision not to escort her, and the failure to weigh that intelligence against her route, placed an unaccompanied capital ship across the path of I-58. In the dark of the new moon on 30 July, Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto sighted her, fired a spread of torpedoes, and hit twice on the starboard side. The bow was blown away and the ship caught fire; she listed, rolled, and went down by the head in roughly twelve minutes, too fast for any orderly evacuation or any confirmed distress message to reach a listener who would act on it.
Four days in the open sea
About 890 men survived the sinking, but they survived into a different kind of dying. They were scattered across miles of open ocean in groups large and small, most wearing kapok lifejackets that grew waterlogged, with only a handful of rafts and almost no water or rations among them. The first day brought sunburn and thirst; by the second, men driven mad by dehydration drank seawater and hallucinated, fought one another over imagined ships, or quietly let go of their jackets and sank. Officers and senior men, among them Ensign Harlan Twible, organized "shark watches" and tried to hold the groups together, but discipline frayed as the men weakened.
The sharks came on the first day and stayed. Oceanic whitetips, drawn by the splashing and the dead, circled the clusters of men and took the bodies first, then the living from the edges of each group. Survivors described sailors snatched from beside them and pulled under without warning. The shark toll has never been fixed — estimates run from a few dozen to more than 150 — and the forensic truth is that exposure, dehydration and saltwater poisoning killed far more men than teeth did. But the sharks made the ordeal a particular horror, and they remain the reason the Indianapolis is associated, above all, with that danger. Through all four days, no search was launched, because no one knew the ship was gone. Her failure to arrive at Leyte on schedule was logged and ignored under wartime procedures that did not flag overdue combatant ships.
The accident of rescue and the verdict
Rescue came by luck, not by system. On the morning of 2 August, Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn, flying a routine antisubmarine patrol in a PV-1 Ventura, looked down and saw an oil slick and then men in the water. His report set in motion a response that should have come days earlier. Lieutenant Commander Adrian Marks flew his PBY Catalina to the scene, and in defiance of standing orders landed the seaplane in twelve-foot swells, taking some fifty-six men aboard and lashing others to the wings. Through that night and the next day, the USS Cecil J. Doyle and other ships pulled survivors from the dark. Of the nearly 1,195 men who had sailed, 316 were found alive. The loss was kept from the public until 15 August, when its announcement was overtaken by news of Japan's surrender.
In December 1945 the Navy court-martialed Captain McVay — the only American captain tried for losing his ship to enemy action in the entire war. He was acquitted of failing to order timely abandonment but convicted of "hazarding" the ship by neglecting to zigzag, though weather and orders had left zigzagging to his discretion. In one of the trial's stranger turns, the Navy brought Commander Hashimoto, the enemy who had sunk the Indianapolis, to testify; he stated that zigzagging would have made no difference to his attack. McVay's sentence was remitted and he returned to duty, but his career was finished and many of the bereaved blamed him by mail for the rest of his life. He died by suicide in 1968. A decades-long campaign by survivors, joined by a schoolboy named Hunter Scott whose history-fair project drew national attention, led Congress in 2000 and the Navy in 2001 to formally exonerate him.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
The Indianapolis lost roughly 880 of her 1,195 men, the worst single-ship loss in U.S. Navy history. The Navy investigated, reformed its tracking so that overdue ships would be flagged, and reckoned slowly with how a major warship had been allowed to disappear unmissed. For Captain McVay, the reckoning was personal and cruel: convicted, hounded by some of the bereaved, and dead by his own hand in 1968. The survivors organized, kept the ship's memory, and pressed for decades to clear his name; the joint resolution of Congress in 2000 and the Navy's action in 2001 finally recorded that he was not to blame for the loss.
The wreck itself lay undiscovered until August 2017, when an expedition led by Paul Allen located it more than 5,000 metres down in the Philippine Sea. The story passed into wider memory through survivors' accounts and through a famous monologue in the film Jaws, which fixed the sharks in popular imagination while flattening the larger truth — that the men died chiefly of thirst, exposure and the long failure to come for them. The dead are remembered each year by the dwindling association of survivors and their families, and by a memorial in Indianapolis to the men who carried the bomb and then were left in the water.
Lessons
- Never route a high-value vessel alone through a known threat; weigh the intelligence against the path before you sail it.
- Track arrivals actively and make non-arrival trigger an alarm — a loss no one notices is a loss no one survives.
- Plan past the catastrophe: the wait for rescue in open water is frequently deadlier than the disaster itself.
- Build rescue as a designed response to a known loss, not a dependence on someone happening to look.
- Direct accountability at the system that failed, not at the most convenient individual, or the real causes go uncorrected.
References
- USS Indianapolis (CA-35) WIKIPEDIA
- The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis Triggered the Worst Shark Attack in History SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
- Surviving the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM
- Charles B. McVay III WIKIPEDIA
- USS Indianapolis torpedoed HISTORY