The heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis had raced across the Pacific with components of the first atomic bomb.
But two torpedoes in the dead of night destroyed that triumph – sparking the deadliest shark attack in history.
The disaster even served as the terrifying real-life inspiration for the character Quint’s famous monologue in the movie Jaws.
Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine’s first torpedo blew off the ship’s starboard bow, igniting 13,250 litres of aviation fuel into a tower of fire.
Seconds later, a second blast ripped through the ship near its powder magazines.
The Indianapolis, still moving at 17 knots, shuddered, broke and disappeared beneath the Pacific in just 12 minutes.
Of 1,196 men on board, around 900 made into the water alive.
But their nightmare had only just begun.
At sunrise, survivors clustered into groups, trying to cling to hope amid the chaos.
Few had rafts and many had no life jackets.
The sun beat down mercilessly, thirst took over, hallucinations crept in. And then sharks came.
Big, muscular and fearless oceanic whitetips closed in first on the floating dead – before the beasts turned their attention to the living.
Recalling the horror, survivor Loel Dean Cox told the BBC: “Every now and then, like lightning, [a shark] would come straight up and take a sailor and take him straight down.
“One came up and took the sailor next to me. It was just somebody screaming, yelling or getting bit.”
Dr Lerwis Hayes, the ship’s chief medical officer, remembered: “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.
“The real young ones – you take away their hope, you take away their water and food – they would drink salt water and then would go fast.”
Sharks circled endlessly, drawn by the explosions, the blood, and the frantic kicking of the exhausted men.
Survivors resorted to pushing the corpses away to spare the living.
They organised “shark watches”, beating the water when a fin cut too close. It helped – sometimes.
Abandoned by their own Navy
The Indianapolis had managed to send SOS signals as she sank, but none were acted on.
Intelligence had even intercepted the Japanese submarine’s boast about sinking an American ship, which was dismissed as a trick.
No one noticed when the Indianapolis failed to reach her destination.
The men drifting below had no idea that no rescue party had been dispatched.
Cox recalled the disaster, saying: “They were big. Some of them I swear were 15ft (4m) long.
“They were continually there, mostly feeding off the dead bodies.
“Thank goodness, there were lots of dead people floating in the area.”
But heat, thirst, and salt poisoning killed far more than the sharks.
Men drank seawater and became delirious, sometimes dragging shipmates under as they succumbed.
Life jackets waterlogged and sagged, and bodies gave out.
“You could barely keep your face out of the water,” Cox said.
Only on the fourth day did a passing Navy plane spot the survivors by chance. Its pilot radioed: many men in the water.
A seaplane crewed by Lt. Adrian Marks raced in, dropping life rafts.
When Marks saw sharks attacking survivors, he ignored orders and landed in the swells, hauling the most vulnerable aboard.
Through the night, the destroyer Cecil J. Doyle steamed toward the scene, firing its searchlight into the sky as a beacon of hope.
Cox said: “Sometime during the night, I remember strong arms were pulling me up into a little bitty boat.
“Just knowing I was saved was the best feeling you can have.”
Of the roughly 900 men who entered the water, only 316 made out alive.
The hunt for blame and an underwater grave
The Navy court-martialed Captain Charles B. McVay III – one of the survivors – accusing him of failing to zigzag.
At trial, prosecutors even called the commander of the attacking submarine, Mochitsura Hashimoto.
To their frustration, he testified that zigzagging “would have had little effect.”
McVay was still convicted.
He lived with that verdict – and the families’ hate mail – for decades.
In 1968 he died by suicide, with a toy sailor in his hand.
Only in 2001 did the Navy clear his name.
The wreck of the USS Indianapolis was located in 2017, more than five metres beneath the Pacific.
It remains undisturbed, serving as a tomb for hundreds of soldiers.
Naval History and Heritage Command director Sam Cox wrote that year: “Even in the worst defeats and disasters, there is valour and sacrifice that deserves to never be forgotten.
“[They] can serve as inspiration to current and future sailors enduring situations of mortal peril.”
The sinking of the Indianapolis is remembered as one of the deadliest naval disasters in American history and what experts call the worst shark attack ever recorded.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission
