Breaking News From The BBC: USS Indianapolis Found After 72 Years.

[mawnansmiff]

If the sinking had happened four days earlier the war could have taken a different route...scary thought.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40991326
Regards,
Jay.

 

[pagan]

I have had the honor to know, and speak with often, a Navy Vet that survived the sinking of USS Indianapolis, horrifying ordeal, I have never look at the ocean the same way

 

[wyfbane]

Paul Allen's team found it. Good to know he isn't just using his money for sports teams. lol

 

[tbradsim1]

Forgotten Heros all of them. The Captain didn't deserve what life gave him. Pivotal Mission in the War.

 

[mso489]

The torpedo sinking of the Indianapolis was likely the death knell of the modern battleship. They are still astonishing specimens to tour where they are available, such as the U.S.S. North Carolina at Wilmington. I've been aboard and through various ships, but the battle ship feels more like a geological formation, like a cave, that a vessel afloat. The shells fired by the main batteries (big guns) throws a projectile the size of a Volkswagen. They were truly the monsters of the fleet. When you rap on the bulkheads (walls) aboard a battleship, there is absolutely no sense that there is anything but steel beyond the steel you touch. It could be a mile thick.

 

[weezell]

God Bless those that gave their lives for us..US. Never forget...

 

[huntertrw]

The USS Indianapolis (CA-35) was a heavy cruiser. Interestingly, she was 2.75' longer than the much heavier USS Arizona (BB-93), a Pennsylvania class battleship. The USS Indianapolis had a main battery of nine eight-inch 55-caliber rifles (three per turret x three turrets), whereas the USS Arizona was fitted with 12 14-inch 45-caliber rifles (three per turret x four turrets. By way of comparison, the Iowa class of battleships (the United States' last) had a main batter of nine 16-inch 50-caliber rifles (three per turret x three turrets).
Regarding the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the story was broken by journalist (and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant j.g.) Robert Ruark, the author of "The Old Man and the Boy" column which appeared in Field & Stream magazine, plus numerous novels including "Something of Value."

 

[huntertrw]

Correction: The USS Arizona was BB-39.

 

[mso489]

Oops. Right. The USS Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser, which I should have known by its being named for a city. Battleships are named for states -- U.S.S. New Jersey, U.S.S. Wisconsin, U.S.S. North Carolina, and so on. The sinking of a heavy cruiser may have reflected on the efficacy of really heavy battle wagons, but it was not a battleship.

 

[madox07]

I guess you guys know all the finer details, over here the only thing we know about USS Indianapolis is that it carried parts for the "fat boy" atomic bomb and then it got sunk soon after. Neat find. They keep finding them now so many years after the war(s). I remember in the news not so long ago reading something about researchers finding the imperial battle ship St Stephen of the Austro Hungary. I guess such finds bring back memories for some elderly veterans, and add finer details to historical research but that's pretty much it. The wreck will stay in its watery grave and there is nothing it can be done about it.

 

[fnord]

Jay:
Thanks for sharing this.
Film fans here might remember Robert Shaw's drunken retelling of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis as Capt. Quint in the film, "Jaws" and the horrifying aftermath.

Y'know, by the end of that first dawn... lost a hundred men. I dunno how many sharks. Maybe a thousand. I dunno how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Bosun's mate. I thought he was asleep. Reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. Young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. Y'know, that was the time I was most frightened, waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.
[he pauses, smiles, and raises his glass]

Everybody's favorite tough guy director/producer/writer John Milius and writer Howard Sackler bled ink and worked that scene up for Steven Spielberg.
God bless the men on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Heroes all. Fair winds and following seas.
Fnord

 

[mso489]

My dad was probably in the general area of the sinking around the time, skippering a YMS minesweeper out of a port at Leyte, Philippines. Before that, just after marriage, he and my mom had a wonderful tour of U.S. ports as he trained and was reassigned, with apartments at Staten Island, Key West, Tacoma WA, and San Pedro Ca. The Navy transported them from place to place with their household goods, and eventually a baby, my older sister. It was a kind of wartime honeymoon. Dad was offered a reassignment in Asia after the war, but figured it was time to get home. He wasn't big on signing up in the first place, but he was an expert nautical guy before he ever went to OCS. I was a mere enlisted radioman, and eventually changed job rating to journalist, but I did sea duty on a minesweeper, so I like to say we were a minesweeper dynasty, as a joke.

 

[huntertrw]

More than anything else, the advent and evolution of the aircraft carrier spelled the end of the modern battleship as a naval weapon. In the Yamato class of the Imperial Japanese Navy the battleship reached its highest expression. The Yamato and its sister ship the Musashi were each equipped with a main battery of nine 18.1-inch 45-caliber rifles (three per turret x three turrets). Each ship displaced 71,659 tons fully loaded. By way of comparison the United States Navy's USS Iowa displaced only 57,000 tons fully loaded.
In his book titled "Harm's Way" the late author (and former Captain, USNR) said this concerning the two Imperial Class ships of Japan's Navy, "Of all the weapons in the Japanese arsenal, Yamato was the most formidable. Completed in time to participate in the great engagement of mid-June (he is referring to the battle of Midway), she hadn't been observed since, and although her fearsome 68,000-ton bulk was out of sight, it was never out of the mind of the American planners. Her sister ship Musashi was ready, too, and together they made more than a match for any combination of the new Iowa-class battleships available. Yamato's nine eighteen-inch guns fired thirty-two-hundred-pound projectiles. Any one of her triple turrets weighed as much as a normal destroyer, and her side armor was sixteen inches thick.
"Nobody would ever build a larger battleship. Nobody would ever want to. She was considered invincible in this last of the personal wars."

 

[huntertrw]

Oops, I inadvertently omitted the author's name; it was James Bassett.