July 30, 1945: The Fate of the USS Indianapolis

July 30, 1945, 80 years ago: The USS Indianapolis is sunk. And that's far from the end of it for its crew.

The Indianapolis was a Portland-class heavy cruiser, launched in 1931. In July 1945, in what turned out to be the closing days of World War II -- of course, nobody knew that at the time, even President Harry Truman didn't know it for sure -- it made a top-secret trip to the Tinian Naval Base, to deliver uranium and other components for "Little Boy," which would become the 1st atomic bomb used in combat.

It then left for the Philippines, for training day. Shortly after midnight on July 30, the Japanese submarine I-58 torpedoed it, and it sank. There were 879 crewmen who died immediately. There were 890 left, in lifeboats in the open ocean. They faced exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and the threat of another Japanese attack.

None of that happened. But they were attacked, by sharks. Hundreds of them were drawn to the wreck by the noise of the explosions and the scent of blood in the water. After picking off the dead and wounded, they began attacking survivors. The number of deaths attributed to sharks ranges from a few dozen to 150. This would inspire the monologue by Quint, played by Robert Shaw, in the 1975 film Jaws.

Because the Indianapolis' mission was top secret, and they had to maintain radio silence at all costs, it took 4 days for the Navy to find out about them and rescue them. Only 316 men survived. It was the greatest loss of life at sea from a single ship in U.S. Navy history.

I-58, the Japanese submarine that sank Indianapolis, was taken over by U.S. forces, and scuttled in 1946. Her commanding officer, Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, was never charged with war crimes. In fact, he became the 1st former enemy military man ever to testify in the court-martial of an American one. The Indianapolis' commander, Charles B. McVay III, was charged with negligence for his role in the ship's sinking. Hashimoto testified that there was nothing that McVay could have done that would have prevented I-58 from sinking his ship.

It ended up not mattering: McVay was convicted of negligence. To this day, he remains the only commander of a U.S. Navy ship to be subject to a court-martial for losing his ship in an act of war, let alone to be convicted for it. Despite a Silver Star and a Bronze Star to his credit, McVay was stripped of his seniority. This sentence was later overturned, but he never got over it, and took his own life in 1968. Hashimoto became a priest in Japan's Shinto religion, and lived until 2000.