Transcription
The USS Indianapolis delivered the parts for the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Four days later, a Japanese submarine sank the USS Indianapolis in 12 minutes. Nearly 900 men made it into the water. The US Navy did not know the USS Indianapolis had gone down for four days. By the time anyone came, only 316 were still alive.
This is not a story most people know fully. Most people know the name from the film Jaws. They remember the scene where the character Quint describes floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis went down. That scene is real. What I want to do is tell you what actually happened, why nobody came, why so many were lost, and why the wreck of the USS Indianapolis sat undiscovered on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 72 years.
Because when I went back through the details of this one, I found myself checking the same facts over and over. Some of them are genuinely hard to believe. The USS Indianapolis was a Portland-class heavy cruiser, 610 ft long, displacing just under 10,000 tons. Launched in 1931, the USS Indianapolis spent years as a fleet flagship, and even carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a tour of South America in 1936. By 1945, the Indianapolis had earned 10 battle stars for service across the Pacific, the Aleutians, Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The USS Indianapolis was a decorated experienced warship with a seasoned crew. None of that would matter on the night of July 30th, 1945.
On July the 16th, 1945, the USS Indianapolis departed San Francisco on a top secret mission. Nobody on board was told what the cargo was. A large wooden crate was loaded onto the port hangar deck. A metal canister was welded directly into the flag quarters. Armed guards were posted around the clock. The Indianapolis raced across the Pacific at an average speed of 29 knots, setting a speed record for the leg between San Francisco and Pearl Harbor that still stands. The USS Indianapolis arrived at the island of Tinian on July the 26th and unloaded the mystery cargo under the eyes of numerous senior military officials. What the crew of the Indianapolis had just delivered were the components for Little Boy, the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima 11 days later.
After completing the delivery, the USS Indianapolis stopped briefly at Guam before being sent onto Leyte Gulf in the Philippines for training ahead of the planned invasion of Japan. The Indianapolis sailed alone with no escort, no destroyer alongside, and no submarine detection equipment. The USS Indianapolis had specifically requested an escort and been denied. Exactly why that request was refused has never been fully explained. The cruiser set course for Leyte at 17 knots, unescorted in open ocean.
Just after midnight on July the 30th, two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 struck the USS Indianapolis on her starboard side. The first torpedo blew the bow off the Indianapolis. The second struck near the powder magazine amidships. The explosion split the Indianapolis to the keel. All power was lost instantly. All communications went down. The ship could not stop her engines. The ship could not send a distress signal. The cruiser was still moving forward with no power, no communication, and no bow, flooding so fast that nothing could stop it. 12 minutes after the first torpedo hit, the USS Indianapolis rolled side and sank, taking approximately 300 crew members down with her.
Around 890 men made it into the water. They had almost nothing. Life jackets were available for most, but there were very few life rafts, no food, almost no fresh water water. The men were scattered across miles of open ocean in the dark in the middle of the Philippine Sea with no way of knowing if anyone knew they were there. Nobody did.
This is the part that I found most difficult to accept when I first looked into it. Three separate stations received or were alerted to distress signals from the Indianapolis, and all three failed to act. One commander was reportedly drunk. Another had ordered his men not to disturb him. A third believed the signal was a Japanese trap designed to lure rescue ships into an ambush. Beyond that, when the USS Indianapolis failed to arrive at Leyte Gulf as scheduled on July the 31st, nobody raised an alarm. The procedures in place at the time did not require anyone to report a ship as overdue. The Indianapolis had simply vanished from the board, and nobody followed up.
The men in the water had no idea any of this was happening. As the first day turned into the second, and the second into the third, the situation in the water was becoming catastrophic. Dehydration was the biggest killer. The life jackets the Indianapolis crew were issued had only been designed to keep a man afloat for around 48 hours. After that, the kapok material began to absorb water, and the jackets started dragging men under rather than keeping them up. Men who had been holding on started to lose their grip. Men who drank seawater, and many did, driven mad by thirst, died quickly as the salt poisoning took hold.
And then there were the sharks. The scene in Jaws where Quint describes the sharks circling in the water is drawn directly from the accounts of the Indianapolis survivors. Oceanic whitetip sharks and tiger sharks were drawn to the wreck site. The sharks were present from the first night. Historians now believe the shark attacks, while real and terrifying, killed fewer men than dehydration and exposure, but that number still runs into the dozens and possibly over 100. The sharks attacked at night and in the early morning. The sharks circled constantly. Men who were bleeding were avoided by their own shipmates because nobody wanted to be near them. Survivors described feeling the sharks brush against their legs underwater.
A 12-year-old boy named Hunter Scott would later watch the film Jaws. Here the character Quint described floating in the water after the USS Indianapolis went down and become so haunted by it that he began researching the story for a school history project. That project would eventually lead to Congress exonerating the captain of the Indianapolis decades after the disaster, but we will come back to that.
On the afternoon of August 2nd, four days after the Indianapolis sank, Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn was flying his PV-1 Ventura bomber on a routine anti-submarine patrol when he looked out and saw an oil slick on the surface. He went lower, and he saw men in the water. He radioed his base immediately. His message was, "Many men in the water." A PBYC plane under Lieutenant Adrian Marks flew to the scene and found survivors spread across miles of ocean. Marks landed on the water against standing orders and began pulling men into the aircraft. When the fuselage was full, survivors were tied to the wings with parachute cord. Marks and his crew rescued 56 men before rescue ships arrived.
Over the following hours, seven United States Navy ships converged on the scene. The rescue operation continued through the night. When it was over, 316 men were pulled from the Pacific Ocean. Of the approximately 1,195 who had been aboard the USS Indianapolis, 879 were gone. No US warship sunk at sea has ever lost more sailors.
The US government delayed reporting the disaster to the public until August 15th, 1945, the same day announced Japan had agreed to surrender. The good news and the bad news arrived on the same day. The captain of the USS Indianapolis, Charles McVay III, had survived. McVay was one of the last men to leave the Indianapolis and one of the last to be rescued from the water.
In November 1945, McVay was court-martialed, the only US Navy captain to be court-martialed for losing his ship in combat during the Second World War. McVay was convicted of hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag. The Japanese submarine commander who sank the Indianapolis, Mochitsura Hashimoto, was brought to Washington to testify against McVay at the trial. Hashimoto testified that zigzagging would have made no difference, that the USS Indianapolis could not have escaped the attack regardless. McVay was convicted anyway. McVay was later returned to active duty and retired as a rear admiral. But the families of men who had gone down with the Indianapolis continued to send McVay hate mail for the rest of his life, including Christmas cards telling him he had ruined their holidays by killing their sons. McVay took his own life in 1968, aged 70, found clutching a small toy sailor that had been given to him as a boy for luck.
This is where the story of Hunter Scott comes back in. After watching Jaws as a 12-year-old, Scott became so determined to clear McVay's name that he took the case to his school history fair, then to his congressman, and eventually testified before the United States Senate. Surviving crew members of the USS Indianapolis rallied behind Scott's campaign. It was also revealed during this process that the United States Navy had known about Japanese submarine activity along the Indianapolis's route and had not warned McVay, that McVay had requested an escort and been denied, and that the Japanese commander himself had testified zigzagging would have made no difference.
In 2000, Congress passed a joint resolution formally exonerating McVay of all wrongdoing. The United States Navy placed a memorandum in McVay's record in 2001 confirming he'd been cleared. It was 56 years too late.
In the decades that followed the sinking, multiple expeditions searched for the wreck of the USS Indianapolis without success. The problem was that nobody knew exactly where the Indianapolis had gone down. No distress signal had been received with coordinates. The cruiser had simply disappeared.
In July 2016, a breakthrough came when a Navy historian named Richard Hulver found a log entry from a tank landing ship that had passed the USS Indianapolis just 11 hours before the torpedoes hit. That single log entry allowed researchers to calculate a new estimated position further west than anyone had previously searched. A team funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen took that information and began scanning a 600-square-mile area of open ocean. On August 19th, 2017, 72 years after the Indianapolis went down, the wreck was found on the floor of the Philippine Sea.
The USS Indianapolis is lying at a depth of 18,000 ft. That is nearly 3 and 1/2 miles straight down. The wreck is in remarkable condition. The hull number 35 is still clearly visible on the side of the cruiser. Paint is still intact on the anchor. Supply boxes with the Indianapolis name still legible are scattered on the seabed. The Indianapolis's guns are still in place, still pointing outward as they were when the cruiser was sailing. The wreck rests in an enormous impact crater on the floor of the North Pacific with the Indianapolis's bow lying about 1 and 1/2 miles away where the bow broke off before the ship sank.
The wreck of the USS Indianapolis is the US Navy's deepest confirmed shipwreck. The US Navy considers the Indianapolis a protected war grave. The exact coordinates remain classified. Human divers cannot reach 18,000 ft. The wreck is accessible only by deep-sea remotely operated vehicles of the kind used by Paul Allen's team. There is no salvage operation planned or proposed. The Indianapolis will stay where it is. The Navy has said it clearly, the Indianapolis is hallowed ground.
The ship that delivered the atomic bomb sunk four days later, 900 men in the water, nobody came for four days. 316 survived, 72 years on the bottom before anyone found it. And now the US Navy has classified the exact location to protect it. Some stories do not have a clean ending. This is one of them.
If you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, please let me know in the comments and I will make more of these about other ships. Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss them. See you next time.