New Details Surface on Loss of WWII USS Indianapolis

[Bruce Nunnally]

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) officials announced July 25 a NHHC historian recently uncovered information that sheds new light on a dark episode in U.S. Navy history -- the loss of the World War II cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA 35).

In the final days of the war, Indianapolis completed a top secret mission to deliver components of the atomic bomb used in Hiroshima to U.S. forces in theater. After dropping those components off at Tinian in the Marianas Islands, Indianapolis headed to Leyte, an island in the Philippines, when it was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine just after midnight July 30, 1945. Around 800 of the ship's 1,196 Sailors and Marines survived the sinking, but after 4-5 harrowing days in the water and suffering exposure, dehydration, drowning, and shark attacks, only 316 survived.

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