SYMHC Classics: Unearthed! USS Indianapolis

This 2017 episode covers the U.S.S. Indianapolis, known today for its crew's horrifying wait for rescue after being torpedoed following a secret mission at the end of World War II. But the ship's history goes back much farther than that.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's the anniversary of the USS Indianapolis being
struck by a torpedo during World War Two. That happened
on July, so we're bringing out our episode on the
Indianapolis is our Saturday Classic today. We originally released this
on December seventeen as part of our Unearthed series because

(00:24):
the wreck of the Indianapolis had just been found. You
can hear from our discussion of that how the number
of Unearthed episodes has increased since then. And just in
case that name doesn't immediately ring a bell, this is
the incident that comes up during the movie Jaws, in
which the ship's survivors wound up waiting for rescue for

(00:44):
days in shark infested waters. So just f y if
that's a little too heavy for your Saturday. We're not
gonna begrudge anybody who saves it for later. No, it's
a it's a wrenching story in a lot of ways,
but here he goes. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and

(01:12):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Fry. It is time to kick off Unearthed Season
on a show a lot of people's favorite season. The
things people tell us so they're favorites are pretty much
Halloween and Unearthed. So as is as we do every
year and now also once in the summer, we're going
to spend a couple of upcoming episodes recapping things that

(01:34):
were either literally or figuratively unearthed in But as has
also happened a few times in the past, we've got
a big one that's related to a historical event that
we have not covered on the show before. Over the
last few years, we've gotten requests to talk about the
USS Indianapolis from Margaret Brandy, Sarah, Shawn, Heidi, and Craig

(01:55):
among I am sure other people. If you have ever
seen Jaw, you have heard of this. So this is
part of our Unearthed series this year because a team
led by Microsoft co founder Paul Allen actually located the
wreckage of the Indianapolis this year, after which point we

(02:16):
got so many media emails about it. There were a
lot people uh huh. So today, the USS Indianapolis is
most known for its cruise horrifying wait for rescue after
being torpedoed following a secret mission at the end of
World War two. But the ship's history goes back much
farther than that. It started out as a peacetime vessel

(02:39):
before being active in the Pacific for much of the war,
participating in multiple combat engagements and earning ten Battle stars
before its destruction. All the way back in the U. S.
Department of the Navy decided that it's thirty five cruiser
would be named the USS Indianapolis. The New York Ship
Building Company laid its keel and cam in New Jersey

(03:00):
on March n then construction of the Portland class heavy
cruiser continued into ninety one. It was launched on November
seven of that year and then officially commissioned at Philadelphia
Navy Yard on November fifteenth, nineteen thirty two. During its
years of peacetime service, the USS Indianapolis was an important

(03:21):
ship in the U. S. Naval Fleet. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt selected it as his Ship of State in nineteen
thirty three, using it for maritime travel and diplomatic visits
throughout his time in office, including his nineteen thirty six
Good Neighbor Cruise to South America. In addition to the President,
the ship was frequently host to dignitaries, royalty, and other

(03:43):
high profile visitors, and it became the flagship of the
Scouting Force. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December seven,
ninety one, the Indianapolis was at Johnson Atoll also known
as Kalama Atoll conducting bombarding exercises, so it escaped the
destruction of so much of the rest of the fleet
at Pearl Harbor and then joined the unsuccessful effort to

(04:06):
try to hunt down the Japanese attack force. With the
US at war, the Indianapolis continued to operate in the Pacific,
starting in the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska
as part of the Aleutian Islands Campaign. Apart from returns
to Port for overhauls and refitting, the Indianapolis spent most
of its time in the North Pacific and saw combat

(04:27):
several times, including sinking the Japanese transport Okagana Maru on
February nineteenth nine. After another refitting later in nineteen forty three,
the Indianapolis was named flagship of the Fifth Fleet and
moved to Hawaii. The ship again saw reputed combat in
the Pacific, now in the much warmer waters of the

(04:48):
South Pacific headed towards Japan. This included being part of
the Battle of the Philippine Sea in nineteen forty four,
which was nicknamed the Mariannae Turkey Shoot because of the
number of Japanese planes that were shot down around the
Marianna's islands during that time. At the beginning of nineteen
forty five, the Indianapolis became part of the task force
that attacked Japan's outlying islands, participating in numerous assaults from

(05:13):
January through March, including providing support and cover for strikes
on Iwajima, qu Shu, Honshu, and Okinawa. On March thirty one,
ninety five, the Indianapolis was hit by a Kamakazi plane
and heavily damaged. Nine men were killed and about thirty
injured in the attack, but the ship was able to
return to Mayor Island Naval Shipyard northeast of San Francisco

(05:36):
under its own power that arrived at the shipyard in
late April. While in dry dock at Mayor Island, the
Indianapolis again, in addition to the repairs, underwent refitting and updates.
At this point, the United States was nearing completion of
the Atomic bombs that would be dropped on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A crew of scientists and

(05:58):
researchers were already the on Tinnian Island in the Northern
Mariana Islands doing the final work. There's more on the
development of the atomic bomb in our past two parter
on Luis Alvarez, who was on board one of the
aircraft escorting the Anola Gay when the bomb was dropped
and was at this point on Tinnian Island. There were
still bomb components on the US mainland that needed to

(06:21):
be taken to Tinnian Island. This included the firing mechanism
and nuclear material for the bomb code named Little Boy,
which would be dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima
on August. This made the Indianapolis is time in dry
docks somewhat conveniently timed. With an accelerated repair schedule, the
Indianapolis could pick up the components as cargo and deliver

(06:43):
them to Tinnyan Island without the Navy needing to recall
another ship from combat to make that trip. The firing
mechanism was packed in a fifteen foot or four and
a half meter crate, which was bolted to the hangar deck.
In transit. The uranium two thirty five nuclear material was
packed into two separate leadline containers weighing hundreds of pounds.

(07:05):
These were secured to the deck and the Admiral's quarters
to scientists also came aboard for the mission disguised as
artillery officers. The Captain Charles B. McVeigh the third knew
they were on a secret mission that was critical to
the war effort, but he did not know what was
actually in those containers. The same was true of the
ship's crew, and this led to a lot of ridiculous

(07:27):
rumors about what they were carrying in those large, heavy containers,
with expensive luxuries for General MacArthur, including a crate of
scented toilet paper. As one of the running themes or theories,
the Indianapolis stayed close to its maximum speed of thirty
two knots while on this delivery mission. It actually broke
a speed record that still stands for a ship of

(07:48):
its type today. In the process of doing that, they
arrived at Tennian Island on July, delivered that critical cargo,
and then headed south to Guam to receive new orders.
Two days later, the Indianapolis left Guam, headed to the
Late Gulf to rendezvous with the U. S. S Idaho,
where the two ships were to undergo gun to repractice.

(08:10):
And while there were men on board the Indianapolis who
had been with the ship for most of the war,
more than a quarter of the crew had turned over
while in dry dock at Mayor Island. Overwhelmingly, these were
inexperienced new recruits in their late teens, and because of
the ship's accelerated repair schedule, their training time in San
Francisco had also been cut short. So Captain McVeigh was

(08:33):
really focused on getting to Laity quickly and efficiently to
give his crew as much as much training time as possible.
After all, they had no idea that they had just
delivered necessary components for one of the two bombs that
would be credited with ending the war. Everyone aboard the
Indianapolis was working under the understanding that they were getting
ready for a full scale land invasion of Japan. McVeigh

(08:57):
wanted them to have enough training to be able to
succeed at that invasion. There's a lack of consensus about
whether McVeigh asked for a destroyer escort when he left Guam.
According to some accounts, he did, but was denied because
the Navy didn't think there were Japanese threats along that route.
But according to others, McVeigh himself didn't believe there was
a threat, so he did not request an escort. But

(09:20):
either way, the Indianapolis proceeded toward late alone. There was
a Japanese submarine along the route that the Indianapolis was taking,
the I fifty eight, which fired a spread of six
torpedoes at the Indianapolis just after midnight on July. At
least two of them hit. It's commonly reported as too,
but it is possible that there were other hits, and

(09:43):
we'll talk more about what happened after the ship was
torpedoed after a quick sponsor break, when two torpedoes struck
the U S S. Indianapolis on July, the result was
immediate and devastating, and the words of Captain McVeigh quote,

(10:05):
at approximately five minutes after midnight, I was thrown from
my emergency cabin bunk on the bridge by a very
violent explosion, followed shortly thereafter by another explosion. I went
to the bridge and noticed in my emergency cabin and
chart house that there was quite a bit of accurate
white smoke. I couldn't see anything for just a few moments.

(10:25):
The captain thought they might stay afloat from his position
on the bridge. They had only a slight list, and
it seemed reasonably similar to what they'd survived with the
kamikaze attack. But the executive officer, Commander Joseph Flynn, surveyed
the scene and told the captain it was clear the
ship was going down. One of the torpedoes had destroyed

(10:47):
part of the ship's bow, the other had hit near
a powder magazine and bunkers that held fuel oil. Apart
from this colossal damage, the ship's power and communication systems
were down. There was no way to broadcast an announcement
to abandoned ship or to reach the engine room with
an order to stop the engines, so the captain gave
the order to pass the word to abandon ship, which

(11:10):
had to be done from man to man. McVeigh had
also asked the navigator to confirm that a distress signal
had been sent. Having not heard back from him, the
captain tried to go to the radio room to double
check personally, but as he did, the ship suddenly listed
to ninety degrees and began to sink so rapidly that
there was no possible way to get there. It's still

(11:32):
unclear exactly what happened with that distress signal. Survivors who
were in the radio room have insisted that according to
their gauges, a signal did leave the ship, but no
message was ever received. One hypothesis is that an s
OS did go out, but that the signal was so
short before communication failed that anyone hearing it concluded that

(11:53):
it was just some kind of interference or an errant transmission.
About twelve minutes after being hit, the USS Indianapolis sunk.
About three hundred men had been killed immediately or otherwise
went down with the ship, but of the one thousand,
one nine sailors and marines on board, the vast majority
between eight and nine hundred were able to evacuate before

(12:15):
the ship went down. Since the ship was still moving
as it sank and men were still escaping the whole
time it was going down, Survivors were spread over miles
and miles of water. The ship's destruction left a slick
of fuel oil on the water it burned the eyes
of the men who landed in it or came up
through it, and it caused vomiting and anyone who swallowed it.

(12:38):
And because it spread so far across the surface of
the water, it was nearly impossible to get away from
for anybody who was caught in it. Captain McVeigh and
a handful of other men were relatively fortunate. They wound
up in the water close to a few life rafts,
some of them capsized that they were able to use,
but most of the emergency supplies above a board the

(13:00):
rafts were gone or ruined, so matches and first aid
kits had been packed in paraffin infused cardboard that disintegrated,
and most of the drinking water was no longer podible
because the containers were leaky and seawater had gotten in.
The men did, however, have a few cans of spam,
a couple of signal mirrors, and some signaling flares. Most

(13:22):
of the other men, though, were in a much worse situation.
They had virtually no food or water, apart from a
few supply cans and emergency rations that were either taken
off the ship or found among the very few life
rafts that had deployed, they had no way to protect
themselves from the heat or the sun. There was little
to nothing that could be done to treat injuries that

(13:43):
were incurred in the blast or the evacuation. Many of
the men had no life jackets or belts, and even
for those who did, nearly all of them were kapok
jackets that were only really designed to work for about
forty eight hours, and after that they became water logged
and they didn't have enough buoyancy to keep a person's
head above water. The belts were pneumatics, so they didn't

(14:04):
have that issue, but they had another problem. If they
slipped too far down on a person's body, they could
basically force them to flip over with their head under water,
and it became a constant effort simply to stay afloat.
For the first couple of days, the men tried to
work together and protect each other as best they could,
forming groups trying to rescue whether survivors they saw, and

(14:24):
using things like cargo netting and rope to try to
group themselves together. But as time went on, conditions got
progressively worse. Eight to ten foot swells meant that the
various groups of survivors couldn't see or reach one another.
People by themselves often didn't know there was someone else
not far away in the swells, and it was physically

(14:45):
exhausting to be in all of that. Men who became
desperate from thirst drink seawater, which made their dehydration rapidly worse.
Hundreds of men died due to dehydration, salt poisoning, injury, exposure,
and drowning. Dehydrated, exhausted, traumatized men also started experiencing hallucinations,

(15:06):
swimming away from the group because they believed that they
saw an island, or attacking their fellows because they thought
they were enemy combatants. And the thing that has become
most anonymous with the USS Indianapolis sharks. For McVeigh and
his group in the life raft, these were mainly a nuisance.
They had an undamaged fishing kit, but a large shark

(15:27):
kept scaring away any fish that they might catch with it.
For the men in life jackets who were floating in
the water, the sharks became both a threat and a terror.
The sharks mainly fed on the dead and dying, but
they were easily visible through the clear water by day,
and then they brushed past the submerged parts of men's
bodies by night. Survivors would go on to describe being

(15:50):
surrounded by fins in the water, or seeing other men's
life jackets suddenly submerged, with parts of their bodies resurfacing later,
or of hearing sudden, blood curdling screams nearby or in
the distance. Captain Lewis L. Haines, chief medical officer, was
with one of the larger groups who were floating in
the water and tried to render aid to the other men,

(16:13):
even though he had no supplies or medicines to do
it with. At first, he also collected the dog tags
of all the men who died, but eventually he just
had more of them than he could possibly hold. When
the U S S. Indianapolis didn't arrive at late he
is scheduled on July one, it wasn't noted as missing,
its name was removed from the arrivals board, and the

(16:35):
next shift didn't realize that it hadn't actually arrived. Meanwhile,
the surviving men spent days in the water, at first
praying and holding onto hope that their s O S
had been received, and then thinking surely the Navy would
come looking for them when they didn't show up at
late on time, but since no one realized the Indianapolis

(16:57):
was missing, no one was searching. The survivors of the
USS Indianapolis were spotted only by coincidence. On August two, ninet,
well over a hundred hours after the ship had gone down.
By chance, Lieutenant Wilbert Chuck Gwyn, flying on a routine patrol,
looked down from his plane and spotted something unusual in

(17:17):
the water. He flew lower to investigate and saw wreckage
and survivors scattered along a huge stretch of ocean. Gwyn
radioed back to base and Lieutenant Adrian Marks was dispatched
aboard a p By flying boat, a seaplane capable of
landing on water. He wasn't supposed to land the plane
in the open sea, but when he saw the men

(17:38):
in the water, he did, ultimately pulling fifty six men aboard,
including loading them onto the wings to get as many
out of the water as possible. Sadly, there were men
so desperate to get to the plane that they exhausted
themselves on the way and drowned. Marx had also flown
over the U. S. S Cecil Jade Doyle on the

(17:59):
way to where Gwen had reported spotting these survivors, and
he radioed the destroyer to notify them of what he
was doing. The Doyle came to the survivor's aid, becoming
the first of eleven ships to be part of the
searchain rescue effort. The captain and his group were picked
up by the USS ringness Because of the swells in
the sea, they had no idea there were any other

(18:20):
survivors until later. They didn't know anything about Gwin spotting
them or the flying boat rescue. The ships that came
to the rescue deployed landing craft to pull men out
of the water. Those who were able also clung to
rope ladders on the sides of ships and were pulled aboard. Overwhelmingly,
due the combination of hunger, dehydration, and all that time

(18:42):
in the water, they just could not stand. Those who
had to be lifted aboard had to be pulled by
their life jackets because their skin and flesh were so damaged.
At that point, the men being rescued had been in
the water for four and a half days. Fuel oil
had to be carefully removed from their skin and hair,
and for many of them, Their oil soaked and salt

(19:05):
laden clothes had to be cut off of them, and
the end of the roughly eight hundred fifty men who
went into the water when the Indianapolis When the Indianapolis sank,
only three hundred seventeen survived. You'll also see this number
as three hundred sixteen, including in official Navy records. This
is apparently a discrepancy that has gone on for decades.

(19:26):
The reason is reportedly that radio technicians second class clearance
William Donner was incorrectly reported as deceased, but survived survivors
were taken to bases in the Philippines before being sent
on to Guam by plane and aboard the hospital ship Tranquility.
More ships returned to the area on August four, but
no one else was found alive. The few bodies that

(19:49):
were recovered were buried at sea. We'll talk more about
the aftermath of this disaster and the discovery of the
wreckage this year. After one more quick sponsor break, the
survivors of the U S s. Indianapolis were allowed to

(20:11):
write letters home from glam although, as is the usual
case in wartime correspondence, their letters were censored. They were
also told to write as though nothing had happened to
the Indianapolis. There was no announcement that the ship had
been destroyed or notification of the families of the deceased
for weeks. On August six, the Anola Gate dropped the

(20:32):
atomic bomb assembled using the components delivered by the U
s s Indianapolis on Hiroshima, Japan. On August nine, the
US dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
Japan announced its unconditional surrender on August fourteen. Only then
was the destruction of the Indianapolis made public, and families

(20:52):
were finally notified of their loved ones deaths. By that point,
an inquiry and to the cause of the disaster was
the greatest loss of life at sea in US naval
history had already begun. Captain Charles Butler McVeigh the third
was court martialed. He was acquitted of a charge of
failing to issue a timely order to abandon ship, but

(21:13):
he was found guilty of failing to zigzag. It was
a standard procedure to steer the ship in an evasive
zigzag course in waters where a submarine attack was likely.
McVeigh had done so during the day, but he had
stopped at night due to weather conditions because he needed
to conserve fuel to reach late on schedule. While also

(21:33):
zig zagging, he would have needed to travel at a
faster speed that just wasn't fuel efficient. He basically had
contradictory orders here to simultaneously zigzag and conserve fuel, and
it like it wasn't possible to do both of those
things at the same time. This court martial was highly publicized,

(21:54):
and it included the testimony of Moti Sara Hashimoto, captain
of the who said it would not have mattered if
the Indianapolis had zigzagged, he would have hit the ship anyway.
This court martial was and continues to be highly controversial. Overwhelmingly,
survivors of the U. S s. Indianapolis have maintained that
McVeigh was a good man and a good captain and

(22:16):
that he had done nothing wrong, arguing that it was
within his discretion not to zigzag that night. McVeigh had
also continued to act as captain for the handful of
men that were with him in the life rafts, bolstering
their morale, rationing their food, and signaling any planes that
they saw with mirrors and flares. He also sent letters
to the families of his eight hundred seventy nine deceased crew.

(22:39):
In September of another circumstances, McVeigh might have faced a
letter of reprimand, and it's still not fully clear why
the Navy instead pursued a widely covered court martial. One
of the hypotheses that it came down to someone's personal
grudge against mcveigh's father, who was also career military for Guardless,

(23:00):
though even though McVeigh was not punished, the fact that
he was found guilty meant that in the eyes of
many people, especially the family members of men who did
not survive, it was his fault and he should carry
all of the blame. To be clear, Captain McVeigh was
ultimately responsible for the safety of this ship. This was
his job. He knew this and accepted it, and he

(23:22):
didn't try to deflect the blame or pass the buck.
He took full responsibility for the decision not to zigzag.
But simultaneously, the Navy didn't show that same level of
accountability in return, for many years pinning the entire disaster
on the failure to zigzag, even though that did not
at all explain the more than four days that survivors

(23:44):
were left waiting in the water. There's also been ongoing
speculation about whether the Navy did or did not know
that there was likely to be a Japanese sub between
Quam and Laity, whether they withheld that information from McVeigh
if they did know, and whether the secrecy of their
mission contributed to the breakdown in communication in reporting the

(24:05):
ship missing. Captain Charles B. McVeigh retired in nineteen forty
nine and was promoted to rear admiral, although he was
never given command of another ship. On November six, nineteen
sixty eight, he took his own life. In October of
two thousand, Congress passed a resolution that McVeigh should be
exonerated for the loss of the Indianapolis, which was signed

(24:27):
by President Bill Clinton, and two thousand one, a memo
was placed in his personnel file absolving him of blame.
This action by Congress took place after years of advocacy
by survivors of the Indianapolis and their families. Then thirteen
year old Hunter Scott came to the public's attention after
doing a school history project on the Indianapolis, which became

(24:48):
something of a viral news story. Also involved was Commander
William J. Tody, who commanded a submarine called the USS Indianapolis.
When the submarine Indianapolis was decom isstioned, Tody invited the
survivors of the cruiser Indianapolis to attend the ceremony, since
they had not been able to decommission their own ship.

(25:08):
Tody became an advocate for clearing mcveigh's name. Commander moch
Sarah Hashimoto also wrote to the head of the Senate
Armed Services Committee during all of this, saying, quote, our
people's have forgiven each other for that terrible war. Perhaps
it is time your people's forgave captain McVeigh for the
humiliation of his unjust conviction. Although there are still questions

(25:31):
and criticisms of how the Navy handled the aftermath of
the Indianapolis is Sinking, especially in regard to Captain McVeigh.
After the ship's loss, it did adjust procedures for ship escorts,
life saving equipment, and reporting procedures to try to prevent
something similar from ever happening again, which brings us to

(25:51):
why this is in our Unearthed series. On August it
was announced that a civilian research team had located the
wreck of the U S sus Indianapolis. Although this is
a civilian project, historians from the Naval History and Heritage
Command in Washington, d C were involved as well. Leading,
as we said at the top of the show, was
Paul G. Allen, who co founded Microsoft with Bill Gates

(26:14):
and has put a chunk of his resulting wealth into
various philanthropic efforts. The discovery was made from Allen's research vessel,
the RV Petrol. It's a two hundred and fifty foot
that's seventy six vessel capable of diving to a depth
of six thousand meters. It's a little more than nineteen
thousand feet and the researchers aboard the Petrol found the

(26:34):
ship in water about five thousand, five hundreds, or eighteen
thousand feet deep. Often the discovery of wreckage like this
takes some time to authenticate, but in this case, the
wreckage has been protected from sunlight and it's in a
spot on the seafloor that doesn't have a lot of currents,
so it is incredibly well preserved. There is very little

(26:56):
marine growth or corrosion on the surface of the ship.
The number thirty five remember this was the thirty five
cruiser is clearly visible on the whole and supply boxes
are still legible and visibly marked with the USS Indianapolis.
Paul Allen's team wasn't at all the first to look
for the ship. One reason that earlier efforts had failed

(27:19):
was that they were looking in the wrong place. Although
Allied intelligence did recover a transmission from the Japanese submarine
if confirming the kill, that message didn't specify what ship
had been sunk, and the Allies didn't recover information saying
exactly where. Commander Mochusura Hashimoto also destroyed his records before

(27:40):
surrendering at the end of the war. So initial searches
for the wreckage we're working off the idea of where
the ship would have been along Convoy Root Petty if
it was traveling exactly on that route, which was what
it was following from Guam to Laity, and also exactly
on schedule. But as it turns out it was it

(28:00):
it was slightly off the convoy route and slightly ahead
of schedule. Both of these were well within the captain's discretion,
and as we discussed earlier, he was trying to make
good time for late for training purposes for his crew.
This new information about the Indianapolis position is a recent
discovery in the Naval History and Heritage Command decided to

(28:21):
review the case of the Indianapolis to see if any
new information came to light and to make sure the
Navy's in the public's understanding of the disaster was accurate.
This review uncovered a Memorial Day blog post John Murdick
did about his father, Francis G. Murdick. John Murdick told
the story of his father having been stationed on a

(28:42):
tank landing ship or LST that passed by the Indianapolis
before it was sunk, and how thankful he was that
his father's ship hadn't met the same fate. Historians followed
the bread crumb from Francis G. Murdick to the LST
he was stationed on to the l S. T. S Log,
and although the log did not mention the Indianapolis directly,

(29:04):
it did include a lot of other data about where
it was and what it was doing, along with weather
and sea conditions, and so they crossed referenced this with
an oral history from Captain Charles B. McVeigh, which was
already on the record in which he mentioned communicating with
an LST in the hours before the torpedo attack. So
by cross referencing this data and the LST log and

(29:26):
the LST s log with mcveigh's description, historians figured out
a more precise location for where the ship had probably
gone down. Alan and others then put that information to
use in their searches and the press releases about this discovery.
They actually alluded to a project by National Geographic when
it turned out to be Paul Allen who found it.

(29:48):
UH twenty two survivors of the Indianapolis were still living
as of August. When that discovery was announced, reactions from
survivors and their families were really pretty mixed. Captain William J. To,
speaking for the survivors, said, quote to a man, they
have longed for the day when their ship would be found,
solving their final mystery. But there are family members of

(30:09):
men who died who were also quoted as saying that
this discovery was quite painful and they had actually hoped
it would never be found. At this point. The side
of the wreck is considered to be a military grave site,
so its exact location was reported only to the Navy
and any exploration and survey of the site has to
be done without disturbing it. There is a lot of

(30:31):
footage from the wreckage that you can watch online, including
a PBS special called USS Indianapolis Live from the Deep,
and we will link to that in our show notes.
There's also documentary called USS Indianapolis The Legacy that's pretty
much all interviews with survivors and their families and the
family members of the deceased. Uh If you are interested

(30:52):
in this, it is highly worth watching, and I will
say parts of it are devastating. UH So watching this
with your handkerchief and just be ready for the emotional
to bring tissues. I watched it at my desk. Thany

(31:13):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
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(31:34):
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