Posted on 04/23/2025 1:00:55 PM PDT by george76
Sharks are almost up there with pit bulls.
Our passtime was killing sharks when I was in the Coast Guard in 1968, we didn’t have any shark-huggers back then.
I am continually amazed at the unwise things people do like seeing a shark coming and telling the kid next to you, don’t move. and what are you afraid of sharks.
Unless it was a family member, I would be VERY reluctant to try and rescue someone drowning in water I can’t stand in. It’s a good way to drown yourself as the victim panics and pulls you under. Unless you KNOW you can do it, you’re basically standing an even chance of volunteering your corpse to be a life preserver.
I’m a fairly decent swimmer and consistently qual’d S2 in the Marines, but was never able to make S1 (requiring rescuing a victim)….
When I was at Lejeune, a Marine (certified rescue swimmer) rescued a couple at Topsail swept away in riptide. He drowned; they lived.
I have a hard time faulting someone opting not to attempt rescue in a drowning situation. That said, the ignorance and callousness of filming it all in your story…..is pretty f’d up.
That whole sequence was reshot and mixed with existing footage with him still alive prior.
Quint got the month wrong in his speech (It had been July, not June), but that was still a gripping story.
You know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette till your last dyin’ day
Not unusual for a warship. They could have been ordered elsewhere.
Understood. However, it's a documented fact that the junior officer who was responsible for checking the piers and counting ships at Leyte Gulf failed to report that Indianapolis had never arrived. (This was his duty; a higher-up would have been able to determine if the ship had received new orders. The junior officer never reported the missing ship, as required according to his responsibilities.)
Understood. However, it's a documented fact that the junior officer who was responsible for checking the piers and counting ships at Leyte Gulf failed to report that Indianapolis had never arrived. (This was his duty; a higher-up would have been able to determine if the ship had received new orders. The junior officer never reported the missing ship, as required according to his responsibilities.)
You have a better chance of being struck by lightning than of a shark attack. Better to just never leave the house.
Right...when a Golden Retriever mauls and kills its owner, that is news.
When a pit bull does the same, or a shark eats a human the horror is news, but the fact that they did it is not.
Exactly. Wild critters should always be assumed to be hungry. But there are always people who say that predators and wolves are just given a bad rap.
"Yeah. There was a reason wolves have been hunted to extinction anywhere there were encounters between wolves and humans, and it wasn't just because the wolves were eating all the sheep."
Yep. Standing in shallow water.
The problem was a mislaid communication.
She sank in 12 minutes, only enough time to get off a terse communication.
A junior officer even found the communication sent by the USS Indianapolis as she was sinking and brought it to the attention of his sleeping superior officer, who discounted it as a Japanese ploy, something the Japanese did quite frequently.
But because of the secrecy of the mission, and the huge volume of vessels coming and going, she slipped through the cracks and was only discovered days after when she didn’t show up. And it took them days to find her crew in the water, and even then, it was only by accident.
That is war. That is the mess and sloppiness inherent in war. What a tragedy.
It was particularly galling that Captain McVay was courtmartialed as he was. That was the Naval Service looking out for its reputation. They did him a grievous injustice, and 23 years later, he donned his Navy khakis and shot himself in the head.
What a tragedy.
You must be an old fart like me.
I doubt many people today would understand your reference.
I barely remember it, I was pretty young when West side story came out.
As someone pointed out to me years ago, a tragedy is usually not the result of a single factor that results in the loss of life or limb, but a chain of smaller incidents leading to it; the interruption of any of the smaller incidents would have prevented the tragedy.
While I am not familiar with the particular incident you describe here, it is completely plausible so I will take it at face value.
But it raises an obvious question: Was an attempt made to reach Indianapolis through another channel (or did they really go to bed that night without investigating the distress signal because, you know, the Japs did that stuff all the time)?
But even the safety net failed. A ship could be sunk without a word, either because it was physically impossible get a message out or because the message ended up in the hands of an officer who was not terribly concerned about it's veracity. Here, Ensign Benson (not his real name) whose only job it was to match the list of ships he actually saw in port with the list of ships he should have seen in port couldn't even do this properly.
And you're right; McVay lived with this until he checked himself out.
When you look at this in retrospect, it is just awful.
The ship was not reported missing when it failed to arrive in Leyte Gulf as scheduled on 31 July.
Records later showed that three stations even received distress signals but failed to act upon the call, because one commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him and the third thought it was a Japanese trap.
Granted, it was wartime, and the message was very brief and non-standard, but the fact that three places did pick up the faint message and ignored it, well...that is just terrible to read.
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