After the cruiser USS Indianapolis was sunk by Japanese torpedoes on July 30, 1945, 880 men went into the water with almost no lifeboats or supplies. They survived four days in the Pacific. What history books often soften: the second and third nights in the water were when the sharks came. Sailors reported that the sharks — mostly oceanic whitetips — were drawn first to the screaming, then to the silence of the dead. One survivor, Seaman John D. Bulkley, later wrote that he could tell which groups had died by the pattern of floating life jackets — tight clusters meant they had tried to stay together. Of the 880 men, only 317 survived. The sharks claimed an estimated 60-150 men. The last survivor died in 2021. The ship's captain, McVay, was wrongly blamed and convicted at a court-martial — he was only exonerated in 2000, 28 years after his death.