On the night of July 30, 1945, USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was sunk by Japanese submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea. She went down in approximately twelve minutes, too fast for a proper distress call to get through, too fast for most of her crew to get off the ship in good order. Of the 1,195 men aboard, approximately 900 went into the water. When rescue finally came four days later — days during which the Navy did not know the ship was missing — 317 men were still alive. The story of what happened in those waters between July 30 and August 2, 1945, is one of the most harrowing in the history of the American Navy.
The Ship and Her Mission
USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was a Portland-class heavy cruiser, commissioned on November 15, 1932. She served as the flagship of the Fifth Fleet and had survived a kamikaze strike off Okinawa in March 1945. In late July 1945, she was given a top-secret mission: transport the components of the first atomic bomb — the gun mechanism and uranium for “Little Boy” — from San Francisco to Tinian Island in the Marianas. She completed that mission, delivering the components that would be used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Indianapolis departed Tinian on July 28 and was en route to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines when I-58's commander, Mochitsura Hashimoto, spotted her through his periscope just after midnight on July 30. He fired six torpedoes. Two hit.
The Sinking
The first torpedo struck near the bow, blowing off the entire front section of the ship. The second hit amidships, detonating near the fuel tanks and aviation gasoline storage. The explosions and fires were catastrophic. The ship listed immediately and began going down by the bow. Officers tried to give the order to abandon ship; many men never received it. Others were trapped below decks or killed in the initial explosions. Indianapolis sank in twelve minutes.
The survivors in the water faced a nightmare that grew worse with each passing day. There were no life rafts for everyone — many men were in life jackets only, treading water. Shark attacks began the first night and continued throughout the ordeal. Dehydration and exposure took men who had survived the sharks. Men who drank seawater went delirious. Officers worked to keep survivors together, organized, and focused on the hope of rescue — a rescue that was not coming, because no one knew to look for them.
The Delay
Indianapolis's failure to arrive at Leyte Gulf was not immediately reported or investigated. The circumstances of why — miscommunications, administrative failures, assumptions that non-arrival reports would be handled by someone else — were examined in the Navy's subsequent investigation and in congressional hearings. Captain Charles McVay III, the ship's commanding officer and one of the survivors, was court-martialed for “hazarding his vessel” by failing to zigzag. He was the only American naval captain court-martialed for losing a ship in combat during World War II. The verdict remained controversial for decades; Congress passed a resolution in 2000 exonerating him, and the Navy officially amended his record. McVay had died in 1968.
The Rescue
The survivors were discovered by accident on August 2, when a patrol aircraft crew spotted the oil slick and men in the water. The rescue that followed was immediate and large-scale, but it came too late for the hundreds who had already died. Of the 900 men who went into the water, 583 died before rescue arrived — to sharks, to exposure, to dehydration, to the simple fact that four days in the open ocean is a very long time.
The story of USS Indianapolis is one that every student of naval history should know. If you're looking to honor the men who served in the cruiser force, browse The Ship's Store for collections honoring the ships and sailors of the U.S. Navy.
Legacy
Indianapolis is remembered as a cautionary story about the cost of administrative failure and the endurance of the human spirit in the worst possible circumstances. The survivors who spent four days in the Philippine Sea — the men who kept each other alive, who refused to stop swimming, who watched their shipmates die and kept going anyway — demonstrated something about what sailors are made of that no official history fully captures. The ship herself was never raised; she rests on the bottom of the Philippine Sea. In 2017, researchers located the wreck at a depth of approximately 18,000 feet, finally giving her a precise resting place after seventy-two years. The men who went down with her are still there.