by Doug Stanton
Ensign Twible tried to compensate, but he was seriously underexperienced. Still, he had taken to heart his Naval Academy training, and he began a close imitation of what he believed an officer’s behavior should be. He wasn’t trying to fool anyone; he was only trying to keep the men alive and get them organized into some kind of survival plan. Three weeks earlier, he’d been riding a train across the country, freshly graduated from the academy; now more than 300 oil-smeared faces stared back at him as he issued orders. As he told them to tie their life vests together, the blank look in their eyes startled him. Few obeyed.
Then, from within the crowd, a voice said, “You heard the officer. Now do it!” This was Durward Horner, a gunnery captain, one of the old salts who was widely respected by the crew.
Twible spotted one of the sailors holding up a bottle of whiskey. He couldn’t believe it—what had the boy been thinking as he struggled to get off the ship? “Toss that out,” Twible ordered. “It’ll only cause you trouble.” The sailor grumpily handed the bottle over and Twible emptied it into the sea.
Jack Miner—minus the bucket that had fallen on his head earlier—was in a daze, but he tried to do as commanded. As Twible was issuing an order to remove shoes so as to swim more easily, Miner looked down and saw something flash beneath his feet. One moment the image was there, and then it was gone. He gave it no more thought.
About two miles to the south of this group, Dr. Haynes, Captain Parke, and Father Conway were undeterred by the day’s scorching heat. One of their boys found a life ring and passed it to Parke, who quickly devised a use for it. Attached to the ring was 200 feet of ship’s line. Parke ordered the boys—as many as would fit—to grab hold. As if impelled by an invisible wind, the line began curling around the epicenter of the life ring. With the boys attached, it whirled slowly and in a circular motion, creating a flower of pain, with the most severely wounded caught in the middle.
Captain Parke ordered Haynes into the center among the wounded, while Father Conway paddled the edges, hearing confessions and saying last rites for those too wounded to carry on. About half the boys were naked or dressed only in skivvies, while others wore only a shirt or just their shoes. Some had nothing but a hat. Still, the boys’ spirits rose as the day progressed, and they cheerfully cursed their predicament. Having endured the torpedoing, the group was plagued by a strange giddiness. At times, they laughed and shouted over one another’s heads like men at a New Year’s Eve party; rescue, most were sure, was just a day, maybe two, away.
Around 10 A.M., they unexpectedly drifted free of the vaporous oil slick, and beneath them the sea lit up like an enormous green room. The effect was fantastic. Suddenly they were floating in space, suspended between earth and sky. A complex web of sea life, including giant grouper, man-of-war jellyfish with stinging tentacles, and giant barracudas, twined beneath them.
But the relief was short-lived; the sea also teemed with dozens of probing bacteria and organisms that, as the boys drifted, began gnawing at their flesh. The salt water itself was a caustic brew, consisting of 3.5 percent sodium chloride, and including trace elements of sulphate, magnesium, potassium, bicarbonate, and boric acid. Floating in it was not unlike immersion in a mild acid bath. The boys swallowed small amounts of seawater each time a wave splashed their faces. The high potassium levels in each taste began leaking into their bloodstreams and breaking down their red blood cells, forging the first link in a chain that could, if left unchecked, lead to the onset of anemia and increased physical weakness.
Whenever the boys inhaled any of the salt spray, accidentally aspirating it, it set off what doctors call a “plasma shift” in the lungs. This meant that their lungs were slowly beginning to fill with fluid, the accumulation of which could cause the onset of pulmonary edema; the edema itself would lead to difficulty in breathing, a lowering of the oxygen content in the bloodstream, and finally rapid, irregular heartbeats.
By late morning, the heavy swell dropped, the sea went flat, and the sun began shattering around them in millions of burning medallions across the water. The boys’ eyes stung in the glare. For some, the pain was unbearable. Even with their eyes closed, they could still see the sun. Each blink of an eyelid felt like sandpaper dragged over the inflamed cornea. The boys were beginning to suffer the first stages of photophobia.
Dr. Haynes ordered them to tear their clothing in strips and tie them in blindfolds. As they drifted, they now resembled men facing a firing squad. Haynes knew the situation with the sun was bad, but thought it would be controlled if the boys kept their eyes protected. He also noticed that the whites of some of the boys’ eyes were swelling from exposure to the salt water. His sense of futility defied his paternal instincts and determination as a doctor. He knew that, by the hour, the boys could turn into physiological time bombs, detonating all around him.
Then he realized that he was no different from the rest.
Captain McVay and his ragged crew passed Monday morning in relative comfort, all things considered. The nine men hunched down on the edges of their rafts. At some point they discovered that the fuel oil, which had nearly poisoned them, made an excellent sunscreen. McVay ordered them to slather it on any exposed parts of their bodies.
As the day went on, planes buzzed high overhead, some near, some far. In spite of McVay’s earlier pronouncement that rescue would in all probability not arrive by air, the planes were a welcome sight and cheered the captain and boys. Whenever one passed, McVay ordered everyone to splash and kick at the water, in a fruitless bid to attract attention. At 1 P.M., McVay spotted what he thought was a twin-engine bomber flying west. He flashed it with a metal signal mirror, but to no avail. At 3 P.M., he saw what he identified as either a B-24 or a B-29 passing to the south. It also failed to respond to the signal mirror. These planes had taken off from Tinian and Okinawa and were almost certainly heading toward the Philippines.
McVay recorded all of these sightings in a makeshift log he crafted out of paper scraps cadged from his crew’s wallets. He was determined to carry out his normal duties. He patiently instructed the boys in the use of the signal mirror and the flares. But as more planes passed overhead, these proved of no use. This shocked some of the men, but not the captain.
“It’s the same old thing,” he announced. “If an aviator doesn’t expect to see anything, he doesn’t see it. He’s too busy flying his plane.”
McVay also took an inventory of the boys’ rations. He found several cans of Spam and of crackers, a couple of tins of malted milk tablets, a first aid kit, flares, a flare gun, and a fishing kit containing hooks and line. There was enough, he figured, to last ten days at sea. He ordered the crew to stand two-hour watches for rescue planes.
At one point, he spotted a wooden water cask drifting on the tide and hauled it aboard. It was a boon worth its weight in gold, and the boys were overjoyed. Sadly, McVay realized that the wooden keg had cracked. Still, he shook it and heard the jostle of liquid inside. He gingerly lifted it to his lips and sipped. The taste was awful; it contained plain salt water. But sensing how vulnerable the boys were, he lowered the cask and smiled. The water, he told them, was okay, but that they would save it for a time when they really needed a drink. He then encouraged them to keep their eyes peeled for planes.
This was a characteristic moment for the captain. On board the Indy, he had once made his reputation with the enlisted men by standing in the sailors’ chow line—the officers ate at their own mess—waiting his turn to eat the same “shit on a shingle” served to the lowly seamen. McVay had heard the men complaining about the food; he was determined to taste it himself. After the cook carefully dolloped the slop onto the captain’s dented metal tray, McVay sat down and ate. It wasn’t terrible. It was mediocre, which in McVay’s world may have been an even worse offense. He got up, approached the cooks, and announced: “These men work hard for this ship. You make sure they eat damn well. I don’t want to hear any more complaints.”
Mc Vay—like Private McCoy an
d Dr. Haynes floating nearby—was operating on the thinnest fumes of hope. He thought rescue would come. But he was a logical man without illusions. What good would worrying do?
Below, drawn up from the deep, perhaps attracted by the booming of the Indy’s exploding chambers or lured by the blood trail of the injured and the dead, the boys’ greatest fears were coming to life.
By dusk on Monday, hundreds of sharks had encircled them. There were makos, tigers, white-tips, and blues. Rising at the speed of a man at a gentle run, the sharks ascended from the depths of the dark sea to the paler glow of approaching night overhead, toward a sky empty of stars. As the heat of the day tempered into relative cool, the boys, lying in their rafts, hanging from floating nets, and bobbing in life vests, began to feel things bumping from below—nudges and kicks that they mistook for the touch of their comrades treading water.
They nodded off and slept, if their wounds allowed them to rest. They woke often, with a start, staring into the dark, wondering, Who’s there?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shark Attack
They stalked for hours, going around and around. And somebody
said, “Those are PT boats!” And another guy said, “No, those are
sharks! It’s the wake they make!” Finally, they attacked—they
pulled guys right out of the water. We thrashed, trying to keep
’em away from us, but they came right into the group. Took the
net and everything right up into the air. Tore guys’ limbs off.
The water was bloody.
—GUS KAY, seaman first-class, USS Indianapolis
DAY TWO
TUESDAY, JULY 31, 1945
The sharks attacked around dawn on Tuesday.
McCoy looked over his raft’s edge and saw them prowling in frenzied schools. Like figures trapped in glass, the huge, gray fish were spiraling to the surface. Jesus, he thought, sitting up, this is getting serious.
They had begun their attacks late Sunday night, but in the dark, many of the disoriented survivors hadn’t really taken notice. Around daybreak on Monday, McCoy had seen a man slumped in his life vest—apparently asleep—suddenly disappear. McCoy waited for the vest to pop back up to the surface, but it never did.
In all likelihood, the sharks now gathered around the boys had been following the Indy for days. It is the habit of sharks to track oceangoing vessels and feed on refuse regularly tossed overboard. The Indy, made of steel, emitted low-grade electrical currents that may have stimulated and attracted the predators.
Until this point, it seemed, the restless fish had been feeding mostly on the dead, tearing at the bodies as they fell to the ocean floor. Or they had concentrated on lone, straying swimmers. But now the sharks were starting to home in on the large groups that had amassed during the past thirty-six hours. Those sailors who were naked or not fully clothed were at greatest risk of attack. The fish keyed in on color contrasts, such as that between a pale body and a blue sea.
Sharks are some of the oldest predators on the planet, dating back 400 million years, but, perhaps mercifully, many of the sailors hadn’t given the possibility of attack a second thought until this morning. Most of these boys—many of whom were away from home for the first time in their lives—had had little contact with the sea, and sharks were the stuff of tall tales. Navy lore abounded with advice about what to do in case of an attack, but who really had paid attention to how to protect themselves? Certainly, the haggard and weakening survivors of the Indianapolis were ill-prepared to deal with the danger as the sun began burning off the night’s haze.
The truth was, there was nothing naval command could have told the boys about how to handle an actual encounter. Boot-camp training had taught the sailors to thrash the water to frighten the predators away.21 In 1943, the navy had set out to develop a shark repellent device known as the Life Jacket Shark Repellent Compound Packet; it was made of black dye, decomposing shark flesh, and ammonium acetate, and was meant to be deployed by a floating sailor from a pocket kept in his flotation vest. The plume of noxious odors and dark color was supposed to shield the luckless swimmer from attack. But none of the Indy’s boys were equipped with these devices (which had proved to be useless anyway). All that these men had to combat what sailors call the “hyenas of the sea” were occasional luck, guts, and what remained of their common sense.
No evidence has ever been found that sharks prefer humans to their regular diet of fish. Nor has it been scientifically established that they attack wounded or bleeding people more readily than the unwounded. Biologists are not even sure why sharks attack humans, although they do believe that people emit irregular low-level frequencies and odors that resemble those of wounded fish. They are opportunistic eaters (especially the rapacious tiger shark) and have also been known to eat turtles, seagulls, and tin cans. Even submarines have been attacked, and fiber-optic cables on the ocean bed have been bitten and ruined. Other objects found in shark stomachs include a suit of armor, a barrel of nails, a roll of tar paper, coal, raincoats, shoes, plastic bags, goats, sheep, lizards, snakes, chicken, reindeer, and monkeys.
In Dr. Haynes’s group this Tuesday, where most were dressed only in their gray life vests, one sailor would wake from sleep, half stupefied and half dreaming, and give a buddy next to him a “good morning” shove. The guy didn’t respond. When the sailor pushed again, the friend’s body tipped over like a child’s toy and bobbed away. He’d been eaten in half, right up to the hem of his life vest.
At one point, Bob Gause swam away from the group to aid an exhausted sailor who was on the verge of drowning. The boy had clearly gone out of his head at the sight of the fish circling below him. He was waving his hands and calling for help. As Gause paddled out, he was intercepted immediately by a large dorsal fin knifing toward him, so he swam as fast as he could back to the group. The boy in distress soon disappeared.
As the shark attacks multiplied, the once optimistic boys were filled with a sense of helplessness. Jack Cassidy came face-to-face with a tiger shark that had been bothering him so long that he had even given it a name: he called the beast Oscar. He swung at it with his homemade knife and buried the blade an inch deep in the fish’s tough snout, but Oscar swam away as if only annoyed. Cassidy was furious—he wanted to kill the shark—but he was relieved to be left alone.
As the water flashed with twisting tails and dorsal fins, the boys resolved to stay calm, clamping their hands over their ears against the erupting screams, but this resolve vanished when one of the boys was dragged through the water like a fisherman’s bobber tugged by a big catfish. The victim, clenched in the uplifted jaws of a shark, was pushed at waist level through the surf, screaming. Others disappeared quietly without a trace, their life vests shooting back to the surface empty, the straps in shreds. As the excited sharks grew more agitated, the attacks intensified in ferocity.
Capable of bursts of speed up to forty-three miles per hour, they were attacking using what is known as “bump and bite maneuvers.” The fast, powerful bites of sharks in laboratory pools have been measured at fifteen tons per square inch; their chewing process has been honed to evolutionary perfection. Their jaws, suspended on a length of braided muscle, allow the embedded teeth to rip away chunks of flesh, without releasing their clamp on victims. The bumps stun the prey, while the bites deliver the victims to eternity.
About twenty-five sharks circled around McCoy’s group of rafts. Most, he estimated, measured about ten feet. He watched as they searched the rafts looking for a way in, pursuing them, he realized, the way wolves follow the scent trail of a wounded deer. Because McCoy’s raft was broken at the bow, there was, in fact, a gaping entrance. He and his four compatriots bunched together at the far end of the craft as one shark rose up through the broken wooden grating in the floor.
McCoy recoiled as the shark’s pointed snout, tipped with large black nasal chambers, jabbed hungrily through the hole. The eyes reminded him of plums. The teeth, about two inches long, were
snow-white, protruding from a jaw about two feet wide.
At first McCoy was stunned by his fear. He reached for his .45 in its holster and pulled the trigger, but the gun wouldn’t fire. Then he kicked out blindly, trying to drive the fish from the raft with his leg. The rough scaly skin ripped at his bare foot, but he managed to kick the fish in the eye. McCoy was amazed as he watched it thrashing back out of the raft in retreat. Glancing over the side, he watched the shark writhe and spin fifteen feet below him, its spasms magnified by the pure, green lens of the sea. But within seconds another shark came nosing into the raft’s opening.
Elsewhere, in Dr. Haynes’s group, some of the men went perfectly catatonic during the attacks, while others flailed. Boys at the edges of a floating group fared worse than those in the middle. Clinging to a floater net, one sailor looked down and saw hundreds of sharks circling.
Around Captain McVay’s raft, one particular shark passed so close that the boys tried knocking the pilot fish leading it with a paddle, in hopes of capturing and eating it. When they realized they couldn’t kill the pilot fish, they swung at the shark itself—an enormous twelve-footer—hoping to drive it away. Instead, the shark circled the raft in ever-tightening rings, at times bumping the raft’s bottom with its dorsal fin.
And then, just as quickly as they began, the attacks stopped, the ghostly shapes dropping back into the gloom beneath. The sea was a bloody mess of bits of clothes and drowning men with arms and legs sheared off.
This pattern of attacks in low-light conditions, particularly at twilight and in the dawn hours, soon established itself as the rhythm of the men’s days: the sharks would attack in the morning, then cruise through the wounded and the dying all day, feeding again at night on the living.
