The sea was a black, oily mirror reflecting the dying flames of the USS Indianapolis, and for the 900 men bobbing in its toxic swell, the true horror was only beginning. Within hours, the first fins began to slice through the surface, circling the desperate, bloodied sailors with a patient, predatory hunger that would turn the Pacific into a charnel house over the next four days. Edgar Harrell, a 20-year-old Marine corporal, watched as his shipmates, driven mad by thirst and terror, swam toward mirages of islands, only to be dragged under with blood-curdling screams, their kapok life jackets bobbing back to the surface like gruesome fishing corks.
This was not a battle; it was a slow, agonizing execution by the elements, and Harrell, now one of the last surviving witnesses, has relived every shark attack, every hallucination, and every desperate prayer in a harrowing account of the worst sea disaster in U. S. Navy history.
The ordeal began in the dead of night on July 30, 1945, just days after the heavy cruiser had completed a top-secret mission of unimaginable importance. The Indianapolis, under the command of Captain Charles B. McVay III, had just delivered the core components of “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, to the island of Tinian.
Having completed this critical task, the ship was sailing without escort, a decision that would prove catastrophic. At approximately 12:15 a. m.
, the Japanese submarine I-58, commanded by Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, fired a spread of six torpedoes. Two struck the starboard side, ripping a 45-foot gash in the bow and igniting a chain reaction of explosions that doomed the ship in a mere 12 minutes. Harrell, who had been sleeping topside under the barrels of turret one to escape the 100-degree heat below deck, was thrown into a maelstrom of twisted metal, screaming men, and the deafening roar of the sea pouring into the open hatches.
“The first hundred yards of the ship was just a complete open funnel,” Harrell recounted, his voice still carrying the tremor of that night. “The bow was already under the water, and the ship was listing so much to the starboard that the quarterdeck was awash.” As he scrambled toward his emergency station, he witnessed the flash-burned officers stumbling from their quarters, their skin hanging from their faces, pleading for help that no one could give.
The ship, a 610-foot behemoth that had survived the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the invasion of Okinawa, was dying beneath his feet. With the order to abandon ship finally given, Harrell grabbed a kapok life jacket, a “horse collar” of cork and canvas, and jumped feet-first into the blackness, the oil coating his body as he desperately swam away from the sinking hull. He turned back just in time to see the fantail rise high into the air, the massive propellers still churning, and watched in horror as some of his shipmates, unable to see in the dark, jumped directly into those spinning blades.
Of the 1,196 men aboard, an estimated 900 made it into the water. They were scattered across a 75-mile area of ocean, with no lifeboats, no food, and very little fresh water. The first night was a struggle for survival against drowning and hypothermia, but as the sun rose on the first day, a new, more terrifying enemy arrived.
“When I say we had company at any given time, you could look out and see a big fin swimming around and around,” Harrell said. “Seemingly out of fairness to the sharks, they weren’t going to attack us. But you can imagine the fright we were experiencing.”
The sharks, mostly oceanic whitetips, were not just circling; they were feeding. The injured, the hallucinating, and the simply unlucky were picked off one by one. Harrell described the gruesome process with chilling clarity: a man would begin to hallucinate, convinced he saw an island, and swim away from the group.
“You hear a blood-curdling scream and you see that kapok jacket go under. Then momentarily, it brings the remains of the body back up to the surface like a fish cork.”
The men formed a circle, linking their kapok jackets together in a desperate attempt to stay together, but the swells, estimated at 10 to 12 feet, would break them apart, scattering them across the waves. By the second day, dehydration was setting in. A brief rain shower offered a moment of relief, but it was gone in minutes.
The sharks grew bolder. “Every little bit, even that first day, there were those who had been injured or had a temperature, they begin to hallucinate,” Harrell remembered. The screams were constant, a soundtrack of agony that punctuated the relentless sun.
By noon on the third day, of the 80 men in Harrell’s initial group, only 17 remained. Their kapok jackets, rated for 48 hours, were waterlogged and useless. They were forced to sit inside them, using their legs to tread water, a futile effort against the encroaching exhaustion.
It was on that third day that Harrell and his Marine buddy, Miles Spooner, made a fateful decision. A group of five sailors approached, pushing a makeshift raft constructed from 40mm ammunition cans and a slatted potato crate. They were planning to swim the remaining 500 miles to the Philippines.
“I said to Spooner, ‘I’m going to go with them,'” Harrell said. “He said, ‘Harold, if you go, I’m going.'” The group set off, but without the sun or stars to guide them, they were soon lost.
It was then that Harrell spotted a crate bobbing in the water. Ignoring the warnings of his comrades, he swam out to it and found a treasure beyond measure: rotten potatoes. “In the agony of defeat, that rot began to squeeze through my fingers,” he said.
“But you’re so desperate for water that even the rot has some water in it.” He stuffed his pockets with the putrid tubers, sharing them with his group and later with a group led by Lieutenant Charles McKissick, who joined them in the night.
By the morning of the fourth day, Harrell was alone with McKissick. Spooner and the others had drifted away in the darkness. The two men, completely exhausted and hallucinating, clung to life.
Harrell, in his delirium, began to confuse McKissick with his beloved uncle, Edwin. “My mind was playing tricks on me,” he admitted. “Even though I knew who he was, to me, he was Uncle Edwin.”
They were on the verge of giving up when they heard the sound of an aircraft. A PV-1 Ventura, flown by Lieutenant Wilbur C. Gwinn, was flying overhead at 8,000 feet.
Gwinn was having trouble with his radio antenna and opened the bomb bay doors to reel it in. As he glanced down, he saw an oil slick and, thinking it was a submarine, began a bombing run. As he descended, he saw the true horror: massive sharks attacking men in the water.
He didn’t drop his bombs. Instead, he circled the survivors, tilting his wings to signal he had seen them, and radioed back to base with the code phrase: “Ducks on the pond.”
The rescue effort was chaotic. A PBY Catalina seaplane, piloted by Lieutenant Adrian Marks, was dispatched. Despite explicit orders not to land in the open sea, Marks and his crew, seeing the sharks mutilating the men, defied orders.
“He takes that big goose and brings it down,” Harrell said. “He hit that first swell, went up in the air 50 feet or so, and bounced it several times before he finally got it landed.” The landing tore up one of the plane’s motors and ruptured a pontoon, but Marks managed to get the plane down.
He taxied through the swells, picking up survivors. Harrell, who had been in the water for over 100 hours, was dragged aboard like a “sack of feed.” The plane, designed to hold a crew of eight, was soon packed with 56 survivors, with seven more tied to the wings.
It was on that plane that Harrell was reunited with Spooner, who, despite his sore eyes, had managed to hack open a can of green beans and was jealously guarding the juice. “I asked Spooner for some of his bean juice,” Harrell recalled with a faint smile. “He told me where I could get off.
I said, ‘Spooner, this is Harold.’ He fell over the buddy between us and shared it with me.”
The survivors were eventually transferred to the destroyer USS Doyle, which arrived that night. Of the 900 men who entered the water, only 316 survived. The rest were killed by sharks, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, or the sheer hopelessness of their situation.
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis remains the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U. S. Navy.
Captain McVay, who survived, was later court-martialed for failing to zigzag, a charge that was widely seen as a scapegoat for the Navy’s own failures. He was posthumously exonerated in 2000, after years of lobbying by survivors and their families.
Harrell, who was awarded the Purple Heart for his injuries, spent weeks in the hospital recovering from a perforated appendix and the physical and psychological trauma of his ordeal. He was discharged from the Marine Corps in February 1946, carrying with him the memories of the 880 men who did not come home. For decades, he refused to talk about it, burying the horror deep within.
But in his later years, he became one of the most vocal and powerful advocates for the crew’s legacy, speaking at memorials and to new generations of sailors, ensuring that the story of the Indianapolis and its men would never be forgotten. His account, delivered with a mixture of soldierly precision and raw, gut-wrenching emotion, serves as a stark reminder of the cost of war and the indomitable will of the human spirit to survive against all odds. The sharks may have taken his shipmates, but they could not take his story, and now, that story is a permanent part of the American historical record, a testament to the courage of those who endured the unendurable.