Charles B. McVay
When a man’s body falls into the sea, there is a terrible silence of sharp edges that dig right down into the man’s insides. An invisible fist punches the organism of this person who is plummeting to the depths of the ocean. For a moment, his heart stops beating, his lungs are completely shut off from oxygen. Everything stops. When eight hundred and eighty men fall into the sea, the effect is devastating. It results in an immense, unbearable void.
In the early morning of July 30, shortly after midnight, the radar of the Japanese submarine I-58 detected the USS Indianapolis. Its commander, Mochitsura Hashimoto, put his eye to the periscope, scanned the surface of the Pacific and smiled, not without certain anxiety. The American ship was within firing range. He gave an immediate order to torpedo the ship. Hashimoto knew they weren’t going to miss; the kaitens were infallible. Inspired by the figure of the kamikazes, the Japanese invented another horrific means of sacrifice. On top of each torpedo, they mounted a soldier who would guide the missile to its target. The soldiers died on impact, purifying their warrior souls and obtaining a privileged place in the beyond. The commander ordered a line of soldiers to form and asked for volunteers who would assume the responsibility of being kaitens. A pair of sailors no more than twenty years old took a step forwards. They would have the honour of guiding the torpedoes. They were giving themselves over to death, but their faces were without expression. They were like wax statues.
Of the six missiles fired from the I-58, the two that hit the hull of the Indianapolis head on, inflicting serious damage, were precisely the two carrying kaitens. The water poured through the holes with irrepressible force. The ship began to take on water, but there was so much it couldn’t fit. No sooner had the sailors felt the force of the impact than they ran instinctively to their battle stations. By this stage, however, the Indianapolis had already started to list, overwhelmed by the weight of the Pacific. Charles gave the order to abandon ship.
‘Put on your life jackets!’ he shouted amid all the confusion. ‘I don’t want anyone jumping into the sea without a life jacket!’
Many, however, were so dazed that they didn’t hear him. They had only one idea in their heads: to jump off the Indianapolis and swim as far away as possible to avoid being sucked down by the sinking ship. The speed with which the boat was devoured by the Philippine Sea and the collective hysteria prevented many from following the captain’s orders. It took twelve minutes for the ship to go down. Twelve minutes of panic in which more than three hundred men lost their lives. Some died upon impact; others ran all over the deck, suffering from disorientation, wounded or brutally mutilated. Many ended up collapsing on the ground in a matter of minutes. In an attempt to find the best place to jump into the water, survivors bumped into one another and passed over their shipmates’ bodies, trampling on them in the madness of the scramble. In the background, the thunderous roar of the sirens made their heads burst.
From the I-58, Hashimoto watched as a vast cloud of black smoke rose straight into the sky from the ship. Flames illuminated the scene. Hundreds of men jumped off the Indianapolis in a desperate bid to stay alive. Meanwhile, the crew of the I-58 remained in position by their machine guns, awaiting the commander’s final order and contemplating the picture of death and desolation. The procedure to follow in such situations was clear: having hit your target, you had to gun down the survivors, exterminate the whole crew. But, for some reason, Hashimoto decided to spare those men’s lives. He gave the order to change direction, and the I-58 quickly and silently moved away beneath the ocean, merging with the sea floor like another fish. Had he known that the Indianapolis had just delivered the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Mariana Islands, perhaps Hashimoto’s behaviour would have been different.
In the water, there is a lot of fear. You are suddenly alone at the mercy of the elements, confronted by a brute force. You are nothing more than a rag doll that happens to be breathing. The crew of the Indianapolis, floating on the ocean, presented an outlandish appearance. Clinging to their life jackets, they were like hundreds and hundreds of gleaming jellyfish being swung by the tide. They were exhausted, having swum with all their strength to distance themselves from the ship. Some hadn’t made it and had been consumed by the same force that had pulled the ship down into the abyss. An abyss without oxygen or light.
‘Captain!’ shouted one of the sailors, trying to swim towards him. ‘Did you send an SOS?’
Charles, in the middle of a group of men with one who was seriously wounded, was incapable of lying.
‘The radio was damaged by the blast,’ he explained. ‘We were unable to raise the alarm. We’ll have to wait until they notice our absence.’
‘Blasted yellow monkeys!’ shouted the sailor, slapping the surface of the water.
‘This is not a good time to lose control,’ Charles warned him. ‘It won’t take long for them to come and rescue us. Most of us are wearing life jackets, so we can wait for hours and hours without wasting energy. Those who don’t have life jackets should stay with the group. We have to stay afloat any way we can.’
But the truth was even he didn’t believe what he was saying. The authorities had treated that strange mission so secretively he was convinced that hardly anyone knew the position of their ship. Occupied as they were in the invasion of Japan, it would take them another couple of days to realize their absence. The wait would be eternal.
‘How many wounded are there?’ asked Charles with all the strength his lungs permitted him.
There were quite a few. One had lost several fingers on his hand, another had serious wounds on his leg, a third complained about his arm… These were the ones that worried the captain the most. There was no way he wanted to watch them bleed to death in the Pacific, their lives ebbing away while he was powerless to prevent it. If they didn’t get help soon, their chances of survival were nil.
The ocean in the middle of the night is a black sheet. An unreal blanket that sways beneath the stars with a mysterious, unsettling rhythm. It’s like being lost in the middle of nothing. Darkness is a perverse animal. It arouses fears that are lodged in the deepest part of us. Fears we are not even aware of. But more perverse than the darkness is that which moves inside the waters, in that place where nature chose to summarize the concept of ferocity. A few hours after the torpedoes hit, just after daybreak, something happened that altered the direction of events once and for all. Something none of these men was prepared for. The hours that followed were a kind of horror movie. The shipwrecked sailors were still coming to terms with events and gathering the mental strength for the wait that lay ahead when, all of a sudden, a pitiless bevy of tiger sharks emerged from the stomach of the ocean. Several dorsal fins broke the surface of the water and started moving in circles, one behind the other. First, with absolute calm, as if studying the terrain, then more quickly, as in a kind of ritual.
‘Sharks!’ shouted the first men to realize.
Seeing the fins appearing above the water and the sailors’ anguished faces, Charles felt that the dawn sky had come down on top of him. How was he going to be able to resist such a weight? Several men were bleeding, their open wounds oozing into the sea, and these waters were the sharks’ natural territory. The tiger sharks’ hunting zone. They didn’t stand a chance.
The sharks swam comfortably around a group of thirteen men, among them a wounded sailor bleeding profusely. It was as if they were just taking their measurements. There was a moment when the sailors convinced themselves the sharks would leave just as they had come, but they were wrong. Everybody knew perfectly well how ferocious these animals could be, how implacable when it came to blood. The chaotic dimension of their feeding frenzy. The animals started attacking simultaneously and in the same way: they would lift their heads and half their bodies out of the water and launch themselves on their prey. These specimens were between four and five metres, coloured white and grey. The image of their impressive open mouths, with all those steel-tipped teeth, produced a sentiment that was far more complex than fear. They devoured four men with terrifying ease. They drove their teeth into the sailors’ flesh, ripping apart members and organs beneath the horrified gaze of the others. The waters turned red, as if by magic. And then silence, broken only by the lamentations of those who dared to cry. That day was eternal. Every now and then, several dorsal fins would suddenly emerge from the ocean. The sharks were so silent nobody could hear them. They would select a group of men and start circling them. By the time the sailors realized, the sharks were on top of them, eating them alive. Some were killed in the act, their lives cut down as soon as the teeth sank in, but others suffered a worse fate. Some sharks would attack in stages. The first attack was fierce, but not decisive. They would shear off a leg or an arm and then leave. While the victim screamed out in agony, the shark would move away, but not for good. Soon it would come back to carry on mutilating its prey until finally finishing it off, swallowing up all that suffering.
Most of the men were not eaten whole. A few chunks of flesh would be left floating on the sea, rolling in the current. It was a horrifying image. Some of the sailors who were still alive would begin to vomit when they realized the remains of their old shipmates were floating all around them. They knew they would be the next to die. They had nothing to hold on to, no place where they could seek shelter. Not even inside themselves. Their inner landscapes were desolate and withered. Charles thought about Eva, their son, that delicious afternoon with Mary Jane, when he had dared to free himself for the first time. He also thought about the ease with which life can turn towards disaster. His mind was a carousel of images from the past. At this point, a shark passed by him, brushing him with macabre softness. The viscous, cold contact sent a shiver through his marrow. ‘It’s over,’ he thought. ‘The end has come.’ And yet the captain had plenty more to suffer. The animal made straight for Paul, his second in command. Charles’ trustworthy companion, the one he’d spent half his life with. The only person he could fully open up to. The shark landed on top of him and swallowed his stomach whole. Charles had to close his eyes at the sight of Paul’s intestines spilling out of his body. The water was again stained red, while the shouts of sailors being feasted upon rose one above the other. For the first time since the Japanese attack on their ship, Charles let himself go and wrenched his vocal cords by cussing and cursing until he could no more. Everything ceased to make sense to the captain. The years in the Navy, that war, the distance from his family. The ocean reeked of fresh blood. It was carnage, that was all. Charles put his hands together, closed his eyes and prayed.
The castaways’ fate was truly cruel. They spent four days and nights resisting the sharks’ onslaughts. Every day that passed, dozens of men were eaten alive. First, they tried to smack the water and jostle about in an attempt to frighten them off. But this tactic didn’t work; all it did was egg the sharks on and drain the sailors of the little energy they had left. In the end, they opted to remain motionless and completely silent. When they sensed a shark in the vicinity, they would hug themselves and pray that it would pass. Spare their lives. But there was always one man who ended up falling victim to the animals’ voraciousness. The sharks weren’t the only ones to take it out on the sailors. Hunger and sunstroke also did their bit. By the third day, all the survivors had burnt heads, blistered lips, flaking skin on their arms and faces. The salt and saltpetre drew the sun like a magnet, acting as fuel. The pitiless sun beat down on top of them and didn’t yield.
‘Don’t drink any seawater,’ Charles kept saying. ‘I know the thirst is unbearable, but you have to be strong. A rescue plane will be here any moment.’
The captain knew the consequences of ingesting huge quantities of salt water. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a sailor go completely mad after subjecting his body to quantities of salt it wasn’t prepared for. In the beginning, they all followed his advice. When the sharks weren’t around, they tried any way they could to think about nice things. They endeavoured to ignore the thirst scorching their throats and mouths. But there were those who couldn’t take any more. ‘Just a little,’ they said to themselves. And they drank greedily. After a few hours, the hallucinations began and the sailors started behaving strangely, taking off their life jackets, swimming further and further away while shouting unintelligible things… Some had a violent outburst and started beating their closest neighbour. Several sailors were killed by those they’d shared a cabin with. The situation was unbearable. A Dantesque scene took place in each group of sailors: a man pummelling another’s face; a shark determined to eat a cabin boy’s head; the broken voices of those calling to their mothers and wives in amongst the tears… On the morning of the fourth day, there were only four hundred men left alive.
On land, the Americans intercepted a transmission by the I-58 in which Commander Hashimoto let it be known he’d succeeded in sinking the Indianapolis, having hit the target with two manned torpedoes. Even so, it didn’t occur to anybody to mount a rescue mission, to send a plane to fly over the area in case there were any survivors. Nothing at all. They preferred to deduce that the message was false. In this simple way, they handed them over to the sharks of the Pacific on a plate. Absolute carnage.
On the morning of the fifth day, a PV-1 Ventura bomber was flying over the zone where the ship had sunk on routine patrol when it noticed a suspicious shadow on the sea. At first, the pilots thought it was an oil slick, but then they realized this stain was in fact made up of men. They radioed for a flying boat to be sent out on reconnaissance. It took the flying boat two hours to arrive. Two hours in which the sharks continued doing their work. Pulling off legs, hands, lungs. Ripping out the intestines of those men of war until they were empty.
The commander of the flying boat, Lieutenant Marks, flew low over the area to see if it was really men the PV-1 Ventura had spotted in the sea. The shipwrecked sailors desperately waved their arms about, begging to be taken out of that inferno. Marks grabbed the radio and radioed back to base.
‘There are about three hundred survivors,’ he informed them. ‘I request the immediate launch of a rescue mission.’
From base, he was given the order to return. They would send several ships to pull the sailors out of the water; he had done his bit. Marks started dropping all the rubber rafts, food and water he had on board into the sea. The men quickly gathered the supplies. Marks was just about to return to base when he spotted another, vast shadow in the water, underneath the shipwrecked sailors. His heart started beating fast, threatening to pound its way out of his chest.
‘Sharks.’
That was all he could say in a burst of panic. The sailors were being devoured before his very eyes. Never in his life had he witnessed such a scene. Disobeying standing orders and risking the stability of his plane, he landed and started pulling as many men as he could out of the water. Fifty-six sailors scrambled on to the flying boat, shaking like defenceless animals. There was no room for any more. In a desperate attempt to escape the sharks, some men tied themselves to the wings of the plane with parachute cord, following the instructions of the captain, who guided them from the water. Beneath them, in the Philippine Sea, the sharks didn’t relent. They carried on attacking men until the rescue ships arrived and the last survivor, Captain McVay, was pulled out of the water.
