The USS Indianapolis — Torpedoed in secret, abandoned to the sharks

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.

Poon Lim — 133 days alone on a raft, and lived

On 23 November 1942 the British merchant steamer SS Benlomond, sailing alone in the South Atlantic, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-172 and sank within about two minutes. Of the roughly fifty-five aboard, only one man lived: Poon Lim, a Chinese second mess steward, then twenty-four years old. He surfaced in a lifejacket, drifted for about two hours, and found an eight-foot wooden raft adrift on the open sea. Alone on that raft, with the equator’s sun overhead and no land in sight, he survived 133 days before three Brazilian fishermen found him near the coast of Pará on 5 April 1943. It remains the longest documented solo survival on a raft at sea.

The raft carried a fixed store of provisions — about ten gallons of fresh water, biscuits, chocolate, tins of pemmican and evaporated milk, a little lime juice — enough for a man to last weeks, not months. Poon Lim’s achievement was to outlast that store by improvisation and discipline. He rationed the water and food from the first, then extended his life by catching rainwater in the canvas of his lifejacket, fashioning a fishhook from a wire spring and a line from unravelled rope, catching fish and seabirds, and on one occasion killing a shark and drinking the blood from its liver. He marked each passing day, watched ships and aircraft pass without seeing him, and held on.

His survival was not luck but method, sustained over four and a half months of solitude, exposure and slow starvation. By the time the fishermen reached him he had drifted close to the South American coast and had lost about twenty pounds, but he could still walk. For his endurance King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy folded his improvised techniques into its survival training. He later emigrated and lived four more decades, dying in Brooklyn in 1991. No one has since spent longer alone on a raft.