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Fatal Voyage

The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis

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About this listen

 Shortly after midnight on July 30, 1945, the Navy cruiser USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. The ship had just left the island of Tinian, delivering components of the atomic bomb destined for Hiroshima. As the torpedoes hit, the Indianapolis erupted into a fiery coffin, sinking in less than fifteen minutes and leaving nine hundred crewmen fighting for life in shark-infested waters. They expected a swift, routine rescue, unaware that the Navy high command didn’t even realize that the Indianapolis was missing. Help would not arrive for another five days.

Drawn from definitive interviews with key figures, Fatal Voyage recounts the horrific events endured as the number of water-treading survivors dwindled to just 316. Each gruesome day brought more madness and slow death, from explosion-related injuries, dehydration, and, most terrifying of all, shark attacks. But the pain did not end when the men finally returned home: The Indianapolis’s commander, Captain Charles B. McVay III, was court-martialed for causing the clearly unavoidable disaster.

With a new afterword chronicling the fifty-five-year campaign by Indianapolis survivors and their supporters to win public vindication for Captain McVay, this classic is restored, along with memories of the Indianapolis crew. Armed Forces Military Military & War Naval Forces World War II War Submarine Imperial Japan Survival

Critic reviews

"Mr. Kurzman’s description of the Indianapolis…lingers in the memory…A well-told–and disturbing–disaster story."
--New York Times Book Review

"Kurzman’s gripping book paints a…horrible scene. The sinking of the Indianapolis was–and remains–perhaps the most shameful naval disaster in American history."
--People
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Admittedly, I didn't get to the ends, but got past the rescue of the survivors, and in all that time, there was scanty mention of the one thing which makes the Indianapolis disaster stand out form other maritime disasters, and that is constant shark attacks on the survivors in the water. The few minutes of dialogue in the movie Jaws relays better than any portion of this book the absolute, pitiable horror of the event. True, it conveys well the attricious predicament of being toepedoed in and escaping a sinking ship, but once into the water, the true nightmare of the endless shark attacks is hardly mentioned, the author preferring to concentrate on the ruminations of the survivors he never directly quotes. Everything is interpreted in a more novelistic style than I'm personally comfortable with. Unless directly quoted, I'm never sure how much of the narrative is imagines by the author.

Misses the biggest part of the story.

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I came to this book after watching the pretty poor Hollywood interpretation of this WW2 horrific sinking. The film focuses on the horrifying shark attacks and not on the effects of relentless sun and drinking seawater on rapidly dehydrating sailors stuck for days in the ocean as also occurred.

There was the failure to recognise the US Indianapolis was missing and the shameful Court Martial of the Captain.

A great read and production that filled in the gaps of the movie. Interesting and easy to listen to.

The sharks were just a small part of this tragedy.

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