Based on a decade of original research and reporting, the riveting, emotionally wrenching, and definitive full story of the worst sea disaster in United States naval history: the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II—and the fifty-year fight to exonerate the captain after an unjust court-martial.

USS Indianapolis sailors on liberty.

Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, days after delivering the Hiroshima bomb from California to the Pacific islands in the most highly classified naval mission of the war, USS Indianapolis is sailing in the center of the Philippine Sea when she is struck by two Japanese torpedoes. The ship is instantly transformed into a fiery cauldron and sinks within minutes. Three hundred men go down with the ship. Nearly 900 make it into the water alive. For five nights and four days, almost three hundred miles from the nearest land, they battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Only 317 survive and scores go on to spend the next half-century fighting to clear the name of their captain, who was court-martialed for the sinking.

Now, thanks to new research and firsthand interviews with 108 of the survivors over more than a decade, Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic tell the full story of the USS Indianapolis for the first time—an extraordinary human drama that brings the ship and its crew back to full, vivid, unforgettable life.
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