On July 30, 1945, in the eerie stillness of the Philippine Sea, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. The Indianapolis, having just delivered components for the atomic bomb to Tinian Island, was steaming westward alone and unescorted. Captain Charles McVay had requested a destroyer escort for the Indianapolis from Tinian to Leyte. The request was denied. He was informed that the waters were safe, with no known enemy submarine activity in the area. Naval command believed the threat in that region had been neutralised.
Two torpedoes slammed into her starboard side with precision. One hit near the bow, the other directly beneath the fuel tanks and ammunition stores. The result was catastrophic. Explosions tore through the lower decks. Fires erupted. Compartments flooded instantly as the ship’s watertight doors had been left open, a break from naval protocol meant to improve airflow in the tropical heat. That small comfort became a death sentence. With the doors open, water coursed unchecked through the ship’s corridors. What might have been a controlled evacuation turned into a rapid, chaotic descent.
Within twelve minutes, the Indianapolis disappeared beneath the surface. Nearly 300 men were trapped below decks and went down with her. The remaining 900 were flung into the ocean, dazed, bleeding, and clinging to the remnants of their vessel.
The Navy wasn’t tracking their movement and didn’t register the ship as overdue. For four days, the men floated in a stew of flotsam, jetsam, oil, blood, and body parts. They lashed themselves to crates, life jackets, and one another. The debris of their fallen ship was their only shelter.
Sharks circled almost immediately, drawn by the chaos. At first, they took the dead. Then they started taking the living. The water was so thick with oil that some men went blind. Others, driven mad by thirst, drank seawater and spiralled into delirium. The sun burned their skin by day. Hypothermia crept in at night. They hallucinated rescue ships, swimming away from safety and into oblivion.
By the time a passing patrol plane spotted the survivors and help finally arrived, only 316 remained.
It stands as the deadliest shark attack in recorded history. But this was no mere quirk of nature. It was the culmination of leadership failures, systemic blind spots, and decisions that turned a survivable disaster into an unspeakable one.
_underway_at_sea_on_27_September_1939_(80-G-425615).jpg "USS Indianapolis")
1. The Weight of Command: Captain Charles McVay
Captain Charles B. McVay III didn’t die when the Indianapolis went down, but the burden of command followed him to the grave. The Navy charged him with:
- Failing to zigzag—a manoeuvre used to reduce the likelihood of submarine attacks.
- Failing to issue an abandon-ship order in time.
That was it. Not a word about the lack of escort, the faulty intelligence claiming the waters were safe, or the institutional blind eye toward operational safety standards like watertight integrity. And certainly nothing about the Navy’s own negligence in tracking the ship’s movement, which left hundreds floating in shark-infested waters for four days before anyone noticed they were gone.
Even the Japanese submarine commander, Mochitsura Hashimoto, testified at the trial and stated unequivocally: zigzagging would have made no difference. The Indianapolis was doomed the moment the torpedoes fired.
The open doors and the ship’s readiness state, though clearly contributing factors, were not central to the Navy’s case, likely because acknowledging them would have implicated broader systemic failings:
- Inadequate operating procedures for tropical service
- Lax enforcement of safety protocols across the fleet
- Command complacency regarding standard damage control practices
The Navy knew it was happening across the fleet. Crews knew it compromised damage control protocol. But nothing changed. Bringing this up in court would have forced the Navy to confront its institutional culture and operational standards, which it avoided by pinning the blame squarely on McVay’s decision-making.
Leadership Insight:
When systems fail, the survivors often become the sacrifices. McVay followed procedure. He made decisions with the information he had, which sadly turned out to be catastrophically wrong. He requested a destroyer escort. It was denied. He operated under the assumption—fed by naval intelligence—that no enemy subs were active in the area.
The open watertight doors were a failure in discipline, but not of McVay’s alone. This was a fleet-wide cultural problem. A bending of rules in the name of short-term comfort. A quiet trade-off that leadership allowed to go unaddressed. Bringing it up in court would have meant holding the Navy itself accountable for normalising unsafe practices. So, it was quietly excluded from the official charges.
When an organisation refuses to confront its own rot, it shifts the weight onto the backs of individuals. It rebrands systemic failure as personal failure. In doing so, it teaches every other leader that survival doesn’t guarantee vindication, but it may guarantee blame.
The Distress Signal Was Sent
As the Indianapolis was struck by torpedoes and began to sink, radio operators managed to transmit an SOS message. At least three separate stations received the signal—each reportedly acknowledging it. But none acted.
Why It Was Ignored
Each receiving station had its own rationale for disregarding the message. The reasons ranged from procedural rigidity to catastrophic assumption:
- One commander had given strict orders not to be disturbed. The operator who received the SOS didn’t wake their superior and therefore took no action.
- Another station believed the signal was a Japanese ruse. At that stage of the war, it was common for Japanese forces to send false signals to lure American ships into ambushes. The message from the Indianapolis—coming unexpectedly, without follow-up, and from a ship that supposedly wasn't even in danger—was viewed with suspicion.
- A third station dismissed it as a mistake. They assumed the message was an error or duplication and didn’t verify or respond.
No Cross-Verification
Tragically, no one followed up to confirm the ship’s status, even though multiple stations received the distress signal. There was no centralised protocol for escalating such reports during peacetime transit. Because the Indianapolis was coming off a classified mission and wasn’t expected for days, no one noticed she had vanished.
For four days, nearly 900 men floated in the open ocean, waiting for a rescue that no one knew was needed.
The discovery of survivors only happened by chance, when a pilot on a routine patrol spotted an oil slick and saw bodies and movement in the water.
The official U.S. Navy report into the sinking made no mention of these ignored distress signals. To include those failures would have required an admission that the system didn’t just fail McVay and his crew during the mission—it failed them after the torpedoes hit. Rather than confront that, the Navy sanitised the record.
Leadership Insight
This is what happens when leadership becomes more loyal to process than people. The radio operators didn’t act out of negligence—they followed rules. Standard operating procedures are designed to filter chaos. But in this case, they filtered out a cry for help.
The Navy’s refusal to believe anything contrary to what they thought they knew, paired with a deep-seated fear of being manipulated, overrode their duty to verify. A failure cost hundreds of lives. Sometimes, the most dangerous thing is not a lie—it’s the truth we refuse to confirm.
The Loneliness of Leadership
After the war, McVay returned to civilian life. But he received hundreds of letters blaming him for the deaths of sailors. He lived with that weight for two decades before taking his own life in 1968. He was found on his front lawn with a toy sailor in his hand—rumoured to be a memento from one of the boys lost at sea.
Leadership Insight:
People talk about the burden of command. What they rarely talk about is its silence. Leaders are expected to be stoic, composed, unshakable. When things go wrong, that stoicism turns into isolation.
Who does the leader confide in when they’re not allowed to break? Who carries them when the institution that relied on their courage refuses to acknowledge their pain?
Leadership without emotional safety becomes martyrdom. Even the strongest will crumble if they’re left to bear it alone. The higher the command, the heavier the silence can become.
Closing Thought: Leadership in Crisis Isn’t Always Heroic—But It Is Always Human
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis remains the deadliest shark attack in recorded history. It was a systemic collapse masquerading as isolated misfortune. A perfect storm of miscommunication, broken protocols, ignored warnings, and misplaced blame. At every stage—before, during, and after the torpedoes struck—the people and processes responsible for safeguarding those lives either faltered or turned away.
Captain McVay followed protocol, trusted command, and made decisions based on the intelligence he was given. When it all went wrong, the institution that denied him support turned around and demanded accountability. He was court-martialled not for what he did, but for being the last one left to blame. The open watertight doors, the denied escort, the silence after the SOS was all conveniently excluded from the official record.
The lessons of the Indianapolis are not confined to the ocean. Leadership is not about avoiding blame—it’s about absorbing reality, however uncomfortable. And when the cost of failure is human life, there is no room for cowardice dressed as caution.
