The Sun
EDGAR Harrell could still hear the screams of the friends who were clinging to each other as a school of hungry sharks began tearing chunks out of their legs.
The blue Pacific waters turned red with blood as, one by one, hundreds of men were eaten alive.
Harell was one of 1,195 men onboard the USS Indianapolis in 1945 when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, leaving him and hundreds of others fighting for survival in shark-infested waters.
Over four days, survivors were attacked by the beasts in the middle of the Philippine Sea before they were accidentally found by a friendly bomber plane.
“All we heard was men being eaten alive. Every day, every night,” Harrell told Sun Online in 2019.
“You’d find your buddy and check him and find that he’s disembowelled, or the bottom was gone.”
Harrell was 20 years old at the time of the attack – he passed away in May this year aged 96.
It has since become known as the worst shark attack in history and inspired the character of Captain Quint in the blockbuster Jaws, who said he had survived the attack.
900 people in shark-infested waters
On the night of July 30, 1945, the Indianapolis was sailing from Tinian Island to the Philippines after completing a secret mission delivering uranium for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which was dropped just one week later.
At 12:14am, a Japanese submarine fired six torpedoes at the Indianapolis, and two hit it directly.
Sergeant Harrell, who was on lookout that night, told Sun Online: “One of the torpedoes cut the bow of the ship off.
“The second exploded under a turret.
I could see and hear and feel all the water coming in below me, and the ship began flooding.”
He scrambled to get a life jacket and then clung on to a rail as the sinking ship started to go down, watching in horror as badly burned men ran screaming from the vessel.
Harrell said: “I hung on to that rail looking out into the blackness of the night.
“May I say there’s times when you pray and there’s times when you pray.”
He then leapt into the water as the ship went down.
He said: “I swam away from the ship and towards a group of marines who had already fled the boat.
“One was badly injured and he died in my arms within the next hour.”
Three hundred men went down with the ship, leaving another 900 bobbing in the pitch-dark waters.
Sailors eaten alive
While Harrell and his comrades were thankful to have survived the torpedoes, it soon became clear they faced an even more terrifying enemy – hundreds of oceanic whitetip and tiger sharks which prowl the Pacific.
In the next few hours as day broke, Harrell was floating with a group of roughly 80 other men when dorsal fins started to cut through the waves around them.
The men clung to each other in a bid to intimidate the predators – but those weakened by injuries would lose their grip.
Read the full story in The Sun
