Transcript of Episode 9 - Written by Stephen Bance

USS Indianapolis

The blood-red suspension cables of the Golden Gate bridge rose above the USS Indianapolis, as she raced out of San Francisco bay, on the 6th of July, 1945. First launched in 1931, the Indy was the flagship of The American Fifth Fleet, and had fought in numerous Pacific Ocean battles throughout World War Two. Leaving the Californian coastline in her wake, she set an impressive average speed of 29 knots. Just over 74 hours later, the Indianapolis had torn through the waters of the North Pacific in record time to reach the safety of Hawaii’s Pearl Harbour. Four years earlier, the Japanese Imperial army had bombed the US naval base- an act that pulled back the curtain on the Pacific theatre of The War. Rather than docking there, the Indy continued to speed in a south-westerly direction and by the 26th of July, she had reached her destination- the tiny island of Tinian, a strategically important American base due to its proximity to Japan.

The Indy’s crew had no idea what the purpose of their mission was, or why the journey was made with such ferocious haste. The only information they received was that it was top-secret, and of critical national importance. In fact, the cargo aboard would come to alter the course of human history. For the cruiser was delivering crucial assembly components of the atomic weapons codenamed ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’- which would be used to decimate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than one month later. This blaze of human destruction- the scale of which had never before been witnessed- would ultimately end the Second World War. What the crew aboard the ship could not know, was that the historical infamy of the USS Indianapolis would not come from this element of the top secret mission. Rather the horrific events on the return leg of the journey, hundreds of miles from land and in the vast blue nothingness of the Philippine Sea, would come to define the Indy, and those of her crew that managed to survive…

With their precious cargo disembarked on Tinian, the Indy and her crew plotted a course to the Philippine island of Leyte- over 2,000 kilometres to the west- where they were to receive fresh orders. Four days into this journey, after midnight on the 30th of July, as the majority of the men slept in their bunks, the crew were suddenly jolted awake. With only the faint stars of an inky black sky to bear witness, a series of explosions began to rip through the Indy’s hull, shaking its occupants to consciousness. A pair of Japanese Type-95 torpedoes, carrying 1200 pounds of explosives each, had just found their target. Now the waters of the Pacific flowed unbounded throughout the inner structures of the Portland-class heavy cruiser which was quickly ripping in two.

Don McCall, Seaman Second Class, remembered the situation as the men quickly realised that sinking was inevitable. Looking over the ship’s rail to the water below, McCall realised a lot of the men were without life jackets, and resolved that he was going to make sure he had one when he got there, tightly strapping his on before jumping. The instant he hit the surface, fuel oil and seawater went down his throat and coated his face. Gagging and spitting through the viscous liquid, McCall swam frantically. Glancing back over his shoulder, a terrifying sight greeted him. The Indy’s ten thousand tonne hull was now towering above the water, groaning as it began to point skywards, her huge exposed propellers still turning. The men in the water closest to the hull raced against the negative current being generated as the massive structure continued to sink deeper, desperately trying to escape being dragged under with the ship.

The ocean the Indianapolis had been traversing is over ten kilometres deep in parts, and was, at that time, regularly patrolled by the Diamond Submarine Division of the Japanese Navy. That night, the I-58 submarine, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, had successfully located and fired upon the oblivious enemy vessel. Aboard the I-58, Hashimoto ordered his crew to surface the submarine so he could confirm whether their attack had been successful. Just twelve minutes after launching the torpedoes, Hashimoto now peered through his periscope. All he saw before him was an empty horizon. The Indy was gone.

Treading water in the blackness of a moonless night, the remaining crew of the USS Indianapolis steeled themselves against the growing chill, determined to keep one another alive until rescue arrived. Less than an hour before many of the men had been warm and dry in bed, or switching over shifts on an uneventful journey. The swiftness of their change of fortune was hard to make sense of, finding themselves all at once bobbing in the vast darkness of the ocean, hundreds of miles from land. With little else to do but pray, grip the flotsam and keep their heads above water , they were left to wonder- ‘How did we end up here?’

Fourteen days prior to the torpedoing of the Indianapolis, some thousands of miles away in the arid expanse of the Jornado del Muerto desert, a group of military personnel and scientists huddled together in the dawn chill. Darkness was suddenly shattered, replaced by a fantastic flash, as a nuclear device code-named ‘the gadget’ was detonated. In an instant it released the energy equivalent of 25 kilotons of TNT- making it even more powerful than the bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima weeks later. An 80 meter-wide crevasse was instantly carved into the dry earth, and surrounding desert sands melted and solidified into a light green, radioactive glass.

The roar of the shockwave took forty seconds to reach the gathered observers. Major General Thomas Farrell recalled ‘a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described, but must be seen to be imagined’.  William L. Laurence of The New York Times, who was tasked with writing the official press release, remembered: ‘A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance, the rhythm of primitive man dancing at one of his fire festivals at the coming of Spring’. In his recollection of the event some twenty years later, J Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who headed the Los Alamos laboratory, and later became known as the father of the atomic bomb, stated that: ‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form, and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another’.

In an example of Lorenz’s Chaos Theory , the success of these tests, which were code-named ‘Trinity’, set in motion a sequence of events that began in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard, and culminated in the Indy’s crew now finding themselves floating atop the Philippine sea, with little chance of being rescued. Whether or not any distress signal was ever received from the sinking Indy has remained a point of contention for historians. Although SOS distress signals were transmitted by the radio operators during the approximately twelve minutes it took for the Indy to sink, the prevalent theory argues that records declassified after the war showed that, in spite of three stations receiving the distress signals, none acted upon the call. One commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him, and a third thought it was a Japanese trap. In effect, no one knew where the crew were, and no one was coming to save them.

Of the nearly 1,200 crew members aboard the Indianapolis that night, approximately 900 survived the sinking. A third of the crew on the voyage had been recently enlisted and it was their first time at sea. In fact, many of the men onboard did not even know how to swim- the navy, somewhat incongruously, did not teach recruits as part of their training at the time. After abandoning ship they had to learn quickly, and it was a matter of life or death. For these young men- many of whom were only in their late teens and early twenties- the worst was, unbelievably, still to come. For beneath the panic stricken survivors, perhaps attracted by the booming of the Indy’s exploding chambers, or lured by the blood trail emitted by the injured and the dead, the boy’s greatest fears were swimming ever closer.

Chaos reigned on the ocean’s surface as the night opened out. Injured men were dotted everywhere, many burned by the inferno that had spread through the ship’s interior before it sank. The first torpedo had ignited thousands of gallons of aviation fuel, while the second hit the ammunition stores, creating scorching  jets of flame. Men had been battered, tumbled and thrown around, as the Indy’s compartments filled with air and exploded as she went down. Others were severely weakened by fumes, shock and near-drowning experiences. They all made up the masses now clinging to life, expecting help to come and end their misery. What they couldn’t know was that rescue  was still a long way off- and a much swifter arrival would ensure many of them would not live to see it.   

With distinctive gun-metal grey fins, flecked in white at the tips like a painter's brush, the oceanic whitetip shark has been well known to mariners for its predilection for following ships. Preferring to cruise near the top of the water column, these sharks often cover vast stretches of empty water searching for food. For this precarious, roaming existence they are fitted with a hardy character, being resilient, bold and opportunistic. Seeking out and investigating each potential food source as if reaching an oasis in the desert, they also lack the more discerning dietary preferences of many other shark species. Occasionally this has resulted in troubling encounters with humans.

The renowned oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau, described oceanic whitetips as ‘the most dangerous of all sharks’ because of their predation on survivors of shipwrecks or downed aircraft in tropical and warm seas. As such, some researchers have concluded that in terms of attacks on humans, they are in fact more prolific than sharks with more notorious reputations, that are typically found closer to shore and regard humans with more caution. Oceanic whitetips are known to pursue food with great persistence- perfectly illustrated in the form of sucker scars on the skin of one individual believed to have dived into the deep to battle a giant squid. Though usually slow and unhurried in their movements while crossing expanses of ocean, when an oceanic whitetip eventually spots a potential food source, it switches into hunting mode, its movements becoming more avid as it begins to probe. If pushed back the shark will often stubbornly persist, undeterred, waiting for its opportunity. It was this relentless predatory behaviour, and the sight of the accompanying white-capped fins, that would soon become burned into the minds of the Indianapolis’ surviving crew.

Though sharks play a central role in sailor’s lore, recorded encounters between the animals and naval men were to that point extremely rare. Nevertheless, the United States Navy has throughout its history, by no means ignored their existence. The Navy’s perception of sharks has frequently oscillated between enemy and allyship status, and, on occasion, military interest in the animals has flirted with the fantastical. In the 1950s, Project ‘Head Gear’ attempted, and ultimately failed, to use electrodes to manipulate the swimming patterns of sharks to deliver bombs to specified targets. At the time of the Indianapolis’ sinking, much less was known about the behaviours and traits of sharks, and naval training methods reflected this. American naval boot camp during the inter-war period, for instance, taught sailors to thrash the water to frighten the predators away. This instruction is now contrary to accepted wisdom, as such movements are perceived as distress signals and can attract sharks. In 1943, The Navy, increasingly aware of the unease of its recruits over what awaited them in the ocean, set out to develop a shark-repellent device. Known as the lifejacket shark-repellent compound packet, it was made of black dye, decomposing shark flesh, and ammonium acetate, and was meant to be deployed by a floating sailor from a pocket kept in his flotation vest. The plume of noxious odours and dark colour was intended to form a protective perimeter, shielding the swimmer from attack.

However, despite research and development efforts, there is no recorded evidence of repellent lifejackets ever being successfully deployed in the field against an attacking shark. In addition, there is no evidence that the Indianapolis had any of these lifejackets on board as part of its lifesaving equipment. What’s more, the jackets were likely designed to defend a man from an encounter with a single shark. This would have provided scant protection to the crew of the Indy, who were slowly becoming surrounded on all sides.

In all likelihood, the sharks now gathered around the shipwrecked men had been following the Indy for days. It is a well-established habit of sharks to track oceangoing vessels, feeding on refuse routinely tossed overboard. The Indy, made of steel, emitted low-grade electrical currents that may have also drawn the animals. Once it had sunk, they languidly trailed the adrift sailors, and as the hours passed, moved in ever closer. Normally solitary drifters, the disturbance had attracted whitetips from far and wide, and though the exact numbers can never be known, by the time the survivors had been in the water for just twelve hours, hundreds of sharks encircled them. As the heat of the daytime tempered into relative cool, the crew, lying in the few rafts, and more often hanging from floating nets or life vests, began to feel things bumping from below- nudges that they initially mistook for the kicks of their comrades treading water nearby. Instinctively the servicemen had gathered in groups, some large, others only a handful of men, seeking company and reassurance while they endured the drawn-out wait for rescue. Scattered miles apart on the currents, these pods became worlds unto themselves, some with salvaged supplies and attempts at military order, others without. As dusk fell at the end of the first day in the water, some men nodded off and slept, if their fear allowed them to rest. They woke often, with a start, staring into the dark, asking ‘who’s there’?

Gus Kayman was huddled with a group when isolated attacks began on the first morning. The seamen first class recalled that the force of some of the attacks would lift men close to him into the air, tearing them limb from limb as the water around turned bloody. The observation that men on the outer rim appeared to be disproportionally targeted, led to desperate jostling to manoeuvre oneself to near the middle of a group. Seargeant Edgar Harrell remembered the encroaching presence of the sharks, recalling- ‘At daybreak the first day, we saw fins, out in the distance. It wasn’t long until a straggler would be out there, and you would hear a blood curdling scream, and you look, and you would see that lifejacket go under. And you dare not to go. It’s happening so often that we’re just losing boys every little bit. When you do go and check, you find maybe that the bottom torso is gone, or he’s disembowelled.’

Marine Corps Private Giles McCoy saw a man slumped in his life vest, apparently asleep, suddenly disappear. Closely watching the patch of water where the man had vanished, he waited for the vest to pop back to the surface, but it never did. Until that point, it seemed to McCoy, that the restless fish had been feeding mostly on the dead, tearing at the bodies as they became submerged. Or they had concentrated on lone, straying swimmers. Visibility in the pristine waters was high, and many estimated that they could see sharks moving below them to a depth of 50 feet. But as dusk began to fall on the second night, the sharks started to hone in on the large groups that had amassed during the past thirty-six hours. When a shark was spotted approaching, men would tense their legs, priming to aim a swift kick at the animal once it made its move on them. Victor Buckett recalled a terrifying moment, recounting- ‘One shark swam right through my legs. And I remember saying to myself, oh boy, I’m glad he didn’t like me’. Those sailors who were naked or not fully clothed seemed to be at greatest risk of attack. This was likely due to the vision of most sharks, as research since has strongly indicated, tending to focus in on colour contrasts, such as that between human skin and a blue sea.

With the arrival of dawn on the third morning, the waters flashed with twisting tails and dorsal fins, but the crew resolved to stay calm. Seaman Jack Cassidy attempted to defuse his anxiety by naming a particularly persistent shark Oscar- eventually burying his knife in the animals snout to deter its interest in him. W hen a man was bitten, numerous survivors recalled clamping their hands over their ears against the erupting screams. However, this stoicism soon vanished when one of the boys was dragged through the water like a fisherman’s bobber being tugged by a large catfish. The victim, clenched in the uplifted jaws of a shark, was pushed at waist level through the surf, screaming for his life. Others disappeared quietly, without a trace, their life vests shooting back to the surface empty, the straps in shreds.

The excited sharks grew more agitated, and the attacks intensified in ferocity, some turning into feeding frenzies. Many of the white tips were attacking using ‘bump and bite manoeuvres’- the bump testing the target’s defences, the subsequent bite delivering the victim to eternity.

Hours slipped past, and the situation among the survivors became increasingly chaotic, as extreme dehydration, exhaustion and the punishing sunshine began to take their toll. As the sun fell on Wednesday evening, men suffering agonising thirst began drinking salt water, becoming delirious as a consequence. Many of the crew had weapons such as knives on their person, and crazed by extreme dehydration or saltwater poisoning, some began fighting and killing one another during the night. Others would hallucinate that the Indy was floating below them, and that fresh water and food was being given out in the galley. Diving down to investigate, and separating themselves from the group, they were quickly picked off by the patrolling whitetips.

By Thursday the 2nd of August, as the fourth morning adrift arrived, the dead outnumbered the living. Then, minutes after 11 a.m., Lieutenant Junior Grade Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, a PV-1 Ventura pilot on a routine sector search, was adjusting a malfunctioning antenna when he happened to spot a winding slick of fuel oil far below. At first, the airman thought it was the trail of an enemy sub. Descending to 300 feet to take a closer look, Gwinn saw the last thing he expected- scattered bands of oil-covered men waving and splashing and slapping the water. A massive rescue mission immediately commenced.

The rescuers involved would be haunted by the sights that awaited them for the rest of their lives. The majority of the dead they found were completely naked, horribly bloated and decomposing. About half of the bodies were shark bitten, some to such a degree that they more closely resembled skeletons. Although the rescuers attempted to drive them away with rifle fire, the sharks were unrelenting, and tirelessly fed and attacked as the operation continued. Spread out across 25 miles, the herculean rescue efforts to leave no man behind lasted well into that evening in a race against time- dehydration, injury and the sharks still claiming lives and extinguishing individuals’ hopes with every passing hour.

According to a navy memorandum, it was probable that at least 200 men who had survived the sinking were killed by sharks. 900 crew went into the water on the 30th of July and just 317 were pulled out. By these dreadful tallies the event ranks as both the worst US naval disaster, as well as the worst shark attack ever recorded. As the rescue ships sailed for safety, Lieutenant Commander Adrian Marks recalled that scores of badly injured men were stacked three deep in the fuselage, softly crying with thirst and pain. One thought would linger and haunt Marks, years later lamenting- ‘I often wondered how many were left out there and just watched those planes and ships finally disappear from sight.’

Little is known about the variables which determine how an individual will react when placed in a situation of extreme duress, such as the one the Indy’s crew found themselves in during that summer of 1945. Why do some choose to fight, treading water for four and a half days, without food or water, as hundreds of men around them slip beneath the surface? Why still do others seek to escape the situation, by any means necessary? Perhaps the most shocking details of the drifting hellscape that materialised were the seemingly bizarre decisions that some made when hallucinating from salt water ingestion and sleep deprivation. As the fourth morning dawned, faced with a perceived remote chance of rescue, and a present reality steeped in pain and suffering, many of the delirious sailors considered death unavoidable. To some, being killed by a shark now seemed preferable to the slower remaining options of drowning or dying of thirst. Those still lucid enough looked on in disbelief as their bewildered former shipmates would suddenly turn from the group and start swimming madly, thrashing their limbs and waiting to be hit. When the impact came, their bodies would be launched skywards, a look of terrified satisfaction settling on their faces as the shark soundlessly propelled them through the water, its yellow serpentine eyes glinting in the morning sun.

There was perhaps some grim cosmic symmetry at work with the military men who chose to end their own lives in this way. The USS Indianapolis crew had been placed in this wretchedness by the Japanese Imperial enemy, namely commander Hashimoto of the I-58. The officer class of the Imperial Japanese army were, at that time, renowned for upholding the ancient samurai suicide ritual of seppuku. Seppuku involved a defeated, or disgraced warrior inflicting a deep wound in his abdomen using his sword, called a tanto blade. His appointed kaishakunin or ‘second’ would then strike a fatal blow to the neck, partially decapitating the warrior and ending his life. For those crazed and broken sailors who beckoned the sharks on with their flailing legs and arms - eagerly awaiting death - their tanto blade were tiers of serrated teeth, their kaishakunin a marauding whitetip.

In the many decades since, though the bloodshed and chaos of The Second World War has long passed, oceanic whitetips have found themselves the victims of an ongoing massacre in the Western Pacific. Once the most common pelagic shark in tropical waters, their numbers have plummeted, declining by 95% since only the mid ‘90s. Unregulated fishing in this Wild West of the high seas has seen tens of thousands caught and killed in tuna nets. Their impressive fins have also become prized in shark-fin soup- a delicacy in parts of East and South-east Asia. This trade- responsible for approximately 70 million shark deaths a year- catches huge numbers of oceanic whitetips. Once the creature’s fins are sliced off, they are promptly dumped overboard, still alive, and let sink to the ocean floor, where they suffocate, bleed out or are eaten by other sea life.

Following the demobilization of the Japanese military at the end of World War Two, submarine commander Mochitsura Hashimoto retired from Japan’s military. In a cruel example of the fortunes of war, upon returning to land, Mochitsura learned that his entire family had been wiped out by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima- key components of which had been carried by the Indy. Once the war ended, Hashimoto chose to live in seclusion, becoming a Shinto priest at a shrine in Kyoto. In December 1990, as an old man, the former commander travelled to Pearl Harbour to reconcile with survivors of the USS Indianapolis. Upon meeting the men, he stated: ‘I came here to pray for your ship mates whose deaths I caused’.  Private Giles McCoy, on behalf of the survivors gathered around him, simply responded: ‘I forgive you.’

In the summer of 2016, Naval historian Richard Hulver discovered records pinpointing the Indy’s location 11 hours before it sank. Using this information, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, funded an expedition that located the wreck, 72 years after the sinking. Lying at a depth of over five and a half kilometres, the USS Indianapolis’ exact location will stay a guarded secret, to be preserved as a military gravesite. The remains of the 600 men who survived the torpedoing- but died adrift in an ocean that covers one third of the earth’s surface- can never be known. They are- and will forever remain- lost at sea.