Remembering the Worst Naval Disaster In American History (The USS Indianapolis)—A Story Featured in the Movie “Jaws”

And we continue with our Memorial Day special here on Our American Stories. Up next, the story of America’s worst naval disaster. It took a movie about a shark terrorizing a small New England town in the summer of nineteen seventy-five for millions of Americans to discover the story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It was the night scene in Jaws, in the cabin of the Orca, as the intrepid shark hunters used some much-needed downtime to drink some booze and swap some fish stories. It’s a scene anyone not living under a rock for the past half-century has seen, and it’s worth sharing before telling the rest of the story of that eight whole day back in late July of nineteen forty-five. In the cabin, sharing those fish stories was the town cop, played by Roy Scheider; the new-age shark hunter, played by Richard Dreyfuss; and the old-school sea captain named Quint, played by Robert Shaw. The scene begins with some laughs, but when Quint tells the guys he’d been a crew member of the USS Indianapolis, everything turned somber. He proceeded to tell the boys one of the most brutal fish stories of all time. Here’s Robert Shaw.

Eleven hundred men went into the water. This will went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger thirteen foot, very first life. Chief sharks came cruising. So we formed ourselves into tight groups, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man. Then, when he starts bounding, hollering, and screaming. Sometimes a shark goowy, sometimes ELOI. Sometimes a shark looks right into you, right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, again: lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye.

I was a teenager when I saw that scene, and I was not unfamiliar with the costs of war. My mother’s only brother volunteered to join the army in nineteen forty-four. He never came home. He’s buried in a gravesite in Saint Laurent, France. The next day I went to my local library and started reading up. Remarkably, the scene was accurate in almost all aspects. It turns out the USS Indianapolis was no stranger to adversity. The ship, commissioned in nineteen thirty, was struck by a kamikaze attack during the Battle of Okinawa. The ship was sent back to California for an overhaul and was soon at sea again, this time on a top-secret mission, transporting critical components of the atomic bomb to Tinian Island, fifteen hundred miles from Japan. The uranium on the ship was nearly half of the total U.S. supply. The crew was unaware of the nature of the cargo or its intended use, but the commanding officers knew something urgent was happening. They were under direct orders from President Truman that the ship was not to be diverted from its mission for any reason. What was on that ship? A week later, the world would know the answer. The Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on a city that was until then pretty much unknown: Hiroshima. After completing its mission, the Indianapolis headed back to sea. Shortly after midnight on July thirtieth, halfway between Guam and Leyte Gulf, a Japanese sub blasted the unescorted Indianapolis, sparking an explosion that split the ship and caused it to sink in twelve minutes, with three hundred men trapped inside. The nine hundred crew members not trapped in the wreckage found themselves in the water. One of those men, a real-life Quint, was Corporal Edgar Harrold, a twenty-year-old Marine. He and the surviving seamen were left out in the Pacific in the sweltering summer heat, with nothing but a small kapok life jacket to keep them afloat. Here is Harrold at Stanley Heights Baptist Church, not long after he wrote his memoir, “Out of the Depth,” talking about that first day lost at sea.

The next morning, the first day, we had company. When I say we had company, at any given time, you could see a big fin cutting around and around. They’re about eighty of us, and you can imagine the fright from that. We had trouble staying together. So we said, “You know, hook your jacket on to the next person.” This formed a circle, and try to keep everyone in. And when we’d go up on a swell, then you’d kind of drift together. But it isn’t long till someone begins to hallucinate. Maybe he’s been injured, and he can see in his mind, he can see an oasis out there. I had one swim up to me, “Hey, Marine, see that island over there? I just came from there. Captain Parks, Lieutenant and staffers over there, they’re having a picnic. Want you to come over there, come and join them?” I knew better, but nearly convincing. And then I’d just see him swim away, then to his imagination, and hear a blood-curdling scream and see that kapok go under, and then momentarily a kapok would bring the body back to the surface. But you dared not to go and check who your buddy was because you could see all kinds of fins coming to the blood, and you steered clear completely. But sometime later, maybe you took the dog tag off of that whomever that was in checking him, you find out the bottom torso was gone or was disemboweled.

Harrold then told the story about the second day lost at sea and about his Marine buddy, Spooner.

Spooner said to me, he said, “Harrold, we don’t know if word got off the ship. No one’s looking for us.” And Spooner said, “I can’t take this anymore. He said, ‘I’m, I’m going to commit suicide.’ Spooner, you’re not. How are you going to do it?” He said, “I’m going to swim down, so far I’ll drown before I come back up.” I said, “Spooner, there are only two Marines in this group, and there are going to be two Marines when the help comes, and the help will come.”

By day three, only seventeen of the original eighty men in Harrold’s group remained alive. Here is Harrold. About that third day, things were looking grim.

About one o’clock there that third day, we heard voices. Now, may I say from experience, there are times when you can hear something that’s not there. There are times when you can see something out there that’s not there.

Believe me.

Third day, noon, seventeen of us, and we were praying. Everyone that would pray audibly, would pray. Some of us knew to whom we were praying. I remember this one saying, “Dear God, if you’re out there, I don’t want to die. I’ve got a son back home I’ve never seen.” We were desperate.

The next day, Day Four, while on a routine patrol in his PV-1 Ventura, Lieutenant Chuck Win spotted Harrold and his fellow seamen and Marines floating adrift in the Pacific and immediately dropped a life raft and radio transmitter. Soon all air and surface rescue units were dispatched to the scene. Of the eleven hundred and ninety-six crew members on board the Indianapolis, only three hundred and sixteen survived. News of the tragedy wasn’t released until August fifteenth, V-J Day. Questions remain about why the rescue took so long. Some argued that no distress signal was sent. Others argued that it was fear that the messages were originated by the Japanese in an attempt to ambush rescue ships. Others still that communications lagged because of the top-secret status of the ship’s mission. The answer is still unclear. One thing is certain: the sinking of the Indianapolis was not just the worst naval disaster in American history. It was the worst mass shark attack in world history. And that’s no fish tale. Harrold’s autobiography can be found at Indie survivor dot org. On the website is a piece of scripture from Psalm he thought was worth sharing, and he’s worth ending this story with: “Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.” Harrold died on May eighth, twenty twenty-one, in Murray, Kentucky, at the age of ninety-six. He was the last surviving Marine from the USS Indianapolis. Corporal Edgar Harrold’s story, the crew members of the Indianapolis’s story, the story of so many seamen lost at sea and in battle. Here on Our American Stories.