Delivering The Bomb: Deaths Upon Deaths

They were named Little Boy and Fat Boy. Dropped from the bellies of two B-29s named Enola Gay and Bocks's Car, these two atomic bombs took an estimated 240,000 Japanese lives from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the blink of an eye on the 6th and the 9th of August, 1945.

Tinian was the where a key B29 bomber airstrip was, and where the two planes took off from on their unique, world-changing missions. Tinian, situated in the Marianas island chain, was only considered a valuable part of the US military landscape for its close flight proximity to the Japanese mainland.

The atomic bombs, or more precisely, the components that went into them, arrived at Tinian in the hold of the USS Indianapolis. A Portland-class heavy cruiser, 588 feet long and with four screws putting out 107,000 horsepower, Indianapolis was steaming for the Philippines after dropping off its deadly cargo on the 26th of July, a cargo that not even the captain of the ship, Charles B. McVay, was privy to.

Also unknown to McVay, of course, his ship was vectoring directly toward disaster at the hands of his enemy, an enemy who, of course, was working in darkness, and had no idea of the role that his target had just played in defeating his nation. To Mochitsura Hashimoto, skipper of the I-58, it was simply a target of opportunity, and a fat one at that.

The first explosion, near the bow, happened just after midnight on July 30th, a little over day before the ship was due into Leyte. A second explosion occurred shortly thereafter, sealing the fate of the men aboard her.

I find it fascinating that the sequence of events happened in the order they did. Some of the sailors, of course, died from the initial blasts from Commander Hashimoto's two torpedoes, and many more perished when the ship rolled over and went down by the head. The rest abandoned ship and began the long wait for rescue.

One can almost think of those initial casualities as the lucky dead. Over the course of the next few days, until rescue ships began to pluck men out of the water, many died of exhaustion, while others drowned in their life preservers. Others fell victim to mass hallucinations and swam into oblivion trying to chase down phantom islands or ships.

But it was the sharks, ancient preditors of the deep, who took many of the men in the water in those few horrible days of waiting for rescue. The sailors, strapped helplessly in their life preservers, could clearly see them arrowing just beneath their feet. This writer can't say how many died from shark attacks, but it was a substantial number. Of the 1,200 men assigned to the cruiser, perhaps 800 survived the initial torpedoing, and only 320 survived the entire ordeal.

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