EP5 Nightmares of Indianapolis

What this episode is about

The episode explores the haunting experiences surrounding a traumatic event in Indianapolis, emphasizing the nightmarish nature of the recollections and the disjointed, vivid memories that arise when recounting such experiences. It delves into the emotional impact on those present during the event, highlighting how the trauma lingers in their dreams and memories, creating a lasting sense of unease.

Key takeaways

• Recounting nightmares often reveals disjointed truths; the Indianapolis saga captures psychological horror better than any scripted drama.
• Artistic flair sometimes evacuates intent; the rawness of reality can surpass fancier storytelling techniques.
• One man's repetitive tragedy can be another's historical tapestry; some tales demand raw exposure over narrative polish.
• Even the greatest filmmakers find their roots in brutal history; Spielberg's Jaws immortalizes the chilling legacy of the USS Indianapolis.
• A lack of primary sources can stymie storytelling; in history, sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 51 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Audible, Jaws, Robert Shaw
2. 5:00 – 10:00: von Moltke, USS Indianapolis, Robert Shaw, Tinian
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way
4. 20:00 – 25:00: Stanley Lipsky
5. 25:00 – 30:00: Jaws, Robert Shaw
6. 30:00 – 35:00: USS Indianapolis
7. 35:00 – 40:00: Doug Stanton, von Moltke
8. 40:00 – 45:00: Adrian Marx
9. 45:00 – 50:00: USS Indianapolis
10. 50:00 – 53:29: Audible, USS Indianapolis, In Harm's Way

Notable quotes from "EP5 Nightmares of Indianapolis"

• About the low level side you know the killing of your fellow man in butchery he's talking about sort of the higher side of the human experience and it's weird to think about…

  about von Moltke · at 6:18

• Cruiser about 10,000 tons big ship on hold between 600 and 700 feet long and in this case the Indianapolis is famous because it delivered some of the key components you know to…

  about USS Indianapolis · at 9:27

• Interesting and you want to get the real feel for it he does a great job I think but Stanton talks about you know when the two torpedoes hit he's talking to a survivor that was…

  about Doug Stanton · at 11:06

• Good friend and liberty buddy gunnery officer Stanley Lipsky miraculously Lipsky had made his way blind from the quarterdeck off the ship and into the water Haynes knew that lipski's Payne must be intolerable he himself could barely look.

  about Stanley Lipsky · at 24:21

• Within hearing distance of you the nightmare of the Indianapolis and the key part of the monologue that Robert Shaw gives us the Quint character in Jaws is what the moment when…

  about Jaws · at 27:47

• Person up is who the hell are you and where you're from so Stanton writes quote lieutenant Adrian Marx reached the scene of the survivors at 3:20 p.m. and what he found…

  about Adrian Marx · at 43:06

• Particular time and place in the worst place in the world audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet what more do you need to know really than that when…

  about Audible · at 50:04

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Doug Stanton — Person · Referenced author / secondary narrator via quotations · 2 mentions · first at 10:56
  Carlin repeatedly cites Stanton’s book as a key source for survivor accounts and vivid details of the USS Indianapolis sinking.
• Robert Shaw — Person · Referenced actor (example used to introduce topic) · 3 mentions · first at 4:46
  Carlin uses Shaw’s famous USS Indianapolis monologue in *Jaws* as the pop-culture entry point into the historical event.
  Start attacking not you but people within hearing distance of you the nightmare of the Indianapolis and the key part of the monologue that Robert Shaw gives us the Quint…
• Adrian Marx — Person · Referenced military rescuer (quoted via source) · 3 mentions · first at 42:51
  Presented (through Stanton’s account) as one of the early pilots on scene who observed sharks and began dropping provisions to survivors.
• Stanley Lipsky — Person · Referenced survivor/victim (quoted via source) · 1 mention · first at 24:13
  Used as a harrowing example of burn injuries and suffering among survivors in the water; identified as a gunnery officer in Stanton’s quoted passage.
• von Moltke — Person · Referenced historical authority (used for contrast/argument) · 3 mentions · first at 6:06
  Carlin cites a quote attributed to a German general ‘von Moltke’ about war’s effects on human character, then explicitly disagrees while using it to frame ‘higher qualities’ seen in the Indianapolis story.

Books & papers

• In Harm's Way — Book · Primary recommendation · 2 mentions · first at 10:56
  The book is recommended as a detailed account of the USS Indianapolis sinking and its aftermath.
  The front of the ship one slammed sort of amidships but a little forward survivors accounts and by the way you want to read a good book on this let me just break into this for…

Places & events

• USS Indianapolis — Place · Setting · 6 mentions · first at 5:32
  The USS Indianapolis is the central focus of the episode, detailing its sinking and the subsequent ordeal of its crew.
• Tinian — Place · Referenced location · 1 mention · first at 9:59
  Tinian is mentioned as the island where components for the atomic bomb were delivered by the USS Indianapolis.
  Kind of plays into the story in a pretty big way because after delivering the components to the island of Tinian this Indianapolis Portland class heavy cruiser goes off on its…

Media & podcasts

• Jaws — Media · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at 4:02
  Jaws is referenced for its iconic monologue about the USS Indianapolis, linking the movie to the historical event.

Sponsors

• Audible — Product · Sponsor · 7 mentions · first at 0:00
  Audible is mentioned as the sponsor of the podcast, promoting its audiobook services.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 today's show is sponsored by audible go to audible.com slash Carlin that's audible.com slash Carlin or text Carlin to five zero zero five zero zero to get started I've just heard the audio that you're about to hear and this is my own critique of the audio that you're about to hear and it's a little redundant only because I actually start off the program with a little bit of that sort of talk too so I apologize for the redundancy but I'm gonna call this episode I'm gonna throw in nightmare somehow because it sounds like a nightmare and I don't just mean because of the material which is die marish nothing new about that of course I mean you know what we do but almost my recounting of it is like that like you woke up in the middle of the night you know screaming and the next morning your spouse says to you what the heck was that all about and you try to recount you know what happened to you in

1:00 your nightmare and it always sounds like a bunch of disjointed flashing images you know we always like to try to put a little artistic touch or a little flair here or there with the big hardcore history shows and I feel like that's what's missing in the audio that you're gonna hear now it sounds like a nightmare it sounds like I'm just telling you the highlights or worst moments or the things that freaked me out the most or whatever is sticking in my memory after going back to sleep in the middle of the night but for some of you especially I think you know those of you who already know some of this or all of this story it will remind you once again that you know if I'm recounting a nightmarish sort of story to you I mean think about how many people actually woke up in the night for many many many decades after this event with this exact same nightmare and it's pretty safe to say that unlike me who wasn't there the

1:54 people who were there would probably be unable to tell anyone else who wasn't there you know what they were seeing in their dreams so apologies for the lack of artistic flair and what you're going to hear now but um you know welcome to a nightmare of the Indianapolis it's hardcore history attendin I've tried to think about what the difference between one of these hardcore history addendums and one of the larger hardcore history shows is I mean what's the difference between the two of them besides obviously that we're doing some interviews but I thought you know there's a whole bunch of great stories out there and I write them down you know whenever I think of one I put it in a book so that you know someday when I don't have enough ideas there's a bunch already down I know a lot of you do this too and a bunch of these ideas are not worth a whole history show or you can't do a whole history show I mean I'd love

2:50 to do something and I've wanted to do something for a long time on the ancient Egyptian neighbor known as cush the Kushites but there's no primary source material it's one of those things where you just can't hang a whole show on what you have to work with there's a lot of stories like that the one today is like that I mean there is actually enough material to do a whole big for our thing on this subject but it would get repetitive and it will get repetitive in a way that makes the first world war program we did which was pretty repetitive in terms of you know ongoing horror it would make that seem a little tame because at a certain point in this story there's nothing but that and it's psychological torture after a certain amount of time and so it's hard to not get gratuitous or it's hard to not just get redundant at a certain point you want to be able to say to the audience and there's just more of that you know

3:45 what that's like I thought about talking about this because I caught really the tail end the other night of a movie that's underrated although when I went online to do some more modern research on it I was surprised to find that it is considered kind of an artistic classic now it's one of Steven Spielberg's really early movies it's jaws I think he came out in like 1975 I was 10 and I can tell you that it was a huge event and sort of an unexpected when there'd been a novel that had done pretty well but the novel was very different than the movie and the movie as all I think really great films do has a number of really fine actors in it and you give those people a really fine script and I guess there was a significant amount of improvisation from time to time that made it into the final version that the actors did but you remember who was in that immediate Roy Scheider who was great he had Richard Dreyfuss who's still

4:46 great and my god yet Robert Shaw who was unbelievable and in there in that role I mean among others and you get the three of them at certain points in the story and they're just in the cabin I mean there's no scenery there's no movement really of the cameras it's just those three actors working a fine script and at one point Robert Shaw goes into a monologue and it's incredible from from appreciating the craft standpoint those of you who remember though the monologue it has to do with the character that Robert Shaw is playing in his past he's playing sort of an old sea-dog kind of fisherman who's gonna catch this shark and he knows a lot about sharks and he goes into the background and it turns out he was on the USS Indianapolis and those of you who know that story know how that's connected to sharks and so I'm watching this the tail and like I said of Jaws the other night and I just thought you know the Indianapolis is an

5:47 amazing story and it typifies where sort of some of my interests tend to lean as you all know I always like to say maybe it's a nice way of saying if that I'm into the extremes of the human experience but some people think I'm just into war and there's and violence and you know it's funny sometimes I'll read accounts from like a hundred years ago there's a famous one from a german general named von Moltke where he talks about sort of the the reasons you wouldn't want to go too long between wars because it brings out something in the human character and he's not talking about the low level side you know the the killing of your fellow man in butchery he's talking about sort of the higher side of the human experience and it's weird to think about that see I don't agree with him about that I'm not going there but the story of the Indianapolis is a perfect example of something where it only happens because of war but

6:41 what happens after the sinking of the ship the famous sinking of the ship is one of these tales where I mean you just it sends tears down your face and not just because of the human suffering but because of the human reaction to the suffering right that it was kind of those higher qualities that von Moltke was sort of referring to when you see people under amazing amounts of physical and psychological pressure with fellow human beings and how they act in situations that are far more stressful than what one could be expected to reasonably handle the Indianapolis combines a number of things which would make my top 10 list of worst nightmares wrap them all into one wonderful package if you are a fan of disaster movies not to compare this to a disaster movie no offense some family members of Indianapolis survivors or not survivors but I mean thank you my my mom was in a movie once that was a knock knock off of

7:42 the towering inferno so build burning building that's a disaster movie you hang a whole movie on that and you have something like the Poseidon Adventure or Titanic which is a disaster movie of a ship sinking at sea had a whole movie on that there are I mean each each segment and phase in the Indianapolis story is one of those disaster films and by the time the story is over and is the story ever really over you know these people it's like these people went from the towering inferno hopped on board the Titanic I mean just one thing after another and I don't mean to make light of it because when you read the accounts of what these people went through and then you sort of magnify it because what they went through is not that uncommon in human history they're not like these real outliers it's uncommon for you and me to have gone through it but how many Mariners over the waves over the eras have had their ships sink and gone

8:37 through the terrible things that that involves and then had to deal with some of these subsidiary things that all of the people who went in the water with the Indianapolis had to deal with so in a funny way this is a kind of common uncommon human experience if you will but the Indian Apple is a story is there's just it's got its own twists in this case if you don't know it let me fill you in for a minute and I don't know how well this is gonna work in short form because you know that's not my normal John Rowe but the Indianapolis is famously known it's a USS Portland class cruiser heavy cruiser heavy cruisers generally mean you know bigger more armored bigger guns so in the United States Navy in the Second World War if it had six-inch guns it was probably a light cruiser if it had 8-inch guns it was probably a heavy cruiser about 10,000 tons big ship on hold between 600 and 700 feet long and

9:34 in this case the Indianapolis is famous because it delivered some of the key components you know to an island in the Pacific that would be put together and made into the first atomic bomb but because of that it was a secret mission and people weren't really in the know about the comings and the goings of the Indianapolis perhaps as well as they should have been aware of it and this kind of plays into the story in a pretty big way because after delivering the components to the island of Tinian this Indianapolis Portland class heavy cruiser goes off on its merry way kind of towards the Philippines I think it was and in the night gets torpedoed by a Japanese submarine now this is in 1945 I think it's July so it's you know we are not that far from the end of the war at all I mean as we said they're kind of putting the parts together for the hiroshima bomb so not that far away from the end of the war but now you get to

10:34 the first level of this disaster that these Indianapolis folks have to deal with imagine being asleep in your bunk at night on a ship and two torpedoes slam into it one slammed into the bow at the front of the ship one slammed sort of amidships but a little forward survivors accounts and by the way you want to read a good book on this let me just break into this for a minute I really loved in harm's way by Doug Stanton although there are several books on the Indianapolis I'm going to quote a couple of pieces from Stanton's but if you think this story is interesting and you want to get the real feel for it he does a great job I think but Stanton talks about you know when the two torpedoes hit he's talking to a survivor that was loaded in the front of the ship and he was asleep in his bunk in one of these you know sort of ship rooms that they had that you probably have six eight ten guys and the the

11:24 bunks are stacked against the wall and when the torpedoes hit the survivor says the lights go out and all the bunks fall and everybody's in a pile of people and some have broken arms and ribs and everybody of course woken up from a deep sleep you're totally confused and with the lights out it's you know extra bad so immediately this ship starts having problems and so the crew starts doing the typical things you do to try to you know prevent the ship from sinking and one of the things you do is you start walling off the compartments that are damaged and flooding dogging things down is the way Stanton has the Navy guys describing it in the book but the problem with that is if you're cutting off compartments that are flooding what do you do with the people that are still in the flooding compartments right so the first thing that just horrifies you in this story of the Indianapolis going down at night in the tropical waters

12:12 sort of east of the Philippines is that you have these sailors who have to cut their own shipmates off in flooding compartments and stents says you can hear them scream you know don't don't leave us here I mean what do you but what are you supposed to do so right there you get you know want to talk human experiences that are extreme and that are already larger than most of us will ever face in the first five minutes of this disaster there are guys dealing with things that are going to haunt their memories the rest of their lives and the and the affair is hardly started you know when you talk about the human capacity for endurance survival and not just survival through the event but then to be able to live with it you know afterwards and by the way the guy who was the captain of the Indianapolis made it about 20 years afterwards he'll survive the whole thing but he'll kill himself still getting Christmas cards from

13:11 people who say and I'm quoting one here Merry Christmas our family's holiday would be a lot merrier if you hadn't killed my son Stanton says that the captain a guy named McVeigh would keep all of these letters and put them you know with a ribbon around them and keep them in his desk blaming himself always for what happened on that dark night but on this ship these people that survived will talk about seeing him you know running around this sinking ship as it starts to take on water and by the way they have 12 minutes between the time the torpedoes strike till the time it goes down and once again the idea of having a between 600 and 700 foot long 10,000 ton ship begin to disintegrate out from under you and go underwater as the waves begin rolling people off the deck is crazy' also so now right away we're like the second stage so you had to cut your seamen off and dog down into the compartments and consign them to certain

14:19 death so the rest of the ship might survive now you're dealing with the mental image of this ship starting to go down by the bow that's in the front and the stern starts to slowly rise out of the webbing the ship is going perpendicular and people are dropping off and stanton describes survivors saying people will jump off and hit the rudders people will jump off and hit the propellers that are still spinning and be launched off into space once again how do you even in 12 minutes or less really process all this and it's dark and people are freaking out I mean this is like a giant accident scene right away there's like between 11 and 12 hundred guys on the ship and more than 300 are going to die in the first 12 minutes and so you're watching all this happening and many of these people now are grievously wounded Stanton one of the main survivors he talks about in this thing I mean the first thing he

15:17 hears when he recovers from hearing the torpedo hits is somebody screaming in the compartment next door and he runs over there realizes it's his friend the dentist but he can't open the door cuz the whole thing's on fire and he just has to let him burn death in the first two minutes and then he burns his hand because the ship itself is turning red hot he puts his hands on the deck or on a rail boom and he got burned hands and then as the ship starts to go kind of perpendicular he tells the story about they have a bunch of wounded people I guess in the sickbay but they're on cots and they're tied to their beds and whatnot and he says they just all slide right into the sea and he's sitting there watching this happen slack-jawed I read a book um a while back and it's about how people react in disasters trying to remember what it was like if the worst should occur or something like that I think we

16:11 talked about it once but but it's by one of these experts who studies these things and one of the things that they said is in situations like this right plane crashes or shipwrecks or whatnot most people are like stunned into numbness they don't do anything right in some of these bad plane crashes everybody could have gotten out but they sat there and burned to death you know on the tarmac that's shocking but that's what you would expect to happen on a ship like this and yet maybe it's the military training who knows maybe it's the fact you have officers barking out orders but you're not seeing a ton of that you are seeing people jumping in the water as fast as they can go because they're all afraid of the same thing when a big ship goes down it sucks stuff down with it a lot of the time it creates a vacuum that can drown swimmers who are anywhere near by so everyone knows that the ships going

17:01 down you got to get as far away from it as possible it's like you know when you get into an auto wreck and you're worried that the gasoline is leaking in the car is gonna catch on fire you want to get far away from it well when the ship goes down it's gonna suck everything down with it in several of the survivors once again imagine this what one of them talks about having it feel as though somebody was yanking his foot and his shoe came off and all of a sudden with a life vest he went way underwater to where his ears are popping in his eyes feel like they're gonna you know pop out of his head and then he said he got caught in a giant air bubble you know that escaped from the sinking ship and it goes pops him up and shoots him up he said three feet into the air before he came down again in an ABS lutely pitch-black ocean covered as far as the eye could see if it could see in the dark with a 2-inch thick molasses

17:55 like consistency oil spill from the ship that is burning the eyes and coating all of these men and if you ever look at photographs of people being rescued from like their ship being torpedoed when maybe they were in the Merchant Marine maybe they were on a destroyer but you can kind of see there's some great Life magazine ones I recall and when they come on board they're covered in oil and that's what these people are instantly covered in and what's worse is that oil can catch on fire and the surface of the ocean can burn that happened if you look at movie footage you can see that happen to Pearl Harbor you know the ocean caught on fire in places so at this point what you have is the equivalent of like the Titanic sinking or the Lusitania torpedoed you know big ship going down in the middle of the ocean now difference between both the Titanic and the Lusitania though if I can boil it down to one thing is the temperature

18:55 when the Titanic sank you had icebergs so it's cold the Lusitania went down sort of over by Ireland I believe cold water you're not going to have people surviving a long time in the water now if you're trying to rescue them actively this is a nightmarish situation right you've got to get to the people before they you know get hypothermia and they die in the water on the other hand if you're going to die anyway in the water in the Pacific in the very tropical warm regions you might wish it had come as quickly as cold water because with the water as warm as it is sometimes slightly over 80 degrees you can stay in the water a long time good thing if you're trying to be rescued bad things if there's other things in the water you know besides you that you need to worry about also bad if you don't have any fresh water which they don't and all of a sudden 300 or so men perished right away 900 or

20:01 so men are in the water and you begin now the other part of the nightmarish thing um I don't know how many of you have been in the ocean at night in the water in the ocean at night there's something calm and beautiful about it isn't there but there's something a little freaky about it too first of all you have no idea what's going on underneath you if you're in the deep areas right I mean you know there's a whole world of ocean underneath you what's more is if there's no moon out it can get pitch-black and you can't see anything so now when we talk about personal things that would bother us we're getting into my own personal nightmares a little bit here because you throw me out in the middle of the ocean in pitch-black darkness that is so I'm already gonna have some psychological problems I think and I do think that this is why these stories fascinate me because these figures in the story

20:59 because of things like war are cast into situations that are well unimaginable and if they just gave up we would totally understand the fact that they don't is you know if the old is a cliche but it's the triumph of the human species right and let's be honest a bunch of people do give up in this story and you can totally sympathize with them to when you can hear what they've gone through so the story continues and you begin to find you know the men you know as the light of day breaks out in groups they're all in clusters spread out over a great distance you know calling to each other trying to find each other trying to sort of swim to each other as best they can the horrible part of this story now when they're in the water though is a lot of people have horrible injuries you didn't have a bunch of healthy you know ready to go lifeguard type people jump in the water you had a bunch of shipwreck survivors people

21:50 who's you know one guy in the story and once again I always try to remember that the people who were with these people who survived carried these memories with them forever but one guy in this story a friend of one of the people he keeps quoting in the book Stanton has his eyes completely burned out and he's going to die but it's going to take him time but nobody wants to leave him again you see these higher qualities come to the fore where I mean nobody might survive this but we're gonna take a guy who's certainly not going to survive it and expend you know important energy that could be spent on living people that are you know could go either way but that's that's the higher human qualities right and so he talks about this guy eventually saying I'm not gonna make it I want here's what I want you to tell my wife you know and all these kind of things and it's wrenching once again I can't help but think that if the person

22:41 I think he's a doctor who's hearing this man with the burned out eyes tell him you know here's what I want you to tell my wife if he's in no danger at all he's gonna take that memory to the grave with him right probably gonna drink a lot more whiskey than he otherwise would have drank in his life because that is such a emotionally impacting moment but he himself is about to go through this harrowing experience and it's gonna be one hammer blow to the psyche of these people after another you have a lot of wounded people in the water bleeding a lot of burns and as you all know burns are particularly nasty and horrible and not enough life jackets people floating on flotsam and jetsam the guy I just mentioned who had to hear you know what the dying sailor wanted his wife told was named dr. Haynes and he's quoted by Stanton in the book and this incident is particularly highlighted and by the way

23:36 people are vomiting because they've ingested salt water and fuel oil stanton writes quote a few boys were vomiting so violently that they were actually doing somersaults in the water trying to keep calm Haynes called out here right here where is the sick sailor and then he moved into the throng about a dozen sailors were holding a body aloft an amazing feat of strength considering that they were all treading water furiously to stay afloat beneath the added weight the man in question was in terrible shape Stanton writes his eyes had been burned away the flesh on his hands was gone and what remained were bare tendons the boys held him up in an effort to keep these wounds out of the stinging bath of salt water Haynes recognized the man as good friend and liberty buddy gunnery officer Stanley Lipsky miraculously Lipsky had made his way blind from the quarterdeck off the ship and into the water

24:31 Haynes knew that lipski's Payne must be intolerable he himself could barely look at his old friend who was moaning softly Stanley he knew was one tough bird Haynes also understood that he didn't have long to live reluctantly he turned away to those he could actually help end quote and yet that guy with the burned out eyes will make it onto a life raft and eventually tell that same doctor that you know what he wants his wife to know last words and you know get married again after me and all that now I should point out that at this point in the story you know it could be a war story from many theaters many different kinds of conflicts over many different eras the part though that is about to happen now the part that inspired me to talk about this perhaps tapping into you know your own secret nightmares is a little bit different and no doubt it happened many times in history not recorded on

25:31 anyone's parchment or you know logs anywhere but this happened in close enough to modern times that we have many many many gruesome memories written down by survivors of what it was like to go down in the middle of the ocean with sharks everywhere have you ever seen the drone footage some of it came out recently they were showing I think it was the Florida coast from a drone above I don't know wanna say 500 feet a thousand feet above just the coastline so was you know basically taking pictures of a hundred yards offshore and it appears to be schools of fish that's what it looks like if you're not paying close attention so you know lots of fish it's not you know fish in the general term I guess it's officially still fish but they're sharks and I guess they maybe were migrating but the first thing you notice if you're paying attention you watch it over and over and over again not that I'm obsessed with it or

26:27 anything like that is that most of these sharks I was reading in the photograph or in the drone footage are in the four to six range kind of a you know fully grown decent-sized shark from one of these particular breeds of shark but you could instantly tell amongst those average sized ones you know every now and then there are big big big ones I mean you don't even know what they are 18 feet maybe I mean you look at them and there you go that's three times as long as the other one um imagine being you know just you're paragliding one day off the Florida coast and you just splash down right in the middle of that now there's no guarantee that anything will happen to you right they may just all scatter and fright and leave you totally alone but they might not now what if you're bleeding at the same time not gonna make any difference or wounded what if you're there for a long time and you don't go

27:22 away I mean it's one thing to say I crash-landed off the coast of Florida into a school of sharks and I swam to the shore and I made it out miraculously alive yeah but what if you stay there for four days hmm is that a nightmare it's a nightmare in the daytime what happens when you turn out the lights on that and what happens when the sharks start attacking not you but people within hearing distance of you the nightmare of the Indianapolis and the key part of the monologue that Robert Shaw gives us the Quint character in Jaws is what the moment when the sharks start attacking the hundreds of men in the water is like they can see them underneath them I mean this is what's so freaky is that this water is apparently clear to like 40 or 50 feet you know you're in the tropics it's a gorgeous color as a matter of fact it's so bright when the Sun starts hitting the water that that it's blinding people and it's

28:19 over a hundred degrees in the daytime so they're frying the parts that are above the water if these people have life vests a bunch of the people who are floating in the water with life vests will lose everything underneath the water to the Sharks and there are multiple accounts of people you know tapping a buddy who appears to be sleeping in his life vest on the water's surface and having you know by the way the Quint in Jaws actually talks about this too and having them turn over like like like you know Bob if you will turn over and there's nothing below the waist you can see the sharks below you some of these sailors that Stanton talks about say that they would see some of the same sharks and recognize them so offered that they gave them names once Taylor gave a tiger shark of huge tiger shark the name Oscar and eventually another sailor took a two-inch penknife which is you know nothing and tried to stab at

29:14 one of these things some of these sailors were on a raft where it was the raft was disintegrating over time and had a sort of a lattice floor if you will and there was a little hole developing in the floor and these big sharks would come up and stick their snouts right through I mean again you saw this in jars with jaws with the mechanical shark stick their nose right through and try to get a hold of something the sailors started kicking it in the face to me being adrift in the ocean in the middle of the night you know no land anywhere no ships anywhere no birds no planes and sharks all around hundreds of them to me that is the most terrifying situation I can think about and what I what I was gonna do once is I was gonna do either a book or maybe a TV series where the entire premise was based around the worst place you can be in the world you know on any given moment in history January 27th 1987 and Tunisia is

30:11 the worst place to be in the world um you know the Battle of cannae in Italy worst place to be in war this is the worst place to be in the world to me on that date and maybe any date it takes a lot of the things that are the most nasty things I can think of packages them together in one horrible sort of event and then puts these people in this psychological challenge where day after day they're in the water because nobody knows they're gone this mission so secret delivering the components for the bomb meant that they were it wasn't like they were totally off the radar when you read the reports it was quite a scandal after the war because the indianapolis going down will be the worst disaster in US navy history but there were several sort of let's just call them variables maybe i mean first of all war okay variable number one but these ships should have been noticed when they were missing

31:02 number of little things that happened and you can see this I mean the Pearl Harbor attacks another one where a little variable here if that doesn't happen this doesn't happen um I don't want to call it okay but you can kind of see how it happened and yet what it meant was instead of being rescued within a reasonable period of time these people are gonna be out there for day after day after day they have no water and eventually think about the psychological torture that comes from being absolutely able to see almost nothing but water but you will go crazy and then die if you start drinking the water around you right again it's another kind of disaster movie it's being stuck in the desert with water all around you but it's essentially poisonous right and there will come a time in the story where and it's funny because it would like spread from one man to another where people will just start drinking the salt water and

31:55 knowingly die or be soaked raised from thirst that they don't care one thing I found particularly fascinating about the shark aspect that Stanton explained in his book was the idea that most of these sailors probably did not have a very clear conception of sharks the way we do I mean jaws was the big you know sort of before and after a moment on that but we've been fascinated with sharks ever since he points out that it was kind of the stuff of legends back in this era and the idea of confronting one had not been really talked about very often and what's more he says Stanton says that the Navy kind of downplayed the danger cuz it wasn't good for morale to talk about yeah you could run into an 18-foot tiger shark out there and they'll eat anything Stanton says that initially the Sharks probably mostly went after the cadavers in the water and that's why the real big attacks did not start for a

32:50 while but that once they ran out of those to go after that they started going after lone floaters in the water as opposed to the ones that had all gathered into groups and then they would go after the ones at the outside of you know the circle of people floating in the water Stanton talks about you know the incident that we just mentioned the a sailor being cut in half below the waist and then says that there was a sailor who was on the verge of drowning that was calling for help and so well let me let stand and pick up the story he writes quote at one point Bob Gauss swam away from the group to aid an exhausted sailor who was on the verge of drowning the boy had clearly gone out of his head at the sight of the fish meaning the Sharks circling below him he was waving his hands and calling for help as goz paddled out he was intercepted immediately by a large dorsal fin knifing towards him so he swam as fast

33:49 as he could back to the group the boy in distress soon disappeared as the shark attacks multiplied Stanton writes the once optimistic boys were filled with a sense of helplessness Jack Casady came face to face with a tiger shark that had been bothering him for so long that he had even given it a name he called the beast Oscar he swung at it with a homemade knife and buried the blade an inch deep in the fish's tough snout but Oscar swam away as if only annoyed Cassidy was furious he wanted to kill the shark but he was relieved to be left alone as the water flashed with twisting tails and dorsal fins the boys resolved to stay calm clamping their hands over their ears against the erupting screams but this resolve vanished when one of the boys was dragged through the water like a fisherman's bobber tugged by a big catfish the victim clenched in the uplifted jaws of a shark was pushed at waist level through the surf screaming

34:42 others disappeared quietly without a trace their life vests shooting back up to the surface empty the straps in shreds as the excited sharks grew more agitated the attacks intensified in ferocity and quote there are many people who consider the shark attacks over several days against the Indianapolis survivors to be the worst incident of mass shark attacks in history I would suggest that that's a hard one to know think of how many ships have perished over the ages and well sharks are not a new phenomenon right nonetheless we have very few accounts like that and when you add up all the various elements working on these people you just imagine that no one could last long in that environment without losing their mind and that's what begins to happen and we've seen this before right we did a we mentioned one guy when we were doing blueprint for Armageddon in the first world war that you know it's funny what sort of images

35:51 make it into the history books and what sort of memories right so you're in the first world war and you're at Passchendaele and you see some guy stuck in the mud and with all of the things available to modern society at that point in time they can't get him out and he's begging people to help him and no one can do anything so then they come back I forgot how many days later it was it might have only been one day but the guy whose memory this was says the guy was still in the mud but he'd sunk all the way up to his head and he was insane begging people to shoot him we all have a limit right so it should not surprise any of us when some of these people start losing their minds in the water under these conditions and you know you should also point out something that's not always apparent when you're young but as a 52 year old person now is really apparent to me is how young most of these people in this story are in my

36:47 mind they're kids the captain's an adult and some of these officers are you know old enough to have young families and whatnot although these people are having families at 18 years old back then a lot of them so a lot of the more parents but I mean when you read the biographies of these people I mean you know they're kids to me and you're 18 19 20 21 and you're having to deal with this I don't agree with von Moltke his line about you know that we need war cuz it preserves these human qualities but you sure see them on display here don't you you wish you'd never have to see them on display again but you can't help but marvel that people can you know get through this and many of them don't I mean stanton tells story after story about people that consciously decide to give up that it's either I mean even talking about it with other people who are stuck in the water that it's easy to do all you have to do

37:38 he says his swim away from the group and you will get hit by a shark within a hundred yards people will drink the seawater knowing it will kill them Doug Stanton writes quote those with broken arms and legs and backs had gone into shock and died others had succumbed to massive bleeding or head wounds that suspended them in another world still others simply drowned because they were too exhausted to keep swimming they'd been afloat now without food water shelter or sleep for over forty hours of the eleven hundred and ninety six crew members who'd set sail from Guam three days earlier probably no more than 600 were still alive in the previous 24 hours alone at least 200 had likely slipped beneath the waves or been victims of shark attack since the sinking he writes each boy had been floating through the hours asking himself the same hard question will I live or do I quit and as Tuesday unfolded some of the starved bleeding

38:36 and delirious men began to form their answers for those who gave up death now seemed a matter of destiny they started committing suicide those still lucid enough looked on in disbelief he writes as their former shipmates calmly untied their life vests took a single stroke forward and sank without a word others suddenly turn from the group and started swimming waiting for a shark to hit and then looked up in terrified satisfaction when it did others simply fell face forward and refused to rise a boy would swim over to his buddy lift his head by the hair from the water and begin screaming for him to come to his senses often he refused and continued to quietly drown himself end quote and we should point out that there are people in every Navy in the second world war that saw actual combat that had incidents like that and there were quite a few people in the Merchant Marine and the various civilian versions that you

39:32 know kept the supplies you know coming across the water and handling the logistics that would have their ships torpedoed who would go through similar things there's something perversely nasty about having the water be warm enough to keep you alive for days so giving you an opportunity to be rescued you never would have had the North Atlantic for example where you'd be dead in an hour - from the hypothermia but it also gives you time to go through what Stanton just described as I said multiple disaster movies all wrapped into one now as the hours drag on Stanton says that the delirium starts to set in and again the Indianapolis survivors are going through all of these movie tropes that forever the movies will wrench drama and emotion and you know your sense of feeling for the people the fake people in these movies or stories and the Indianapolis people are going through it for real their ship went down

40:37 remember it like 12:15 a.m. first thing in the morning but in the middle of the night on Monday Stanton writes that by Wednesday the men start attacking one another they think they're seeing enemies and at one point he writes in and he says in within 10 minutes an estimated 50 boys were killed by their compatriots when everybody snapped at once see we have another movie here - it's like the shipwreck movie so it's another kind of disaster film you know people are stuck in rafts and dealing with sharks and going crazy and not having I mean it's as though we tried to figure out how many things you could hit the same people with before they broke the higher human qualities though are visible throughout I mean the part that got me was as as people start dying more and more they need their life vests because the life vests are failing they're not meant to be in the water that long so you have these stories

41:38 about people that will you know go over make sure someone that they think is dead has actually expired and then take their life vest off but the one guy that Stanton was quoting in the story he just he would not let them go without some sort of a prayer he'd hold them close which you know these guys are exhausted by this time so anything more than the most minimum effort is excruciating and yet he was going to see that each one of these people had a prayer set over them before he let them go and you know to be eaten by the shark those are the little touches in a story like this that break your heart because those are the I mean that's what separates us from just being some mindless thing that's torn apart by the Sharks I mean the thinking that goes into all of the I mean that man survived the one that said the prayers over the people he had to unstrap from the life vests what are you thinking about at

42:29 night the rest of your life they will eventually be rescued by a pilot that they're not looking for anybody the pilot just kind of sees these people in the water and he swoops down low and he can see the Sharks attacking them Stanton writes of a guy named lieutenant Adrian Marx who's um you know one of the early people on the scene once they figure out they've got people in the water and it's interesting because of the secrecy involving this they don't know who these people are it's not like they're going we found the Indianapolis crew one of the first questions they're gonna ask when they pick the first person up is who the hell are you and where you're from so Stanton writes quote lieutenant Adrian Marx reached the scene of the survivors at 3:20 p.m. and what he found astounded him lieutenant Adam berry inform marks that there were a great many people scattered over a wide area he said not to drop any life-saving

43:23 equipment until he made a full tour which marks quickly did both pilots then decided to steer away from the people clinging to the rafts and to concentrate on those held up solely by vests 30 minutes after he arrived marks began bombing the boys with his provisions about the same time the Destroyers Ralph Talbot and Madison received orders to cut short their patrols near the island of a Lethe and head directly to the rescue site their eta 12 hours from the present sometime early Friday morning marks knew the situation was dire from his recon altitude of a mere 25 feet he had a clear view of the deep green sea in the hundreds of sharks circling the men night which he knew was the Sharks normal feeding period was approaching one of Marx's crewmen watched as a shark attacked one of the men and dragged him under as Marx himself witnessed more attacks his anxiety grew it looked to him as if the survivors were so weak

44:17 they couldn't even begin to fight back end quote and then there's a footnote Stanton put in that says the Sharks had in fact remained a constant presence throughout the men's ordeal even during the daylight hours not long after Gwynn who was the first pilot to find the people in the water by the way not long after Gwynn showed up a massive shark attack involving an estimated 30 fish head in about 15 minutes taken some 60 boys perched on a floater net end quote that doesn't begin to even do justice to the parts of the story that seem by comparison with crap like that to be nothing I mean how do you talk about no water and how that makes you feel day after day when you're suffering and no decent food I mean these no sleep the wounds I mean they said that one boy in one of these rafts one of the survivors couldn't help but point out was sitting there with his mouth wide open in such pain that he

45:11 couldn't even make a noise you ever been in a situation with a person like that just one person in one situation any one of these things is you know again when you talk about war the first thing you think about is none of this stuff should ever happen again and then the next thing you think about is that when it does look what people can endure and look at what they do in terms of self-sacrifice for another human being who's in a situation you know that's awful in a situation that you yourself might be sharing so that's when it becomes extra heroic when some of these people are doing things like giving their life vests to a guy who needs it more it's not like you're doing a good deed for someone you found in the street it's it's reducing your own chances of survival to help somebody else's chances of survival those are pretty amazing stories and I think the reason that we're so fascinated with

46:03 these horrible tales is there's something life-affirming about the people that get through them and not just how they conducted themselves at the time but how it both changed them and how you know that the silent heroism of living with it afterwards and I think we we have more understanding of that now than we used to with things like PTSD but I don't think we even give it anywhere near the thought it deserves I mean we all have traumatic memories in our lives provides you with some by default but some people get way more than their share can you imagine if like plugging something in the back of your head like from the matrix I could upload the memories of one of these Indianapolis survivors into you're not just your brain but like have it fused with your emotions so you know you have the feelings you could have the flashbacks from an experience you never had imagine what that would do to you pretty darn

46:59 quickly right I just gave you the memories of an Indianapolis survivor now imagine not being able to ever get them out of your head now imagine going through the original experience you know my brain never wants to ever do any research on this personally you understand but I can't help but wonder if somehow the cumulative effect you know over decades of all these horrible you know memories and flashbacks and nightmares does that ever come close to equaling the terribleness of the experience itself and if it doesn't how much of it is like you know picking at the scab continually you know of the wound that changed your life forever now we may not have gone through the wound but think about how upset you'd be just having the memories all of a sudden the implanted in your head about what it was like when you got it mentally or emotionally speaking in my mind when you look at it the sinking of the Indianapolis is not

48:00 really a war story if it was a war story I think maybe we would have included it in the series that we're doing on the Pacific War and the war in Asia in the Second World War right now but it's not like that in my mind it's about as connected to war as I see it as the 9/11 attacks were connected to terrorism they are the thing that creates you know the first domino falling and a number of horrible incidents but once the initial attacks happen you go from having a war movie if you'll pardon the connection again to entertainment to a disaster film you know like the kind I grew up with and as I said what is so I don't know if amazing is a good word to use in such a horrific situation what is frightful about what the Indianapolis survivors and nonsurvivors had to go through is they don't get to just have one disaster film be you know their traumatic memory they get to walk on a one of these you know movies like you

48:59 know the towering inferno and get right on you know the Poseidon and then they get to experience the beside an adventure it's one right after another it is as though you know the great gods of history we're trying to see exactly how much they could pile on the same group of human beings and since we're gonna do a study here why not have hundreds of people in your sample size and see how much they can take and what happens to them you know as you continue to give them as much material as some of the people we pity the most for going through terrible human experiences what several of them put together experienced that's why for me if you're talking about you know terrible places in human history to have found yourself in or if your time machine happens to go awry and you hit the button wrong and you end up in just about the worst place you could for me that would be anywhere from about July thirtieth to August 2nd 1945 a

49:54 couple hundred miles from the nearest land in the Philippine Sea and I would definitely say if that happened to you you would have found yourself for that particular time and place in the worst place in the world

50:13 audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet what more do you need to know really than that when audible started sponsoring our programs they were in a similar situation to podcasters where if somebody said well you do I said a podcaster and then had to explain that for a long time well once upon a time audiobooks are something that people had to have explained to them now everybody understands audiobooks and so everyone understands audible the leading provider and well to give you an idea of selection if you're ever worried about that sort of thing they have multiple books and I mean I stopped counting it like five on the USS Indianapolis sinking so let's just call it an unmatched selection and if the story you just heard acts as an appetizer towards finding out more and there's a lot more audibles got plenty to choose from in fact they actually have the book we quoted from Stanton's

51:08 book in harm's way which I've read and is incredible but there's a bunch of other ones too if you've read that or heard this story you can get granular I mean there's a new book that just came out on the Indianapolis so you want some more information on this you want to have somebody speak to you for a little bit longer than this one lasted well why don't you go to audible sign up for their free trial offer you know audible.com forward slash Carlin text my name two five zero zero five zero zero to get started and you can download one two three I think I stopped counting at four or five books that they have on the sinking of the USS Indianapolis it's just one of those stories that it's so hard to believe that it's true and as I said you know there's almost this vicarious horror movie fascination with it and then it just breaks your heart to actually think that no this is real stuff and the basic information you're

51:59 getting comes from the mouths of the people who are experiencing this but that's what makes history so compelling at least to people who have whatever it is the gene or just a sense of the dramatic and there's a reason that this story continues to both fascinate but also inspire why don't you go to audible check out what they have available as I said Auto bull dot-com forward slash Carlin gets you into the free 30-day trial and then you can start to see what it's all about I mean I've talked about every angle that audible has in terms of advantages in the old days these were the things that were new and unusual now you just sort of expect this sort of stuff from your audiobook provider because audible is the one that came up with all this stuff and made this the standard you want to own your books audible let you own your books I mean stuff like that that has made me happy to you know tell

52:53 you about them all this time I mean as I said you want a little bit more USS Indianapolis info go to audible.com forward slash Carlin sign up for a free 30 day offer today own the books you get and start experiencing all the little things that audible just does write about audiobooks be sure to follow us on Twitter the address is at hard core history hey a buck a show that's all we ask go to Dan Karlin comm for information on how to donate to the show

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP5 Nightmares of Indianapolis"?

Dan Carlin (Host).

What is "EP5 Nightmares of Indianapolis" about?

The episode explores the haunting experiences surrounding a traumatic event in Indianapolis, emphasizing the nightmarish nature of the recollections and the disjointed, vivid memories that arise when recounting such experiences. It delves into the emotional impact on those present during the event, highlighting how the trauma lingers in their dreams and memories, creating a lasting sense of…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including USS Indianapolis, Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way, Jaws, Robert Shaw, Adrian Marx. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP5 Nightmares of Indianapolis"?

The episode runs 53 min; the transcript is about 9,994 words in 58 timestamped sections.

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