In the final days of WWII, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis left hundreds of sailors stranded in shark-infested waters.

"Every now and then, like lightning, [a shark] would come straight up and take a sailor and take him straight down," said Loel Dean Cox, one of the USS Indianapolis shark attack survivors.

By then, it was too late. Of the 1,196 men aboard the USS Indianapolis, only 316 survived. The rest had perished - devoured by sharks, lost to exhaustion, or driven to madness by thirst and despair.

A Japanese torpedo attack against the USS Indianapolis leaves the men with no time to launch lifeboats. For four grueling days, the survivors float helplessly in the Pacific Ocean. A Rare Look at ...

On July 26, 1945, the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis landed on Tinian Island ... saltwater poisoning, shark attack—even homicide, when men began slipping into hallucinatory madness, stabbing ...

heat and sharks In recent years, the remaining survivors have met in Indianapolis for their reunions. Two other Navy ships have been named Indianapolis: • USS Indianapolis (ID-3865) was a cargo ...

Dehydrated, exhausted, and preyed upon by sharks, the surviving crew of the sunken USS Indianapolis was in a living nightmare. Thanks to Marine Captain Edward Parke's display of heroism ...

When the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis sank in July 1945, as many as 80 of the sailors’ deaths were blamed on shark attacks as survivors drifted for five days in the “shark-infested waters ...