‘JAWS’ OME FIND
Sunken WW2 cruiser from flick located
The wreckage of the USS Indianapolis, whose sinking led to the worst loss of life from a single ship in US naval history — and inspired a scene in the movie “Jaws’’ that turned a generation onto its tale — has finally been found.
A research crew funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen discovered the mangled, rusting remains of the World War II heavy cruiser off the coast of the Philippines on Friday, about 18,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
In a seemingly too-horrific-tobe-true tale, the ship’s saga began when it was struck by two Japanese torpedoes around midnight July 30, 1945, in the final days of the war.
The massive warship had just completed its secret mission to the remote Pacific island Tinian — delivering parts for the nuclear bomb dubbed Little Boy, which was to be dropped on Hiroshima days later.
The ship sunk in just 12 minutes and what followed was sheer terror.
About 800 of the Indianapolis’ 1,196 crew members survived the torpedoing. But only 316 were rescued alive five days later, with the rest either drowning, perishing from exposure and dehydration — or being eaten by sharks.
“I can still see and feel . . . the trauma of swimming those 4½ days,” said then-Cpl. Edgar Harrell, 92, to the Washington Post on Sunday. “I can still remember today as if it were just yesterday.”
Robert Shaw’s sea-captain character, Quint, in “Jaws,’’ was a survivor of the maritime disaster.
“The very first light, the sharks came cruising,’’ Quint recalls to oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Roy Scheider’s police chief Martin Brody in the 1975 blockbuster.
“You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand,” Quint recounts.
Allen’s team spent months combing a 600-square-mile patch of ocean for the wreckage after a 2016 discovery of the ship’s last movements.
“I hope everyone connected to this historic ship will feel some measure of closure at this discovery so long in coming,” said Allen, whose father served in the Army in the war.