The SS Cape San Juan was a US troop transport torpedoed by a Japanese sub while unescorted enroute to Australia during WWII.
An SOS was sent with the message “torpedoed, ship sinking fast” before the radio was inexplicably ordered destroyed.
As the ship slowly listed into the Pacific, her crew and 1,340 passengers leapt overboard in life jackets and rafts.
With no radio, it took a Navy flying boat until night to locate the burning ship, and a rescue was delayed until dawn...
...when, flying in low, they noticed 2 packs of sharks with 25-30 sharks each were menacing the survivors in the oily water.
To “occupy” the sharks, the PBY5’s Air Gunner let loose with his browning machine gun and armor piercing bullets.
Wounded sharks reportedly flung themselves out of the water before falling back in a bloody mess to be devoured by the pack.
Approximately 115 sailors drowned or had been picked off by the sharks while clinging to their rafts overnight.
In 1985, Shirley Ann Durdin was snorkelling in only 7 ft (2.1 m) of water in Australia’s Peake Bay...
...when she was viciously struck by a great white shark that was so powerful, it ripped her in half.
The gory scene was witnessed by her husband and 4 children who watched helplessly from the shore...
...as the 20-ft (6 m) long great white left only Durdin’s headless torso bobbing up and down in the water.
Rescuers attempted to retrieve the gruesome remains, but could not reach them before the shark returned for its leftovers.
The incident is thought to be the first Australian shark attack by a man-eater that actually devoured its victim.
After the 1942 Battle of Java, some Australian and British troops headed to the hills to form a guerrilla resistance.
An enraged Kempeitai hunted down and rounded up nearly 200 of the soldiers for imprisonment and torture.
The Japanese secret police force then packed the soldiers into 1 m long (3 ft) cages built to transport pigs...
...and reportedly paraded the “dirty animals” around before sending them by rail to waiting boats on the coast.
Witnesses at a war crimes trial recalled seeing the cages stacked on top of each other as the ships headed off to sea.
Off the coast of Surabaya, the cages full of soldiers were then cast overboard into shark infested waters.
It is said that those who didn’t drown were eaten alive, as the sharks broke open the cages for their meal.
In 1916, the Jersey Shore was overflowing with people trying to escape a heatwave and a polio epidemic in the north east.
But rather than avoiding danger, they were plunging into the hunting ground of a young great white shark learning to kill.
It started with an attack on Charles Vansant, who was dragged to the shore by lifeguards but bled to death on a hotel desk
As 3 more people were killed and 1 injured in the jaws of the Jersey man-eater, sensationalized panic set in...
...and shark hunters hit the seas with rifles and dynamite while steel nets were erected to protect the beaches.
Attacks finally ended when Michael Schleisser killed the shark with a broken oar as it tried to sink his boat.
The 7.5 ft (2.3 m), 325 lb (147 kg) shark was found to be full of "suspicious fleshy material and bones" identified as human.
When the USS Indianapolis was split in half by Japanese torpedoes in July 1945, its problems were only just beginning...
...as the 900 men on board soon discovered that the water was filled with hundreds of circling oceanic whitetip sharks.
The rescue operation didn’t arrive until 4 days later, by which time 579 men were dead, many devoured by the sharks.
Sailors recalled the nightmarish dread of dehydrated hallucinations and feeling the bumps of probing sharks in the dark.
Survivor Woody James said, “Everything would be quiet and then you'd hear somebody scream and you knew a shark had got him"...
...and Loel Dean Cox recalled, “Thank goodness, there were lots of dead people floating in the area” to satisfy the sharks.