The wreckage was found below the Philippine Sea, 72 years after it was sunk by Japanese torpedoes.
It was a sweltering July night, about 110 degrees, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The USS Indianapolis had just completed a top-secret mission to deliver the contents of an atomic bomb to Tinian, one of the Northern Mariana Islands. That bomb, called “Little Boy, ” would later be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
That night, the ship was headed west to the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, where she was to join the USS Idaho to prepare to invade Japan. The crew had been traveling 32 knots and had slowed down to 17, Cpl. Edgar Harrell heard his captain say on the speaker. It was about midnight, the end of Harrell’s watch duty. The 20-year-old Marine from Kentucky went below deck, grabbed his blanket and dozed off.
What he and the others on the ship did not know was that they were being watched. Down below, the Japanese submarine I-58 was about to fire six torpedoes.
Two struck the ship. The first one hit just a few minutes after Harrell fell asleep. The second hit the middle of the ship, near the fuel tank and a powder magazine, Harrell said.
He could hear and feel water flooding below deck. It was mostly dark. The explosion knocked the power out, and the only source of light was the fire. He had no idea what was going on, so he made his way to his commanding officer to get his orders.
“The first 100 yards of the ship was under, ” Harrell said. “We knew the ship was doomed.… We knew that our ship was going to leave us, and it’s going to take us with us unless we get off.”
Then he heard his captain’s voice, echoing from a short distance: “Abandon ship! Abandon ship! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”
Harrell made his way to the high side of the ship, grabbed hold of a steel cable, and “looked out into eternity.”
The 610-foot World War II cruiser was divided in pieces. It sank in just 15 minutes, leaving a layer of black oil floating on the surface.
About 800 of the nearly 1,200 crew members made it off the ship before it sank July 30,1945. The Navy did not know what had happened, so help did not come. For four days, the men, some of whom had life jackets while others did not, floated aimlessly and helplessly in shark-infested waters. Many died of dehydration, starvation and shark attacks. Only 317 were alive by the time a pilot on patrol spotted them by accident.
Harrell, who turns 93 in October, is one of a handful who lived long enough to hear that a team of researchers led by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen had found the Indianapolis wreckage, almost 3½ miles below the surface of the Philippine Sea. The discovery was announced Saturday, 72 years after the ship sank.
“It brings closure to the story, ” Harrell said. “But the experience that we survived, the trauma that we felt, that still exists.”
Harrell, who had written a book about his harrowing tale of survival, has been traveling the country retelling his story, often with vividly descriptive details.
“I can still see and feel… the trauma of swimming those 4½ days, ” he said.
