USS Indianapolis
USS Indianapolis
The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis in 1945.
In 1945 the USS Indianapolis was sent to an island off Japan with an important mission. The crew was to deliver the parts for the atomic bomb set to be dropped on Hiroshima then regroup with the USS Oklahoma around midnight when they were done. The crew successfully delivered the parts, but they were attacked on their way to the meeting point. A Japanese submarine launched 2 torpedoes at the ship and that was enough to take it down. After just 12 minutes, the ship sank and the surviving 879 crew members were left floating in the open ocean. Before they went down, some of the crew members were able to send out SOS signals that reached the navy. But, the man in charge of dealing with the signal was drunk and thought it was “a Japanese ruse”, so no action was taken even when the ship failed to arrive at its destination.
Some of the survivors were injured in the initial strike and continuously bled in the ocean. This drew an uncountable number of sharks to their location and they were slowly picked off by the sea creatures. Keep in mind, many of the crew members couldn’t make it to the life rafts or even life preservers in time so they had been treading water for hours when the sharks arrived. The sharks fed on the deceased and surviving crew for days while all the people could do was try not to get eaten or die of dehydration. When the crew were on alert, the sharks reportedly used a tactic where they bumped into people for a while without attacking to get them to let their guards down. These mind games caused even more stress on the crew and cost many lives.
Eventually, some reprieve came to the crew in the form of stray crates floating through the water. These were not sturdy enough to be used as rafts, but they allowed for people to dry out their life vests and keep them from becoming waterlogged over time. A couple of the crates were even filled with rotten potatoes which kept people from starving.
After 5 full days, the crew was spotted from the air by a bomber who sent out a signal to a nearby ship asking for help. The bomber saved around 50 people who seemed the most at risk and the ship came by to pick up the rest. In the end, only around 1/3 of the original 1,196 crew members survived. News of this tragedy was kept secret until the day that the Japanese surrendered. The government claims that this was to keep the Japanese from finding out about the plan to drop an atomic bomb, but you can’t deny that this great news buried the entire incident with the USS Indianapolis.
The commander of the ship survived but was court-martialed after the incident for “not using proper evasive maneuvers” that could have saved the crew. This is a clear instance of the military using a scapegoat to cover for their own lacking efforts since he was the only commander court-martialed for something like this throughout the entirety of WWII. In 2000, congress declared that the charges were unjustified and cleared him of any wrongdoing. Sadly, this came too late since the captain took his own life in 1968. It is now believed that he did this because of the loneliness he experienced after the loss of his wife the cancer in 1961 and the grief that was brought up with every letter and phone call he got from families of the deceased crew members.
