In 1975, the American public was treated to its first-ever summer blockbuster, director Steven Spielberg's masterpiece: Jaws. The movie Jaws, with its blood-soaked images of a shark tearing victims apart, had the singular effect of scaring beachgoers out of the water. Within the heart pounding suspense of that movie, however, emerged a sublime scene of terror that many movie goers found to be the most frightening scene of the movie. The scene would thrust the story of the USS Indianapolis into the public conscience. In that scene, actor Robert Shaw, playing a fictional Indianapolis survivor named Quint, gave a chilling monologue about the sinking and shark attacks that followed. To this day, this monologue is considered one of the best in cinema.

-so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that shark he go away... sometimes he wouldn't go away...

In the shadowy aftermath of World War II, where the public preferred to venerate its triumphs and repress its tragedies, little was spoken of the Indianapolis tragedy. Such was in line with the way most veterans handled the war. Indianapolis survivors shrouded their experiences from even their closest family members for three decades after the war, talking about it mostly between themselves if at all, and it might have stayed that way. But Jaws shattered their repose.

Soon after Jaws was released, reporters inundated survivors with calls, wanting to tell untold tales from the survivors' true-life accounts of their seemingly endless four days and five nights adrift. The calls proved to be a mixed blessing. For some survivors, the calls presented a first step toward healing after their thirty years of silence and a chance to honor their ship and their buddies lost at sea. The Indianapolis, after all, had earned ten battle stars through the war and accolades for a speedy delivery of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to an airbase on Tinian Island. But because the public and the media learned about the ship from the Quint monologue, the questions the survivors received often involved the shark. The survivors learned to talk around these questions. As survivor Harold Bray said, "It was just too bad to remember."

As the Quint monologue suggests, sharks gathered around crewmen who had abandoned the sinking Indianapolis. Such had been a common occurrence since the days of sail, whenever seafarers found themselves stranded in tropical and temperate seas. Whether by accident or by design, sharks bit Indianapolis crewmen, and even a minor slash or bite as sharks chased fish, which naturally gather beneath floating objects in the open sea, was likely to be fatal for a man adrift for a long time. No one possessed the means to properly stem blood loss or infection. Consequently, very few survivors had themselves been bitten.

For family members of the lost at sea, however, the calculus was different. The specter of their loved ones in the Jaws of a shark loomed. If a shark killed their loved one, did they want to know? Questions arose around the possibility. Did shark attacks happen? How did they happen? Many family members yearned to know if anyone saw their son or their brother alive after the torpedo blasts, which left survivors with a moral dilemma. If they knew a shark had killed a man, should they say anything?

Robert Terry stands out as one of the few Indianapolis crewmen revealed as killed by a shark. However, this revelation happened long after the sinking and long after Robert's parents passed away. Survivor Richard Thelen witnessed the shark attack on Robert Terry. The two had been swimming together for a raft dropped by a rescue airplane on their fourth day adrift. Richard met with Robert's family and told them a lot of the story. He recounted that the swim had been strenuous, and that Robert and two others had succumbed to exhaustion before reaching the raft. He omitted telling Robert's family about the shark. This likely left a question in the minds of Robert's family. Why, with salvation at hand, couldn't Robert have garnered the strength to come home? Robert knew, by then, that ships were coming.

The answer for Robert, of course, was the shark. Sharks took no more measure of a person's will to live than artillery shells raining down on a conventional battlefield; and the details about the aftermath were grisly. Details provided by survivors were, therefore, sparse. Just as a veteran of Anzio or the Battle of the Bulge might say a shell hit a foxhole where his buddy had been and leave it at that, a survivor from the Indianapolis would rarely say more than that a shark had taken a man. If he did say more, the victim was usually left nameless. In many instances, the man was, in fact, nameless because oil had begrimed most faces and erased, most likely, even the possibility of determining who a man was later by looking at photographs of the crew from better times.

The men who survived the initial sinking of the Indianapolis found themselves adrift in waters teeming with potentially dangerous sharks. Sharks from miles away would have been drawn to the explosion of the torpedoes and the ongoing, low frequency impulses of collapsing bulkheads as the ship sank. The allure to the scene for a shark would have been heightened by odors of flesh and blood, by the general sounds of distress, and as time progressed, by other fish gathering and even sheltering beneath men and debris. Dominating the scene, most likely, would have been oceanic whitetip sharks, Carcharhinus longimanus, an open ocean species common until the 1990s-but presently threatened with extinction due to overfishing. Some survivors also reported seeing tiger sharks, Galeocerdo cuvier. Both species posed a danger to men adrift because of their size, temperament, and proclivity to scavenge as well as hunt. Other species, such as silky sharks, Carcharhinus falciformis, blue sharks, Prionace glauca, dusky sharks, Carcharhinus obscurus, and mako sharks, Isurus oxyrinchus, may have investigated the stranded men, but when sharks aggregate, usually one or two species will dominate a scene. The most common species where the Indianapolis sank was the oceanic whitetip, based on longline fishing records from the 1950s, followed by silky sharks. Tiger sharks would have been present, albeit fewer in number, but larger in size and with a dangerous proclivity to consume just about anything.

When survivors recounted seeing swarms of sharks swimming beneath their feet, the sharks were most likely oceanic whitetips. The oceanic whitetip is a robust shark characteristically about six-feet-long, with some individuals growing longer. Lending to its name, it has fins with white tipped ends. The oceanic whitetip lives exclusively offshore where opportunities to feed can be few and far between. It was a common attendant of ships, easily keeping pace with masted vessels under sail, able to keep pace with all but the fastest moving powered vessels, and often feeding on the catches of warm water whalers. Prominent scuba diving pioneers who studied sharks shortly after World War II-household names such as Jacques Cousteau-often described oceanic whitetips as the most dangerous of all sharks, and with good reason. Whereas most sharks shy away from people, oceanic whitetips exhibit fearlessness and bare the hardware to match. A typical oceanic whitetip has triangular, serrated teeth and possesses the capacity to strip flesh from a person. Though the species does not school, members may travel loosely together and converge on opportunities, such as a floating whale carcass. Their apparent mob mentality when competing for a share of such bounty inspired the term "feeding frenzy." Oceanic whitetips, triggered to attack as a mob, could tear a person apart, as survivors described.

Oceanic Whitetip

Survivors, however, often spoke about encountering sharks sixteen to even twenty feet long. These were probably tiger sharks. Tiger sharks commonly grow to sixteen feet and longer, and no other tropical species of the typical predatory sharks grows that large. Survivor John Cassidy, interviewed by author Doug Stanton for the book In Harm's Way, authoritatively identified a tiger shark that harassed him long enough for him to name the shark Oscar. The presence of tiger sharks was further substantiated by wounds survivors reported on some shark bite victims, such as lost limbs. Though an oceanic whitetip will strip flesh from a person or may tear a person apart as a mob, a typically sized oceanic whitetip lacks the bite strength to cut through human bone. Even a small tiger shark, however, can sever a limb from a person. A medium-sized tiger shark can bite a person in half. So, when examining injuries reported by survivors-such as a wound survivor Buck Gibson wrote about where a sailor on the floater net next to him lost a leg without Buck even noticing the attack-these bites likely came from tiger sharks. Tiger sharks have the most efficient cutting teeth of any shark. Their teeth are scythe-shaped and stout, and the species evolved such that a preferred food is the sea turtle. But tiger sharks will eat just about anything. Other wounds described by survivors suggest tiger sharks, such as those from a story by Bob Gause that was later used in the Quint monologue in Jaws-where Gause thought his buddy was asleep and shook him and found he was bitten in half below the waist.

Tiger Shark

In the cinematic rendition of Gause's story in Jaws, Quint gave the man bitten in half a name: Herby Robinson. Gause, in contrast, never gave the man in the true story a name, and if he knew the man's name, he kept that name to himself. He might, therefore, have been any of the men lost at sea whose fate was otherwise unknown.

Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, a prominent shark researcher, conducted a study that indirectly provides probably the best scientific perspective on what Indianapolis crewman experienced from tiger and oceanic whitetip sharks. His research was about tiger sharks but illuminates behavior that would be typical of other predatory animals on land and sea where those predators are known to include scavenging as an important foraging strategy. Dr. Hammerschlag delved into the feeding habits of tiger sharks shadowing an annual gathering of sea turtles coming ashore on a Pacific island to lay eggs. A portion of these turtles, aged or fatigued, succumbed near the island. Despite being perfectly capable of killing live turtles, when presented with a bounty of both living and dead turtles, the tiger sharks mostly fed on the dead. Tiger sharks did not feed on the dead turtles exclusively, but dead turtles nourished as well as live ones and would neither fight back nor flee. Dr. Hammerschlag termed this preferential feeding behavior "facultative scavenging."

Indianapolis survivors noted that sharks mostly, but not exclusively, fed on shipmates who were already dead. Tiger sharks and oceanic whitetips, upon encountering crewmembers from the Indianapolis, likely entered a facultative scavenging mode, mostly targeting sailors and marines who had died from other causes. To the men among the living, however, all their senses would have been assaulted by witnessing such scavenging, perhaps possible to avert their eyes from such offense but not their ears. And like the sharks Dr. Hammerschlag wrote about, which still attacked living turtles near the island if the opportunity afforded, nothing precluded a shark from attacking a living man. In that light, survivors noted that sharks often attacked men who drifted away or swam away from a group, and it is typical of predators on land and sea to isolate a victim from a group or attack a member who has strayed away from the group. As survivor Richard Thelen said, "Everyone tried to stay in a group. People got outside the group, and that was the problem."

For Indianapolis crewmen, the very length of time they endured likely compounded their peril from sharks. When gathered around an opportunity for a long time, growing confidence that a scene presents no danger to them may embolden sharks, especially if they are hungry. Nothing, therefore, precluded a shark from time to time attacking a person within a group. They have excellent eyesight day and night. By some queue, they will single out a person, and, as Bob Gause described, no amount of splashing or shouting would keep the shark away.

Survivor Victor Bucket said of the attacks among everything else he experienced while adrift, "the screams of the men being taken by sharks were the most bothersome part." Buck Gibson wrote, "When you hear the screams of someone being pulled away by a shark, it's a scream like nothing you've ever heard or will ever forget. You hear them screaming, and there's nothing you can do to help."

No one can know for certain how many Indianapolis crewmen were killed by sharks and how many of those men might otherwise have survived. Even the men who were there saw only a limited portion of the entire expanse of ocean on which the crewmen drifted. As much as some survivors talked about their experiences, for most, asking them to detail shark attacks was going too far. The attacks were something to be forgotten or suppressed if their nightmares permitted. Such memories reside among the experiences veterans do not share. Lost at sea families, barring some other evidence to the contrary, are left knowing the possibility their loved ones may have been killed by sharks.