Seventy Years Ago....

[csadn]

Seventy Years Ago....

"Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail.

"What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that shark, he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.

"Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes... black eyes... like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah, then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don't know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men... they averaged six an hour.

"Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Bosun's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us, and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, July the 30th, 1945.

"Anyway, we delivered the bomb."

http://www.ussindianapolis.org/

[David Manley]

The treatment Captain McVay received in the aftermath was shocking.

[Loki 13]

" Hooper drives the boat."

[DeRuyter]

RIP

[csadn]

The treatment Captain McVay received in the aftermath was shocking.

A while back, someone suggested "the Navy could make it up to him by naming a submarine for him".

Then he had the nerve to wonder why I broke his nose.... ><

(There's a rumor Hashimoto deliberately testified that zigzagging wouldn't have worked because he knew what the Navy was up to, and he'd be damned if he was going help them sell McVay down the river.)

[capncarp]

Mrs Carp and mesself spent the evening (our 26th anniversary) seeing the 40th anniversary rerelease of Jaws courtesy of Turner Classic Movies at our local cinema. Mrs. Carp has long been a student of the Indianapolis and the subsequent kangaroo-courting of Capt. McVay.