Citation Needed - The USS Indianapolis

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

USS Indianapolis (CL/CA-35) was a Portland-class heavy cruiser of the United States Navy, named for the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. Launched in 1931, the vessel served as the flagship for the commander of Scouting Force 1 for eight years, then as flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance in 1943 and 1944 while he commanded the Fifth Fleet in battles across the Central Pacific during World War II. In July 1945, Indianapolis completed a top-secret high-speed trip to deliver parts of Little Boy, the first nuclear weapon ever used in combat, to the United States Army Air Force Base on the island of Tinian, and subsequently departed for the Philippines on training duty. At 0015 on 30 July, the ship was torpedoed by the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-58, and sank in 12 minutes. Of 1,195 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship.[4] The remaining 890 faced exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks while stranded in the open ocean with few lifeboats and almost no food or water. The Navy only learned of the sinking four days later, when survivors were spotted by the crew of a PV-1 Ventura on routine patrol. Only 316 survived.[4] The sinking of Indianapolis resulted in the greatest single loss of life at sea, from a single ship, in the history of the US Navy.[a]   Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Hmm. Hmm. Huh? Where are we? Good morning, sleepy head. Where's the studio? Where is anything at all I can't even see. Well, you know, this week's episode is on the USS Indianapolis.

So I'm going to have to go to the hospital. We had finally where's the studio where is anything at all I can't even see well You know this week's episode is on the USS Indianapolis So I thought what better way for us to get in the spirit than to spend four days stranded at sea together as a cast You didn't I hate you so much Come on guys. We can find we can fight off sharks and don't worry Come on guys we can find we can fight off sharks and don't worry someone will be My to pick us up in four days. This is our chance to get closer You like have you

Red the essay I Try not to read ahead. I like to stay fresh I want to like drop my energy the way he does really want to perform at the top of my bean You know what I'm saying you'll be in okay, well He does really want to perform at the top of my bean. You know what I'm saying? You'll be in. Okay, well Spoiler two thirds of the people in that story die Eli. They all die Oh And he's what are you eating? Hmm. Oh, um Not calm

Very clearly Tom. It's very it's very clearly. I can see his face. Yeah, he started eating him like as soon as he woke up. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.

Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. And no, and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet That's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be navigating these waters, but I'll need some

Chums First up, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, nobody bought tickets to hear you. First up, two men who even sharks have described his far too tough to eat, Noah and Cecil. I enjoyed that mistake. Yeah, me and you don't get shit for a while. I feel like I'm safe until sharks discover antacids. You'd think with all those teeth they would never problem, it's third row eating. Oh, huh?

Huh? Huh? We have shitsets, signs, audience, and- Wow, twice in the open it. And also joining us tonight, shark food porn, if ever there was one, heath and top. Yeah! Come on, two girls won scup. Was an amazing project.

Wow. Scup is a fish. Fuck everybody. Yeah, sidebar, the sharks watch a lot of porn because without hands it seems like it causes more problems than it solves. It's a Dutch rudder situation. Now before we begin tonight, our final live show for the evening, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Who here's a patron? What's your name? Sarah? Thank you you Sarah. And if you'd like to join Sarah's ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show and with that of the way, tell us Tom what person, place, thing, concept phenomenon or event will we be ending our live show experience on today? Well, since Noah wrote it, it's going to be something uplifting. Says the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. And Noah, you finally decided on this subject after Tom threatened to bomb several important trust and archeological finds. Are you ready to set sail promise?

The trust guns are interesting interesting though, but yes. But yes. So tell us Noah, what was the sinking of the USS Indianapolis? It was the deadliest shark attack in recorded history. And I want to be, yeah, and you guys cheered for it. That's fucking weird. Sorry, nearly. All right, so I want to be super clear here.

I want to push back against the pro shark propaganda that infests the internet. All right, because you're going to constantly come across things like, you know, 10 things more deadly than sharks or whatever, and they'll have shit on the list like vending machines, right? And yes, okay, vending machines kill more people than sharks. This is the vending machines kill like three people a year, shark kill fewer than one. That is not as excopatory as people a year. Shark kill for you are then one. That is not as exculpatory as you might think when you consider how much more time we spend around bending machines than fucking sharks.

Imagine if a couple of times a week you were in the habit of just going up to a shark and shoving a dollar bill and it's cloaca asking for a sagnot. A sagnot. You know, it's like that.'s not gonna fucking, they kill a lot more than three people a year. Plus there is no story of the worst bending machine attack in the recorded history. Don't let them fool you. Sharks are giant murder tubes. Yes.

Sharks gets mad about losing it's dollar He tips over the vending machine on himself. I asked him. Okay, this is kind of funny, because it's the one. It's the stat for both. But it's a Japanese shark, so it's got the panties from the vending machine on its head, with its nose through the leg hole, and it's a super-disappoint. It's like, oh, it's just a rapper. Sorry, sorry, a little side note here.

Noah had to think of a relatable thing that humans fetch from a vending machine and he landed on Zagnut. Yes. That's only because he didn't know after they discontinued cigarette vending machines what they would be used to. It was the funniest sound in one.

Okay. So the villain in question in this story are twofold actually up criminally negligent incompetence and the oceanic white tip shark. This will actually be the only story where the white tip is bigger. Yeah. All right. So oceanic white tips, also known as brown milbert sand bar shark, brown sharks, lesser white sharks, bigano sharks, said in like an Italian voice.

It's a bigano shark, doesn't it? No. Wait, there's more ocean white tipped whalers and silver tipped sharks are among the most aggressive sharks in the world, probably because humans couldn't decide on one fucking name for them. Milbert is not an aggressive sounding thing. No, wait, wait, wait, wait.

They might also just be pissed that among the contenders for name is Lesser White Shark. I love Lesser White Shark. Is he even called the Needs Improvement White Shark? It's the King of the Sea Plus. Yeah. The Satisfactory Shark. Nice, the Santa's factory shark. Nice one.

Well done, sir. You can hold it out, then. All right, so white dib sharks populations are in steep decline today because Chinese people eat weird soup. But back in the 1600s, it's true. These were one of the most familiar sharks to mariners because they were known to follow ships around licking their lips and saying shit like, no, I bet you guys can sail through that.

But I probably looks way worse than it is because sharks are fucking evil and these guys were evil for sharks. Jesus. But despite their well-known homicidal nature, people build boats anyway. We learn so much about each other doing these shows. Somebody did all for white tip sharks. Yeah. We're losing them.

So far the only thing that I know Noah doesn't hate are his wife, a handful of cats, and loudly correcting people. I don't expect to add anything to this list. Okay, okay, I love all cats and all volumes of correcting people. I don't expect to add anything to this list. Okay, okay. I love all cats and all volumes of correcting people. This is conversationally about, but, but conversationally. So anyway, so, so Mike, among the votes that people built was the USS Indianapolis, a Portland class heavy cruiser whose Wikipedia page feels the need to point out that it was named after the capital city of Indiana.

And by the way, I have no idea what Portland class means, but apparently that entire class consists of two ships, this one and one called the Portland. So, feel like the Indianapolis was got of foxes per the U.S.S. adopted kids. Right. Not by gays though, it's from Indiana. So the Indianapolis is launched in 1931. It does a bunch of Navy shit for a dozen years, but it doesn't really get to kick any ass until World War II.

Yeah, but to be fair, that would have been awkward without a war involved. No, you're right. You're right. Now that I think about it. All right. So in 1943 and 44, the Indianapolis served as the flagship for the fifth fleet. And then in July of 1945, it was tasked with a top secret mission to deliver the enriched uranium that would be used for little boy, the first nuclear weapon ever used in combat. Wait, what year was the boat made? Yeah. Why don't you add a new question? Yeah, there they go, yes, thank you. Could we not find a new boat for that fucking mission?

For the uranium? Like, no, we got a 31 Pinto with a sail fucking tape to the top of it. Who we find? Get a model from that decade, right? Get on the East. Jesus. This from a man who drove a car here that once literally caught on fire while we were all

in it. I'm sorry, is that worship 10 years old? Fuck. Oh, that fire was you. And right out. Whatever. That really did happen though. Okay, so to be clear, I still have that car. So to be clear, the uranium they were using for this bomb represented something like half

of the world's supply of uranium 235. This was damn valuable cargo. There was no backup here. It was also some damn secret cargo, right? Because like nuclear bombs weren't a thing at that point, but a lot of people knew that they could be a thing. So if the Japanese found out Americans were taking enriched uranium to such and such an island, they'd have basically committed every available bomb to that island.

So that means that almost no one in the Navy knew where the Indianapolis was supposed to be pulled over for a broken tail light on the FDR. Hopefully it had a white captain. Well, they should have just called it the USS LaCrosse and they'd let it go with a stern talking to them. Well, they're a stern. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I got it. I got it. I got it. Tom. All right. Boom. So the ship leaves from San Francisco on July 16th of 1945 within hours of the first successful nuclear test, by the way, and she is hauling ass. Barely the ship set a record for the time from San Fran to Pearl Harbor and then kept

hauling ass across the Pacific. On July 26th, the Indianapolis delivers her precious cargo to Tinian Island and then sets off towards the Philippines. That had to be an awkward hand off though, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. All the worlds, you're rich uranium.

Just sign right here. Dude, are your bones glowing? I said sign right here. And fast. All right. So now the missions accomplished in all, but they still have a lot of secrecy around these ships movements because they can't afford for people to be going like, where the fuck did this ship come from, right?

So even after the drop off, the movements of the Indianapolis are known to only a few higher ups in the Navy. Okay, seriously, what? The mission is accomplished. They had a banner and everything. That means everything's okay. Everything's okay. No, not so much.

Okay. And that becomes a big problem pretty quick when at a quarter after midnight on July 30th, the Indianapolis was hit with a Japanese torpedo and started to sink. Yeah, they were all, they were gonna take a vase of a maneuver but the torpedo was pixelated

so they couldn't really see what it was. That's right. Sure. It could have been anything. Oh, room handle, you don't know. You all watch Japanese porn, don't you? All right, so keep in mind that the Americans had basically broken all the Japanese codes at this point.

So when a Japanese submarine radio's home and says, hey, we just took out a big ass American heavy cruiser, the Americans decode the message and they go, there's no American heavy cruiser in that area. They must be trying to lure us into a trap. And so they ignored it. Plus, we might literally vaporize all of Asia next week. Yeah. Honestly, we have no idea. It's like 50-50.

So, that ship's getting fucked either way. Can we focus on rending the fundamental building blocks of the universe into fiance of God, please? And not worry about this dumb ship. All right, both little boy and Fat Man are lining up for the Japanese gang bang right there. Oh, God. I have that video on my phone.

I know you do. I know you do. Yeah! All right, so despite all that, I should point out it is not that easy to lose a heavy cruiser. Like, it's fucking telling me, you let them blow you a couple of times, and suddenly they're texting you all day long. All right, he, if you don't quit the show over that, I would.

All right. So there's a command center on Guam that tracks every US ship in the sea, but they're operating under the assumption that if a big ass ship like the Indianapolis should fail to show up where it's supposed to be, someone would tell them because someone other than the command center should be in charge. And that's must have been what they thought. But there's a problem with that. If nobody where the ship is supposed to be knows it's supposed to be there, that kind of

fucks up the plan, right? So basically, when they didn't hear that the That kind of fucks up the plan, right? So basically, when they didn't hear that the Indianapolis didn't show up the next day, they took it off the board and said that it was docked in the Philippines. What? Yeah. Are we sure about this new system? I'm just saying because according to our big risk board, all of our ships are docked in the Philippines.

That can't be right. All right, so back on the ship, the fact that they're not docked in the Philippines is very hard to ignore. So two torpedoes hit the starboard side of the ship and some Japanese submariner is just fist pumping like I told you guys be seven. Yeah. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Pitfall battleship. We got all the top of the references. Yeah.

All right. So the first, the first torpedo blows a chunk of the ship's bow over 60 feet across out of the water and ignites a tank containing something like 3,500 gallons of aviation fuel. This sends a pillar 500 feet into the sky. The second one hits the ship's fuel tanks and powder magazines really should store those in different places I feel like, okay? And then that sets off a chain reaction

that basically rips the ship in half. Right, but the saddest part is that that guy from the infomercial with the tape wasn't just saying the... No, this would be a short, if you had been down. Oh, battleship jokes you like, but the most popular product in the United States for 2016, fuck you! All right, so now all of this shit is happening just after midnight and among the things that go on in this chain reaction is that they lose off their electrical generators. So you have to imagine these sailors are basically woken up by the sound of an explosion.

Seconds later, they're in the dark somewhere in the heart of half a ship that's still tearing ass across the Pacific at 17 knots and also a bunch of people also just exploded. So they're trying to get the fuck out of their and or rescue the wounded, but they're basically also stumbling around in the dark while they do it. And as it happens, they're going to have all of 12 minutes from the time the first torpedo hits before the ship goes under. It's going to take like 14 minutes for Rose to go back below deck and get the jewel of the Nile or whatever. Yeah, they're fucked. Still higher rated than Carnival cruise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can confirm.

All right. So you imagine this hectic scene, you got injured people everywhere. They're desperately trying to get life rafts and emergency rations into the water and just getting them in the water before the ship sinks isn't enough. Of course, you have to get some distance there. Because when the ship goes down, it sucks everything nearby down with it. So basically they're trying to launch life rafts, load them up and get a good ways away from this death trap before it sinks. Needless to say, they don't get all the life rafts in the water. And perhaps just as needless to say, they don't get all the people in the water either of the 1196 men on board,

only about three quarters of them made it off the ship before it went down. Oh, all right. One in four people has to die on the ship right now. We counted off in fours. I feel like some people to be with their friends. They lied about their number. We're gonna try something different.

Everybody look to your left. Now look to your right. Now look to your right. Now kill a third person. I'm doing math badly. So here we are 12 minutes after the initial explosion. You've got some 900 sales that are just bobbin around the Pacific Ocean with way fewer rafts than asses.

Okay, leave it to the Navy to count by asses. It's always by asses, yeah. So now a lot of these guys are wearing life preservers, but many of them aren't. So basically these people are clinging to anything that can float. A lot more people would have survived, but it's one person per door.

It's a rule now. Yeah, I know, they set that rule away, way long before. All right, so keep in mind, too, that when the ship went down, it also left a pretty nasty oil slick on the surface of the water. So this is getting everybody's eyes, their mouths and their open wounds. And speaking of open wounds,

they're also putting a lot of blood in the water. And there's like a shark's some of yay in there. And he's like, I get the richness of the 10 W 30, but I'm getting hints like corn fed to brass kids. All right. So at this point, you got to figure the survivors that aren't seriously injured, figure that they've already made it through the worst of this, right? They got to figure somebody in the Navy and the Naval Command Chain is going to notice a 70 foot long 10,000 ton ship missing. And this is like 30 years pre-jobs as well, so they didn't have a chance to hear quint

speech about this, right? But as it happens, the ship sinks at about half past midnight on Monday morning. I saw some guy with his face all burned up, bobs next, he was like, Monday is my right. Well, it turns out that's, this is actually going to be the best thing that happens to these guys all fucking week Alright, well there's blood in the water and I'm about to chum so we'll take a quick break to think about baseball for a little ditty We like to call apropos of nothing

Yeah! Sir, we just got word from the Japanese. They sunk in international cruiser, sir. Do we even have a cruiser in that space? Not that I know of, sir. Johnson! Yes, sir. Do we have a cruiser at 42, 50, 44, 32? Um... No?

Okay, you're saying that weird. That's weird. What? Steve 44 32? Um, no? Okay, you're saying that weird. That's weird. What? What? No, I'd said no normal. Normal, no. No, you're definitely saying it weird. You're definitely saying it weird.

You're saying it weird. I am not. I'm not saying it weird, but let's just say I were saying it weird. And we did have a cruiser in that space. In that situation, I would not be able to tell you about it. But I'm not- Okay, but listen, if there is a secret ship there, it just got sunk by the Japanese. So we should go help.

That's- No, not until we have other info we can't. No. I mean, we have audio of their screams. Please! How about... They're short here! Those could be dolphins.

English-speaking dolphins? English-speaking dolphins, yep. Okay. Okay. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, English speaking opens! And we're back. When we left off, we were about to lose a whole bunch of semen, but then Cecil yelled at us for jerking off in the dark during the interstitial skits, so something

something boat, Noah, go. Alright, so let me reset the scene here. The USS Indianapolis just sank. About 900 people are floating in the water in various stages of dead and it's almost pitch black. And this is when the sailors start to notice that they are not alone in the water. Oh, they've got each other. Yeah, there's that. Now, it's here that I'd like to return to that bending machines are more dangerous than sharks, bullshit. Right? Because, okay, imagine how this story would play out.

If at this point, they discovered that they were surrounded by bending machines. Right? Like, I mean, don't get me wrong. It would be frustrating. Their money would be wet, the bill reader would keep spitting it back out, they'd be rubbing it against the edge, and either wrinkles out and shit. But it's still be a hell of a lot better than me, it's run out by fucking sharks. Oh, you see, it's a bunch of dollar bills going up and down.

It's just a water. I'm just circling around. It's pee. And that dollar bills, you can only put $5 bills in the water. Man, I just circled. He's a piece. And that dollar bills, you can only put $5 bills in the water. They're fins. I'll take it. Boy, we're putting some mileage on that sign tonight. Okay.

Now, up until this point, this has been a pretty upbeat story. I know, but this is where it gets bad. And it gets really fucking bad. Okay, so at this point, there's a lot of injured people in the water. They're bleeding, they're thrashing. They're basically screaming, all you can eat shark buffet, this exit, and it doesn't take long for the sharks to notice. You know there was one like shark keith dad who refused to pull over because he made

baloney sandwiches for the ride. Yeah, you know, it's great as all it is. You know that little sharks were like, oh, can't just nod the crust off. My dad beat them up. Aw. I got weird. So he's, he's, he's, he's,

he's dad liked to fight sharks. They'll learn a lot about each other. Yeah. All right, so there's an important thing you need to keep in mind here. Sharks are not the universally recognized ocean monsters then that they are now. Like these people were aware that sharks existed and that sharks could kill them, other fucker. But they had nowhere near the fear of them that people who grew up post jaws would have, or at least they didn't have the start of this whole ordeal.

Yeah, sharks were that just that super introverted nerdy guy looking for the right time to strike up a conversation with humans. So, so you come here often? Uh, no, I'm actually trapped in the water. Cool, cool. I can smell your blood. What? Nothing.

I didn't say anything. What? Did you say something? All right. So now at first, the sharks are starting taking the corpses, which is really just tidying up, but you don't know how to do. But they were getting a taste for human meat, and that's not good. So by the time the sun comes up, they can see, like the sailors can see dorsal fins intermingled amongst them. They start to group together as much as they can. The sharks are like, no, no, this is perfect. This is perfect. Get in groups, that's ideal.

They start wrapping seaweed around little circles of people. Sue, you know who's good? Let's get one bag of rice per group. Sprinkle a little row. Yeah, cluster together, it's a good strategy. I don't like when my food is touching either. Right, right, exactly. All right, so, and keep in mind, again, they were leaping off of this ship in a near panic,

right? They are way more people than there are lifeboats. So a lot of these people are just floating in the water with their lifefests on, or in a lot of cases without lifefests on just waiting for some dude to die and hoping they can get to the lifefests before the shark eats them and takes it with them. Is anybody else here picturing like the sharks trying on the lifefests like it's fashion weeks? I did a bulimic shark everyone in home.

They did. The late show went to bulimic sharks. Those people are wondering. All right. So now sharks and drowning are not the only things that these guys have to worry about. There's also Japanese people out in the water trying to kill them, but they also, they managed to get some emergency rations into the water before the ship sunk, but not enough. So in addition to being food, they're also running out of food. And more importantly, they're

running out of water. Of course, a lot of them had pretty severe injuries to begin with, you know, what, with all the torpedoes and the explosions. So basically, they're all bobbin up and down, wondering if the sharks, the starvation, the dehydration, the lack of buoyancy, the gangrenous leg or the enemy ships are going to kill him first. I'm just picturing the reincarnated guys from that steamboat and then the syrup explosion and then the radiation in South America being like, okay, you got to admit at this point, it's a little funny, right?

I love that this eternally dying dude has become like a running guy in our show. He's like a constant character. All right, so now this would already be a historically terrible story if the Navy showed up with rescue boats like the next morning, but they didn't. In fact, these hapless bastards would be floating in the South Pacific for four fucking days before they were rescued. Or at least I'm just sorry, not all of them. Right, right. So the Navy spent four days walking around the docks of Manila, Philippines being like, are you guys fucking sure you haven't seen a 600 vote? We have a system and the captain never said he's not here. I heard it.

I heard it. All right. So by the middle of the first day, the sharks had run out of corpses to feast on and they started turning to injured sailors. Now, there are a lot of really fucked up stories in this and I'll tell as many of them as I can. A lot of the time, like basically these guys are just going to like float around board for hours at a stretch and then suddenly somebody's like pushed up out of the water and drug along for a few dozen yards screaming and then disappear below the waves or else they're

just sitting around and suddenly somebody just disappears below the waves and all they see is a mangled life preserver floating back to the surface. Okay, this seems like a weird situation where people are bored ever, right? Right? Plan candy crush or something. Socks. Now pretty quickly they realize the sharks are going after the isolated sailors. So the survivors start to congregate in ever tighter groups, which is more or less safe,

provided you're in the middle of the group. So you have to imagine like scores of people on the outside of these groups, like desperately trying to push their way into the middle. We said no swimming under and popping back up in the middle. We said, Steve's swimming under right now. He just went under. I'm not saying make this into musical, but I am saying if this were one, this would be a perfect time for that synchronized swimming number.

You know what I mean? And it would still have less deaths than Spider-Man turn off the darks with Grand Roomoney. Oh, you were deaths, thank you. Of course. Yeah. See, and that was quiet.

See, that one was quiet. So, through all this time, of course, they're also starving. They do have some rations, but nowhere near enough. And even what they did have, they often couldn't use, right? Like, there's one, one of the survivors recalls a story of him and his friend opening a can of spam and then seeing a bunch of dorsal fins just zeroing in on that fucking spam. So they like have to, like they're starving to death and still they're throwing food away from themselves

You know, yeah, that's what you need when you're dinathers brine salt pork The only part of the story that makes any sense is throwing the spam away. Yeah Yeah, I'd rather die from sharks. Yeah All right, so of course more important than lack of food is the lack of water People are dropping from dehydration pretty quickly. I mean, they're not dropping very far. It's just, well, basically, slowly they drop in really long ways, but yeah, it's a droop.

Now, and of course, as is so often the case when shipwrecked people start dying of thirst, some of them start drinking salt water, which of course kills them, but also drives a lot of them crazy first. So you have a lot of stories at this point of like people just like diving under their water themselves, dragging people down with them. Yeah, no, it just gets better from here. And also just to validate Quint from jaws, there actually were a lot of stories of people like the sharks would just eat the parts of them that were underwater.

This is my mind for sharks eating you by the way. So there are a lot of stories of people like swimming over and just like tapping somebody on the back that they think is asleep and he just flips over and he's just half a dude. Yeah. You know, World War II Eli pretended to be dead to someone with shake him and he could flash his dick at him. Okay. In World War II Eli Eli's defense got him.

Oh, no, the sharks shoot my gum. What time is it? So now the secrecy surrounding their mission is often as invoked as the ultimate reason why they weren't rescued right away. But I want to be clear that there were actually plenty of opportunities to know that this ship went down. When the torpedo hit, this ship sent out a goddamn distress signal, and it was received by three different stations. But at one, the commander was too drunk to do anything about it, and another, the commander had ordered that nobody disturbed him no matter what.

And a third was paranoid and assumed it was a Japanese trap. Now, apparently none of the subordinates said anything like, okay, but let's make sure we tell him about the thousand drowning guys in shark-infested water after he sobers up or wakes up because they continue to do nothing about this for the next day and the day after that. Okay, you guys laugh, but if Noah told us not to disturb him right now, Heath and I would whisper the rest of this fucking bomb. Do not disturb like the guy runs him with an urgent message.

It's like a neck tie on the commander's door. Yes, damn it. Yes, essentially that. Yeah. So actually when the rescue finally came, it was a complete coincidence. At 10.25 a.m., August 2nd, again, four days after the fucking ship sank, a couple of guys around a routine patrol flight when they spot this huge crowd of American sailors in the water.

They immediately drop a life raft in a radio transmitter and presumably, if he was thinking about it, one of the survivors looked at that life wrapped in scream, we're gonna need a bigger bone! If not, they all felt so fucking wrong about that for the rest of their lives. This is a call forward, trust me, this is gonna kill once they make shots. This is awesome. The movie about sharks. I know we're laughing about this, but one life raft is more aid than they sent Katrina. No, that's true.

That's true. All right. So George Bush, boo. Yep. So the pilot radios this in immediately all the air and surface units that are capable of rescuing are dispatched to that area. And there's a standing order against landing and Phibias planes in the open ocean because that's dangerous as fuck. So at first all they do is drop a bunch of life rafts, but one of them is destroyed in the drop. The

other of ones of them land way too far for these exhausted crew members to swim out to, especially since they'd have to out swim sharks to get there in one of them Indiana Jones in short rounds, slowly drift right into the open shark mouth. Now, but the first plane that arrived did take a vote among their crew and elected to ignore the standing order, land on the ocean and pick up as many people as they could. Turns out, by the way, that if you're willing to strap survivors to your wings with parachute cord, you can get about 56 people on a PBY 5A Catalina patrol plane. Of course, you can't then take off, but it still beats the hell out of me in shark bait,

at least they're over the water at this point. So they just chilled there, I guess, until some rescue boats can arrive. Of the 900 men who survived the initial sinking, only 316 would be ultimately rescued and two of them would die shortly afterwards. You know what's some point though? They're all floating there in terrified silence. And one guy's like, Marco. Another guy's like, Polo, they both get stabbed a bunch by everybody else. Those are the two guys, yes, those are the two guys. Those are the two guys who died shortly after.

Yeah. Because they were chums, right? Chums. We're not playing sharko polo, this is serious, sorry. All right, now this was an institutional failure. It required several high ranking naval officers to fuck up. So naturally they tried to pin all the blame on the ship's commander. That's Charles B. McBay.

He was court margill for failing to issue an order to abandon ship and failing to zigzag to avoid detection. Both of which charges, by the way, were complete bullshit. He did order the, the first one was just a lie. He did order a, a, a, a, a, issue of the order to a man and ship, and he was ordered not to zigzag to avoid detection, which would not have helped in this instance anyway. But regardless of his innocent, uh, innocence, he was made the following guy for all of it, and he spent the rest of his life getting letters from

families of the dead sailors with sentiments like, and this is an actual one quote, Mary Christmas, our family's holiday would be a lot more if you hadn't killed my son. And quote, our fan mail is exactly like this without the Mary Christmas. The Mary Christmas would be nice is what I'm saying. Yeah. All right, so he kept every one of those letters and at the age of 70, he killed himself with his Navy issue revolver. He was found with the gun in one hand and a toy sailor in the other, which made him both the last person to abandon the ship and the last person to die from the disaster. All right. Noah.

Bummer. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha closing off the live show double-head or picking up beat top and are you ready for the quiz? I'm ready to get the fuck out of here, yeah. All right, after the first course, what did the sharks have for dessert? Oh, God. A, A, give me a chance, come on. Just give me a chance. A, Tera Me Crew.

B, B, B, Guy Scream Float. C, C, Drown Cake with Life Preserves, or D, oil slicker doodles. Well, as fun as slicker doodles is to say, I can say it without answering that. I'm gonna, you know what, I like to think that at least the sharks were punished with a Guy Scream headache. So I'm gonna, you know what, I like to think that at least the sharks were punished with a ice cream headache. So I'm gonna go with B.

Yes, it was B, it was B, guys. All right. Well, we were gonna do our live show episodes all relating to New York. So how did Noah think this topic was New York related? Now there's possibilities here. A, a stinking pool of oil, blood, and fish breath would be at home on any of New York related, another possibilities here, A, a stinking pool of oil, blood, and fish breath would be at home on any of New York streets. B, running out of palatable rations is par for the course

at any of your fine pizzerias. Okay. Ooh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

9-11. Or C-A. Oh. Oh. Thanks for the rescue. Yeah, yeah, all right 9 11 or see a Thanks for the rescue. Yeah, thank you or see a bay full of bobbing corpses is just part of the wonderful local scenery There I'm gonna go with secret answer D This makes a lot of sense for most of the time this episode is going to be in archives. This fucking says it's going to be underwater soon as when I'm saying people. This will make sense eventually.

All right. No, I got one more for you. So obviously, they're making this story into porn. Is that obvious? It's rule number 34. Oh, no, you're right. You're right, yes. OK. So which of the following is the best title for that? Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Oh. A, we're going to need a bigger throat. Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Love it. Ah! Ah!

B, Chum inside me. Ah! Ah! Ah! Or C, Deep Blue Seaman. Alright, well, you know, I am disturbed by how often I say this to you, Heath, but I'll choose the Seaman. That is 100% correct, well done. No, yes, yes it is. Yes it is.

No wins. All right. That means I get to choose next week's SAS, then it won't be for a live show. Woo! Made it through all of that, so I'm going to choose Cecil. Yeah. Next time.

Something good. All right. Well, for Cecil, Tom, Noah and Heath, Ami Labos, Nick, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week. And by then, Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between Noah and then, Cecil will refuse to let me into his hotel room manner.

How nice I ask. Heath and Tom will outdrink any of you motherfuckers, just try him. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Noah and myself will be trapped in the corner by whoever here is the weirdest. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation bot.

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