As Stated

Site Issues 2005 Archive Room
#1

In Maxim in the page dedicated to Ask us anything and Misc. facts.:

During World War II, 980 Japanese soldiers were killed by crocodiles after the soldiers were forced to retreat through a Burmese swampland.

That must have been all sorts of well sucky.

#2

do you have a link of the source?
thanks

#3

Dont know if many of you remember the part in Jaws where the crazy captain Robert Shaw talks about being on the USS Indianapolis. True story. The ship delivered the “bombs” and on the way back was sunk by a japanese submarine. Something like 800 men went into the water and only 300 came out. The others drown or got eaten by sharks. :shock: Thats pretty well sucks too.

#4

Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, 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… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ‘til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

Quint’s “Indianapolis speech” refers to the sinking of the ship as having occurred on June 29, 1945. It actually occurred on 30 July 1945.

#5

I remember seeing a good TV movie on the Inianapolis called mission of the shark with David Crusoe ( CSI Miami) and the guy who played Magnum PI ( his name escapes me) I found the end scene the survivors singing the sailors hymn" for those in peril on the sea" at a reunion very moving.

#6

Oooh this is making me wanting to read In Harms Way that I bought a few weeks ago but never got a chance to read (it’s a story about survivors of the USS Indianapolis). Dammit, why must Eisenhower’s memoirs be so long?? I still have 300+ pages of it to go before I can get to the next book :frowning:

#7

By the way, getting eaten by sharks, unfortunately, wasn’t that rare. The Pacific was full of sharks. When the men of the destroyers that sank off Samar, as described by survivors in the book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, they had to face sharks as well, while fighting off sun poisoning, delusions from drinking so much salt water, and of course hunger. Getting your ship sunk by the enemy in the middle of the Pacific was not fun by any account!