July 30, 1945.
Shortly after midnight.

In mid-July 1945, a lead-lined steel canister arrived at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco under armed Army escort. Two Army officers accompanied it. They would not say what was inside. The canister was carried aboard the USS Indianapolis, a Portland-class heavy cruiser, and secured in Admiral Spruance's cabin. The crew was told only that the cargo was critical to the war effort, and that if the ship went down, the canister was to be placed in a boat before anybody else.

Captain Charles Butler McVay III had commanded the Indianapolis since late 1944. He was a career Navy officer from a Navy family. His father had retired as an admiral. McVay had captained the ship through the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where a kamikaze strike had killed several of his crew. After months of repair at the Mare Island Navy Yard, the Indianapolis was ordered back to sea for a single job: deliver this cargo to Tinian, a small island in the Marianas, as fast as the engines could take her.

The ship left San Francisco on July 16. She ran at near-maximum speed, reaching Pearl Harbor in under four days and Tinian on July 26. The canister and a second container were offloaded under guard and taken away. Inside was the enriched uranium that would fuel the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima eleven days later. The crew of the Indianapolis did not know what they had carried. Most of them never would.

McVay received new orders. The ship was to proceed to Guam and then to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, where she would join a task force assembling for the invasion of Japan. She reached Guam on July 27. McVay requested a destroyer escort for the crossing to Leyte. The request was denied. He asked the routing officer about Japanese submarine activity along his planned track. He was told the lane was clear.

Naval intelligence had, by that date, intercepted and decoded Japanese communications showing submarine operations along the route the Indianapolis would take. The intelligence was in the system. It was not passed to McVay or to the office that charted his course.

The Indianapolis left Guam on the morning of July 28 with approximately 1,196 men aboard. She had no escort. She carried no sonar equipment capable of detecting a submerged submarine at useful range. Her captain had not been told that the Navy's own codebreakers had flagged the waters ahead of him.

The transit to Leyte was expected to take roughly three days. On the night of July 29, the Philippine Sea was calm. A low overcast covered the sky and blotted out the moon. McVay had ordered zigzag maneuvering during daylight hours, a standard tactic for complicating torpedo solutions. After dark, with poor visibility, he secured the zigzag. Standing Navy doctrine left the decision to the commanding officer's judgment. In total darkness, with no visible horizon, McVay judged the maneuver served no purpose.

Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto of the Imperial Japanese submarine I-58 was patrolling those same waters. Shortly after midnight on July 30, he picked up a dark shape through his night periscope. He ordered a spread of six torpedoes fired.

Two struck the Indianapolis on her starboard side. The first hit forward and tore the bow apart. The second detonated amidships, near a fuel bunker and a powder magazine, and set off fires that swept through the forward compartments. The ship lost electrical power within minutes. Radio operators keyed out distress signals on failing equipment. Three shore stations picked up fragments of the transmission. At one, the duty officer had standing orders not to wake his commander. At another, the message was dismissed as a possible Japanese ruse designed to lure rescue ships into a submarine trap. At the third, no one acted. The distress call went unanswered at all three.

The Indianapolis listed hard to starboard and began to go down by the bow. Twelve minutes after the first torpedo, she rolled over and sank. An estimated 300 men went down with her. Roughly 900 made it into the sea.

They had a handful of life rafts, a limited supply of kapok life vests that lost buoyancy after roughly two days of immersion, almost no fresh water, and no food. The survivors floated in clusters spread across miles of open ocean, some on rafts, some gripping pieces of wreckage, the majority drifting in nothing but a vest.

The groups that had reached rafts rode low in the swells, men packed tight, arms and legs trailing over the sides. They had small paddles and a few emergency flares. Whatever fresh water they had managed to save from the ship ran out quickly.

The hours after the sinking belonged to the wounded. Men burned in the explosions, men with broken bones and shrapnel wounds, died through the predawn dark and into morning. Bodies slipped from vests and disappeared beneath the surface. Others drifted away from the groups in the current. By midday on July 30, the survivors saw the first sharks.

Oceanic whitetip sharks are surface feeders, common in warm open water. They circled the clusters of floating men. They struck at the edges. A scream, a sudden thrashing, and a man was gone. The attacks came in surges, worst at dawn and dusk. Groups tried to bunch together, hoping a larger mass would deter them. Men splashed the water to drive the animals back. It worked sometimes. Sometimes it brought more.

Officers in the water tried to hold their groups together. Some organized head counts. Some assigned watch rotations, men scanning the empty horizon in shifts for ships or aircraft that did not come. In groups without strong leadership, cohesion broke down faster.

The sun was the other killer. Late July on the open Pacific meant temperatures that blistered exposed skin during the day, while the deeper water around submerged legs brought on hypothermia after dark. Fuel oil from the sunken ship coated skin, burned eyes, and fouled anything the men tried to drink or collect. The cycle ran every twenty-four hours: scorching through daylight, shivering through the night.

By the second day, dehydration took hold. Men began drinking seawater. The salt accelerated hallucinations faster than the thirst did. Survivors later described seeing islands just beyond reach, buildings rising from the swells, springs of fresh water just beneath the surface. Men swam away from their groups toward nothing and did not return. Some turned on other survivors. Some stripped off their vests without a word and went under. The clusters shrank hour by hour.

The Indianapolis had been expected at Leyte Gulf on July 31. She did not arrive. Nobody reported it.

The Navy's tracking system for combatant ships relied on port directors noting when an expected vessel failed to appear. But a standing directive instructed port directors not to report the arrival of combatant ships. The reasoning was that warships might be diverted or operating under radio silence, and that their movements would be tracked through other channels. No other channel tracked them. The Indianapolis dropped off the plotting boards, and the system built to catch a missing warship caught nothing.

For close to four and a half days, roughly 900 American sailors floated in the Philippine Sea. No search was under way. No aircraft were sent. Nobody in the Navy's chain of command knew, or thought to verify, that a heavy cruiser and nearly 1,200 men had disappeared.

On the morning of August 2, Lieutenant Wilbur Gwinn was flying a routine antisubmarine patrol in a PV-1 Ventura out of Peleliu. His trailing wire antenna had come loose, and he dropped altitude to fix it. Through a gap in the clouds, he saw an oil slick on the water. He flew lower. He saw heads.

Gwinn radioed his base. The oil slick ran for miles. A PBY Catalina flying boat, piloted by Lieutenant Adrian Marks, was dispatched to the area. When Marks arrived overhead and saw men below being circled by sharks, he made a decision that broke standing orders. He landed the Catalina on the open sea. The hull cracked on impact with the swells, but the aircraft held together. Marks and his crew began pulling men from the water and lashing those too weak to climb aboard to the wings. By the time the plane could take no more, it was too damaged to fly again.

The destroyer escort USS Cecil J. Doyle arrived after nightfall with searchlights sweeping the dark water, the first surface ship on the scene. More vessels followed through the night and into August 3. The men pulled from the sea had been adrift for close to four and a half days. Many could not grip a line. Many could not speak. Some fought the sailors trying to save them, still locked inside hallucinations, unable to distinguish rescuers from threats.

Of the roughly 900 men who had gone into the Philippine Sea on July 30, 320 were pulled out alive.

The Navy convened a court of inquiry within weeks. In December 1945, McVay was court-martialed. The primary charge was hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag during good visibility.

The prosecution brought Commander Hashimoto from Japan to Washington to testify at the trial. Hashimoto told the court that zigzagging would not have changed the result of his attack. McVay was convicted on the charge.

No charges were brought over the decision to send the Indianapolis without escort, the failure to forward submarine intelligence to her captain, the three shore stations that received the distress signal and took no action, or the tracking directive that allowed a warship and nearly 1,200 men to vanish without notice for four days.

McVay returned to duty and retired from the Navy in 1949 as a rear admiral. For years, he received letters from families of the dead, blaming him for the loss of their sons. On November 6, 1968, McVay was found dead at his home in Connecticut from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 70.

In the late 1990s, Hunter Scott, a student in Pensacola, Florida, researched the Indianapolis for a school history project. He interviewed survivors and presented evidence to Congress that McVay had been scapegoated for failures in the chain of command. In October 2000, Congress passed a resolution stating that McVay's record should reflect his exoneration for the loss of the Indianapolis. The following year, the Secretary of the Navy ordered the record amended.

The wreck of the Indianapolis was located in August 2017 by a civilian research vessel, resting on the floor of the Philippine Sea at a depth of more than 18,000 feet.

McVay's record was cleared in 2001. He had been dead since 1968.