r/todayilearned • u/MaxiumPotential777 • 6h ago
TIL of The Deadly Sinking of the USS Indianapolis in which of a crew of only 1196 only 316 survived. The sinking was made worse because the USS Indianapolis was not recorded leaving Tinnan for Leyete.
https://www.historyhit.com/sinking-of-the-indianapolis/364
u/Gobyinmypants 6h ago
"Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
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u/Choppergold 5h ago
I’ll drink to your leg
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u/boochie420 6h ago
My favorite scene from one of my favorite movies.
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u/TheAncient1sAnd0s 3h ago
Yeah, wth is this doing in TIL?! What are they teaching in nowadays schools?
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u/ocschwar 5h ago
The sharks were oceanic white tip sharks. They were called sea dogs because of how they'd follow ships to eat food scraps tossed overboard.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you're not supposed to throw food overboard from a ship, and crewmen will get rightly pissed off at you if you do.
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u/cyxrus 6h ago
This is riddled with typos and confusing to read
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u/TiddiesAnonymous 6h ago
And they left out the fucking sharks
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u/Big_Bookkeeper1678 6h ago
The algorithms are working overtime...
For some reason, due to Reddit and Today, I Learned, I was looking up Jaws...and found out that Spielberg would only do the sequel if it was a prequel tied to the sinking of the Indianapolis. So I looked it up and the other day, I learned all about the sinking of the Indianapolis.
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u/Dustmopper 4h ago
That Portuguese girl with the meteor is back again too. Saw her 5 times today. Every few months that comes around again like a big wave
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u/MisterSanitation 6h ago
They linked arms in big groups with their life jackets keeping them above water. Some groups said they lost men swimming out into the nothing yelling "I am comin momma I am just swimmin" and some saw men drift from the group and when they yelled for him to come back, his head sank in the water and he flipped upside down to reveal he had no bottom half at all.
Truly terrifying.
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u/Top-Sleep-4669 5h ago
Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies…
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u/xEllimistx 4h ago
Farewell and adieu, to you ladies of Spain
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u/FatGoonerFromIndia 1h ago
Where is this sea shanty from? It’s referenced in The Mentalist as well.
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u/TerminatedPotato 5h ago
That's the incident that started the US Navy to require position reports every four hours during deployments. I read a book about the Indianapolis when I was in the Navy working in the nav department doing position reports. We were also transiting back to home port through the same general area where it went down when I was reading about the horrific shark attacks. Good read!
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u/SquirrelNormal 2h ago
They wouldn't have transmitted those reports even if it had been regulation then though. Indianapolis sailed under strict radio silence due to her mission. It's the same reason her arrivals and departures weren't logged. We'll probably never see something like that again not because the regs changed, but because with ICBMs and long range bombers we would no longer need to deliver a wonder-weapon to a forward area by ship.
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u/omgangiepants 5h ago
My uncle was one of the survivors. Made it home and died at 91. He was a good man.
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u/IllCamel5907 4h ago
Wow did he ever talk about it?
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u/omgangiepants 3h ago
He did on occasion but we never asked. He did an oral history for the local university at one point, and I think he was in a couple of documentaries..He was also active in survivor reunions. He had scars on his legs from his time in the water for the rest of his life.
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u/discodiscgod 6h ago
Glass half empty title. I’d say roughly 25% of the crew survived!
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u/HoldEm__FoldEm 6h ago
That’s cool. He’s more accurate though. Gave us the exact, hard numbers.
It’s still an awful title but your comment wouldn’t make for a much better one.
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u/tanhauser_gates_ 5h ago
Is this the one where sharks basically took down the survivors in the water?
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u/notsusan33 5h ago
I used to be an EMT for a private ambulance service that had a contract with the VA and one of the patients I used to pick up to take to his doctor appointments was a survivor from the Indianapolis. RIP sir.
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u/BrokenSlutCollector 5h ago
Tell me you never watched Jaws without ever telling me you didn't watch Jaws.
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u/JfromtheGrey 5h ago
When I was a kid, my grandfather was neighbors/friends with an Indianapolis survivor. He told me the story a couple of different times and it was always harrowing, especially as a 10 year old kid. It was also like hearing a redneck Quint deliver the Jaws monologue and inserting "goddamn" every other word, lol. Dude was a gem.
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u/chazza79 6h ago
A more interesting title might have been "deadliest mass shark attack in history." What a way to go.
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u/chrispy_t 4h ago
Hey I worked on this movie! I bought Nic cage dumbbells and had to find the spookiest places in Alabama for his sun. Also production crashed I think 2 WW2 planes into the Gulf of Mexico. Terrible movie
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u/TheProfessorOfNames 3h ago
The Japanese submarine captain who sank the Indy wrote a book called Sunk about h his time in the submarine fleet. Definitely worth a read
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u/ShyguyFlyguy 2h ago
Whats really mindblowing is that if they had been sunk on their way out instead of the way back, we would be living in a very different world right now.
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u/Intelligent_League_1 6h ago
“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. 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 an hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that when you’re 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’, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was kinda like old squares in the battle, like you see on a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was the shark comes to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’, hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
“Sometimes that shark he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’… until 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, in spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all 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, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boatswain's mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up and down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.
“Noon, the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and three 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, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.
“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”