Dan Snow's History Hit - The Tragedy of USS Indianapolis

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Just after midnight on 30th 1945, the USS Indianapolis was sailing alone in the Philippine Sea when she was struck by two Japanese torpedoes, almost three hundred miles from land. She sank in 12 minutes. For the next five nights, nearly nine hundred men struggled with battle injuries, shark attacks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other. Sara Vladic is one of the world's leading experts on the USS Indianapolis, having met and interviewed 108 of the ship’s survivors. She joined me on the pod to recount this nightmarish event, revealing the grievous mistakes, extraordinary courage and unimaginable horror which surrounded it.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. On the 30th of July 1945, 75 years ago, USS Indianapolis was torpedoed. It was on an extraordinary voyage and just carried parts of the atomic bomb, the first atomic bomb, across the Pacific Ocean from the west coast of the USA to Tinian Island where it would be assembled and then dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The ship then progressed and was heading towards the Philippines when it was torpedoed. No news of the sinking was received by US Pacific Fleet and hundreds of men perished in the water of dehydration, starvation and shark attack. Sarah Vladić is a documentary filmmaker who is just completely obsessed about USS Indianapolis. She is such a wonderful historian and filmmaker. She's been talking to the veterans since the age of 13. She spent 20 years amassing a knowledge of the sinking like

nobody else and I'm hugely honoured that on this anniversary she's made time for me to talk about the sinking of Indianapolis and what happened to the crew. It was, of course, made even more famous by Robert Shaw's monologue in Jaws. Steven Spielberg said it was the best scene in Jaws. And he describes the horror of the shark attacks in the Pacific. So here comes the interview with Sarah Vladić. If you want to watch videos as well as listen to audio, we've started History Hit TV. It's like the world's best history channel. It's like Netflix for history and there's no aliens on it. You're going to love it. If you sign up using the code POD1, you just go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1,

and then you get a month for free in the second month for just one dollar, one pound, one euro. You get to check out all these kind of amazing documentaries, lots and lots on the Second World War, but going all the way back to the Stone Age. We've got one on Stonehenge coming out soon. So going back thousands and thousands of years. But in the meantime, please enjoy this remarkable anniversary documentary about USS Indianapolis. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on on an important anniversary. Thank you for having me. I mean, I've never met anyone who's gone into such extraordinary, comprehensive detail. How many of the crew members have you met on that fateful ship? When I first got involved with the

group, there were 117 still living. I was able to meet and interview, I believe, 107 of them. Let's start with the story of that extraordinary voyage. What was the to meet and interview, I believe, 107 of them. Let's start with the story of that extraordinary voyage. What was the wartime experience of the Indianapolis leading up to that? What had she been up to? She was an incredible ship. She was a capital ship. And so, you know, she had been through 10 battles and earned 10 battle stars. She had carried President Roosevelt on his good neighbor tour. So, you know, going through South America and doing public relations carried her through that. And then she became the flagship of the Fifth Fleet. And so she really was the ship that everyone knew that had a great battle record and, you know, had been through

Okinawa, Iwo Jima. She was on the front line of that. And so, you know, when it came the time that she was attacked and sunk, that's unfortunately what everyone remembers is not the fact that she was this incredible ship with this rich history. It was that she was lost at the end of World War Two. I never know with the Navy, do they send particular ships with great pedigree out on these particular missions? Or is it complete luck that she was selected for that final mission? In this case, she was one of the fastest ships. that she was selected for that final mission? In this case, she was one of the fastest ships. Cruisers at that time were much faster than battleships or destroyers, and they needed a fast ship. And she happened to be, by a series of unfortunate events, really unfortunate events,

she was hit by a kamikaze attack in March of 1945. And that sent her back to the States and put her in the exact position to be available to take the bomb, to carry the components of the bomb. And there you are. So let's come on to that. So what was this final mission that Indianapolis was sent on? So at the very end of the war, still not knowing that the bomb would even work at this point, Indianapolis was charged with the top secret mission of carrying components, the uranium of the atomic bomb, to Tinian Island so that it could be used in Little Boy. But again, they hadn't made that final decision yet, and the Trinity test didn't happen until hours after they left. So they weren't sure it was going to work, but the people in charge and Manhattan Project and whatnot knew that if they chose this option, it would shorten the war by that many days. Because, you know, they're coming off having gone through Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where these

casualties are massive, and they knew the invasion of Japan would be much greater. So this was an effort to circumvent that, you know, us going into Japan in November. And so Indianapolis was tasked with this, but no one on the ship knew. The captain didn't even know what they were carrying. So no one knew, and the voyage went pretty smoothly? It did. The ship still holds a speed record for how fast they got from Mare Island, which is roughly like San Francisco area, to Pearl Harbor to refuel, and then Tinian Island. So it was very, very quick. The guy said the ship rattled a lot because they were going so fast. Just under a third of the crew was brand, brand new, never been to sea before.

Bunch of teenagers, you know, 16 to 19-year-olds. First time at sea, biggest thing they'd ever seen before this was a tractor. Now here they are going on this high-speed run. So a lot of seasickness, a lot of unsteady sailors. But other than that, the mission was successful and they were able to deliver the components successfully. And then it sets out again heading towards the Philippines, is it? those new sailors, and they were doing this in preparation for the invasion of the main island of Japan set for November of that year. So they were told they were in the backwaters of war. There was nothing to worry about, no danger. You know, they had just done this high-speed run, so they were, you know, going to kind of relax a little bit as they head to the Philippines.

And, you know, they left Guam thinking we're fine, and, and you know they weren't. What they didn't know at the time is that there were at least three Japanese submarines headed in their direct path. They were headed on a main path called Route Petty and the Japanese were headed right for them. It's often said that because of the nature of the secret mission that she sort of somehow fell between competencies or something is it true that because of the ultra secret mission that she just run that for some reason she wasn't quite on people's radar yes well it had less to do with her top secret run and more to do with the fact that we didn't want the Japanese to know we had broken the code. And so the secrecy was the fact that we knew, we meaning the government, knew that the submarines were

approaching that area, but they did not let McVeigh or anyone that could have done anything about it know. So that was really more the problem than anything. It really was a perfect storm because communications were garbled that were received in the various ports and ships that they were going to report to. Those messages never were received, so they didn't know Indianapolis was coming. And then it had also crossed over what was called the CHOP, and it was the two commands in the Pacific Fleet, and both sides said the other side was responsible so they really did slip through the cracks in the most unfortunate way so tell me what happened when one of the japanese submarines caught up with indianapolis so it was a sunday night they just had a very restful day, and most of the guys were in the middle of switching their shift.

And so it was just after midnight, and most of the men described it as a pitch black night. They said you couldn't see your hand in front of your face because the moon wasn't out. It was kind of a cloudy night. And at the time, you know, the order was zigzagging, which was a maneuver that was made strategically to evade Japanese or submarines in general. They were told they didn't have to do that. One, they weren't in danger, and two, it was so dark they wouldn't be seen. So just after midnight, you know, there in the middle of the Pacific, they're about 200 or so miles, 300 miles away from the closest land, when the Japanese submarine I-58 surfaces.

And it's at that moment where the moon breaks through the clouds and shines a light right on the ship. The crew, they don't know what's going on. It's very, very dark. They couldn't see anything. But about four minutes after midnight, Hashimoto, the submarine commander, fired a spread of six torpedoes, and two of those hit the ship. The first one hit the bow, tearing off the bow at about the 12th frame and made it like an open mouth. So the ship is kind of scooping water as it goes. And the second one hit right under the main stack. So that's where the ammunition stores were. And this blew a huge explosion through the ship, tearing out the forward sleeping quarters, officers' quarters, the sick bay, and where all the stewards were. And so many of the men were

killed on impact, but it also tore out the power and all communications on the ship. So remember, this is a 610-foot-long ship, and if they don't have a PA system, they can't convey to the various parts of the ship what's going on. So you remember I told you how it blew the front off. Well, the engine room did not get orders to stop engines, and what happened is the water's pushing in, and they're pushing forward, and they think, oh, there's an enemy around us. We have to get out of here, so they don't stop the engines, and the ship starts to list.

And so it's pushing forward and it's sinking as it goes. But then it's starting to list to the starboard to the right side. And men are sliding down the deck. Men are starting to go overboard. And there's no way to really communicate abandoned ship. You know, the captain makes the determination that the ship is going down, but he can't really convey that. So it's mouth to mouth telling the men, abandoned ship, abandoned ship. And so this is going in, the ship is listing, and the engine room tries to make a last ditch effort, and they release all the fuel oil in the ship in order to ballast it.

release all the fuel oil in the ship in order to ballast it. And so all this fuel oil is in the water and men are abandoning ship. And you know, this is like thick, thick oil that you can only remove with heat. So they're jumping to this, they're suffocating, they're trying to swim away. And they do this for over a mile, where they're jumping overboard. So they're spread out. And the last part of the ship, it goes like this. It tips on its side, and then the tail goes way up in the air. And they said it was multiple stories. It was something like four stories or five stories when it was up like this and just sliding into the ocean slowly.

And the men are watching this happen. And they believe about 800 got off of the ship. There were 1,195 on the ship when it sailed for the Philippines, and so 800 went into the water, and this all happened in 12 minutes. So imagine half the men are sleeping, the other half just changed their shift, and were getting ready for bed or starting their duty, and 12 minutes later they're swimming in the middle of the Pacific, spread out over a mile most of them are swimming they don't have rafts only about 12 rafts got off of the ship and 30 men got in those rafts and the rest were swimming some didn't even have life

jackets so they're out in the pacific it's now pitch black again they can't see some of them didn't even think anyone else but themselves survived and no one knew they were missing. And for many of the men, as you mentioned at the beginning, this is their first voyage at sea. Yes. And didn't know how to swim. At that time, the Navy didn't train sailors how to swim. So the ones who survived would say, I learned how to swim really quickly, but they didn't know. And then extraordinarily, things kind of get worse. How many men go into water? 1,100, did you say?

Well, there were 1,195 on the ship. About 800 went in the water. The ones who were seriously injured or burned died within the first night. So by the time sun rose up the next morning, many had passed away. And they were spread out in various groups. There was a couple large groups, like 200, 300 men, but then there were little scatterings of group. And the smaller groups, actually, some of them had supplies, because if they went down the starboard side of the ship,

where the supplies slid into the water, they had some supplies. But really, when we say some supplies, we're talking a raft with rations for six people, and there's two to 300 people there, and all desperate for it. So what was interesting is that the groups that had the most supplies were the ones that behaved the poorest, they fought over that and the ones that had nothing really banded together to survive. So there's several groups, does order break down? Are some of the groups able to sort of maintain naval discipline and is it a free-for-all? Some of the groups really did a tremendous job of following orders. What really it came down to, it seems, was the

leadership in the groups. The one group that was the gentlemen who were swimming or having life jackets only, they had a couple officers in their group. They had the chaplain, Father Conway. They had Dr. Haynes. They had several younger junior officers in the group, one of the junior medical officers, that really sacrificed themselves in order to save them. So they took charge. They told them to grab onto each other's life jackets and a rope that they found and make a big circle in order to hang on to each other and survive. The groups that were led by officers that acted less than ideal, those were the ones that had a lot of fighting and it was a bit more of every man for himself. And so you could really see what leadership did, the difference in those

groups and how the men behaved. There are many reasons why the story has become infamous, but one of them is shark attacks. Is that an urban myth or is that a reality? Unfortunately, that's a reality. They said that there were, you know, not tens, not dozens, but hundreds of sharks throughout the entire time. They showed up around the first midday. entire time. They showed up around the first midday, so Monday kind of afternoon is when they start showing up, and they would swim in, I don't know if schools is the right term, but the water, and remember the Pacific, you know, 75 years ago, very, very clear. They said you could look down

50 feet and just see them, and they were so thick you could walk on their backs, like step from shark to shark, and you you know they didn't attack right away they more were kind of it seemed like they were investigating from what the survivor said but then once they started attacking it was all over i mean there's multiple stories a gentleman by the name of ld cox his best friend was next to him in the water and they were both hanging on to the side of a raft and he said all of a sudden this wave came up and splashed over his head and he turned to the side and his buddy was gone just gone and that close to him and they had these nets they were called floater nets and they had pieces of cork every so few feet you know and men were able to hold on to that. And there was this one group where there were about 15 to 20 sailors on this net.

And all of a sudden, at one time, this shark frenzy hit it. And the guys described it as froth and splashing and foam. And it was a couple minutes. There was absolutely nothing left. All the men on it and the net were completely gone. And so they faced this for five nights and four days. But honestly, I don't know that the sharks were the worst part. I mean, they also had to deal with dehydration. You know, they're in an ocean and they can't drink water. And you can't drink salt

water because it kills you within hours. And so they started hallucinating. They started turning on one another. Because remember I explained how the oil from the ship they released? Well, these men are covered in oil, and they're starting to lose their mind, and they see someone coming at them, and they think it's Japanese attacking them. So in their mind, it's the enemy, but it's really one of their buddies, and they turn on each other. So, you know, they're dealing with this. They're dealing with wounds.

They're dealing with dehydration. And also, as a result of all this, their brains begin swelling, which only adds to the hallucinations. So by the third night, by Wednesday night, they were as close to death as you can be without dying. And that was, I believe, almost the fourth night of them. I believe it's almost the fourth night of them. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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There are new episodes every week. Did they manage to get a mayday signal out before the ship sunk? That's one of the myths. Lynn, my co-author, and I did extensive research on this. And Lynn is former Navy. She had the insight of where to look in records to see this. And surrounding ships, we checked every record book and log of all the people who had reported receiving a signal. And there's no mention whatsoever of a signal.

And frankly, we kind of joke about this. And Lynn's allowed to joke about it more than I am because she served in the Navy. But you know, she says, frankly, the Navy is not organized enough to cover this up. The amount of paperwork and whatnot that would have to have been covered up and the amount of people you would have had to have kept quiet didn't make any sense. And so what we think it was, was more people that, you know, had wanted to do something or could have played an active role or had somehow been touched by it, but we really don't feel that a signal was received.

We know that they sent one out. That has been confirmed, but there's no record of anyone receiving one. How did the survivors get spotted? Luck, God, whatever you want to call it. It was a pilot by the name of Chuck Gwynn. He was flying a routine patrol over the heavy traffic area, Route Petty. And he was testing out a new antenna that day. And the antenna, it kind of trailed on the plane. And so it kept breaking and he was getting very frustrated. So he, you know, got out of the

cockpit and went to the back of the plane. And he you know reaching down to out of the bomb bay doors to fiddle with this thing and he looks down and he sees an oil slick and he jumps up and he runs back to the cockpit and you know his crew is kind of wondering what's going on what's going on and he says look down and you'll see and he says prepare the bombs because an oil slick is generally an indication of a japanese or a submarine down in the water and he was preparing to attack and so he goes up to the cockpit he prepares the plane he drops down in altitude looks down again and he says all of a sudden he saw these things that look like the bumps on cucumbers in the water and what he was seeing was the men covered in oil floating on the surface.

So he drops down further to check this out. And then all of a sudden he's seeing the hands waving and, you know, men are yelling and they're really close to death. But this is the first time a plane acknowledged that they saw them. And they believe, you know, dozens and dozens of planes had flown over this path. But from that altitude, it would be smaller than, you know, the tip of a hair. That is how big a man's head would look in the water. So for Gwyn to see them, you know, they use the last of their energy and they're waving and he tips his wing and lets him know as he sees them. And they're joyful and everything you can imagine and so he calls it in

ducks on the pond ducks on the pond and start circulating around the area and at this point he's realizing these men are spread out over 25 miles so the drift pattern with a couple dozen that were in the rafts the ones on the floater nets and the ones swimming were very different so they're spread out over 25 miles. And he starts calling other planes, but still nobody knows Indianapolis is missing yet. So they don't think that. They don't know who these people are in the water. They don't know what country they're from. They don't know anything. They just see men in the water. So when pilots start arriving with supplies and dropping stuff, they still don't know anything. But these men are almost 300 miles from the closest land, so when the ships get sent out to rescue these men in the

water, it's going to take 12 more hours for them to arrive. So another pilot by the name of Adrian Marks shows up, and he's in a PBY-5A Catalina, and that is a boat plane, I guess you could say. And he's looking down, and his crew are looking down, and they're seeing all the men in the water, and he's watching men get eaten by sharks right in front of him. And so he says, orders for PBYs are not to land in open sea, because, you know, they're 15-foot swells this day. PBYs are kind of meant to land on, like, a lake surface in a harbor, not open ocean. And he defies orders, and he lands. And he actually bounces off the waves as his plane hits.

I mean, because he bounces, you know, 15 feet in the air, and he finally is able to manage the plane, but it will never fly again because it's so beaten up. But he's able to taxi around, he saves 53 men I mean I saw PBY for the first time this past weekend and I was trying to figure out how in the world they fit a crew and 50 men in this plane and it was a miracle and he actually put some up on the wings and so you know he's tying them down with parachute cord as they're out there waiting for the planes to come or the other ships to come in. So it was kind of miraculous that he was able to save that many. And then after midnight is when

the ship started arriving on the scene for picking up men out of the water. Of the amazing number of veterans you've talked to, was it luck or was there a common thread and how the ones that you met were able to survive? A lot of them believe that their faith helped them. A lot of them believed luck. I think what it came down to, what I heard from most every single survivor I spoke to was that they decided they weren't going to die and they didn't. Now, were there many that probably thought the same? I'm sure.

But there was this will that you can still see. The youngest is 93 right now. And you can still see that spark of like, I was 17 years old and I wasn't going to die. Or, you know, one of them said, if there was one man left, it was going to be me. And so that seemed to be this common thread throughout all of them. Now, their reasons for having that will might have differed, but that was unchanging. And they still, when they go talk to schools and tell their story, they say, never give up, never give up. I've heard that for 19 years now. I'm not allowed to give up on them or, you know, anything really for that matter. Captain McVeigh, he was a hugely maligned figure.

He was kind of blamed for it, right? He was definitely blamed for it. When they got back and they realized what a mess this was, to have a capital ship go missing for nearly five days and no one knew that it was missing was the worst. There aren't even words to say how bad of a mistake that is. But someone had to be blamed. There were only 316 men survived.

So that roughly breaks down to three out of four men didn't come home. So 879 families lost someone and they wanted to know why. How could there be a mistake this bad and there's no one to answer for it. And so in the truest form, the captain is responsible, but he's also, at the time, the lowest man on the totem pole of who should have been blamed. And so all the blame fell on his shoulders, and unfortunately he was brought to court-martial. And the Navy did something they'd never done before. They brought the enemy, the Japanese submarine commander, to testify against McVeigh in the court-martial. So this was unheard of.

testify against McVeigh in the court-martial. So this was unheard of. And you know, if you ever get a chance and you look in newspaper archives and letter archives, there are hundreds of letters that people were irate. Perfect strangers wrote in about how mad they were that we would bring in the enemy to testify against one of our own. And what was interesting though, they brought this submarine commander in, Hashimoto, and he understood English, but he did not speak English very well. And so there was a translator, and he said, I would have sunk the ship. I should take a step back and say they brought him to court-martial under two charges, failure to zigzag and failure to call abandon ship. Well, they quickly rectified the failure to call abandon ship because so many men testified that they'd heard it. It just wasn't over the announcer system. But the failure to zigzag,

you know, that maneuver, he didn't zigzag. And so they could get him on that. That was the one charge they could get him on. And it was his discretion. But in their eyes, it was a way he was vulnerable. So the captain of the japanese submarine came in and testified i would have hit him no matter what i had a direct shot and six torpedoes fired at him there was no way he could have gotten away but they didn't translate that and mcveigh was found guilty and hashimoto said one of his greatest regrets was that he didn't or he wasn't able to speak English enough to fix the translator's translation of what he said and he said this captain was a

scapegoat for this and so going forward 50 years it was about 40 years later 45 years later he actually wrote letters to the naval board on behalf of Captain McVeigh to say he should not have been court-martialed for this. How did the captain in fact perform now that we have all this testimony in terms of his behaviour and leadership during and after the sinking of the ship? He was a beloved captain. He was very well respected by his crew and he was treated poorly. He did everything he could right. With the information he had at the time, he had no idea that this attack was coming, you know. And furthermore, when he was at Guam, the last place they stopped before they sailed, he was given information from an intelligence officer that said he was totally fine.

That exact officer knew that he was going into a path with submarine headed that way that officer actually had that intelligence and so he didn't tell him and captain mcveigh had worked with this gentleman before and knew if anybody will know he would know and he would tell me keep your radar up keeps well they didn't have radar but the expression you know keep aware but he was told nothing he was told he was totally safe so he did the best he could with what he had. He actually was one of the ones who made it onto a raft because he was one of the last ones to leave the ship so there was more supplies around. But he kept order. He kept logs on that raft. He took care of his men. And there is not one crew member that survived, at least that I spoke to,

that held him in any blame whatsoever. And that's part of the reason they spent the next 50 years trying to exonerate him for that charge. What happened to McVeigh after the war? Survivors got together for a reunion in 1960, so 15 years after the sinking. McVeigh came to that. He reconnected with the men and then unfortunately, I think a lot of things in his life weren't going the way that he wanted them. He was essentially pushed out of the Navy. He was given a desk job, but then he left. He was selling insurance and living in an unhappy marriage. And in 1968, he took his own life.

So they say that he was the final victim of the loss of Indianapolis. But that's not quite the end of the story, is it? Because a campaign was launched. It was. It was. The sailors, the crew, both Marines and sailors, decided that they weren't going to let their captain's name be wronged. And they felt that that represented their ship as well. So they really started a campaign to exonerate Captain McVeigh. And they marched the halls of Congress, they wrote letters, they talked to everyone they could. And finally, in about 99, they got the captain of the namesake submarine, Captain Bill Toady. He was the active captain of USS Indianapolis 697. And he got involved. And then a young boy, you may have heard of him by

the name of Hunter Scott got involved. And he really brought national attention because he was, you know, this 12 year old kid, and he wanted to help exonerate the captain too. He did a school project and got interested and, and he started going and speaking at schools doing press and the you know, all sudden the nation's attention was focused on exonerating the captain. So through the efforts of them and through several senators, they were actually finally able to exonerate Captain McVeigh in 2001 and, you know, signed the paperwork and everything. Around 2002, his name was finally cleared. Although it must have been extraordinarily traumatic meeting all these veterans, it sounds crazy, but is there almost pride now that they've survived this,

one of the most infamous episodes of the Second World War? How are they as a group now? They hate being called heroes. There's a sense of pride, but it's more, there's still this enormous amount of survivor's guilt that they carry. You know, every one of them lost friends that day. I don't believe there's a day that goes by that they don't You know, every one of them lost friends that day. I don't believe there's a day that goes by that they don't think about what happened. And so they carry that heavy burden

still, you know, and then also there's this as they're getting older, and they're 93 to 96 years old, they're kind of this rivalry of who's going to be the last. So they're still fighters. And they're sassy and wonderful. And we know when they get together for reunions every year, they have a reunion. Unfortunately, this year, we don't get to have a reunion because of COVID, but that's where they talk. They reconnect. They get to spend time with the only other people in the world that know what they went through. I think they count on that every year. So it's extra sad that it's the 75th anniversary and they don't get to be together.

Well, they'll be here for the 80th. I'm sure of that. I'm counting on it. It is the most extraordinary story. Thank you so much for taking us through it. Now tell us about the work you've produced on this. How can people find it? Well, we did a documentary on it in 2016

and that's on Amazon and Hulu, and it's called USS Indianapolis, The Legacy. And I took those 107 interviews and intercut them so that the survivors and the families of those who were lost at sea tell the story themselves. So it's not narrated, it's their words firsthand of that experience. And that's a great way to hear the story in the most condensed form. And then from there, Lynn Vincent and I, you know, worked on the book Indianapolis. And that came out in 2018. One of the scariest things I got to tell you, and I'm sure every historian can agree that when you write about a subject, the scariest part is giving it to the people who lived it and finding out if you did a good job. And so, you know, I actually had a couple of the survivors

reading it as we were writing chapters and giving it to them and reviewing it. And the junior damage control officer was a very close friend of mine. And, you know, he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. So he'd be like, this is terrible. Do that again. Or this is great, you know. And so when we gave him the final book, he said, you got it right, kid. And that was all I needed. Wow. That's high praise, man. That's high praise.

Well, listen, that was just so fascinating. Thank you very much. Good luck with all your projects. Hope people watch your film. And maybe I'll see you one day at one of those reunions. It'd be amazing to come out and meet everybody. We're going to do it next year. We're going to do it.

So come on out. It'd be great. And it is open to the public. We're doing a virtual reunion this year. So if you go to ussindianapolis.com, there's going to be survivor Zooms. So we're going to see how that goes. I don't know. But there's going to be a lot of interviews our archival footage and that

kind of thing all starting this thursday july 30th which is the anniversary of the sinking so that's open to everyone and we hope you check it out please check it out everyone thank you very much come on the pod sarah thank you thank you take care Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps basically boost up the chart, which is good. and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.