And help didn’t come, in part because the ship’s distress calls were ignored. Meanwhile, sharks circled, eating the dead and, eventually, attacking the surviving men- the worst shark attack in history (and an incident famously referenced in the movie Jaws). For days, they floated on parts of the annihilated warship, suffering from starvation and dehydration, their burnt skin blistering in the unforgiving sun. That was just the start of the ordeal for the roughly 900 sailors that survived the initial blast. The flaming ship sank in just 12 minutes. It came in the form of two torpedoes shot from the I-58, a Japanese submarine commanded by Mochitsura Hashimoto. Piece of the USS Indianapolis discovered by the expedition crew of Paul Allen’s research vessel R/V Petrel. After completing its mission, and following a quick stop in Guam, the ship was heading toward the Philippines carrying nearly 1,200 sailors-without an escort-when disaster struck on the night of July 30, 1945. As the war hurtled toward its end, Indianapolis was tasked with bringing parts for “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, from San Francisco to the Mariana Islands. McVay III, it supported multiple campaigns throughout the Pacific, including helping provide cover for the Iwo Jima landings in 1945.īut its most famous mission was top secret. In 1941, it narrowly missed the Pearl Harbor attack while participating in military exercises a few hundred miles away. Navy’s largest-ever single loss of life at sea: an event that left hundreds of sailors dead, hundreds more ambushed by sharks and the American public reeling at the magnitude of a tragedy that took place so close to the end of World War II.īefore it plunged to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Indianapolis, named after the capital city of Indiana, played a critical role in the war. But the heavy cruiser isn’t just a cool maritime find it’s a graveyard. More than 72 years after it sank in July 1945, the final resting place of USS Indianapolis has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. In August 2017, researchers announced they had found one of history’s most significant-and sought-after-shipwrecks.
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