Terrifying & True | USS Indianapolis Sinking: Sharks, Survival and Captain McVay

The USS Indianapolis sinking remains one of the most devastating naval disasters of World War II. On July 30, 1945, Japanese submarine I-58 torpedoed the heavy cruiser in the Philippine Sea after it completed a secret mission delivering components for the Little Boy atomic bomb to Tinian.

Indianapolis sank in about twelve minutes. Nearly nine hundred sailors and Marines reached the water alive, but only 316 of the nearly twelve hundred people aboard survived. For more than three days, the survivors drifted across miles of open ocean with little food, almost no fresh water and failing life jackets. They endured burns, injuries, dehydration, hallucinations, exposure and real shark attacks whose exact death toll can never be known. No rescue force had been sent to find them. The Navy's movement-reporting system failed to recognize that an entire warship was missing, and patrol pilot Wilbur Gwinn discovered the survivors only after a faulty antenna drew him to a hatch above an enormous oil slick.

In this episode of Terrifying & True, we follow the secret atomic mission, the attack by Mochitsura Hashimoto's submarine, the twelve-minute sinking, the desperate work of men such as Lewis Haynes, Thomas Conway and Edward Parke, and the dangerous open-ocean landing by PBY pilot Robert Adrian Marks. We also examine the court-martial of Captain Charles McVay, the campaign to clear his name, the 2017 discovery of the wreck, and the way Quint's famous Jaws monologue transformed a complex institutional disaster into a shark legend.

Inside this episode:

- USS Indianapolis and the secret Little Boy atomic bomb mission
- Japanese submarine I-58 and commander Mochitsura Hashimoto
- The twelve-minute sinking and nearly nine hundred men in the water
- Sharks, dehydration, hallucinations and more than three days at sea
- Wilbur Gwinn, Robert Marks and the accidental rescue
- Captain Charles McVay's court-martial and eventual exoneration
- How did a decorated American cruiser vanish between major bases without triggering an immediate search - and why did it take fifty-five years to correct the blame placed on its captain?

We're telling that story tonight.

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