Into the jaws of hell: the WW2 sinking of USS Indianapolis

While not everything said by Quint – played to perfection by Robert Shaw – was factually accurate, the scene captured the tragedy with harrowing authenticity. It got survivors who saw Steven Spielberg’s movie talking about what they went through, many for the first time, and helped ensure the Indianapolis would not be forgotten.

By mid-1945, USS Indianapolis, or ‘Indy’ to the crew, had earned 10 battle stars serving in the Pacific Theatre, but its war looked to be over when damaged by a Japanese kamikaze fighter off Okinawa. Instead, while at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco Bay, orders came in to transport a mystery cargo with all haste to the island of Tinian. No one, including the captain, could know what was inside the two cylindrical containers and large crate brought aboard and kept under armed guard at all times.

The purpose of the top-secret mission was to deliver the enriched uranium and some of the parts that would make the atomic bomb, Little Boy: the one to be dropped on Hiroshima. The crew’s guesses of airplane engines, whiskey to celebrate the end of the war, or scented toilet paper for the Pacific commander, were way off.

The Indy completed the voyage without incident in just 10 days, arriving on 26 July and met by a host of high-ranking officers impatient to take control of the cargo. The job done, the ship headed for Guam before making for the Philippines. It wouldn’t get there.

Where and when did the Indianapolis sink?

Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the submarine I-58 snuck up on the Indianapolis and fired six torpedoes. Japan may have been near defeat, but commander Mochitsura Hashimoto intended to keep fighting. One torpedo slammed into the starboard bow and another hit amidships, setting off huge explosions and causing the ship to list severely. It took only 12 minutes to sink.

The Japanese sub had prepared for another attack before realising that was not needed and making a swift exit from the area. Of the nearly 1,200 men on board, around 900 survived the sinking and went into the water when the order was given to abandon ship. With many terribly burned or injured, they left with the barest provisions and limited numbers of lifejackets, and in the darkness they could not see that they were leaping into the gloopy oil slick leaking from the engines.

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes

There was a catalogue of catastrophic failings that doomed the Indianapolis. The ship did not have sonar to detect submarines and the captain’s request for an escort had been denied, despite naval intelligence of enemy activity in the area. Meanwhile at Leyte, it was not regulation to record an arrival, meaning that nothing was done when the Indy failed to show up when expected on 31 July.

Perhaps most egregiously, although multiple distress signals had been sent before the ship went down – warrant officer Leonard Woods gave his life staying in the radio room – the three stations that received them failed to act. One commander was allegedly drunk, another had demanded he not be disturbed as he played cards, and the third dismissed the message as a Japanese trap.

Hundreds of miles from land and in shark-infested waters, the men waited for a rescue that would never come. The hours turned into days. Using lifejackets or, if lucky, a handful of rafts, floater nets and debris from the wreck, they bobbed on the surface in small groups.

How many Indianapolis crew were attacked by sharks?

During daylight, the sun burned them; at night, they shivered from unbearable cold. They had no drinkable water (other than what could be cupped in their hands during a brief spell of rain) and no food, save for a handful of men who eventually salvaged some Spam and crackers.

All the while, men were dying. Hundreds of sharks, mostly oceanic whitetips and tigers, circled the groups and got so close they bumped into legs. At first, they went for the mounting dead bodies, but grew bolder with each attack until wrenching screams and men being pulled under became frequent occurrences.

Sharks were not the only killers, though. More succumbed to dehydration, hypothermia and exhaustion; others choked on the oil or were poisoned by salt water. Drinking too much caused hallucinations, from imaginary islands in the distance to fresh water being served on the Indy wreck at the bottom of the sea.

The descent into madness caused some men to turn on their friends, attacking them in the belief they were the enemy. One last killer was losing the will to live. By the third day, many could not fight any longer and let themselves sink under the surface.

On 2 August, the fourth day in the water, salvation finally came when a passing PV-1 Ventura on a routine patrol, piloted by Chuck Gwinn, happened to spot the survivors, almost impossibly from 3,000 feet up. Gwinn – the ‘Angel’ – sent for help, and a PBY seaplane arrived on the scene.

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Pilot Adrian Marks ignored orders not to land on the water and loaded up 56 men, even laying them out on the wings. Although he could not take off, his plane became a safe haven. By now, a major rescue operation was underway with ships racing to the spot.

The first, USS Cecil J Doyle, arrived after dark and the captain turned on the searchlights, against wartime regulations, as a beacon. Since the survivors were spread over many miles of ocean, the rescue went well into the fifth day – with shark attacks and deaths continuing the whole time.

How many survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis?

While the sharks were by no means responsible for all the deaths, of the around 900 men who went into the water – on 30 July, not 29 June – only 316 came out again. Four days after the rescue began, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima; the survivors learned of the first nuclear weapon from their hospital beds in Guam.

By then, their tragedy was being buried. News of the Indianapolis would not be made public until the day of Japan’s surrender. And for the captain, the ordeal was far from over.

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Jaws brought the story of the Indianapolis to new generations and gave voice to the remaining survivors, many of whom had struggled to talk about their experiences in the decades afterwards. It is why when many people hear the name Indianapolis to this day, their reaction is similar to Hooper’s.

The 316 men that Quint embodies went through nothing short of hell. They suffered unimaginable hardships, they lost friends, they witnessed countless horrors, and they carried their pain for the rest of their lives.

This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed