This was the worst shark attack in history

Dear readers, a question right at the beginning: why did you decide to read this story? I’ve got a guess: it’s the mixture of fascination and horror that sharks inspire in so many of us. A shark attack, especially when announced in superlative terms, has all the makings of what we journalists call a “click bomb.”

The story of the shark attack in the Philippine Sea is worth telling. At the same time, the question why these elegant fish make us tremble so much deserves an answer. Here you will find both.

The cargo that the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis brought to the tiny island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands in late July 1945 was top secret: it contained the components for the atomic bomb that would destroy the Japanese port of Hiroshima on August 6. After the deadly cargo was discharged, the USS Indianapolis set sail again and, after a stopover in Guam, headed for Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. This mission was also classified.

But the USS Indianapolis never arrived at its destination. On the night of July 30, the crew of the Japanese submarine I-58 spotted the heavy cruiser in the Philippine Sea and fired a fan of six torpedoes. Two of them hit the USS Indianapolis – the 186.3-meter warship sank in just twelve minutes. About 300 sailors died when an ammunition room exploded, but most of the 1,196 crew members were able to leave the sinking ship in time.

But that didn’t mean they were safe. Many of them were injured – they had broken arms or legs, some had burns. There were few lifeboats. That night, up to 100 sailors died of their wounds. In the morning, the living searched the waters for the dead to appropriate their life jackets from those who had none. Those who survived the night faced a day-long nightmare that ended in death for more than half.

“The sharks came in the morning,” recalled Edgar Harrell, who was 20 at the time. “We heard a terrifying cry. And then a body disappeared underwater, only the life jacket resurfaced,” Harrell wrote in his book Out of the Depths: An Unforgettable WWII Story of Survival, Courage, and the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis Depths: An Unforgettable World War II Story of Survival, Courage, and the Sinking of the USS Indianapolis”), released in 2014.

What happened next was, according to some survivors, the worst shark attack in history. The sharks were attracted by the explosion and the movements of the sailors. Until their demise, the sharks were primarily a species considered particularly aggressive and to which many of the shark attacks on humans in the open sea are attributed: the oceanic whitetip shark (Carcharhinus longimanus). This opportunistic hunter searches for prey in the upper layers of deep-water zones; mainly squid and bony fish. Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau called it the most dangerous of all sharks.

The sharks, there were hundreds of them, mainly ate the corpses floating in the water – which, to the morbid relief of the survivors, they had had enough for the time being. Many sailors clung to each other because they thought the sharks would not dare approach them and they would have a better chance of survival. Those too weak to hold on, either from injury or exhaustion, floated alone in the water, making them more likely to be targeted by shark attacks, Harrell said. “You heard a bloodcurdling scream and saw someone sink.”

The sight of the dorsal fins – one or two dozen always circling – kept the sailors in constant fear. Survivor Loel Dean Cox, then 19, recalled how the sharks sometimes nudged him: “They came up to you and nudged you. I bumped into you a few times – you never know when they’re going to attack you.” They lost three or four comrades every night and every day, Cox said. “In this clear water you could see the sharks circling. And every now and then, like a flash of lightning, someone would appear and take a sailor and pull them down. One came up and grabbed the sailor next to me.”

The sharks were not the only horror: during the day the sun shone mercilessly on the visibly weakened men, at night they were cold: “It was so hot that we prayed that it would get dark, and when it got dark we prayed that it would because it got so cold our teeth chattered,” said Cox. Again and again men drowned who had lost their strength or whose life jackets were full of water.

The thirst became unbearable, the tongue swelled, the lips burst, the salt water caked the face. Some hallucinated in delirium and fantasized about secret islands beyond the horizon, others drank sea water – a certain death penalty. On the second day it rained briefly and the men were able to catch a few drops in their mouths. Not enough for most of them: of the party of about 80 seamen that Harrell was with, only 17 were still alive at noon on the third day. And still no salvation was in sight.

Because the USS Indianapolis sailed without escort ships and only a few naval authorities knew of their secret mission, the ship’s failure to arrive at its destination at the scheduled time went unnoticed at first. Although the crew sent out several SOS signals before the sinking, the US Navy did not take them seriously; a Japanese trap was suspected.

So it took four days for the oil trail from the sunken cruiser and the castaways to be accidentally discovered by an aircraft. Eventually rescuers were called. First, a flying boat reached the survivors and dropped rafts and food on them. Seeing the sharks, the pilot ignored orders not to land in the choppy sea and picked up a first group of sailors.

Cox later described the moment as follows: “The man in the plane’s hatch stood there and waved to us. It was then that my tears came and my hair stood on end and you knew you were saved, that at least you was found. That was the happiest time of my life.” While waiting to be rescued, Cox said he kept falling unconscious and was in a sort of twilight state.

By evening, seven ships reached the scene of the accident and began to rescue the remaining survivors. Cox: “Somewhere in the night, I remember, strong arms pulled me into a tiny, tiny boat. Knowing I was saved was the best feeling you can have.” But only 317 sailors of the original crew of 1196 were saved. They sometimes took years to recover and process this experience.

The dramatic survival struggles of the USS Indianapolis castaways were referenced in Steven Spielberg’s successful horror-shocker: In “Jaws” (“Jaws”, 1975), the shark hunter tells Quint that he was a crewman on the cruiser when it sank. . The films “Operation Shark – Silently Comes Death” (“Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the USS Indianapolis”, 1991) and “USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage” (2015) directly reference the shark attack in the Philippine Sea.

If it really happened. How many sailors actually fell victim to the sharks is impossible to say – the information is conflicting anyway. According to more recent studies, it is certain that many more seafarers died of exhaustion or sunstroke. Or from dehydration when they tried to quench their murderous thirst with seawater. While there were clear contacts and bites, humans — with whom the cartilaginous fishes, which have existed for some 400 million years, have only recently come into contact — don’t fit the shark prey scheme.

While shark attacks on living humans undoubtedly occur, while most human remains sometimes found in shark stomachs may have come from cadavers, that is, from humans who drowned or otherwise died before being eaten, some sharks are scavengers. Most of the sailors who died on the USS Indianapolis were probably already dead.

In most cases, a shark will take a trial bite from an unknown potential prey, such as humans – the taste buds are located in the palate – which, however, can be fatal if the animal injures a larger blood vessel. However, sharks generally only do this if they get stuck with their other senses, including pressure sensors and an electrical sense.

In fact, there are very few shark attacks on humans. The number of shark-caused fatalities around the world barely exceeds a dozen; In 2021, for example, there were nine. Many more people become victims of other animals – about 500 people die every year from hippo attacks. And to stay in the sea: jellyfish cause about 40 deaths every year. Not to mention other dangers such as road traffic, which many more people fall victim to.

In any case, there are numerous myths about sharks, mostly negative ones. An example of this is the assumption that sharks are attracted to the blood of the wounded – which is often mentioned in the case of the USS Indianapolis. Some sharks can still smell blood at a dilution of 1 in 10 billion, but testing human blood in the water has shown that the sharks do not react to it because it has a different biochemical composition than fish blood.

So where does the fear of sharks come from, which cannot be rationally justified given the number of victims? You might think it is a kind of primal fear, based on the feeling of being attacked by a dangerous and much stronger creature. This can play a certain role. But fishermen and sailors used to know that these powerful predatory fish pose no existential threat or even evil in general. Sea monsters were represented differently – for example as huge sea serpents, giant octopuses or later as a mighty whale as in Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick”.

A factor that should not be underestimated is the Spielberg film mentioned above. “Jaws” established the image of a mindless and ravenous monster that attacks anything that moves. Of course, Spielberg’s distorted image could hardly have stuck so firmly in our minds if we had not been receptive to it. By the time the film hit theaters, humans had wiped out nearly all of the major terrestrial predators in industrialized regions. “The shark” was more suitable as a gruesome beast than almost any other predator, as a projection surface for diffuse fears of the still untamed nature.

Today, our view of these fascinating creatures is gradually changing. There is a growing awareness that these cartilaginous fish are among the most endangered animal groups in the world. Humans kill an estimated 100 million sharks worldwide each year, according to WWF estimates. It is high time to demonize sharks and limit the hunting of them – otherwise our grandchildren will only know about these predatory fish, which even outlived the dinosaurs, from books and movies.