The living searched for the dead floating in the water and appropriated their lifejackets for survivors who had none. Their ordeal-what is considered the worst shark attack in history-was just beginning.Īs the sun rose on July 30, the survivors bobbed in the water.

Of the 1,196 men aboard, 900 made it into the water alive. Still traveling at 17 knots, the Indianapolis began taking on massive amounts of water the ship sank in just 12 minutes. Then another torpedo from the same submarine hit closer to midship, hitting fuel tanks and powder magazines and setting off a chain reaction of explosions that effectively ripped the Indianapolis in two. As the sun set over the ship, the sailors played cards and read books some spoke with the ship’s priest, Father Thomas Conway.īut shortly after midnight, a Japanese torpedo hit the Indianapolis in the starboard bow, blowing almost 65 feet of the ship’s bow out of the water and igniting a tank containing 3,500 gallons of aviation fuel into a pillar of fire shooting several hundred feet into the sky. The next day was quiet, with the Indianapolis making about 17 knots through swells of five or six feet in the seemingly endless Pacific. But now, on July 28, the Indianapolis sailed from Guam, without an escort, to meet the battleship USS Idaho in the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines and prepare for an invasion of Japan. On August 6, 1945, the weapon would level Hiroshima.

The USS Indianapolis had delivered the crucial components of the first operational atomic bomb to a naval base on the Pacific island of Tinian.

Submarine world of warships