Considering History: The U.S.S. Indianapolis, Jaws, and the Human Horrors of War

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

On August 6^th, 1945, the U.S. Air Force B-29 bomber the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb known as “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Alongside its counterpart bomb “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki three days later, the Hiroshima bombing led directly to the end of the war, but it also did a great deal more than that. It immediately raised, and has continued to raise in the eight decades since, complex philosophical questions: of the balance of national security and human rights priorities, of the relationship between exigency and morality in our decision-making, of when and how strategic military decisions risk becoming war crimes.

Such questions are important, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the human stories at the heart of such historic events. That of course includes the hundreds of thousands of Japanese people killed and injured by the bombing, and the millions more subsequently affected. But it also includes the human and horrific story of the American sailors aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis, a story captured pitch-perfectly by one of the greatest movie monologues ever delivered.

The heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis had been active in the Pacific Theater for much of the war, but in July 1945 it received a secret new assignment: to deliver a “critical shipment” of non-nuclear material to Tinian Island, components that would be used to complete “Little Boy” (along with the enriched uranium, which for safety and security reasons was delivered by three cargo planes from New Mexico). Indianapolis sailed from San Francisco on July 16^th, just hours after the successful atomic test at Trinity Site; on board were two representatives of the Manhattan Project, including its Chief Medical Officer Dr. James F. Nolan. The ship set a speed record for the leg from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, and then sailed on to Tinian, arriving at the Marianas Islands location on July 26^th.

While the Indianapolis completed its mission without incident, its return journey would become the most destructive and tragic in naval history. After a stopover in Guam, the ship was en route toward the Philippine island of Leyte when it was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 early in the morning on July 30^th. She sank in just 12 minutes, with about 300 of the 1190 total crewmen going down with the ship as a result, and the other 890 stranded in the ocean with few lifeboats and not enough lifejackets for all of them. And “stranded” is exactly the word: Due to the secret nature of the ship’s mission, few in the Navy even knew the Indianapolis was there; moreover, due to the location and rapidity of the torpedo strike, no distress signal was sent before the ship sank. Rarely has the contrast between the human and historic sides of war been made more plain.

Those 890 sailors would spend three and a half days in the water before they were spotted by a patrolling aircraft on the morning of August 2^nd and a rescue operation began. That would have been a perilous and painful ordeal under any conditions, with dehydration, exposure, hypothermia, and delirium just some of the terrors they’d have to face. But by all accounts the most dreadful threat was the sharks; hundreds were drawn to the wreck, and many continued to hunt the survivors throughout the ordeal. Only 316 of the 890 men who went into the water survived to be rescued (with two more dying soon thereafter). While no one knows how many were killed by sharks, there’s no doubt that the attacks added another layer of horror to the experience for each and every man.

Due to a combination of factors, including the mission’s secrecy and the public’s understandable subsequent focus on the atomic bombings and the end of the war, the tragedy of the Indianapolis was not particularly well-known in its era. That would change dramatically 30 years later, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s iconic summer blockbuster film Jaws (1975). At the heart of Spielberg’s film is one of the greatest movie monologues ever delivered, when Robert Shaw’s laconic shark hunter Quint opens up and reveals to his compatriots, Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper and Roy Scheider’s Brody, that he is a survivor of the Indianapolis. For nearly five uninterrupted minutes, Quint tells the story of the sinking and its aftermath, and while the film takes a few dramatic liberties with the facts (for whatever reason Quint says the ordeal began on June the 29^th, for example), I would argue that the monologue perfectly and powerfully captures the human horrors of this historic event.

Quint’s monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis in Jaws (Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips)

Quint focuses much of his monologue on the shark attacks (unsurprisingly, given the film in which the speech is found), but two more distinct individual lines toward the end are particularly powerful representations of those human sides to history. As he describes the long-overdue rescue, Quint recalls, “You know that was the time I was most frightened, waiting for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again.” The last sentence is delivered quickly and quietly, but it reminds us of a crucial fact: that even for the few hundred men who managed to survive the ordeal, they were undoubtedly and permanently affected with about the worst PTSD possible (in an era when that diagnosis didn’t yet exist and so the subject was too often left unaddressed). Even those who survived the Indianapolis, that is, carried the horrors with them as enduringly and fully as Quint clearly has.

After that quietly devastating moment, Quint continues, “So, eleven hundred men went into the water, 316 men came out, and the sharks took the rest. June the 29^th, 1945.” Then, after a pause, he concludes, “Anyway, we delivered the bomb.” And that final sentence does two important things at once: It offers an especially pointed and potent reminder of the gap between historic events and human suffering, of a military mission and the men affected by it; and it adds one more human story to the tragedy of the Indianapolis. After all, those survivors would soon and for the rest of their lives have to exist in the atomic age.