- Heavy Cruiser USS Indianapolis
The wreck of the warship USS Indianapolis has been rediscovered 18,000 feet underwater in the Pacific just over 72 years after being sunk by a Japanese submarine.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/19/us/uss-indianapolis-wreckage-found/index.html
The discovery was made on Friday by a civilian team of researchers led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen on the search vessel Petrel which is equipped with state-of-the-art equipment capable of diving to 6000 metres.
The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was a Portland class heavy cruiser that was sunk by a Japanese submarine I-58 on 30th July 1945. The warship had just completed a top secret mission sailing from San Francisco to Tinian island to deliver the enriched Uranium 235 for the first ’Little Boy’ atom bomb that would be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima just a week later.
The consignment of Uranium 235 which represented over half of the existing supply in the world at the time had been shipped aboard in total secrecy, and the metal containers holding it had been welded to the ship’s deck for added security. Having delivered its precious cargo to Tinian, the USS Indianapolis was sailing back to Leyte in the Philippine islands when she was struck by two torpedoes shortly after midnight on 30 July and sank within 12 minutes from the catastrophic damage caused.
Because the USS Indianapolis had been sailing on a top secret mission under conditions of radio silence, the US navy initially failed to realise that the vessel was missing. It wasn’t until almost four days later on 2 August when a reconnaissance aeroplane spotted survivors in the water that a rescue operation was launched.
Of the 1,196 men aboard the ship, only 317 were rescued. An enquiry found that around 800 men had survived the sinking, but over half of them had subsequently died from shark attacks and exposure. It was the largest single loss of life suffered at sea by the US navy in its history.
The loss of USS Indianapolis became part of the back-story of the film ‘Jaws’ (1975). Robert Shaw’s character Quint is supposed to be a survivor of the shark attacks that followed the sinking. The story was also dramatised in a more recent film ‘USS Indianapolis:Men of Courage’ (2016) starring Nicolas Cage.
