The USS Indianapolis: The Full Story of the Navy's Worst Disaster at Sea
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Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine put two torpedoes into the USS Indianapolis and sank her in twelve minutes. Almost 900 men went into the Pacific Ocean. Nobody came looking for them for nearly four days. By the time rescue planes finally spotted the survivors, sharks, dehydration and salt poisoning had cut their numbers from around 900 down to 316. It remains the single worst loss of life from one ship in the history of the US Navy, and it happened five days after that same ship had secretly delivered the components of the bomb that would end the war.
Flagship of the Fifth Fleet
The Indianapolis wasn't some anonymous cargo hauler pressed into a secret mission. Commissioned in 1932, she'd carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt on multiple goodwill cruises before the war and later became flagship of the Fifth Fleet under Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of the Navy's most important commanders in the Pacific. She fought through New Guinea, the Aleutians, the Marianas and Iwo Jima, earning ten battle stars along the way.
In March 1945, during the bombardment ahead of the invasion of Okinawa, a kamikaze pilot dove toward the ship, using the glare of the sun to hide his approach until it was almost too late. Gunners got off a few shots, but the plane's bomb tore through the deck and detonated underwater, close enough to kill nine crew members and force the ship back to California for repairs. Because Indianapolis had been built without full torpedo shielding, a tradeoff made under the Washington Naval Treaty to keep her armed with heavier guns, that underwater blast likely would have been far more destructive if it had detonated inside the hull rather than beneath it. She'd barely finished those repairs when she was handed the assignment that would define her: the run to Tinian.
A Secret Cargo, A Ten-Day Sprint
On July 16, 1945, the Indianapolis left San Francisco carrying a wooden crate and a lead-lined canister, guarded around the clock, that almost nobody aboard was allowed to know anything about. Inside were the uranium core and firing mechanisms for Little Boy, the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima three weeks later. The ship covered the roughly 5,000 miles to the island of Tinian in just ten days, an extraordinary pace for the time, and handed off its cargo on July 26. From there it sailed to Guam, then set out alone, without an escort, for Leyte in the Philippines, where it was due to begin training ahead of the planned invasion of Japan.
Captain Charles B. McVay III had requested a destroyer escort for the crossing and was turned down. Standard doctrine called for combat ships in that stretch of ocean to travel with anti-submarine cover, but Indianapolis had none, and no sonar of her own either. Naval intelligence had also failed to pass along reports of Japanese submarine activity along the exact route McVay was given, information that, had he had it, might have changed his decision about whether to zigzag that night.
Six Torpedoes in the Dark
Just after midnight, a Japanese submarine, I-58, spotted the Indianapolis in clear, moonlit water. Its commander, Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, had never sunk an enemy ship before. He ordered six torpedoes fired in a spread. “We waited anxiously,” he said afterward. “Every minute seemed an age.” Two, possibly three, struck home. The first tore off the bow. The second hit near the ship's fuel tanks and powder magazine and split the hull almost to the keel.
The explosions knocked out electrical power almost immediately, which meant most of the crew's distress calls likely never made it out. Whether any signal actually reached shore has been argued over for decades. Some historians point to Navy records suggesting three separate stations received a distress call that night and did nothing with it, one commanding officer reportedly drunk, another asleep with orders not to be disturbed, a third dismissing it as a Japanese decoy. The Navy's own Court of Inquiry, convened on Guam less than two weeks later, concluded the opposite: that no message actually got out, because the ship lost power too fast for it to transmit. What isn't disputed is that nobody was looking for the Indianapolis when she failed to arrive at Leyte the next day. A garbled arrival message and a badly managed movement-reporting system meant her absence simply wasn't noticed.
The ship went down in about twelve minutes, so fast that many men never made it off. Roughly 300 of the crew died in the sinking itself, trapped below decks or caught in the fire that swept the ship after the fuel tanks ignited. The remaining 880 or so went into the water with whatever they could grab: life jackets, a handful of life rafts, floater nets, or nothing at all.
Four Days in the Water
What followed is the part of the story that's stayed with people for eighty years. The survivors were scattered across several miles of open ocean in loose clusters, the largest holding several hundred men with nothing but life jackets and a few nets to cling to. There was almost no fresh water and no food beyond what little had gone into the rafts. Men who couldn't resist drinking seawater died from it, often after a period of severe hallucination that led some to attack their own shipmates, convinced they were enemies or that the Indianapolis was floating just beneath them, full of fresh water if only they could dive down and reach it.
And there were the sharks. Oceanic whitetips, a species known to gather in open water far from any reef, began circling within hours and returned every day, picking off the wounded, the dead, and eventually anyone who drifted away from a group. Survivors described the water going still at times, then a man simply vanishing. It's since been called the worst single shark attack event on humans in recorded history, though nobody has ever been able to put an exact number on how many of the roughly 500 men who died in the water were taken by sharks rather than lost to exposure, dehydration or drowning.
Found by Accident
Nobody was searching for the Indianapolis. She was only found because a Navy pilot, Lieutenant Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, happened to be flying a routine anti-submarine patrol on the morning of August 2 and spotted a massive oil slick with what looked like dozens of heads bobbing in it. He radioed it in without knowing what ship, if any, he'd found.
The first aircraft to actually reach the men was a PBY-5A Catalina flying boat, nicknamed “Playmate 2” and piloted by Lieutenant Adrian Marks, an Indiana lawyer turned naval aviator. Watching sharks pick off men in the water below him, Marks broke standing orders that prohibited open-sea landings and set his plane down in twelve-foot swells anyway. The impact was hard enough to damage the hull. Once down, his crew hauled survivors aboard until every inch of the cabin was full, then began tying the overflow to the wings with parachute cord. Marks and his crew pulled 56 men out of the water before nightfall, when the destroyer escort USS Cecil J. Doyle arrived and used its searchlight as a beacon for the men still in the water. Marks's plane, wrecked beyond flying, was deliberately sunk once everyone aboard had been transferred off.
Rescue ships worked through the night and into the next day. By the time the search wound down, 316 men had been pulled alive from the Pacific, out of the roughly 1,195 who had been aboard when the torpedoes hit.
The Only Captain Ever Court-Martialed for Losing His Ship
Captain McVay survived the sinking and was rescued along with his crew. That December, the Navy court-martialed him, the only commanding officer in US naval history to face a court-martial specifically for losing his ship to enemy action in wartime. The charge was hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag, a defensive maneuver meant to make a ship harder for a submarine to target.
The Navy's own case worked against it almost immediately. Mochitsura Hashimoto, the Japanese officer who had sunk the ship, was brought from Japan to testify, and told the court plainly that zigzagging would have made no difference to his attack. Several of McVay's own surviving crew testified in his defense as well. None of it mattered. McVay was convicted and lost seniority in both his temporary and permanent rank, effectively ending his career. He was one of very few officers ever convicted in a case where the enemy commander himself testified for the defense.
A Sixth-Grader Reopens the Case
The conviction stood for over fifty years. In the years afterward, McVay received hate mail every Christmas from families of men who'd died on the Indianapolis, some of it blaming him personally for their loss, on top of personal tragedies of his own: his second wife Louise died of cancer, so did his young grandson Mark, and his own father died in 1959. By November 1968 he was 70, in an unhappy third marriage, and living in Litchfield, Connecticut. On November 6, he shot himself with a revolver at his home. Some accounts say he was found holding a small toy sailor, while others, including the USS Indianapolis Legacy Organization, dispute that detail entirely, saying police photos from the scene show no such object. It would take a sixth-grader to finally get his record corrected.
In 1996, 11-year-old Hunter Scott from Pensacola, Florida watched Jaws with his father and was struck by the monologue about the Indianapolis, delivered by Robert Shaw's character Quint. Scott chose the ship's story for a school history project, interviewed roughly 150 survivors himself, and dug through more than 800 documents, eventually concluding that the Navy's own case against McVay had ignored evidence available to it at the time.
Scott took his findings to his congressman, Joe Scarborough, who helped push a resolution through Congress. It passed as part of the Defense Authorization Act and was signed by President Bill Clinton in October 2000, formally stating that McVay's court-martial had not been “morally sustainable.” The following year, the Navy amended McVay's official record to reflect the exoneration. He never lived to see any of it. In 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the sinking, Congress awarded the entire crew a Congressional Gold Medal.
The Man Who Sank Her
Mochitsura Hashimoto spent the rest of his own life carrying the weight of that night. Nearly all of his family had been killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the very weapon Indianapolis had delivered days before he torpedoed her, an irony he was well aware of. He eventually became a Shinto priest in Kyoto, following the path his own father had set out for him decades earlier.
In 1990, he traveled to a reunion of Indianapolis survivors and told them plainly, “I came here to pray with you for your shipmates whose deaths I caused.” One of the men in the room told him he forgave him. In 1999, when he learned survivors were pushing to clear McVay's name, Hashimoto wrote directly to US Senator John Warner in support of the effort, repeating what he'd told the court back in 1945: zigzagging or not, he would have sunk the ship regardless. The letter closed by suggesting it was time for Americans to extend McVay the same forgiveness the two countries had extended each other. Hashimoto died on October 25, 2000, five days before McVay's exoneration became official.
Finding the Wreck
For seventy years nobody knew exactly where the Indianapolis had gone down. That changed in 2016, when a naval historian working with the Naval History and Heritage Command turned up a logbook entry from a small landing craft, LST-779, that had crossed paths with the Indianapolis roughly eleven hours before she was torpedoed. The entry corroborated McVay's own account of his course and narrowed the search area from an impossibly large stretch of the Philippine Sea down to about 600 square miles. In August 2017, a civilian expedition led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen used that data to locate the wreck, more than 18,000 feet down, deeper than almost any other WWII shipwreck ever found. Video from the site showed paint still legible on the hull, including the ship's hull number, 35. In line with federal law protecting sunken military vessels as war graves, the exact coordinates were never made public and the wreck has never been disturbed.
What's Left of the Crew
Every year for decades, survivors and their families gathered for a reunion, first in Indianapolis and later at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. The group has shrunk to almost nothing. As of the most recent reporting, Harold Bray Jr., who was a teenager aboard the ship in 1945, is believed to be the last living survivor of the sinking. The men who once filled a hotel ballroom for their reunion now number in the single digits, then fewer, and soon none at all, though the wreck they came from will likely still be sitting on the floor of the Philippine Sea for a very long time after that.
