USS Indianapolis Remembered

Sixty-two years ago today, the USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered components for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.

The heavy cruiser steamed out of San Francisco Bay just after dawn on July 16, 1945 and raced unescorted towards Pearl Harbor, where it briefly stopped on July 19. The ship reached its destination of the island of Tinian on July 26, having set a record in covering some 5,000 miles in only 10 days. The bomb components were promptly unloaded, assembled to form “Little Boy,” and then loaded aboard the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, killing an estimated 140,000 people and opening the nuclear Pandora’s Box forever.

From Tinian, the USS Indianapolis sailed to the island of Guam and from there was ordered to the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Japan. A few minutes past midnight on July 30, two Japanese torpedoes tore into the ship’s side, igniting an explosion that broke the ship in two. An estimated 900 from a crew of 1,196 survived the explosion, only to float helplessly for several days. Exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks would slowly reduce the number of survivors to 317, making the sinking of the USS Indianapolis the worst naval disaster in U.S. history.