Blacked out and unescorted, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis was 39 hours out on the moonlit Philippine Sea, bound for the U.S.'s great new anchorage at Leyte. She had carried vital materials for the first atomic bomb from the States to Guam, and now, on Sunday, July 29, was logging 17 knots to rejoin the fleet. Shortly before midnight the end came for the veteran (commissioned in 1932) clipper-bowed "Indy." Two explosions on her starboard side smashed her communications, fouled her controls. She sank within 15 minutes.
No one knows how many hundreds of her crew bobbed in the ocean the next morning....
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