Making Discoveries from the Faintest Clues

[Stormy]

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was struck by a Japanese torpedo. She sank in less than 15 minutes. Of the 1146 sailors on board, an estimated 800 made it off the ship. 

She sank so quickly that her distress call never made it out. It was four days before the US Navy even realized she was missing. Almost 500 of those who made it off the ship died of dehydration, drowning, or shark attack. 

Ever since I first learned of the USS Indianapolis several years ago, I've been fascinated by the story. So many things went wrong. The torpedo hitting exactly where it did. The speed of the sinking The days lost at sea, without the Navy even looking. 

Capt. Charles McVay was the only Navy Captain to be court-martialed for losing a ship in WWII, despite the testimony of the survivors that he did everything he was supposed to do. (He was officially exonerated in 2001 -- 35 years after he committed suicide.)

The wreckage of the USS Indianapolis was lost... until this week Why did it take 72 years to find the wreckage? The Navy had no record of receiving a distress call, so they had no final coordinates to start from. The ship's logs went down with the ship. The radio operators who survived couldn't recall the coordinates they sent. 

It wasn't until a historian found a record of another ship who recorded the position of the USS Indianapolis hours before she was sunk. This position was west of where searchers had been looking. The search shifted (though it still covered 600 square miles.) She was finally found in 18,000 feet of water. 

I bring this up because it gives me hope for finding things we think are lost. 

Search teams need a starting point. Since they didn't have the distress call, the ship's logs, or the memory of the radio operators, they did the best they could, but as it turns out they were looking in the wrong place. 

It wasn't until someone found a reference that gave another starting point that they started looking in the right place. The search still wasn't easy -- hundreds of square miles and thousands of feet below the surface of the Philippine Sea is a lot to cover. 

But how many of our research problems are there because we simply aren't looking in the right place? How many times have we given up when we don't have the equivalent of the distress call, the ship's logs, or the radio operator?

Keep looking for any clue you can and be willing to follow up on the faintest of them. It may not always be easy, but it is worth it. 

Until next time,
 
Amy

[Nan]

Very Interesting reading.   And yet with all the improvements in technology since then, they can't find the Malaysian Airlines plane that went down.  

[Stormy]

Exactly, there is, I believe, more to that story than we'll ever know.

 

[Koach]

it is interesting, but, who is Amy?

[Stormy]

No Idea, I got that on there by mistake, I got this in an email

 

[Smiley]

The story of the Indianapolis is a tragic one.  I just saw a movie (docu-drama) about it (I think on net-flix but it might have been Amazon.

The Indianapolis was under sealed orders and radio silence on its outbound trip where it had carried the two atom bombs eventually dropped on Japan from the states to the staging point on an island in the pacific.  That part of the journey was very hush hush so that most of the people in PACFLT were completely unaware that the Indianapolis was even in the area.

On the return trip the Indianapolis was no longer under radio silence but apparently had very little time to send out an SOS before going down.  Two radio stations received the SOS and both failed to forward it for rather nebulous reasons (garsh sgt carter, is this har boat the indanapplepuss one of ours you think?) or (hell, its sunday and i am hung over so I'll log it and let my relief handle the paperwork.)

At any rate the crew floated around for a few days being eaten by sharks before an airplane noticed them in the ocean.

It would be a great Marx Brothers comedy if it weren't so damned tragic.