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Essay / Suicide bombing: the Indianapolis disaster
The Indianapolis began its history in July 1945. At that time, the heavy cruiser was undergoing intense repairs in San Francisco Bay. Under the command of Captain McVay, the ship had been damaged by a Japanese suicide bomber near Okinawa. On March 31, the suicide bomber killed 9 people at the rear of the ship. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay before you limp home. Unexpectedly, McVay received orders in July to assemble his crew and prepare to sail to an island near the Japanese mainland. Aboard the Indianapolis was highly classified cargo: parts for the atomic bombs that were to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that summer. Neither McVay nor his crew knew the importance of the cargo they were carrying; they only knew that their mission was top secret, that the cargo had its own guards in the maritime core whose only job was to protect the secret cargo and that there was an unlikely sailor on board, two army officers who were in reality top secret specialists. weapons.On July 26, the ship delivered its mysterious cargo to Tinian, a small island in the Pacific. Within six hours, the Indianapolis was en route to Guam, then to the Philippines. The ship had to travel unescorted, without a destroyer escort specializing in searching for enemy submarines. McVay agreed without question after being informed that the Navy considered his route safe. However, a few days earlier, a Navy ship had been sunk in nearby waters by a manned suicide torpedo called a kaiten launched by a submarine. Navy intelligence indicated that a group of submarines was operating in an area the ship would pass through. None of this important information was given to McVay who was ordered to zigzag, the reason being that a moving target is much more difficult to hit. Due to bad weather, McVay stopped zigzagging until the weather improved. The enemy submarine that later sank the Indianapolis was named I-58 under the command of Lt.Cdr. Hashimoto had never sunk an enemy ship during the entire war, which was bad luck. An Imperial Navy sonar operator had heard the sound of dishes. Lt. Cdr. Hashimoto then got on the periscope, but could see nothing but a dot, so the enemy submarine began tracking the ship. Some of the fog was starting to clear. Hashimoto could now see a triangle sufficient to fire a target. The Indianapolis was at sea for only a few days when two torpedoes hit her in the sides, the first torpedo torpedoed a 60-foot hole and the second. the torpedo made a 40-foot hole, water began to fill the ship by tons. Within twelve minutes, the cruiser had sunk, throwing some nine hundred young crew members offshore. The remaining three hundred crew members were killed by the torpedo or trapped and unable to escape the sinking ship. Stanton (the author) describes the sinking from the perspective of the survivors: "The boys watched in horrified fascination as the ship finally righted itself and stopped, shuddering – the stern pointed straight to the sky – then began to sink, slowly at first, then gaining speed, suddenly pulled into the depths by the nose. »For the boys, as Stanton calls them, who arrived at the water, the ordeal had barely begun. Many of the boys were sleeping at the time of the attack and were naked or wearing only underwear. Furthermore, the speed with which-1.