Found, US warship whose crew was eaten by sharks
Wreck discovered 72 years after torpedo attack by Japanese
AN AMERICAN warship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine has been found 72 years later.
Around a quarter of the 1,197 crew went down with the USS Indianapolis and nearly 900 sailors were left floating for four days and nights in shark-infested tropical waters.
The 620ft heavy cruiser, which had been on a mission to deliver parts for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 1945, sank in 12 minutes after sending a single SOS.
Drawn by the blood in the oil-slicked water, sharks began to pick off the initial survivors as they clung to a few liferafts waiting to be rescued.
Loel Dean Cox, who was on the bridge when the torpedoes hit, was among those in the sea. He recalled: ‘We were sunk at midnight. I saw one [shark] the first morning after daylight. They were big. Some of them I swear were 15ft long. They were continually there, mostly feeding off the dead bodies. Thank goodness, there were lots of dead people floating in the area.’
But soon they came for the living. ‘We were losing three or four each night and day,’ said Mr Cox. ‘ You were constantly in fear because you’d see them all the time. Every few minutes you’d see their fins – a dozen to two dozen fins in the water.
‘They would come up and bump you. I was bumped a few times - you never know when they are going to attack you.’
Some of the men would pound the water, kick and yell when the sharks attacked. Most decided that sticking together in a group was their best defence. But with each attack, the clouds of blood in the water brought more sharks. Mr Cox said: 'In that clear water you could see the sharks circling. Then every now and then, like lightning, one would come straight up and take a sailor and take him straight down. One came up and took the sailor next to me. It was just somebody screaming, yelling or getting bit.' The predators, believed to be whitetip sharks, are typically soli-tary but are known to group together in a feeding frenzy. Just 317 of the ship's crew of 1.197 survived after being spotted by chance when an American air-craft investigated an oil slick four days later. The 880 death toll is the largest loss of life in US naval history. The long-lost ship - destroyed on July 30 1945 -was found 18.000ft down in the Philippine Sea by a civilian search team led by Micro-soft co-founder Paul Allen. He said: 'To be able to honour the brave men of the USS Indian-apolis and their families through the discovery of a ship that played such a significant role during the Second World War is truly hum-bling.' Twenty-two survivors are still alive. Captain William J Toti, who represents them, said: °lb a man, they have longed for the day when their ship would be found, solving their final mystery.' The discovery follows research which pointed to a specific part of the Pacific where the Indianapolis was sighted the night before it was destroyed. That led billionaire Mr Allen's crew, whose boat has advanced underwater search equipment, to make their discov-ery on Saturday. His expedition released pictures of wreckage on the sea floor - with pieces includ-ing a section of hull marked '36', the vessel's fleet number. The Indianapolis's final mission was to carry parts for the 'Little Boy' nuclear bomb as well as enriched uranium fuel for its payload. It will now be a protected war memorial and it remains the prop-erty of the US Navy