WASHINGTON • Naval researchers announced last Saturday that they have found the wreckage of lost World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, 72 years after the vessel sank in minutes after it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine..
WASHINGTON • Naval researchers announced last Saturday that they have found the wreckage of lost World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, 72 years after the vessel sank in minutes after it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.
The ship was found more than 5km below the surface of the Philippine Sea, said a tweet from Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen, who led a team of civilian researchers that made the discovery.
Historians and architects from the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington had joined forces with Mr Allen last year to revisit the tragedy.
The ship sank within 15 minutes on July 30,1945, in the war’s final days, and it took the navy four days to realise that the vessel was missing. About 800 of the crew’s 1,200 sailors and marines made it off the cruiser before it sank. But almost 600 of them died over the next four to five days from exposure, dehydration, drowning and shark attacks. Nineteen crew members are alive today, the navy command said in a news release.
The Indianapolis had just completed a top-secret mission to deliver components of the atomic bomb Little Boy to the island of Tinian.
