The Indianapolis began its history in July 1945. At that time the heavy cruiser was undergoing intensive repairs in San Francisco Bay. Under the command of Captain McVay the ship had suffered damage from a Japanese Kamikaze near Okinawa: on March 31 a kamikaze had killed 9 people in the stern of the ship. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before You Hobble Home. Unexpectedly, in July McVay received orders to gather his crew and prepare to sail to an island near the Japanese mainland. On board the Indianapolis was highly classified cargo: parts of the atomic bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that summer. Neither McVay nor his crew knew the importance of the cargo they were carrying; they only knew that their mission was top secret the cargo had its own guards in the marine core that the only task was to protect the secret cargo and that on board there were some unlikely sailors, two army officers who were actually specialists in top secret weapons. On July 26, the ship delivered its mysterious cargo to Tinian, a small island in the Pacific. Within six hours, the Indianapolis was on its way to Guam, and then to the Philippines. The ship was to travel unescorted, without a destroyer escort specializing in searching for enemy submarines. McVay accepted without question after being told that the Navy considered his route safe. However, just a few days earlier, a Navy ship had been sunk in nearby waters by a manned suicide torpedo called Kaiten, launched from a submarine. Navy intelligence indicated that there was a group of submarines operating in an area that the ship would pass through. None of this important information was given to McVay and he was ordered to zigzag because a moving target is much harder to hit. Due to bad weather McVay stopped zigzagging until the weather improved. The enemy submarine that later sank the Indianapolis was named I-58 under the command of Lieutenant Commander. Hashimoto had never sunk an enemy ship in the entire war, which was bad luck. An Imperial Navy sonar operator had heard something banging dishes. Lieutenant Cdr. Hashimoto then climbed onto the periscope, but could see nothing but a dot, so the enemy submarine began to follow the ship. Some of the fog began to lift. Hashimoto could now see enough of a triangle to make Hashimoto shoot a target. The Indianapolis was at sea for only a few days when two torpedoes slammed into her sides, the first torpedo made a 60 foot hole and the second torpedo blew a 40 foot hole and water began to fill the ship to tons. Within twelve minutes the cruiser sank, throwing approximately nine hundred young crew members into the open sea. The remaining three hundred crew members were killed by the torpedo or were trapped and unable to escape the sinking ship. Stanton (the author) describes the sinking from the survivors' point of view: "The boys watched with horrified fascination as the ship finally righted itself and stopped, trembling - the stern pointing straight at the sky - then began to sink, slowly at first, then picking up speed, suddenly dragged into the deep by the nose "For the boys, as Stanton calls them, who reached the water, the ordeal had just begun. Many of the boys were asleep at the time of the attack and were naked or dressed only in underwear. Furthermore, the speed with which the ship sank made it impossible to gather supplies or launch properly-1.