by Doug Stanton
339 pages, 2001, Henry Holt and Company

For people born in the last few decades, the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis is a mere pop culture reference at most, having been briefly referenced in the 1975 classic, “Jaws.” As the men sit adrift in the middle of the ocean, drinking and sharing battle scar stories, the wonderful Robert Shaw, as Quint, delivers his monologue about being aboard a fictionalized version of the doomed cruiser: “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 in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb…” Needless to say, Quint wins the tough guy contest.

The entire account of the ship’s sinking is unbelievable. The Indianapolis had been assigned the task of delivering parts of the atomic bomb “Little Boy,” which would later be used in the attack on Hiroshima. After successfully completing its assignment, and headed for home, the cruiser was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, killing 300 men instantly and pitching another 900 into the ocean.

Stanton’s narrative is almost as riveting as the story itself. The crew would have nothing but bad luck from the moment the torpedo struck. Due to the extremely top secret nature of the mission, very few people knew where the ship was in the first place. And, due to human error, one of those people failed to recognize that the ship had not arrived at its scheduled time, setting off a chain of incompetence that left the shipmen to drift and die in the open Pacific Ocean for four days. In the water, some men died of injuries sustained in the attack, some from exposure and dehydration.

But most horrifyingly of all were the sharks. “Until this point, it seemed, the restless fish had been feeding mostly on the dead, tearing at the bodies as they fell to the ocean floor. Or they had concentrated on lone, straying swimmers. But now the sharks were starting to home in on the large groups that had amassed during the past thirty-six hours.” Stanton does a thorough job acquainting us with many of the crew members. As far as the sharks are concerned, the book is almost like a mystery novel: who is going to die next?

Charles Butler McVay III, captain of the Indianapolis, was court-martialed and convicted of failing to keep the ship safe, even though the Japanese captain of the submarine that attacked the ship testified that it was simply dumb luck that they had come across the cruiser. Many of the survivors never spoke of the incident. Rescue for the surviving crew may have come after four days, but the nightmares never ended. “In Harm’s Way” is a live wire of a book—there is something shocking on almost every page.