Terrifying & True | USS Indianapolis Sinking: Sharks, Survival and Captain McVay

In twelve minutes, the USS Indianapolis vanished beneath the Philippine Sea. Nearly nine hundred men were left in the water, burned, thirsty, surrounded by sharks, and no rescue force even knew they were there. What followed was one of World War two's most horrifying survival stories. What you were about to pat is burnt to be based on witness accounts, testimonies, and public record. This is terrifying and. August second, nineteen forty five, Tenant Wilburg Win is three thousand feet above the Philippine Sea when a piece of equipment in his patrol plane breaks for the second time that morning.

A trailing radio antenna has come loose. Winn leaves the controls with his co pilot, crawls toward a hatch in the belly of the aircraft and looks down. Below him is an oil slick. It stretches across the ocean for miles. Gwinn brings the plane lower and follows it. At first the shapes in the water look like wreckage, Then one of the moves, and then another. They are men. Some are clustered around rafts, most are floating in life jackets too. Weak to wave. Sharks circle between them. The slick seems to have no end. Gwen radios that he's found survivors from a very large ship.

He doesn't yet know which one. The men below have been waiting for this sound for more than three days. They've survived explosions, fire, drowning, thirst, hallucinations, exposure, and attacks from the sea. Hundreds who entered the water with them are already gone, and until this accidental sighting, no rescue force had been looking for them. The missing ship was the USS Indianapolis, one of the most decorated cruisers in the United States Navy. She had carried a president, she had fought across the Pacific, and days earlier she had delivered components for the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima.

Then she sank in twelve minutes. Nearly twelve hundred men had been aboard. Only three hundred and sixteen would survive. This is not only the story of a torpedo attack, or even of sharks in the water. It's the story of a secret mission, a failure to notice a warship was gone, four days of almost unimaginable endurance, and a captain made to carry blame for a disaster much larger than any one man. The ship disappeared before victory. The truth took more than half a century to surface, and we're telling that story tonight. So make sure you're subscribed on your podcast app for a brand new, terrifying and true story every single Monday.

Before the USS, Indianapolis became a grave, she was a symbol of American power. Commissioned in nineteen thirty two, the heavy cruiser had served as President Franklin Roosevelt's ship of State and later as flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance. During World War II, she fought from the Aleutians to the Central Pacific and earned ten Battle stars. Her crew had already learned how quickly steel could become a coffin. On March thirty first, nineteen for five, during the Battle for Okinawa, a kamikazi struck the ship. The aircraft punched through the deck and exploded beneath the hull. Nine men were killed.

Indianapolis survived, crossed the Pacific under her own power, and entered Mare Island Naval Shipyard for repairs. By July she was ready for sea again. Her next assignment was so secret that almost no one aboard knew what they were carrying. On July sixteenth, Indianapolis left San Francisco at high speed. In guarded compartments were bomb assemblies, instruments, and the enriched uranium projectile for Little Boy, the atomic weapon later dropped on Hiroshima. A metal canister holding the enriched uranium was welded to the deck in protected flag Officer quarters. Manhattan Project personnel traveled with the ship under cover identities.

The sailors saw armed guards and sealed cargo. Rumors spread. Some imagined radar equipment. Others guessed that whatever sat below deck might shorten the war. They were right, though not in a way they could have ever understood. Indianapolis delivered the cargo to Tinian on July twenty sixth. The weapon assembled there would be used against Hiroshima one week after the ship had went down in one of the most consequential and morally contested acts in human history, but the cruiser was not sent home. After complete her mission, she continued to Guam, took on personnel, and received orders to sail for Lete in the Philippines for training before the expected invasion of Japan.

The final compliment was a mixture of combat veterans and men who had only recently joined the ship. Some had crossed oceans with Indianapolis, others were still learning her passageways, ladders, and emergency stations. None had been told that the cruiser was moving through the last days of her life. The wider war encouraged dangerous confidence. Okinawa had been secured. American aircraft attacked the Japanese home islands almost daily. Planning for an invasion continued, but many sailors could feel that the end was close. That made the remaining danger easier to underestimate, not less real Japanese submarines were still at sea and their commanders were still under orders to attack.

Indianapolis sailed alone. That fact has become one of the stories enduring accusations, but it does need a little context. Indianapolis was fast and large warships often traveled without escort when commanders judged the risk to be acceptable. Yet she was not equipped for anti submarine detection. She depended on lookouts, speed routing, and the protection of information. Some of that protection failed. Vay was not given all the submarine intelligence available to higher command. He was not told that the destroyer escort USS Underhill had been sunk by a Japanese submarine in the wider region just days earlier. He asked whether an escort or another ship was available for the passage.

None was a sign. His sailing orders allowed him discretion about zigzagging. The repeated course changes intended to complicate a submarine's aim. Visibility had worsened during the night of July twenty ninth, and McVeigh suspended the maneuver. Later, a break in the cloud cover helped silhouette the cruiser against the moonlit horizon. Below that horizon, Japanese submarine I fifty eight was stillhunting. Its commander, Mochisura Hashimoto, knew Japan was nearing defeat. He also knew the war had not ended. When a lookout reported a dark Silhouette, Hashimoto maneuvered into position and prepared a spread of six torpedoes. The men aboard Indianapolis did not see him.

At about twelve fifteen on the morning of July thirtieth, the first torpedo struck. The explosion destroyed the starboard bow men sleeping in forward compartments died before they could wake. The ship's momentum forced tons of water into the open hull. Fuel ignited, smoke and steam filled passageways. A second torpedo hit amidships beneath areas crowded with sailors. Power failed, interior communications collapsed. The cruiser began listing hard to starboard and settling by the bow. Those who escaped their bunks entered a ship that no longer made any sense. Decks became slopes. Familiar corridors ended in flame or twisted. Metal hatches wouldn't open.

Men climbed ladders in darkness while sea water rose behind them. Captain McVeigh reached the bridge and understood almost immediately that Indianapolis could not be saved. An abandoned ship order was given, but damaged communications meant it could not reach everyone. The ship was disappearing too quickly for an organized evacuation. Life rafts were cut loose or thrown overboard, Some inflated, some did not. Many men jumped with only kapic life jackets. Others entered the water without flotation at all. Radio operators attempted to send distress traffic, but the paper records sank with the ship, and later claims about who received what have never been fully resolved, not cleanly anyway.

What is certain is simpler and crueler. No message produced a rescue, and no immediate alarm followed. About twelve minutes after the first impact, Indianapolis rolled over her stern rose into the air. Men in the water watched propellers and steel tower above them, then slide into the dark. The suction pulled some sailors under, Others were struck by debris or coated in fuel oil. Men surfaced among mattresses, crates, cork floats, twisted metal, and the dead. Some gave flotation to injured shipmates and searched the wreckage for anything else that would hold their weight. The sea did not become quiet.

As the ship disappeared, fuel burned on patches of water. Men shouted names into darkness, trying to learn whether friends had escaped. Officers called for survivors to form circles around rafts and cargo nets. The scattered groups had no way to know how far the sinking had spread them apart. Roughly three hundred men died in the attack and sinking. About nine hundred reached the sea alive. For a few minutes, survival may have felt possible. The explosions were over. The ship had gone quiet. Men found friends, gathered around rafts and called into the darkness, hoping and praying someone would hear them.

The crew surely believed somebody had heard the distress call. Surely Layte would report the ship overdue. Surely aircraft would arrive after sunrise. Indianapolis was too large to vanish, but the Navy's movement reporting system didn't work in that way. Responsibility for tracking the cruiser was divided among commands at Leyte. Paperwork and assumptions allowed Indianapolis to be treated as though she had arrived. Navy plotting boards often showed the predicted movement of large ships, rather than positions confirmed by direct reports. Once a ship was expected at its destination, it could disappear from one board before anyone had verified that it appeared on another.

Indianapolis was overdue, and at least one officer knew she had not arrived, but delayed arrivals were common. Responsibilities were fragmented, and no clear rule required an immediate missing ship alert. A later court of inquiry called the reporting system faulty. The result was astonishing. A heavy cruiser carrying nearly twelve hundred people vanished between major American bases, and the machinery built to track it didn't ask where it had gone. The first night passed without rescue, mourning revealed what darkness had hidden. The men were spread across miles of ocean. Daylight gave the survivors a horizon, but nothing on it.

The Pacific was colm enough to expose them and rough enough to separate them. Oil clung to hair, skin, and clothing. It burned eyes and entered mouths. Men vomited. Some were badly burned. Others had broken limbs, internal injuries, or wounds that could not be treated. Lieutenant Commander Lewis Haynes, the ship's senior medical officer, had almost no equipment. He could not perform surgery or replenish fluids. All he could do was organize. Haines gathered men into a large group and tried to impose rules. Stay together, conserve strength, do not drink sea water. He examined the wounded with his hands and voice, because there was little left to use.

Chaplain Thomas Conway moved among groups of survivors, praying with the frightened and giving comfort to the dying. He kept swimming from clustered to cluster, long after exhaustion should have stopped him. Marine Captain Edward Park tried to keep delirious men from leaving the group. As dehydration advanced, some sailors became convinced Indianapolis was still beneath them, stocked with food and fresh water. They announced that they were going down to the ship, slipped away and disappeared. Park repeatedly pulled men back. There is a biological cruelty in thirst at sea. Human kidneys cannot remove the ocean's concentration of salt without spending more water than the drink provides.

Seawater does not relieve dehydration, it accelerates it. Men who drank became violently ill. Confusion deepened into hallucination. Some saw islands or heard voices, or believed rain was falling when the sky was clear. Discipline became harder to maintain because the sick no longer understood why anyone was stopping them from swimming towards rescue that didn't exist. The life jackets were failing as well. Kapik could keep a man afloat for a time, but days in the water compressed and saturated the material. Jackets rowed lower. Men had to kick to keep their mouths above the surface. Rafts were overcrowded, floating nets and scraps of wreckage became precious.

The groups developed crude routines. Men counted heads. Those still thinking clearly took turns watching the wounded, or shaking awake someone whose face had slipped just a bit too close to the water. A sailor might spend hours holding up a stranger and then discover by daylight that the man had died during the night. Letting go could feel like be trail, even when keeping the body endangered everyone nearby. Food was almost irrelevant next to water. A few survivors found scraps of rations among the debris, but dry food intensified thirst. The ocean remained everywhere, glittering against cracked lips, offering the one thing they couldn't safely drink.

Then the sharks arrived in greater numbers. Survivors described fins moving around the groups and bodies being struck from below. Men heard screams, saw blood spread through the oil, and learned that isolation was dangerous. They packed together, kicked at approaching animals, and tried not to look at what was happening beyond the center of the group. The sharks are the most famous part of the Indianapolis story because they provide a visible monster. The exact number of men they killed is unknown. Many sailors died from blast injuries, drowning, exposure, dehydration, salt poisoning, and exhaustion. Some bodies were scavenged after death.

Any precise shark death figure is purely speculation, but that doesn't make the attacks any less real. It simply makes the ordeal larger than the legend. The first day became a second night. Heat left the water, and men who had baked beneath the sun began to shiver. Darkness erased the horizon. Every bump against a leg jested a shark. Every voice that stopped answering meant someone else had died or drifted away. The second day brought more sun and fewer voices. Groups separated as wind and current carried them across an area eventually measured in dozens of miles. Men tied themselves together with belts or held one arm under the other.

The dead remained among the living because exhausted sailors sometimes couldn't release them, and because bodies still offered flotation. Conway continued praying, Park continued intercepting men who wanted to swim toward imaginary safety. Neither Conway nor Park survived to be rescued. Their deaths are important because heroism in this story was rarely a single dramatic act. Often it was a man spending the last of his strength to keep someone else alive for another hour. By the third day, time itself had become an injury. Skin blistered and peeled, tongues swelled, salt sores opened beneath life jackets, Oil and sea water damaged eyes, men drifted in and out of consciousness.

Those who still understood the situation had to decide whether to tell others the truth that no aircraft had appeared, no ship had answered, and hope was becoming difficult to defend. Beyond the horizon, the American war machine remained in enormous bases, Ships, radios, and patrol aircraft covered the Pacific. None had been assigned to find Indianapolis because no command had recognized that a disaster had occurred. This was not intentional abandonment. To the men in the water, the distinction meant very little. They had survived the enemy. Now they were dying inside an administrative blind spot. On the morning of August, second Lieutenant Wilburg Gwynn's patrol plane took off from pelelu on a routine anti submarine mission.

A faulty trailing antenna brought him to the belly of the hatch, and the oil slick brought him lower. At eleven eighteen, he saw the men. The discovery depended on a ch pane of accidents, a patrol assigned to another purpose, a troublesome antennae, a pilot leaving his seat, and a glance through a hatch at exactly the right patch of ocean. Had Gwynn looked a few minutes earlier or later, the slick might have been passed beneath a wing unseen. Gwynn's first report estimated thirty survivors. As he followed the slick, the number became one hundred and fifty, then more.

He dropped what rafts and emergency supplies he carried and remained overhead while the message moved through command channels. For the survivors, the plane was proof that the world still existed. Some men waved, others cried, while some were too weak to react. Lieutenant Robert Adrian Marx that afternoon in a Pby Catalina seaplane. He and his crew dropped rafts and survival kits, then surveyed groups scattered across the water surface. Ships would not reach them until after dark. Marx faced an impossible choice. The largest clusters had numbers, rafts and organization. Men floating alone or in pairs might be dead before a ship could arrive.

He decided to land open ocean landings were strongly discouraged because a heavy swell could tear a pby apart. Marx had never attempted one. He brought the Catalina down anyway, striking the surface hard and damaging the aircraft. Then the crew began pulling men aboard. The interior filled quickly. Survivors were laid across the wings and tied in place with parachute cord so they wouldn't slide into the sea. Marx taxied from one isolated group to another until fifty six men were on or inside the aircraft. After dark, two crewmen took a rubber boat toward cries they could hear but couldn't see.

In choosing the isolated Marx passed Haines large group. The men saw the plane approaching, cheered, and then watched it turn away. Marx carried that decision for years. When he later asked Haynes whether he had been wrong, the doctor told him he had made the right choice. Night fell before the first rescue ship had arrived. Lieutenant Commander W. Graham Claytor, junior of the destroyer Escort USS Cecil J. Doyle new submarines might still be nearby. He also knew hundreds of men were scattered in darkness. He ordered the ship's searchlight pointed into the low clouds, creating a beacon visible across the sea.

To survivors who had watched empty horizons for days, that light was almost impossible to believe. Doyle reached Mark's damaged Catalina shortly after midnight and began taking men aboard. The destroyer Escort ultimately carried ninety three survivors, including the fifty six crowded onto the pby Mark's aircraft had been damaged beyond safe flight and was later destroyed by gunfire so it would not remain adrift. Six more ships joined the search, moving among the rafts, oil, slicks and bodies, their crews slowed engines to listen for faint voices. Small boats entered the darkness. Sailors leaned over nets to pull aboard men who could no longer climb, no longer speak, or even lift an arm.

Some survivors were found only because a hand moved or a face turned toward a light. The rescue continued into August third. Surface ships remained in the area afterward, searching a field of debris that stretched for roughly fifty miles. Only three hundred and sixteen men were recovered alive. Nearly nine hundred were dead. Some had gone down with the cruiser. Most had survived the sinking and then died while waiting to be found. Rescue ended the physical ordeal, but it did not end the story. Captain McVeigh had entered the water with his crew and endured the same days of thirst and exposure.

After his recovery, he expected an investigation. Instead, he became the only United States Navy captain in World War II court martialed for losing a ship due to enemy action. The Navy charged him with failing to order an abandoned ship promptly and with hazarding Indianapolis by failing to zigzag. He was acquitted on the first charge and convicted on the second. The decision to prosecute had not been inevitable. Admiral Spruance and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz opposed a court martial. The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, ordered one after Fleet Admiral Ernest King recommended it. McVeigh went on trial in December of nineteen forty five, only months after the country had celebrated victory.

The prosecution brought Mochisura Hashimoto, the commander of the I fifty eight, to Washington, to testify. Hashimoto explained that his firing solution and spread of torpedoes could have struck the cruiser, whether or not she had been zigzagging. The choice to zigzag had also been left to mcveigh's discretion under the conditions described in his orders, Yet the conviction still stood. The public had learned of the ship's life loss on August fifteen, the same day the end of the war dominated American headlines. Families received telegrams before many understood what had happened. The scale of the deaths, the secrecy of the mission, and the delayed rescue created pressure for a comprehensible cause.

A single captain was easier to put on trial than an entire network of commands, assumptions, and missing procedures. The conviction gave a human face to a disaster created by many factors in complete intelligence, no escort, a ship vulnerable to submarine attack, uncertain distress traffic, a broken arrival reporting system, and a rescue launched only after a chance sighting. The Secretary of the Navy later remitted McVeigh sentence and nimits restored him to active duty. McVeigh retired as a rear admiral in nineteen forty nine, but the official conviction and private blame followed him. Some families of the dead sent letters accusing him of killing their sons.

In nineteen sixty eight, Charles McVeigh died by suicide. The survivors did not accept that his conviction should be the final word. They argued that their captain had been turned into a container for failures the Navy did not want to hold as a system. Public memory followed a different path. In nineteen seventy five, the film Jaws placed the Indianapolis into popular culture through Quint's Unforgettable monologue. The scene preserved the terror of the men in the world, but it also fixed the disaster in many minds as a shark story. The sharks were real. They were not the reason rescue took so long, and they were not the reason McVeigh was blamed.

Decades after the sinking, a middle school student named Hunter Scott began interviewing survivors for a history project. His work helped renew national attention on the court martial. Survivors, historians, lawmakers, and even Hashimoto pressed for the record to be corrected. In the year two thousand, Congress declared that the American people should recognize mcveigh's lack of culpability and that his military record should reflect his exoneration. In two thousand one, the Secretary of the Navy ordered the record amended. The correction came fifty five years after the trial and thirty two years after mcveigh's death. In two thousand seventeen, a civilian expedition led by Paul Allen located the wreck of Indianapolis more than three miles beneath the Philippine Sea.

The ship had broken apart during the sinking, scattering sections across the seabed cameras found gun mounts, sections of hall, personal objects, and the number thirty five, still visible in the darkness. The discovery answered the question of where the ship rested, but it was not treated as salvage. The site was documented and left undisturbed. It's now a grave of war. For Memorial Day, the USS Indianapolis asks something more difficult than admiration. It asks for accurate memory. The men who died were not a number, a movie monologue, or a frightening piece of shark lore. They were sailors and marines who survived one disaster only to be trapped inside another.

Some died instantly, Some spent days keeping strangers afloat. Some used their final strength to pray with the frightened, restrain the delirious, and hold a wounded shipmate's head above water. Remembering them also means remembering the failures around them. Honor does not require us to make the story neat and tidy. It requires us to tell the truth about the courage, the confusion, the institutiontional mistakes, and the cost paid by the people who had no control over any of it. At the USS Indianapolis National Memorial, the names of the ship's final company are cut into stone beside a representation of the cruiser.

That's where the story finally belongs, not an account of shark attacks, but in individual names, each attached to a home, a family, and a life interrupted just before peace. Indianapolis carried part of the weapon that would announce the atomic age. Then the ship descended into a darkness where no human being would see her again for seventy two years. But the most haunting absence was never the wreck. It was the empty home horizon above. The survivors twelve minutes to lose a ship more than three days before anyone saw the men, fifty five years to clear the captain's record.

While the ocean kept the USS Indianapolis, it does not have to keep the truth as well. Terrifying and True is narrated by Henrique Couto. It's executive produced by Rob Fields and bobble Toopia dot com and produced by Dan Wilder, with original theme music by Ray Mattis. If you have a story you think we should cover on Terrifying and True, send us an email at weekly Spooky at gmail dot com, and if you want to support us for as little as one dollar a month, go to weeklyspooky dot com slash join. Your support for as little as one dollar a month keeps the show going.

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