Tension in Stephen Spielberg's classic film, Jaws, reaches a height when Robert Shaw's
character tells of being in shark-infested waters after the 1945 sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
Was this chilling monologue based on a true story?
Yes.
The USS Indianapolis was a battle-scarred veteran of World War II's Pacific front.
The ship's last major action was to bombard Okinawa in March 1945, and after taking damage,
withdrew to the Naval Yard at Mare's Island near San Francisco.
It was there that Captain Charles B. McVay, III, received secret orders to carry a small
load of cargo to the island of Tinian.
The chief medical officer reported McVay saying,
"I can't tell you what the mission is.
I don't know myself but I've been told that every day we take off the trip is a day off
the war."
The Indy made the 5,000-nautical-mile crossing to Tinian in ten days, arriving on July 26,
1945.
McVay and the crew of the Indy learned later that they had delivered components of the
first atomic bombs — "Little Boy," which leveled Hiroshima, and "Fat Man," which destroyed
Nagasaki.
After Tinian, the Indy made for Guam then left for the Philippines.
They were about halfway there when a Japanese submarine sighted them.
It was a little after midnight on July 30, 1945, when two torpedoes sliced through the
ocean, en route to their target.
The torpedoes slammed into the USS Indianapolis' bow and amidships, and this made short work
of the veteran cruiser.
It only took 12 minutes to sink, slipping to its tomb 18,044 feet below the surface.
Some 300 of the 1,195 crew were killed immediately.
These may have been the lucky ones.
Those that lived clawed for life vests and cut out as many of the ship's life rafts as
possible.
Some scrambled down the ship's side and others jumped into the sea, which was glossed with
a thick veneer of fuel oil.
According to a recount by Captain Lewis L. Haynes, chief medical officer onboard the
ship, the crew leapt into the muck of oil sloshing with sea water before swimming away
hard to escape being sucked down with the ship.
It was chaotic and confusing.
There were hardly enough life rafts.
The vast majority of men bobbed like corks covered with fuel and oil.
They formed a long, dirty string that stretched over the open ocean for a mile or more.
They prayed for rescue.
For the USS Indianapolis, no rescue was forthcoming.
According to an official account by the Navy, distress messages had been sent, but were
not received.
In fact, on July 31, 1945, the naval staff at Leyte removed the USS Indianapolis from
its arrival board.
This was a standard practice during World War II, when combat ships were assumed to
have arrived on time unless other information became available.
In this instance, the naval officers who knew the ship was overdue did not investigate why.
Another failure occurred when naval intelligence received information that the Japanese had
sunk something in the area where the Indianapolis was expected to be.
Their lack of interest was explained by the Navy: Through the course of the war, there
had been numerous instances of fake claims or fake intelligence made by Japanese forces.
It meant that naval intelligence looked skeptically at Japanese reports, and when information
about the incident was shared with top brass, they chose to disregard it.
If the survivors of the USS Indianapolis knew that naval headquarters were not aware of
their disappearance, they may have lost hope then and there.
Still, the 900 men clung to the thought of rescue, but they were swimming in a nightmare
of epic proportions.
The first trouble was exposure.
At first, the fuel oil from the wreck acted as a crude sunscreen, but the survivors soon
drifted into clear waters that provided no shelter from the sun.
Men's skin burned by day and then although the tropical water is warm, it was still colder
than human body temperature.
At night especially, life was slowly sucked away as some of the crew succumbed to hypothermia.
This grew worse as hours stretched to days.
Those particularly at risk were those who had sustained injuries when the ship initially
sank.
The chief medical officer Haynes later recalled,
"There was nothing I could do but give advice, bury the dead, save the life jackets, and
try to keep the men from drinking the salt water when we drifted out of the fuel oil."
With hardly any freshwater to speak of, the men were sorely tempted to drink the seawater.
Those who did, fell victim to salt poisoning.
Men hallucinated, seeing the ship beneath them full of food and water.
They thrashed about desperately and drank even more seawater, thinking it would cure
their thirst.
"The first couple days…
They, uh...
Those guys never lasted very long."
It is estimated that up to 150 of the USS Indianapolis' crew were killed by sharks.
While at first, the sharks largely concentrated on the dead, by at least the second day, the
living were targeted.
Injuries and open wounds spilled blood into the water, and more sharks came to feast.
To ward off the sharks, the crew took to pushing out the dead bodies, hoping that by sacrificing
them to the sharks they'd be left alone.
They organized shark watches, when they noticed that the animals tended to attack those survivors
who floated alone.
So they gathered in large groups.
When a shark approached, the men beat at it to drive it away.
Those in the center of a group fared best.
Survivor Edgar Harrell recalled,
"You see maybe a body up on an eight foot swell and all of a sudden that swell breaks
and that body comes down and he hits you and he leaves parts and residue on you.
You see that and you wonder, 'Is that going to me tomorrow or yet today?'"
Another survivor, Clarence Hershberger, only saw one or two sharks but recalled,
"But you knew they were there because somebody would let out a blood-curdling scream like
you never heard before.
And you knew someone had been hit, usually on the outer edge of the group."
And in 2017, another survivor summed it up like this:
"How I got through this, I really don't know.
I just… damn lucky, that's all there is to it."
So what species of shark attacked the crew of the USS Indianapolis?
National Geographic says that the great white shark is statistically the most dangerous
shark, along with bull and tiger sharks.
However, in the case of the Indianapolis, the main culprits were oceanic whitetips.
The oceanic whitetips primarily range in the open ocean far from humans, but they are considered
potentially dangerous to people.
They're often seen in waters around boating disasters, and it's an aggressive species
that shows little fear.
Once plentiful through the world's oceans, the oceanic whitetip has become a victim of
bycatch and rising demand for shark fins.
It is estimated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the species
has declined between 80% and 95% in the Pacific since the 1990s.
In 2018, the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The crew of the USS Indianapolis would not have cared about what species of shark was
attacking.
To them, it was a continuous nightmare as some of the crew slipped into madness when
signs of rescue failed to materialize.
By their second night in the water, men's minds broke from lack of hydration and food,
witnessing the continuous death of their shipmates, and the terror of the sharks.
"Shark comes to the nearest man, and he's poundin' and hollerin' and screamin'... and
sometimes the shark would go away… and sometimes he wouldn't."
By the morning of Aug. 3, 1945, there were a little over 300 crew of the USS Indianapolis
left.
The only solace was in prayer.
But that morning, things changed as a Navy PV-1 Ventura piloted by Wilbur "Chuck" Gwinn
flew over the disaster area on a routine patrol.
He was cruising at 3,000 feet and had a 20-mile view of the blue Pacific about him.
He was far too high and at too odd an angle to see what was going on below him.
However, the plane's antenna had broken.
Gwinn turned over the controls to investigate, which brought him to the bottom of the plane.
There was a window on the deck through which he saw, to his utter amazement, an oil slick.
After tracing it, he found the survivors and radioed for help.
By that evening, rescue craft had arrived in full force and evacuated the victims.
Search operations continued until August 8, 1945.
"You can never forget that.
That's….
I've never forgotten it."
Of the 1,194 crew, only 316 survived.
In the immediate aftermath, a court of inquiry recommended Captain Charles B. McVay, III,
be court-martialed.
Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz disagreed and issued a letter of reprimand to McVay instead.
However, according to the U.S. Naval Institute, the chief of naval operations, Chief of Naval
Operations Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, overruled him and ordered a court-martial.
There has been speculation that motivations involved much more than simply the Indianapolis
disaster, and McVay found himself at the mercy of the courts.
December 3 to 19, 1945, became the only time during World War II that a skipper was tried
for losing his vessel.
According to the records, he was charged with failing to issue orders to properly abandon
the ship and for failing to take proper zigzagging evasive maneuvers to avoid submarines.
At the trial, the commander of the Japanese sub that sank the Indianapolis even appeared
to give testimony, stating that zigzagging would not have saved the ship.
Still, McVay was acquitted of the first charge and found guilty of the second.
He lost a chunk of his seniority, which was later restored by Navy Secretary James Forrestal.
McVay retired in 1949 as a rear admiral, but the blame of the disaster was firmly fixed
on his shoulders.
The psychological toll on the crew was devastating.
It would be fair to say, however, that McVay bore the brunt of it.
To the families of some of the victims, McVay was being let off too lightly for the deaths
of 879 husbands, fathers, and sons.
The surviving crew of the Indianapolis supported him, and McVay attended their first reunion
in 1960.
But the shadow, and evidently guilt, of the disaster never left him.
On Nov. 6, 1968, at half past noon, McVay shot and killed himself outside his home in
Litchfield, Connecticut.
After McVay's death, the survivors of the USS Indianapolis wanted justice and exoneration
for their captain.
It seemed clear to them that McVay had been made a scapegoat.
Yet the effort to exonerate McVay didn't really begin until Hunter Scott, a middle school
student, interviewed survivors of the disaster in the 1990s for a class project.
This caught the attention of congressmen.
In 1999, the veterans of the Indy pressed for and received a hearing with the U.S. Senate
Armed Services Committee, where they shared Scott's considerable research.
They pressed for full exoneration.
This cause was further supported by a letter from the then 90-year old Mochitsura Hashimoto
to Senator John Warner.
He wrote:
"Our peoples have forgiven each other for that terrible war.
Perhaps it is time your peoples forgave Captain McVay for the humiliation of his unjust conviction."
Warner introduced a resolution in 2000 to exonerate McVay.
This passed, as well as a stronger version in the House of Representatives.
The final version noted,
"Captain McVay's conviction was a miscarriage of justice that led to his unjust humiliation
and damage to his naval career; and the American people should now recognize Captain McVay's
lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the U.S.S.
INDIANAPOLIS and the lives of the men who died as a result of her sinking."
Over the years, the survivors of the USS Indianapolis have had regular reunions.
At first, it was once every five years, but as more and more crew passed, they decided
to make it an annual affair held in the city for which their ship was named.
"I don't know what made me so lucky, you know… guys died right by me."
These reunions include a memorial service for those who were lost at the sinking and
to honor those USS Indianapolis veterans who have passed.
This group, aside from their advocacy for their captain, were also instrumental in the
commissioning of a memorial to their lost shipmates.
Dedicated in 1995, the memorial includes a replica of the vessel and a piece of the USS
Arizona, connecting the first and one of the last ships sunk in World War II.
The living memory of one of America's greatest naval tragedies will not last much longer,
but it's safe to say that the sacrifices of the crew of the USS Indianapolis will be forever
etched into naval history.
As of January 2022, only three crewmen are still alive.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.