Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks The Worst Shark Attack in History, the USS Indianapolis Disaster - Part 3: The Rescue and the Trial About this episode This is the third and final episode in the horrifying saga of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. The bravery and perseverance shown by the men was matched only by the tragic aftermath that many of the men faced long after the ordeal was over.
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Transcript 16,746 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:13 Jeff Larson? Welcome back everyone. This is Tooth and Claw Podcast. This is our last ever episode about sharks.
0:20 Mike Smith? We had a good run.
0:21 Jeff Larson? Part three. I mean, at least for
0:24 Wes Larson? My for at least
0:25 Jeff Larson? What we have planned.
0:26 Wes Larson? Yeah, sure. This might be our last oceanic white tip. Nah, probably not.
0:31 Jeff Larson? Hey, Wes.
0:31 Wes Larson? Yeah.
0:32 Jeff Larson? If you saw someone do an upside down flipping you off.
0:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
0:36 Jeff Larson? Would you be offended? Like their hands upside down? Like a thumbs down?
0:40 Wes Larson? I wouldn't be. I wouldn't be any less offended than like a normal flip off.
0:44 Jeff Larson? Right. That makes sense. But would you be offended? Equally offended?
0:49 Wes Larson? I would be equally offended, which is very little.
0:51 Mike Smith? Really?
0:51 Wes Larson? Offended.
0:52 Mike Smith? Cause I think if someone did that to me, it wouldn't even really register as it just looks so weird.
0:58 Wes Larson? I would just think, why are they flipping me off like that?
1:01 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:01 Wes Larson? Why? Where's this coming from?
1:03 Jeff Larson? Braxton, our editor got mad at me for flipping him off, but it was pointed downwards.
1:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, I don't think that matters. I just think it's weird.
1:12 Jeff Larson? I didn't think I was doing anything.
1:13 Wes Larson? Okay, I think you are. But well, like Jeff said, we are about to do our
1:19 Mike Smith? Jeff said a lot of things right there. So maybe you need to clarify.
1:22 Wes Larson? We're not actually about to do our last ever episode on sharks, but we are doing our last episode on the shark attack of the USS Indianapolis.
1:30 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:30 Wes Larson? And if you're just joining us. Yeah, this is your first time listening to Tooth and Claw. Jeff, what should they do?
1:37 Jeff Larson? Go back in time.
1:39 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:39 Jeff Larson? And listen to part one right when it comes out.
1:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, they you don't actually have to go back in time. Mike, what could they do in real time?
1:47 Mike Smith? They could press stop.
1:49 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:50 Mike Smith? Toggle over to the first or the second episode, preferably the first.
1:54 Wes Larson? Probably start on the first.
1:55 Mike Smith? That's just my personal suggestion.
1:57 Jeff Larson? They could start the second episode where we do the same thing.
2:01 Mike Smith? Right.
2:01 Jeff Larson? And tell them to stop and then they can go back to the first.
2:04 Wes Larson? Or maybe they're like a savant and they can listen to them at the same time.
2:08 Mike Smith? Yeah.
2:08 Wes Larson? Or like start the first one and 10 seconds later, start the second one. That work?
2:12 Mike Smith? No, that's a good thought, though. I like the way you're thinking.
2:16 Wes Larson? Yeah.
2:16 Jeff Larson? All right.
2:17 Wes Larson? And don't listen to us at a fast speed because our voices will sound high and whiny.
2:24 Mike Smith? Alvin.
2:24 Wes Larson? So we don't allow that.
2:26 Mike Smith? Oh.
2:27 Wes Larson? If you're at 1.2 or something, put it down to one. That's not that bad. 1.2 is alright. It's what I listen to when I'm doing edits and I, it always makes me kind of like, ugh. Really? Yeah. Gives me the ick. Yeah. You might, you might say. So I stopped at doing edits. Yeah, fair enough. Anyway, we're Teeth and Claw Podcast. We tell stories about animal attacks and we talk about why they're often the fault of the humans or the people did something to lead the animals to attack them. You're always blaming humans for everything.
2:58 Mike Smith? Victim blaming us for everything.
2:59 Wes Larson? The world is too hot because humans. We would have way more sharks if it weren't for humans. Without a doubt, we would. Yes. I do blame humans for most things. Uh, and you know, I'm complicit in some of it, but I'm doing my best. Oh, you admit it. I'm doing my best to change that. Alright.
3:16 Mike Smith? You and all your shark fin boots.
3:18 Wes Larson? I don't have any kind of shark anything.
3:20 Mike Smith? Actually, they don't make boots out of shark fins.
3:23 Wes Larson? No. Just gave them the idea though. Yeah.
3:26 Mike Smith? Strike that from the record, your honor.
3:29 Wes Larson? Okay, so if you guys remember in part two, we had left where all the men were in the water. They were dying at a really fast pace. It had been days since most of them had had any water or any food. They were being eaten by sharks. They were killing each other. Things were looking really, really bad. I think we were getting to a point where all of these men were probably going to die. And they were all praying for help. Well, Lieutenant Chuck Gwynn was pretty frustrated in the late morning of August 2nd, 1945. This is a rancher's son from rural California and he now is a bomber pilot in the Pacific.
4:07 Wes Larson? And after a lot of flights looking for enemy ships and submarines, he and his flight crew had yet to see any action, kind of like Hashimoto in his sub. This is someone that's gone the entire war without really having any kind of success. He'd just been, yeah, flying around, doing nothing. Just flying over the blank Pacific. They're based on the small island of Peleliu and each day they would do patrols at 3,000 feet in a Lockheed PV1 Ventura bomber and each day they would come back without having shot a single round or dropped a single bomb. They had lots of bombs. They also had depth charges. You guys know what depth charges are?
4:41 Jeff Larson? For submarines.
4:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, for submarines, exactly.
4:44 Mike Smith? You're a gun guy, Jeff. You kind of know what depth charges are.
4:47 Jeff Larson? Yeah, it kind of fits in that Venn diagram of guns.
4:52 Mike Smith? You got some torpedo chambers in your closet.
4:54 Wes Larson? Go to Walmart and say, what kind of depth charges do you have? All right. August 2nd was particularly frustrating because Gwyn was flying a certain plane he didn't especially love or feel comfortable in and they were using a new antenna that was constantly breaking and needing repairs. This antenna had like a sock on it and the sock would blow off or break. They constantly had to fix it. It was really annoying.
5:17 Mike Smith? Like the Bill and Ted's antenna where they're like using chewing gum to put it together again?
5:21 Wes Larson? That's kind of what I pictured, yeah. It broke that morning and Gwyn and a few of his crew were doing their best to fix it in the air when Gwyn suddenly saw something strange out of the window down on the water. And I think this is important to know, like it's because they were fixing this antenna that he had the perspective to look straight down through the plane. Usually they would just kind of be looking out and they're not necessarily looking straight down and looking out, they probably wouldn't have seen the darker, slightly darker color of this oil slick. Like people have run numbers on the chances of him seeing this oil slick and it was like a million to one chances or something.
6:00 Jeff Larson? Really?
6:00 Wes Larson? Yeah.
6:01 Jeff Larson? This is a pretty big oil slick, right?
6:03 Wes Larson? Yeah, but he did see the oil slick.
6:06 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
6:06 Wes Larson? So they suddenly get really excited because an oil slick like this is mostly coming from a submarine generally and maybe one that had been damaged. And so they finally had some hope that they would be able to sink one of the Emperor's submarines.
6:20 Mike Smith? Do you think that's what BP Oil was hoping people would blame it on up in Alaska? It's like, no, it's one of those Japanese subs from like forever.
6:27 Jeff Larson? Or they're like hoping that the million to one chance no one would notice it.
6:34 Mike Smith? They gotta look straight down. Let's just hope no one looks straight down.
6:38 Wes Larson? BP was the Gulf, right? Yeah, Alaska was Conoco.
6:42 Mike Smith? You're right.
6:42 Wes Larson? Or Exxon, Exxon Mobil.
6:44 Mike Smith? Let's start the episode over.
6:45 Wes Larson? Yeah, re-rack it. Bill, re-rack it. Just kidding, Bill, don't come out here. So they're ready to go. They make sure their guns and bombs are ready to go. Depth charges. Yeah, depth charges. Gwyn takes the plane lower to about 900 feet, which is also very important. And they're following this oil slick. And as they do it, his eyes are just fixed on this water, looking for the shape of a submarine just below the surface. But he doesn't see a submarine. What he did see confused him. He could just barely make out the figures of a few dozen men in the water, and they're waving and slapping the water, trying to get his attention. This point, he has no idea if these are Japanese or American soldiers, because no American ship had been reported sunk in the area for weeks.
7:29 Wes Larson? But as they saw more and more men in the water, they realized these survivors had to have come from a big ship and that they needed immediate help. So he told the men in his plane to drop emergency life rafts and this thing called a sono buoy that could be used as like a communication port and as a way for them to get a point to come back to. Meanwhile, many of the men in the water had essentially given up hope. They knew that soon they would either die of thirst, be killed by the sharks, or even their own crewmen. They were starting to lose their minds. And during their time in the water, a lot of planes had actually passed way overhead, like they'd seen a lot of bombers flying by and whatnot.
8:07 Wes Larson? But almost all of them were flying at high altitudes. And to see them at like 3,000 feet would be essentially impossible. It's like if you're coming in for a landing over a city and you're still 3, 5,000 feet above and you look down, you can't make out a person. It would look like a, like a hair almost. So they just knew they weren't going to get seen by them. They even had some flares and they, like, they weren't seeing the flares or anything. I can see all your hairs. Yeah, you can. But can you see one if I put it on the ground right now? No. Okay, that's what I'm talking about. But there is more than one guy. That's true. That's a good point.
8:41 Mike Smith? Yeah, it'd be like 800 hairs.
8:44 Wes Larson? Also, the sea is like glittery and stuff. Okay. Anyway, they dropped- Doc Rivers hairs.
8:50 Mike Smith? Yeah.
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9:55 Wes Larson? So these guys are starting to lose their minds. Planes are flying by. They knew that the chance of them seeing was essentially zero. And they'd been floating for four and a half days now, so they knew that a rescue hadn't been launched. They were expecting a rescue. It would have been in the first few days. And they had actually floated about 80 miles from the side of the sinking, so rescue crews wouldn't even know where to look.
10:17 Mike Smith? No flares in the provisions, I take it?
10:20 Wes Larson? They did have some flares, but they were like short-range ones and not effective for like these bombers that were way up there.
10:27 Jeff Larson? Does that count for like, do you think they can say they swam 80 miles?
10:31 Wes Larson? No.
10:32 Jeff Larson? The ones out of the raft?
10:33 Wes Larson? The ones floating? I don't think so.
10:35 Jeff Larson? I mean...
10:36 Wes Larson? They drifted 80 miles.
10:37 Jeff Larson? It's not like they didn't go 80 miles in the water.
10:40 Mike Smith? Sure. I'd put an asterisk next to it.
10:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, they're doing asterisks, yeah. It was pretty far, this wind. So even as they're like, even as they're floating there, their prayers start to become more hopeless. They're praying that their end would be quick and painless, that their families would know how much they loved them. But the thought of rescue is very far from most of their minds, especially the guys that were floating. So when some of the men start noticing something in the air on the far horizon, they immediately assumed it was just like a large bird or maybe hallucination. But as they got closer and closer, the unmistakable sound of a bomber filled their ears. It was a plane and it was much, much lower than all of the ones they'd seen so far. So they started yelling and splashing, doing their best to get the attention of the pilot.
11:25 Wes Larson? Tragically, this actually led to more shark attacks. Because they start splashing in the water and stuff and the sharks came in and started attacking them. And as the plane passed, there was a brief moment where this big feeling of sadness hit them. Because the plane flew by them and they thought maybe he hadn't seen them. But then rafts fell from the plane and Gwyn tipped the wings and wobbled them in a clear message that they had been seen. And help was on the way.
11:50 Mike Smith? It's like when Gandalf rides by all the kids and they're like expecting fireworks. And he doesn't light them until he's passed.
11:56 Wes Larson? Yeah.
11:57 Mike Smith? It's kind of like that.
11:57 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think that's probably where this Gwyn guy was trying to reference when he did that.
12:02 Mike Smith? That's where Tolkien got his.
12:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, I think.
12:05 Mike Smith? Got that idea from.
12:08 Wes Larson? I just like to, I mean, they talk about the euphoria they felt. When like he rocked the wings back and forth. But it's just like, I think it's a feeling of euphoria and happiness that we like can't experience, you know, it's like. I mean, we could. We could, but like. If like the exact same scenario happened to us. Yeah, it just seemed like they had resigned themselves to like violent deaths. And then suddenly they were pulled out of that.
12:35 Mike Smith? Yeah.
12:35 Wes Larson? And it's hard to even like put into words what that must have felt like. Pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. I think, yeah, that's it. That's exactly what I was looking for. All right. One of the groups that Gwyn had seen was the group that Dr. Haynes was in, the group of floaters. He was still barely clinging to life and his sanity, but his group of 400 men had been whittled down to about 100. Oh, man. Yeah. Most of the men had found life jackets, but at this, at this point, they're so waterlogged that they almost were more of a hindrance than they were a help. So they're actually pulling men underwater and they were fighting to keep their chins above water. Bad life jackets. Yeah, they're old ones. They just like get waterlogged. Uh, so they would also like take them
13:17 Wes Larson? off, but they talked about how they were getting kind of melted by the seawater at this point. So when they would take off the life jackets, like skin and flesh would go with them. Yeah. So even as this, as Gwyn is circling above these men, men are giving up and drowning. Like there are people that drowned while he was circling. Uh, but life jackets and rafts are raining down from the heavens. And for those that were able to rally a little bit of last strength, they finally had hope again. Okay. This next part is a little crazy. I'm going to do my best to explain it concisely. I would do want to just like shout out my sources again. Uh, I really enjoyed these books, but I used in harms way, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the
13:59 Wes Larson? extraordinary story of its survivors by Doug Stanton, Indianapolis, the true story of the worst sea disaster in US naval history and the 50 year fight to exonerate an innocent man by Lynn Vincent and Sarah Vladek. And then the last one was left for dead, a young man's search for justice for the USS Indianapolis by Pete Nelson. Those were my main sources and I wanted to say those now because I kind of have to condense a bit of this and I just want to say that I do think these books are worth reading. They're very interesting. There's a lot of stories that I couldn't really put into this three part series. So check them out. Okay. Basically Gwyn's plane
14:41 Wes Larson? didn't have enough fuel to keep circling. So he managed to get a fix when he fixes this antenna. He gets a point for where these guys are. He radios it into command and tells them there was at least 150 people in the water and that they need to send some ships. So again, this is going to kind of talk. Not one guy's like, I already tried to. They won't let me. The Navy kind of messes up here again. Oh, no. So one of the guys that gets this message immediately wants to send some amphibious planes that were used to pick up people at sea. Usually they're used for planes that went down, not ships. But he didn't have any authority to actually make this call. And when he tries, he gets shut down by his high ranking official that didn't really know anything about the rescue mission yet. So.
15:26 Wes Larson? That's crazy. Yeah. So he like, they say, no, you can't send those planes. Did the guy say like, it's a rescue mission? Yeah, but like it hadn't gotten up to like high command yet. Only these guys that immediately heard the message were were saying anything. Yeah. And they're like, no, we need like authorization. That's crazy. Yeah. So instead, what he did have authorization to do was send out another one of these little bombers to circle so Gwyn could come back. Meanwhile, the message finally does trickle into the laps of some high command. And luckily, one of them does take it seriously. And he dispatches two destroyers to the area and he tells them to like haul ass. He says, get there as quick as you can. We're going to talk about what happens when they show up.
16:09 Wes Larson? But one of the craziest things is that not long after Gwyn spotted the oil slick, an amphibious PBM five does show up in the area. This was exactly the type of plane the other guy had wanted to send, but he wouldn't be able to get permission. So this PBM five drops altitude, they see the men in the water and they drop their life rafts, their life jackets, provisions. But as they're circling, they see something that just chills them to the core. As they're circling these men, they also see hundreds of sharks circling them. And right before their eyes, they watch as men who were happily splashing in the water to draw their attention were ripped to shreds by sharks. Geez. Yeah. So they actually saw people being killed by sharks.
16:52 Wes Larson? And they had to kind of watch the happiest moment of these men's lives turn to nightmare. So the people weren't making up the shark stories? They weren't. No, like there is a second. Yeah. So this is kind of a cool story. Adrian Marks was the pilot of this PBM five, which was affectionately called a Dumbo. And he had actually heard the message from Gwyn. And he just took his plane off with his crew immediately without getting authorization. Wow. He was just like, we have the right plane for this. We're going to go rescue these guys. And when he saw the sharks and then the men below, he immediately called in to request permission to land the plane on the water. And pick up the survivors and his request was immediately denied.
17:34 Wes Larson? And the reason for that is landing these planes on the open ocean was almost always a disaster because there's swells and if you hit them, you like rocket off of them and stuff. And it just like is a bad scenario, but he really wanted to do it. Anyway, Marx hears that he's not allowed to do this and he pretty much says, fuck it. I'm not leaving these guys. He sends a message that says, we'll attempt open sea landing. And his whole crew agrees with them that they're just gonna do it because they also witnessed these shark attacks. Okay, I want to read about their landing straight from one of the books, In Harm's Way by Doug Stanton. I think this is just a really interesting picture that he paints and I can't say it better than him.
18:18 Wes Larson? So I'm just gonna read it right from the book. He cut the throttle dramatically lifting the nose of the lumbering Catalina and set her down in a power stall. Hitting the top of one of the waves, the Playmate 2, that was the name of this, this plane, was knocked back skyward 15 feet, then it came down even harder. At any moment, the plane could blow apart. On the third huge blow, she settled down like a hen over an egg, her seams and rivets popping and seawater streaming in. Marx's crew shoved cotton and pencils into the holes in the metal skin of the plane. The radio compartment located midplane was taking on water and the radio men began immediately bailing, starting a pace that would keep all the crew busy at a rate of 10 to 12 buckets an hour.
19:01 Wes Larson? The propellers were still spinning and it was essential they didn't dig into the sea or they would flip the plane. So they really risked a lot. Yeah, it sounds like there's kind of good reason to tell them not to attempt that. Yeah, yeah. And what they do is they immediately begin taxiing this plane around on the water and just loading as many men as possible into the plane. They had landed near the men from Dr. Haynes's group, which now has about 95 people in it because some have drowned and been eaten by sharks since they first spotted them. And the nearest destroyer was still 12 hours away. So they had to do their best to get as many of the people out of the water as quickly as possible. And they were focusing on the men that looked like they needed the most help. So a lot of the really unfortunate part of this.
19:46 Wes Larson? Is a lot of these men actually drowned or were killed as they swam for rescue? Uh, I watched an interview with one of the survivors. His name was Seaman First Class Dick Thellin. And he was with his good buddy and two other men in the Haynes group. And when one of the rafts landed, so they dropped all these rafts from the planes and they were rubber rafts. So they would actually get him out of the water. One of them landed 50 yards from him and his friends and they decided to swim for it. He swims as hard as he can. He's the first to reach the raft. And when he pulls himself in, he realizes he's alone. Dude. He looks back and he sees one of the men like grabbing his chest way back and struggling to swim. And then that guy drowns. And the other guy that he didn't really know was nowhere to be seen.
20:31 Wes Larson? Then he sees his friend Terry, who's only 10 feet from the raft, but really struggling to stay afloat. And for a second, he thinks about jumping in to help Terry, but he's so worried about his own energy reserves that he doesn't know he'll be able to pull himself back up on the raft. So instead he just yells, come on, come on, you're gonna make it. And he stretches out his arm to help him get into the raft. And a shark explodes from the water. And with his arm still stretched out, he sees as Terry screams and is pulled under the water. And he's the only one that makes it to the raft. Jeez. And he told this story himself. It was like, yeah, it was crazy. So Pilot Marx is now taxiing. There's a large net hanging out the door of the plane that they could use to pull men up on.
21:14 Wes Larson? And as they bring the plane toward the first men they see in the water, he reaches down to pull them up. And he just comes really quickly out of the water and he realizes he's just holding on to the torso of a guy. So he immediately drops that. And then they start rescuing living men. And as they pick them up, they learn they're from the Indianapolis, which was a big shock for them. But back on land, some of the- That ship that's been missing for five days? Oh, yeah. Huh.
21:41 Jeff Larson? That's, that doesn't make any sense.
21:45 Wes Larson? Back on land, some of the High Command at Guam and Leti and Peleliu were starting to kind of figure it out. They had heard that there was this many men floating at sea and they were like, wait, we haven't seen the Indianapolis for a bit.
21:59 Mike Smith? Yeah, right.
22:00 Wes Larson? And some of these like rear admirals and admirals and commanders are starting to realize like they really messed up.
22:07 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
22:08 Wes Larson? So Commander Norman Gillette, who was one of the guys that received the SOS message and didn't follow up, sent a message to Rear Admiral McCormick, who was the guy that was going to be in charge of training the Indianapolis crew on Leti. And his message said, has Indianapolis reported to you? And the response from McCormick was negative.
22:28 Mike Smith? Oh, no.
22:28 Wes Larson? Yeah. So a lot of these guys are starting to sweat, like they know that they messed up.
22:32 Mike Smith? Gillette's the guy that had those, the tugboats turn around like seven hours into their trip, right? Oh dude.
22:39 Jeff Larson? He could have been a hero.
22:40 Wes Larson? I know.
22:40 Mike Smith? Yeah.
22:41 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right. So a lot happens during this first 12 hours before the destroyer show up, but I'm gonna have to summarize it. Basically Marx's plane is pretty much coming apart at the seams, but he continues to pack men onto it. It becomes so full that he even starts putting survivors on the wings of the plane. They do their best to pick up men that seem to be in the most need of rescue. Uh, but dozens, if not more drowned or were killed by sharks as they tried to get to the plane to be picked up.
23:09 Mike Smith? Do you know what'd make me happy is when the captain gives you those little wings you can pin on your shirt? I'd hand those out to all the men.
23:15 Wes Larson? Yeah.
23:18 Wes Larson? They're like, they're like water and you just give them those little wings.
23:22 Mike Smith? Yeah.
23:22 Wes Larson? This is much better. Here we go. Other planes had arrived and were dropping more rafts and rescue gear, but the water that they were dropping was in these wood casks. And it almost always broke when it hit the water. So these men kept like, that was the first thing they wanted. And then it would be like tainted with seawater.
23:41 Mike Smith? Just destroyed.
23:42 Wes Larson? Yes, they're just devastated. Yeah. So Marx had 53 survivors on his plane by the time he was completely full and he was like really shocked by their state. Men are covered in ulcers, oil, shark bites, sunburn, and they're all gaunt, starving and ravaged by dehydration.
24:01 Wes Larson? They look like living corpses. So I want to read a quick section from Indianapolis, that other book.
24:08 Mike Smith? It's how people lost weight before Ozempic.
24:11 Wes Larson? Just going out to war.
24:12 Mike Smith? Stranded at sea.
24:14 Wes Larson? Yeah.
24:14 Mike Smith? I get socks, but it works.
24:16 Wes Larson? It does work. It works very well.
24:17 Mike Smith? It's effective. Right.
24:18 Wes Larson? All right. So this is about, I just thought this was like a really touching thing that happened with these survivors as they were on the plane. In the rear of the plane, the crew thought they'd run out of fresh water until a thorough search turned up a partially full water beaker in the radio compartment. Someone poured the water into a kettle and passed it up top, where a crew member picked his way carefully down the wing, rationing the precious liquid to four or five men at a time. The kettle was then passed below, refilled, and the process begun again. As the crewmen on the wing took the last of the water down to the line of men in the dark, he worried that he wouldn't be able to figure out where in the line he'd left off. He was surprised when, despite their misery, voice after voice in the darkness said the same thing. I've had mine.
25:04 Mike Smith? Wow.
25:04 Wes Larson? Yeah. So these men that are like, as thirsty as a human being can possibly be, would just get a sip of water, and they had the chance to kind of lie and get more, but they cared so much about their fellow shipmates that they told them they were honest, you know?
25:17 Mike Smith? Yeah.
25:17 Wes Larson? Which is crazy.
25:18 Mike Smith? I get that sense talking to my brothers who both served in different tours in war. The brothership you develop with your fellow soldiers, whether you agree or not with whatever they get up to wherever they go, like, it's a friendship and a bond that you can't artificially create. You know, you go through hell and life and death.
25:38 Wes Larson? Well, I think especially like something like this, you know, where it's like, maybe the worst thing that any soldiers in modern war have had to deal with, you know? I think lately, there's been a lot of science about proper hydration, and we're learning a lot about electrolytes and how good they can be for you. And that's why we love talking about Element. Element is a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte drink, born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations. And we just did the story about the USS Indianapolis. They were drinking a ton of seawater, so they were getting like 100 times the recommendations. But Element has really nailed it. They're
26:19 Wes Larson? telling us the right amount of sodium and other electrolytes that we need to be drinking. To stay properly hydrated, I've been drinking Element now for over a year. Almost exclusively, I drink Element and water. And I just feel better hydrated than I ever have. I feel like I have more energy. I even feel like my skin is better since I started drinking Element. And I know it's been formulated for anyone on a mission to restore health through hydration. If you're just looking to get a little bit more healthy through proper hydration, Element is for you, and it tastes great. I love the way it tastes. I've never liked the way the other electrolyte mixes taste, but I really like the way the Element does. So you can get a free eight-count sample pack of Element's most popular drink mix flavors
27:01 Wes Larson? with any purchase at drinkelement.com/tooth. That's drink L M N T dot com slash tooth. You can find your favorite Element flavor or share with a friend. You can try it totally risk-free. If you don't like it, you can give it away to a friend and they'll give you your money back, no questions asked. They have a very low return rate and a very high reorder rate. Thank you, Element, for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so close to midnight, the USS Doyle, which is one of the destroyers, finally arrives on the scene and it's being captained by this guy named Graham Clayder. He had also defied orders and chain of command to get his ship that close. And he was about to do something even more rebellious and courageous.
27:45 Wes Larson? He ordered the men on his ship to turn on their huge spotlight and point at Skyward. Why do you guys think that might be something that they really wouldn't want him to do?
27:54 Mike Smith? Batman.
27:55 Wes Larson? Batman might show up.
27:59 Mike Smith? Shine the lights upward?
28:00 Wes Larson? A huge spotlight pointing straight up.
28:03 Mike Smith? Japanese.
28:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, it makes him a huge target, like a huge beacon for any submarine, any plane, any warship. It essentially makes him the biggest target in the Pacific. Like, they wouldn't even smoke cigarettes in the nighttime on these ships because they were worried about the cigarette light being seen by enemies. So this was a huge risk. But the reason he wanted to do it was to tell the men in the water that he was there and to hang on a little longer. And there are multiple men that, once they came out, said they would have died had he not turned on that light. Oh, okay.
28:35 Wes Larson? So it's really cool. It had its intended effect, and the men in the water had not managed to board the plane, knew that they would be able to just hang on a little bit longer for rescue. The Doyle dropped whaleboats and the smaller boats went first to Marx's Dumbo, that floating plane. And they took the men from the plane and took them back to the Doyle. Okay, this is the gross part. It's terrifying, it's gross. Most of these men had been floating in saltwater for four days and five nights. And the saltwater, as I mentioned earlier, had made their skin and flesh extremely soggy and pruned and waterlogged. I think, you know, if you guys go into the ocean for a couple hours even, your fingers afterward, like, how do they feel? My nipples. Your nipples.
29:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, if I'm on a surfboard. Yeah. Bad. They're not just, like, pruney, but they're also really sensitive, I feel like. Like, you kind of, they feel almost like translucent, you know? For sure, yeah. And these men had been in the water for, like, almost five days. So they'd essentially started melting. And their life vests were rubbing on them. Yeah, they're covered in ulcers. So a lot of the men are screaming when they're lifted out of the water and onto the boats. And that's because as the rescuers grabbed them under the arms or whatever, they would feel the skin and flesh and muscle pull away from the bones, kind of like a sock pulling off of a foot. And they were, like, removing big chunks of these men as they're pulling them aboard. So they learned they had to be as gentle as possible.
30:04 Wes Larson? Sometimes they're not able to because the boats are moving and there's currents and everything. So it was some pretty unbelievably bad stuff to witness and be a part of. Another boat showed up, the other destroyer, the USS Basset. And not long after they began rescuing men and pulling them aboard too, the captain of this boat, Captain Thurl. Was apparently a huge asshole and his men like hated him because when they first met him, he made other people like carry his bags and stuff and was just like really hoity toity. And so something crazy happened as they were starting to load their small boats into the water. One of his crew saw shark and he yelled out, look at that huge fish.
30:49 Wes Larson? Fish is also a term for a torpedo. And so he heard that and he panicked and he told his crew to fire up the engines and just to get out of there. And some of his high ranking officials knew he was a coward. They physically got in his way and said, we're not leaving these men. And they escorted him to his room. And put an armed guard around him so that he couldn't like change his mind, which is really sweet.
31:16 Jeff Larson? Yeah. And then they told on him too.
31:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah, because we know about it.
31:23 Wes Larson? Uh, there were other ships that showed up too, but there was also some really incredible heroism. This one guy, Bill Van Welp, was literally jumping in this pitch black water. This is like happening after midnight, swimming around to help men get into the rescue boats. And this is like a big farm boy and he's just huge. So they said he would pick up like six men at a time in his arms.
31:44 Jeff Larson? That's awesome.
31:45 Wes Larson? And he's staying in the water so long so they can help all these men get to safety. And when his boat was full, he actually stayed in the water so that more of the men could like get into the boat and get to safety. He said, they can have my spot. I'll wait here for you to come back. Uh, when his boat showed back up, he got back in and they headed toward the Bassett. But they hit a wave and their boat tipped to one side and three of the Indianapolis survivors toppled into the water and immediately sank. So everyone on this rescue boat is just like, this is the saddest thing that could possibly happen. Like these guys are on their way to rescue. And they drown. And before they're even able to really process it, this guy, Bill Van Welp,
32:26 Wes Larson? jumps in the water and just dives down. And everyone's just looking out with their binoculars and just watching the water for like 20 seconds. And then he breaks the surface and he's holding all three of these guys and they're all alive. Yeah. Like a legend. Yeah.
32:42 Mike Smith? I want to read his biography.
32:44 Wes Larson? I know.
32:44 Mike Smith? Build him a statue.
32:46 Wes Larson? Meanwhile, the people in command in Guam and Leti and Peleliu learned that it was indeed the Indianapolis that was rescued. And I think they also realized that they'd goofed pretty hard.
32:58 Jeff Larson? No goof.
32:58 Wes Larson? Yeah. So messages start getting passed back and forth, and they gradually become more and more confidential. And soon, everything related to the Indianapolis was classified as top secret. Yeah.
33:11 Jeff Larson? Cover your back.
33:12 Wes Larson? Yeah. And I think that's part of the reason there's this myth of like, oh, this happened because they were on a secret mission. And let's just remember, everyone, their secret mission was over after Tinian. Like, they were just doing normal Navy stuff after that point. So that's not the reason that rescue didn't come for them. It's not because of the atomic bomb.
33:30 Mike Smith? Incompetence.
33:31 Jeff Larson? Well, and so you could say their prayers were answered, right?
33:35 Wes Larson? Yeah.
33:35 Jeff Larson? By the rescue?
33:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
33:36 Jeff Larson? But then, like, they probably should have prayed to not got torpedoed.
33:40 Wes Larson? In the first place?
33:41 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
33:42 Wes Larson? Yeah. They went praying hard enough for that.
33:43 Jeff Larson? They should have prayed to just be safe from the start.
33:46 Mike Smith? I'm gonna pray right now and never get torpedoed.
33:49 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
33:49 Wes Larson? That's just gonna be my most.
33:51 Mike Smith? That's what I'm thinking as well.
33:51 Jeff Larson? Cover everything.
33:52 Wes Larson? Perfect prayers.
33:53 Mike Smith? I'll pray for you guys too, so you don't have to.
33:57 Wes Larson? I'd love that. So the men of the Indianapolis were now, at this point, in a line of like 40 miles when they were rescued. So it took a long time to rescue them. And Captain McVeigh's raft was one of the furthest ones away, and he was one of the last groups to be rescued. But soon, all 316 survivors were on board either the Doyle, the Basset, or some of the other rescue ships that had shown up. They're getting their first food, water, and medical attention for five days. The plane that had landed, actually, they had to sink, because they couldn't fly it anymore. So that plane, that was its last mission. The last men were pulled from the water on the evening of August 3rd, almost 30 hours after the rescue had first started.
34:39 Wes Larson? They would be the last men rescued at sea during World War II. Eight hundred and ninety men had gone into the water, three hundred and sixteen had come out.
34:48 Jeff Larson? That's like the most famous scripture verse, John three sixteen.
34:52 Wes Larson? Three sixteen. Braxton.
34:55 Mike Smith? Dude, that's three in a row. We're on a roll.
34:57 Wes Larson? Uh, some of these men wouldn't survive the boat ride to Peleliu. Like, that's how depleted they were. They just couldn't, it was past the point of, of any kind of resuscitation.
35:08 Mike Smith? I mean, it seems that they'd, they'd be so fragile that even everything they're ingesting, you have to be careful every step along the way, getting them to a bunker to the medical bay or whatever.
35:20 Wes Larson? Do you think there were any sharks that like showed up right after they got pulled out of the water and they're like, hey, guys, I heard this is like, like quite the place. And they're all like, dude, you just missed it.
35:29 Jeff Larson? Like one shark that is there from the start, just like, oh, man, you're gonna be mad.
35:34 Mike Smith? You're never gonna believe, there was a guy that was this big.
35:38 Jeff Larson? I was trying to tell you, like.
35:41 Wes Larson? Dude, we said to hurry up. Just three days later, the nuclear cargo that the Indianapolis had dropped in Tinian would be dropped in Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb nicknamed Little Boy would immediately kill almost seventy thousand people that were like instantly killed and vaporized, almost all of them innocent civilians. And by the end of the year, roughly another eighty thousand would die from the terrible radiation the bomb would leave in its wake. Uh, in my opinion, one of the most kind of horrific things that's ever happened in the history of the world.
36:13 Mike Smith? For sure. Yeah, and you can argue for and against it.
36:17 Jeff Larson? It's hard to argue for it too much.
36:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, I mean, their argument was that it ended the war, but.
36:22 Mike Smith? And it saved millions of lives that maybe otherwise would have lost it if we had to occupy the mainland. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.
36:28 Jeff Larson? I got him to argue for it.
36:30 Wes Larson? I will say though, something.
36:31 Mike Smith? What I'm saying is it's inarguable that it is one of the worst thing that it's ever happened, justifiable or not.
36:37 Wes Larson? I think something that we've kind of always been lied to, that's kind of propaganda, in my opinion, is we were told the Japanese wouldn't surrender if we didn't drop this bomb. What I've kind of learned is that they wouldn't unconditionally surrender.
36:50 Jeff Larson? Sure.
36:51 Wes Larson? If we didn't drop the bomb and an unconditional surrender is what the US wanted. And that basically means we got to dictate every single term of that surrender. And I do think Japan was ready to surrender, but they wanted to kind of go to like a negotiating table.
37:05 Jeff Larson? Interesting.
37:06 Wes Larson? And the US didn't want that. They wanted unconditional.
37:09 Jeff Larson? Well, I remember.
37:10 Wes Larson? That's what makes it wrong.
37:12 Jeff Larson? In the movie Oppenheimer, he kind of says that too, that like they're saying that this is made them surrender. But he's like, actually, they were like about to surrender anyway.
37:22 Wes Larson? They were ready to surrender that the US just didn't like.
37:24 Jeff Larson? Well, we kind of killed more people with the bombs in Tokyo.
37:29 Wes Larson? Firebombing. Yeah, the firebombing was like maybe up like close to a million people. But between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think we're talking like over 300,000 people dead. By the time the fallout was over and everything. So yeah, it was a lot. McVeigh was on the boat, the Ringness, and almost immediately was asked for information about the sinking. And he's still kind of in a daze and all these people are asking him questions. And he couldn't even remember if they'd been zigzagging or not. Jeff, we pinned that in the first episode.
38:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
38:00 Wes Larson? Will you pull that pin out?
38:01 Jeff Larson? Let's unpin it.
38:02 Wes Larson? Okay, unpin it.
38:03 Jeff Larson? Was he zigzagging with?
38:04 Wes Larson? No.
38:06 Jeff Larson? Spoiler.
38:07 Wes Larson? But he had, he had gone to bed and given one of his other officers command when the ship was sunk. But in his report, he decided to say they hadn't been zigzagging. And this would prove to be a very costly admission. And again, the zigzagging thing was required in good visibility, but in poor visibility, they could choose not to zigzag because they were afraid they might like hit something. Or it wasn't necessarily useful because a submarine can't even really see them in poor visibility. So they actually didn't think the visibility was good enough to be zigzagging and that's why they weren't doing it.
38:43 Mike Smith? It was in the middle of the night, right? Is that not enough to constitute just?
38:46 Wes Larson? I mean.
38:47 Mike Smith? Blanket statement, poor visibility.
38:48 Wes Larson? Not to like be on the prosecution side here at all.
38:51 Mike Smith? Yeah.
38:52 Wes Larson? The Hashimoto sub did see them.
38:55 Mike Smith? Sure.
38:55 Wes Larson? You know, so like visibility wasn't that bad.
38:58 Mike Smith? Yeah.
38:58 Wes Larson? But we're gonna get into whether or not zigzagging even matters.
39:01 Jeff Larson? Because like in the movie Apocalypto.
39:03 Wes Larson? Uh huh.
39:04 Jeff Larson? Jaguar Pa.
39:05 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:05 Jeff Larson? He zigzags and that's why he's like able to escape.
39:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, the other guy doesn't.
39:09 Jeff Larson? But then like he's much smaller than a naval ship.
39:14 Wes Larson? Yeah, I would say so.
39:16 Jeff Larson? So like, I feel like he's a harder target when he zigzags. I feel like with a naval ship, you gotta, you gotta take into account.
39:24 Wes Larson? That they're not Jaguar Pa.
39:25 Jeff Larson? That it's bigger.
39:25 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:26 Jeff Larson? And that it might still be easy to hit even if it is zigzag.
39:30 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:31 Jeff Larson? Because of how big it is.
39:32 Wes Larson? I think in the trial, the defendant was, or the defense was like, your honor, we want to bring to your attention the movie Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson.
39:41 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
39:42 Wes Larson? And if you'll notice here Jaguar Pa is zigzagging.
39:46 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
39:46 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:46 Jeff Larson? It would have been a good point.
39:48 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:49 Mike Smith? How good can those?
39:50 Wes Larson? Torpedo, I don't think so.
39:51 Mike Smith? That's what I was gonna ask though, cause the Kaiten, are the guys zigzagging in their torpedoes?
39:57 Wes Larson? Uh, they, they could move. I don't think the Kaitens were like, like you could do a 90 degree turn and hit something. I think it was more like you could direct it a little bit.
40:06 Mike Smith? Sure.
40:06 Wes Larson? Still the coolest thing ever, though. Those are so cool.
40:10 Mike Smith? Yeah, you wanna get in one?
40:11 Wes Larson? Kinda.
40:12 Mike Smith? Yeah, where would you target?
40:13 Wes Larson? I would say if I was anyone.
40:15 Jeff Larson? I mean, I know where Wes would target.
40:16 Wes Larson? Yeah. If I missed, I would just blow myself up.
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41:51 Mike Smith? Rocketmoney.com/claw. Alright, when they got to Peleliu, a media blackout was ordered and no one was allowed to publish any stories about the Indianapolis. McVeigh was quoted asking everyone, like, why it took the Navy so long to rescue them? Like, he immediately was like, "Hey, what happened? You know, like, why were we floating for so long?" And not long after Admiral Nimitz in Guam called for a court of inquiry into the sinking of the Indianapolis. And he was joined by this guy named Admiral King, and their job was basically to figure out if anyone was to blame for the sinking and the delayed rescue. Now, Admiral King is a bit of a villain, in my opinion, in this story, and I'm sure he did plenty of good stuff.
42:34 Mike Smith? But he hated McVeigh's father because he was once a junior officer to McVeigh's dad, and he tried sneaking some girls into a ship, and McVeigh's dad issued him a formal letter of reprimand that was on his record. So, some people think the reason this guy went so hard after McVeigh is because he just had a grudge against his family.
42:54 Wes Larson? That's so weak.
42:55 Mike Smith? Because, pretty much-
42:56 Jeff Larson? Well, by his dad, though, too.
42:58 Mike Smith? Yeah.
42:58 Jeff Larson? The guy's just having some fun.
43:00 Mike Smith? Yeah, he should just let him, like, they're at war, you know, let him blow off some steam.
43:04 Wes Larson? Also, one of the judges on the Court of Inquiry, like the guy that's gonna make the decision whether or not to court martial McVeigh, was one of the admirals that was responsible for the incomplete intelligence report that McVeigh got about enemy submarines.
43:18 Mike Smith? Oh, so he had a conflict of interest here to-
43:21 Wes Larson? Yeah, he wanted to protect himself. If you guys remember, the USS Underhill, I don't think I said the name of the boat, which I definitely should have, because it sounds like a Tolkien reference.
43:30 Mike Smith? Yeah.
43:31 Wes Larson? The USS Underhill had been sunk by submarines on the very same route that the Indianapolis was on, just like four or five days before the Indianapolis was told there was no danger and they didn't need an escort.
43:44 Mike Smith? Yeah.
43:45 Wes Larson? So that was a huge mistake by the Navy, and this guy was not about to admit it.
43:49 Jeff Larson? Smart. I mean, he shouldn't ever admit anything is what I've learned.
43:55 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's a sign of weakness to admit you're wrong.
43:57 Jeff Larson? What list?
43:58 Mike Smith? Why would you do that?
43:58 Jeff Larson? What list? Why are people still talking about it?
44:01 Mike Smith? It was five days ago. There's nothing wrong then. It was almost a whole week.
44:06 Jeff Larson? I don't even think there was a client list ever.
44:08 Wes Larson? Yeah.
44:10 Mike Smith? Let's move on. Yeah. I like new looking forward, not, don't like living in the past.
44:16 Wes Larson? All right. After the Court of Inquiry was conducted, and they pretty much said, yeah, a bunch of people messed up and that's why you guys weren't rescued earlier. They issued some light reprimands to all of those people, like the guy that recalled the tugboats. But ultimately, they said that McVeigh was responsible because he didn't zigzag and he didn't make the call to abandon the ship in a timely matter. Two of the admirals just wanted to reprimand him, but Admiral King pushed really hard for a court martial, and ultimately, they decided to court martial him.
44:46 Jeff Larson? Crazy.
44:47 Wes Larson? Yeah, which means another trial. And he would be the only captain in US Navy history to be court martialed for the sinking of a ship from an act of war. So this isn't normal at all that they would do this. So the crazy thing here to me is that the whole Navy should have been on trial for just leaving these guys to float in the ocean.
45:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah, like the main crime here was not getting them as soon as they sunk.
45:08 Wes Larson? Right. Yeah. It wasn't, like, McVeigh probably made some little mistakes, but the, like, the biggest issue was that, that no one rescued him.
45:16 Jeff Larson? Right.
45:17 Wes Larson? Yeah. But they, I think they knew that, and so they wanted to make McVeigh a scapegoat.
45:23 Mike Smith? Yeah.
45:24 Wes Larson? They wanted to put all of the blame on him. So the court martial-
45:27 Jeff Larson? It's like us with Bill whenever we mess up.
45:29 Wes Larson? Except it's actually his fault, always.
45:33 Wes Larson? The court martial convened in Washington DC on December 3rd, 1945. And a lot of the survivors were called to testify. They weren't allowed to talk about the time in the water, the heroicism of their captain. They were mostly just asked about visibility on the night that they were sunk. And while most of them said the visibility was bad, and that's why McVeigh didn't zigzag. The prosecution made the point that it couldn't have been that bad because they were obviously seen by the Japanese.
46:03 Wes Larson? So the prosecution called witnesses. The witnesses were like, visibility is bad. And they're like, well, that doesn't count, actually.
46:13 Jeff Larson? Was it?
46:14 Mike Smith? It's infuriating. That's so frustrating.
46:18 Wes Larson? This is even more frustrating. Behind the scenes, the Navy inspector general had sent a report that said McVeigh did not have proper intelligence about the Japanese submarines. And that they needed more time to investigate. But Admiral King really wanted to get McVeigh court martialed. So he ignored this report. He just said, no, we're going to keep moving forward. And that report probably would have exonerated McVeigh. On the second week of the trial, they made a really crazy decision and they brought Commander Hashimoto, the commander from the sub that sank the Indianapolis to the trial.
46:53 Mike Smith? I can't imagine what Hashimoto is going to be thinking as he's walking down the aisle. It's like surrounded by this country that just bombed his people.
47:01 Wes Larson? Yeah, that they just lost a war to. And that he killed, he caused the worst experience of like 900 men's lives.
47:08 Mike Smith? Those people are probably in that crowd watching him walk up to the stand. Dude, that's intense, actually.
47:14 Wes Larson? That's crazy. That, okay, yeah, so what? At first, he told the prosecution what they wanted to hear. And he said the visibility wasn't that bad. But then he immediately said that he was super close to the Indianapolis, that he had shot six torpedoes and that all of the zigzagging in the world wouldn't have stopped the sinking. Oh, nice. Yeah. Like, yeah. He's like, there's no way I was missing her. Yeah. Yeah. It was sweet.
47:42 Mike Smith? Prosecution, though, we know how they play.
47:44 Wes Larson? They're like, oh, I don't know. Cut out that last part.
47:49 Wes Larson? But the visibility was good, right?
47:51 Mike Smith? Yeah.
47:52 Wes Larson? They also talked to a highly decorated US submarine commander and asked him how effective zigzagging is. And he pretty much said it does absolutely nothing. But after the trial was concluded, they still convicted him on the
48:06 Mike Smith? No way.
48:06 Wes Larson? On the count of failing to zigzag. He was demoted, which meant he could never become an admiral and basically meant he would never command another ship. Some of the admirals in the Navy did take pity on him and they remitted his sentence. He ended up being promoted to rear admiral, which is kind of a dead end thing. And they only did it when he retired from the Navy in 1949.
48:29 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right, it's gonna get a little sad here for a second. That Christmas, he started receiving phone calls and letters from angry relatives of the boys who had died from the Indianapolis disaster. Cause again, the media had blamed him for all this. So these people now think that he was responsible and they would essentially tell him that he was the reason their loved ones had died. And he took it really hard because in some ways I think he did kind of believe him. In 1961, his wife Louise suddenly passed away from cancer. He remarried an old flame and they seemed to have a happy enough life. But in 1965, his grandson that he really loved died suddenly of an illness and that kind of sent him over the edge. He became despondent and depressed. One morning, his stepson heard him crying in the bathroom.
49:13 Wes Larson? And when he opened the door, McVeigh was clutching a fresh hate letter from a relative. And he just told his son in law, I can't take this. And then on a cold morning in November of 1968, Charles Butler McVeigh went out onto his front porch with his revolver and ended his own life. He was 70 years old.
49:32 Mike Smith? Man.
49:32 Wes Larson? Yeah. Rough.
49:34 Mike Smith? I mean, imagine sometimes we'll get an unhappy review on Apple podcast.
49:40 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:40 Mike Smith? It's like, kind of bums us out, you know? This guy for decades was getting the brunt of the blame for
49:46 Wes Larson? The worst thing possible.
49:47 Mike Smith? People's children dying in a war.
49:49 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:49 Mike Smith? And yeah, unfairly, it seems.
49:52 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:52 Mike Smith? But dude, that's brutal.
49:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
49:55 Mike Smith? That's the worst.
49:56 Wes Larson? It really is. It, and like, I, I don't, I think that definitely added to all of it. I think part of it was losing his wife. And we're going to talk a little bit about mental health in a minute, but anyway, really, really tragic end. But there is kind of a silver lining that we're going to talk about right now. We're actually going to time travel. We're gonna hop into our time machine.
50:16 Jeff Larson? Awesome.
50:17 Wes Larson? We're gonna go to 1996.
50:19 Jeff Larson? Oh.
50:20 Wes Larson? 11 year old Hunter Scott was probably a little young to see Jurassic Park when it came out three years ago in 1993, but hopefully his parents have let him watch it by now. And I'm guessing they have because he was watching Jaws, his dad, in 1996.
50:35 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I mean, there's more nudity in Jaws.
50:37 Wes Larson? There is, and I would, I would argue scarier and more violent, too.
50:42 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
50:42 Wes Larson? Jurassic Park. That's my argument. When they get to Quint's monologue, Hunter is pretty transfixed by it, and he asks his dad, "Did that really happen?" And that started a big old fixation for 11 year old Hunter Scott. He decided to make his history fair project about the Indianapolis, and he basically put out a want ad to try and get in touch with the survivors of the sinking, and someone replied with a list of all the survivors that went to a reunion. And he interviewed all of them that were willing to be interviewed, and by the time he was 12, he'd interviewed 150 of the survivors, almost 150, and reviewed over 800 documents about the sinking.
51:21 Jeff Larson? Yeah. How old is he?
51:22 Wes Larson? 12.
51:23 Jeff Larson? Geez.
51:24 Wes Larson? There's a photo of him on the back of Left 4 Dead, that book, and he's just like surrounded by all these like papers and stuff, this kid.
51:32 Jeff Larson? That's cool.
51:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
51:34 Jeff Larson? It's like, I feel like if I was one of the men that survived the, like, just telling a 12 year old, like, yeah, then the shark like tore his guts out in front of me, and I was swimming in his guts, and the 12 year old's like, go on.
51:50 Mike Smith? Just imagine, imagine you're his parents, and it's like, Hunter, do you see what Hunter was reading? It's got 7,000 pages of shark attacks.
52:00 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah, that would be hard if you're like sitting in your house trying to forget all this, and it's like, hey, I'm doing my, my history project, and I want you to tell me about the worst time of your life. Anyway, during that time, he learned that all of the survivors felt as though their captain had been court martialed unfairly, and his new mission was to try and get McVeigh exonerated. So during this time, he turns up some of these declassified documents that showed how much the Navy bungled the whole disaster, and those documents would be key to this fight for exonerating McVeigh. He was joined by survivors of the Indianapolis, some of McVeigh's sons, congressmen, authors, and many others in his fight to clear McVeigh's name.
52:43 Wes Larson? He even testified before Congress, and he talked to Commander Hashimoto.
52:48 Jeff Larson? Wow, that's awesome.
52:49 Wes Larson? Yeah.
52:50 Jeff Larson? Hashimoto's cool.
52:51 Wes Larson? I love Hashimoto. I love him. Like, I am, he seems so cool to me. In October of 2000, Congress passed a resolution that exonerated Charles McVeigh for the sinking of the Indianapolis, and Bill Clinton signed that resolution.
53:07 Jeff Larson? Oh, nice.
53:08 Wes Larson? Unfortunately, Hashimoto had died five days before the resolution was passed.
53:12 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah. I like Hashimoto. He's like, if like Steph Curry hit a game winner on someone, and they tried to like blame the defender for like not staying on him, he's like, no, no, no. Like, he did everything he could, I just hit the shot.
53:28 Wes Larson? I'm just that good.
53:29 Jeff Larson? Yeah. The coaching, the coaching, they should have like, they should have had a...
53:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, I wasn't missing that shot.
53:37 Mike Smith? Trapped him at half court or something.
53:39 Jeff Larson? They should have had a, what, what's the other ship?
53:41 Wes Larson? Just an escort.
53:42 Jeff Larson? An escort. Yeah, the defender needed help.
53:45 Wes Larson? He's like, no, I, even with 10 escorts, I would have sunk that ship. All right, so the books go into what happened with these men after they got home, their lives, how they kind of went through everything. And I listened to, again, a lot of interviews from these men that talked about this trauma. And I just kind of wanted to mention that I think, especially, you know, in these, these wars that happened in the middle of the century, the 20th century, it was really backwards kind of how these men were taught to deal with their trauma, you know? I think after World War II is when they kind of started to realize what PTSD was. And even in that context, these men were kind of just told to rub dirt in it and just get over it. And go back to normal life and a lot of them have
54:30 Jeff Larson? Maybe cry in your sleep.
54:32 Wes Larson? Yeah, exactly. But like, therapy wasn't for them and all of these different things and men have to be tough. And I think some of that still is today, like men aren't allowed to kind of feel these things. And I just want to say like, there's nothing wrong with talking to a therapist. There's nothing wrong with getting help if you have some trauma. Uh, it doesn't matter if you're the toughest guy in the world, you know, you need to process that stuff. And I wish some of these men had have been able to, because you could still see it in their eyes as they talked about it. That trauma was still with them and
55:06 Jeff Larson? Go talk to a 12 year old.
55:07 Wes Larson? Yeah.
55:08 Jeff Larson? You know?
55:11 Wes Larson? That's not what I was talking about, but
55:14 Jeff Larson? I mean, it worked.
55:16 Wes Larson? It, no, I don't think that's what helped them process their trauma, but it did help exonerate their captain.
55:22 Mike Smith? I want to see what grade Hunter got. He got like a C minus.
55:26 Jeff Larson? Some teachers like you didn't follow the guidelines of the
55:30 Mike Smith? But I testified before Congress.
55:34 Mike Smith? You didn't cite your sources, bro. You missed a comma here. It's like
55:38 Wes Larson? Sorry, rules are rules.
55:39 Mike Smith? Yeah.
55:40 Wes Larson? All right. And I also just want to do a quick pitch. Read these books if you're more interested in this story, because
55:45 Mike Smith? I will.
55:46 Wes Larson? There's so much information in them. There's likely some things that I, you know, didn't report as well as I could have. So go back and read them. I am like forever
55:55 Jeff Larson? Make your own podcast.
55:56 Wes Larson? Yeah.
55:56 Jeff Larson? Make a podcast.
55:57 Wes Larson? It might be better than mine, ours. Uh, yeah, I, it has really opened up a whole new appreciation for me of like,
56:05 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
56:06 Wes Larson? World War II, what these men went through, what the human, what human beings can withstand, uh, in the face of just some terrible odds stacked against them.
56:15 Jeff Larson? Well, for me too, it's kind of like what sharks are capable. If you really give them the opportunity.
56:21 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah. I know we hadn't talked about sharks much this episode, but they, you don't see anything about the Indianapolis without mention of them. And I think that just points to the fact that this was a lot of sharks that took a lot of people.
56:35 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
56:35 Wes Larson? Yeah.
56:36 Mike Smith? What did you say the final count was? Probably from sharks?
56:41 Wes Larson? Uh, up to, up to 150 is what they typically say.
56:45 Mike Smith? Man.
56:45 Wes Larson? I actually think it could have even been more.
56:48 Mike Smith? Sure.
56:48 Wes Larson? Between 30 and 150 is what you often read.
56:51 Jeff Larson? Yeah, you told like 150 stories of sharks killing someone, I feel like.
56:56 Wes Larson? I just feel like if the planes are seeing multiple people get killed by sharks. And I know the planes made them like really, you know, energetic and stuff, the people and that drew in the sharks, but yeah, anyway.
57:08 Mike Smith? Yeah. It is, it's another, um, I was watching some of those interviews. I think it was at the World War II exhibit in New Orleans or somewhere down there. We went to see something and there are some interviews from survivors of the shipwreck. One of the guys that was being interviewed was like, you know, I don't care for sharks.
57:25 Wes Larson? Yeah.
57:26 Mike Smith? I don't really like them very much. It's like, uh, kind of an understatement, but, um.
57:31 Jeff Larson? It's fair.
57:32 Mike Smith? Yeah.
57:32 Wes Larson? It's fair.
57:33 Mike Smith? You know, we try not to vilify them, but.
57:36 Jeff Larson? If I could talk to that guy, I'd probably be like, listen.
57:39 Mike Smith? Yeah.
57:40 Jeff Larson? Sharks are cool, dude.
57:41 Mike Smith? Yeah.
57:42 Wes Larson? Do you have any idea how many sharks are dying right now?
57:44 Jeff Larson? I'm like, look at whale sharks. They wouldn't even eat you.
57:48 Mike Smith? Have you heard of the lampullae of Lorenzini? It's really cool. If you like, you really get into the biology.
57:55 Wes Larson? We do, I mean, we want our listeners to have a huge appreciation for sharks. And again, I want to stress that these are animals that go a long time without eating. And they're going to take advantage of feeding opportunities and that's all they were doing. And in a way, it's crazy that more people weren't killed after them floating that long, like the sharks didn't just kill all of them. So it still shows how cautious they are, you know, they weren't just attacking all of them. There were some of these guys that were bumped the entire time by sharks and they never got bit.
58:24 Mike Smith? Never got munched.
58:24 Wes Larson? Yeah.
58:25 Mike Smith? They're into the intermittent fasting trend.
58:28 Jeff Larson? You think-
58:29 Mike Smith? Like, not even that effective, it turns out. I'll introduce him to that Joe Rogan podcast episode.
58:34 Jeff Larson? That guy, that guy that like, still hates sharks?
58:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
58:38 Jeff Larson? Like, it's fine with me, as long as he still hates the Japanese as well. But if he like, got rid of that grudge and he still holds a grudge against sharks, I'm kinda like, alright dude, you gotta pick both or none.
58:50 Wes Larson? Right. Hmm. He's like, "I hate sharks, but you know what I love? Torpedoes."
58:54 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
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1:00:26 Wes Larson? All right. So you guys have any questions about the rescue? Anything honestly about the Indianapolis before we go into categories?
1:00:34 Mike Smith? In your personal opinion, I don't know if there was as much material as you'd want to feel confident saying, would you have exonerated McVeigh of all wrongdoing? Or do you think there is some justification for that court martialing?
1:00:46 Wes Larson? I don't think there was justification for the court martialing. I don't know if I would say I exonerate him of all wrongdoing.
1:00:54 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:00:55 Wes Larson? Like, I do think even just him being like, oh, we don't have an escort. And I have incomplete intelligence and then still kind of going forward. Just seems a little like, maybe a little kind of
1:01:07 Mike Smith? Reckless?
1:01:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah, casual. Like, you're kind of just assuming that you're gonna be okay. But I don't think McVeigh deserved what he got by any means. I think he was a really good captain and I think he just was kind of railroaded by the Navy.
1:01:22 Mike Smith? Sure.
1:01:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, this seems like one of the scariest worst things that's happened in human history. Honestly, like even Jaws, which is like a horror movie and very scary.
1:01:36 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:01:37 Jeff Larson? The scariest part is them talking about this.
1:01:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:01:39 Jeff Larson? You know?
1:01:40 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:01:40 Jeff Larson? And I don't know, it's just
1:01:43 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:01:43 Jeff Larson? Good. It's a, it's almost like too, too much to comprehend a bit, though. Like, sometimes with our shark stories, it's like one raft.
1:01:53 Wes Larson? Right.
1:01:53 Jeff Larson? And then you get like a real insight to each person. And for this, it's like 150 people. It's like hard to even keep track of it all.
1:02:02 Wes Larson? Yeah, like shark attacks were getting to be just kind of like normal to them.
1:02:06 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:02:06 Wes Larson? You know? Yeah, it's, it's, I agree.
1:02:09 Jeff Larson? Should we normalize shark attacks?
1:02:10 Wes Larson? I don't know if we need to normalize them, but yeah. I actually just read an interesting article about that, about how like, have we pushed it too far saying that sharks aren't dangerous?
1:02:21 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:02:22 Wes Larson? But I don't think we have on this show. I think we do our best to say that they can be dangerous. Okay, you guys good? Should we move on to categories?
1:02:31 Mike Smith? I think so.
1:02:31 Wes Larson? Okay. First category is your favorite captain from pop culture in honor of Charles McVeigh.
1:02:39 Jeff Larson? I mean, there's a bunch. You want just my favorite ever? Probably Jack Sparrow.
1:02:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:02:45 Mike Smith? Hmm.
1:02:45 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's a good pick. It's hard not to say him.
1:02:48 Jeff Larson? It's funny in the first one too, where he's like, you're the worst captain I've ever seen. And then the ship, the other guy's like, that's the best captain I've ever seen.
1:02:57 Wes Larson? Or he says, you're the worst captain I've ever heard of or something.
1:03:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:03:00 Wes Larson? He goes, but you have heard of me.
1:03:02 Jeff Larson? Oh, that's good.
1:03:03 Wes Larson? That might have been pirate that he says, yeah. Yeah, he's a good captain. I agree. First movie is like one of the most rewatchable movies in history.
1:03:11 Jeff Larson? I was playing around with, so we just did our top songs.
1:03:16 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:03:16 Jeff Larson? We made our own Tooth and Claw bracket of each of us, like chose sixteen songs.
1:03:22 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:03:23 Jeff Larson? I was playing around with Pirates of Caribbean song.
1:03:25 Wes Larson? Oh, the Hans Zimmer. Yeah, yeah, it's great.
1:03:28 Mike Smith? It goes hard. I'm gonna pick, um, Peanut Butter Captain Crunch balls.
1:03:34 Wes Larson? Just you love just the top of your mouth being ripped to shreds.
1:03:38 Mike Smith? Well, that's, that's more so regular Captain Crunch. I think the Peanut Butter balls are a little more gentle on the top of your mouth.
1:03:44 Wes Larson? I think the Peanut Butter ones are the worst for me.
1:03:46 Mike Smith? Really?
1:03:46 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:03:46 Mike Smith? The cat, regular ones have like razor edges.
1:03:50 Jeff Larson? Captain Crunch is good. I'll stand by that.
1:03:52 Wes Larson? I do like that. He's a great captain.
1:03:54 Jeff Larson? He's a pretty good, like he always has little games for you to play.
1:03:57 Mike Smith? Yeah, mazes and trivia and stuff.
1:04:00 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:04:00 Mike Smith? Like all good captains. Jack, Jack Sparrow just has game night every night on the Black Pearl.
1:04:07 Jeff Larson? Little mazes.
1:04:10 Wes Larson? Uh, I picked Captain Hook from the like Disney animated Peter Pan.
1:04:15 Jeff Larson? Oh.
1:04:15 Wes Larson? I just always thought he was such a good character and villain. And something I really miss is just villains that were bad, like through and through, they're just bad. I hate that in new movies, they have to humanize villains and kind of give them like a backstory to show us why they're bad.
1:04:33 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:04:33 Wes Larson? And he was just like a really bad guy.
1:04:35 Mike Smith? He was.
1:04:35 Wes Larson? So I liked that.
1:04:36 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:04:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:04:37 Mike Smith? He didn't treat Smee very well.
1:04:39 Wes Larson? No, it wasn't good to Smee. And Smee is like one of the best voice actors in all time, I think.
1:04:44 Mike Smith? One of the greatest.
1:04:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:04:44 Mike Smith? I actually, this is not official or anything, but I kind of view Captain Hook and Smee as one of the first like iconic gay.
1:04:52 Wes Larson? I think you might be right.
1:04:53 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:04:53 Jeff Larson? Oh.
1:04:53 Mike Smith? You know, they have that kind of, they have a relationship where it's like they're so comfortable with each other that like even the guy that's serving under Captain Hook is willing to kind of give him a little bit of the business.
1:05:03 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:05:04 Wes Larson? What does that mean?
1:05:06 Mike Smith? How it means whatever you want it to mean.
1:05:09 Jeff Larson? I'm gonna shout out Captain Morgan.
1:05:11 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:05:12 Jeff Larson? Um, Luffy's actually my favorite from One Piece.
1:05:16 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:05:16 Jeff Larson? And then Captain Moroni.
1:05:18 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:05:20 Jeff Larson? Captain Falcon.
1:05:21 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:05:22 Mike Smith? I don't like Captain Falcon.
1:05:23 Wes Larson? Captain Falcon.
1:05:24 Jeff Larson? Falcon Punch. Oh, yeah. Falcon Punch.
1:05:27 Mike Smith? What is he captain of? A race car? I don't know.
1:05:30 Wes Larson? Captain Kirk.
1:05:31 Mike Smith? Captain Kirk. El Capitan. That one, Rock.
1:05:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, The Rock. Big old rock.
1:05:38 Jeff Larson? That's a pretty good one, actually.
1:05:39 Wes Larson? It's the most powerful captain.
1:05:40 Mike Smith? Right.
1:05:41 Jeff Larson? Alex Harnd.
1:05:42 Wes Larson? Harnd.
1:05:43 Mike Smith? Harnd.
1:05:44 Wes Larson? Harnd, yeah.
1:05:45 Mike Smith? His hands? Oh, my gosh.
1:05:46 Wes Larson? All right.
1:05:47 Mike Smith? See those guys?
1:05:48 Wes Larson? If you were doing a history fair project, what would you guys do it on? Like, if you have to just do a big old project about one thing in history, what would you pick right now?
1:05:57 Mike Smith? I've been listening to a podcast called The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
1:06:01 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:06:02 Mike Smith? And the first couple of episodes are about those early Greek philosophers. And you know how philosophy back then kind of was all encompassing of sciences and anthropology, et cetera, et cetera?
1:06:10 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:11 Mike Smith? But they didn't have any basis upon which to expand their knowledge or their theories upon. So they were just saying like, uh, yeah, magnets have souls. Why else would they move? You know, they're just kind of like making stuff up and seeing, you know, just kind of testing it out. And I think that's such a fun idea to really get into, like, what they thought the shape of the earth was. Is it a cylinder? Is it a globe? Is it a flat disc? I just think there's a lot of meat on that bone to explore and have fun with.
1:06:40 Wes Larson? That's cool.
1:06:41 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:06:41 Mike Smith? Theies of Miletus.
1:06:43 Jeff Larson? Like Mayan culture.
1:06:45 Wes Larson? Yeah, I like that.
1:06:46 Jeff Larson? Like Tikal, Guatemala type thing.
1:06:48 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:06:49 Jeff Larson? The guy in, uh, the second Black Panther, the bad guy.
1:06:52 Wes Larson? Jaguar Paw.
1:06:53 Jeff Larson? Uh, Jaguar Paw. That like hoop.
1:06:56 Mike Smith? Zigzagging.
1:06:57 Jeff Larson? That like hoop where you gotta like hit the ball through with your hip and the losing team like dies every time or something?
1:07:04 Mike Smith? Right.
1:07:04 Jeff Larson? That is pretty crazy.
1:07:05 Wes Larson? That's a fun to watch. Yeah.
1:07:07 Mike Smith? I'd watch a lot of NBA.
1:07:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:07:10 Mike Smith? If that was. Like, you don't even have to like kill them.
1:07:13 Jeff Larson? It'd just be hard to like get a favorite player then.
1:07:15 Mike Smith? Maim them slightly.
1:07:18 Mike Smith? That's true.
1:07:19 Jeff Larson? Like, I wouldn't want to buy a jersey because what if they die?
1:07:24 Mike Smith? That's something they'll need to work through.
1:07:26 Wes Larson? I think I would pick Lewis and Clark because I recently learned that there's a pretty decent chance they walked like through my plot, like where I live.
1:07:36 Mike Smith? Oh.
1:07:36 Wes Larson? That they crossed the river like right by us and walked through our little valley. And that just kind of got my mind spinning and I've been reading Undaunted Courage. And I think that, I do think their expedition like led to a lot of really terrible things afterward. But the expedition itself is really fascinating to me.
1:07:54 Jeff Larson? It's not like a Columbus thing where they were the ones causing the terrible stuff.
1:08:00 Wes Larson? But they kind of brought that idea of manifest destiny with them, which is a bad idea. But, um, but they, it was still really cool that they used so much indigenous knowledge and stuff. And they formed good relationships with a lot of those people. So I just think it's a fascinating story. I'm really enjoying the book. So that's what I would do it on.
1:08:19 Mike Smith? What are their full names? There's a Meriwether.
1:08:21 Wes Larson? Meriwether Lewis and, um, man.
1:08:25 Mike Smith? Saddam Clark.
1:08:26 Wes Larson? Saddam Clark. That was it.
1:08:27 Jeff Larson? No way, Saddam?
1:08:30 Mike Smith? I don't know why that's the name.
1:08:32 Wes Larson? I can't remember his name. I don't know why.
1:08:34 Mike Smith? Mark. It's Meriwether.
1:08:37 Wes Larson? I gotta look it up now because I just said I'm reading a book about him and I can't remember his name. William Clark.
1:08:45 Wes Larson? Okay. Uh, I wanted to ask you guys, another real life nightmare situation you've heard about that you would hate to be involved in. Cause this just seems like the biggest nightmare possible. I'll go first for this one.
1:08:58 Mike Smith? I want you to.
1:08:59 Wes Larson? Did you guys ever go in the Nutty Putty Caves?
1:09:01 Jeff Larson? Oh yeah, that's good.
1:09:02 Wes Larson? Yeah. So out by Utah or in Utah, there's these caves that I've been in like probably 20 times where you could just kind of like go yourself and wiggle around and they're really tight little caves. And there was this part called the birth canal that I went into where you literally just go through this tiny little canal with your flashlight and you can't move at all until you get all the way through. And then you can turn around and come back. It's like one of the scariest things I've ever done and probably like 15 years ago, a guy got stuck in it. And there's a whole
1:09:34 Mike Smith? The worst.
1:09:35 Wes Larson? Um, documentary about it. He got stuck, I think in the birth canal or one of these other little chutes and was stuck upside down and just died a slow death in these caves.
1:09:45 Jeff Larson? Yeah, like they, like hell could get to him, but not get him out.
1:09:49 Wes Larson? Couldn't get him out. Yeah. And so he just died and they closed the caves afterward. I mean, they like blew up the entrance or something, but that one, anytime I think about it, I get the shakes, the willies.
1:10:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:10:01 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:10:01 Jeff Larson? Uh, I'm gonna go with Robert Landsberg and Reed Blackburn.
1:10:06 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:10:06 Jeff Larson? They were two photographers with Mount St. Helen.
1:10:11 Wes Larson? Hmm.
1:10:11 Jeff Larson? And when Mount St. Helen blew up, especially Landsberg, he was famous for like not even trying to get away from it. He like knew it. He was toast.
1:10:20 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:10:21 Jeff Larson? And he just used his body to protect his camera. So at least like his images of the eruption would make it.
1:10:28 Wes Larson? Yeah. That's cool.
1:10:30 Mike Smith? Yeah. I'm gonna go, it's, it's really similar actually to just kind of like a crazy sequence of events of consisting of incompetency and poor judgment and everything, kind of like the USS Indianapolis, but the Chernobyl disaster.
1:10:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:10:45 Mike Smith? Where there was just like poor communication, people trying to like save themselves, cover their own backs. And just for so many people there, when they realized how dangerous the situation was, it was already just way too late. You know, like anyone that was anywhere near there or like on that bridge witnessing, I don't know how accurate that mini series was, but yeah, just melting.
1:11:08 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:11:09 Mike Smith? Melting while still alive.
1:11:11 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:11:11 Mike Smith? The worst.
1:11:12 Wes Larson? All right. Uh, next category, I want you both to pitch me an idea for a show for Shark Week and I'll pick the better one.
1:11:20 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I was thinking kind of like all the sharks, they get points for um taking pictures of different types of sharks.
1:11:27 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:11:28 Jeff Larson? I think like season two, it should be you get points for how many sharks you touch with your skin.
1:11:36 Wes Larson? Like I already have an idea of who's I'm going.
1:11:39 Mike Smith? I'm gonna have to do some real bad work.
1:11:42 Jeff Larson? Maybe or like in that shark week where it got canceled where the great white went in the cage and broke stuff.
1:11:48 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:11:49 Jeff Larson? That's just the whole show is like different sharks in a cage with someone.
1:11:54 Wes Larson? Like breaking into glass cages with people. All right. Don't touch sharks, by the way.
1:12:00 Mike Smith? So mine's a little more like a sport than a reality TV show. I want to do like a Nathan's hot dog eating contest, but for sharks. You know, there's like the big bait balls and the sharks like take passes through. If there was some way to keep track of how many fish each of these sharks was eating, you know?
1:12:17 Jeff Larson? Yeah, like a fat bear week for sharks.
1:12:20 Mike Smith? Exactly. And you could like keep track of like which shark shows up first, how many passes through the feeding frenzy.
1:12:26 Wes Larson? We could kill a bunch of whales. Oh. And leave the whales out there floating. And then at the end of the week, whichever sharks have eaten the most of the whale.
1:12:35 Mike Smith? That's such a good idea, Wes.
1:12:37 Wes Larson? Okay, pick my idea.
1:12:39 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:12:39 Wes Larson? No, Mike, you win. Sorry, Jeff. I don't want people touching sharks. All right, uh, this was kind of.
1:12:45 Jeff Larson? Which one of us three do you think would make it longest on the USS Indianapolis?
1:12:50 Wes Larson? Oh, that's a good question. Huh?
1:12:53 Jeff Larson? I'm saying Mike dies first.
1:12:54 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:12:55 Jeff Larson? Just because he's such a good swimmer, I think he'll try to swim too much and the sharks will get him.
1:12:59 Wes Larson? I think he burns up on the ship or drowns because he doesn't want to get out of bed.
1:13:03 Mike Smith? Yeah, my, my door is closed and locked and like it's gonna be long.
1:13:07 Jeff Larson? He doesn't notice the torpedo.
1:13:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:10 Mike Smith? I think Jeff is surviving the longest because he, I think he's the most, has the most mental fortitude.
1:13:15 Wes Larson? I would agree.
1:13:16 Mike Smith? He can just turn his brain off and be like, this isn't whatever.
1:13:19 Jeff Larson? I may be like the least polite and like least to set. Well, actually Wes is pretty good at not listening to authority. So I feel like if like someone tried to pull rank and be like, you can't be on this raft, Wes would be like, no.
1:13:33 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:13:34 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:13:34 Mike Smith? Right.
1:13:36 Jeff Larson? So I don't know.
1:13:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:13:37 Jeff Larson? But I wouldn't worry about like being polite. I'd get on a raft.
1:13:41 Wes Larson? I think Jeff's mental like protection would be the biggest tool. So I would vote Jeff too.
1:13:47 Mike Smith? Right.
1:13:47 Wes Larson? Yeah. I think all three of us at this point would know what to do around these sharks, which I just want to remind people, if you do find yourself in the open ocean and there's sharks around, the main thing is just staying as calm as possible. So not splashing, not looking like prey, like thrashing in the water or anything. If the shark does come in close to you, if there is something you can keep in between you and the shark, that's great. And like Dan mentioned, if you just keep facing that shark, especially underwater, and even swim toward it, like we've talked about with like mountain lions and stuff too, that isn't what prey does for them. That is very scary to a shark and that might be enough to convince it that you're not prey.
1:14:28 Wes Larson? So really, the main thing is just kind of staying in a dominant position with these sharks.
1:14:33 Jeff Larson? Keep your wits about you.
1:14:34 Wes Larson? Keeping your wits about you and not splashing at all.
1:14:37 Jeff Larson? I think Mike might've died from the kamikaze pilot because you'd be eating all those beans.
1:14:44 Mike Smith? Scraping them off behind the.
1:14:45 Jeff Larson? Well, like you'd be in the beans and then the pilot hits and you explode with the beans.
1:14:51 Mike Smith? I do like those beans. Jeff, have you heard the story of the beans, Wes?
1:14:57 Wes Larson? I told it.
1:14:58 Mike Smith? No, my beans.
1:14:59 Wes Larson? No, I don't think so.
1:15:00 Mike Smith? I left my beans in Jeff's fridge and he threw them away like immediately. And I came back the next day thinking they were still gonna be there.
1:15:08 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:08 Mike Smith? Wow.
1:15:09 Jeff Larson? Think they were in there for like six months.
1:15:11 Mike Smith? Great. Were they white northern beans, I think is what they were.
1:15:15 Wes Larson? You guys are even for the lasagna.
1:15:16 Jeff Larson? I probably still have them.
1:15:17 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:15:19 Jeff Larson? He just refuses to take them back.
1:15:22 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right. It's kind of a bummer of a story, so I just wanted to ask you guys to something you're stoked about this week.
1:15:29 Mike Smith? I've been getting really into, so I think we've brought this up before, how none of us are traditionally the biggest fans of the character of Superman. Maybe we've thought he's a little boring and bland and flat. And maybe that's true. But I've been reading a lot of comics, like the most highly recommended ones. And I think a lot of people thought the message of this newest movie was a little saccharine and simple, where it's just like, be kind, be good, like, treat people well. And I think fundamentally, that is what his character is. But like, just having it in the context of like, the most powerful, one of the most intelligent, the most, the man with the most resources chooses to use his power for good.
1:16:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:16:09 Mike Smith? And we just don't see enough people in places of power, whose main goal in life is to like, help other people, you know?
1:16:17 Wes Larson? I agree.
1:16:18 Mike Smith? So I just, that's something I've been really excited to kind of get deeper into is, yeah.
1:16:23 Wes Larson? Me and Jeff are going on a week-long float trip, and I brought some of your comics, so I can read them.
1:16:29 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:16:29 Wes Larson? I'm excited to also get into that. Jerf?
1:16:32 Jeff Larson? Is that your pick?
1:16:33 Wes Larson? No.
1:16:34 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's probably my pick. It's just, you know, I'm in Montana right now, and haven't really fished much this year, so it's been kind of getting to a point where I just can't take it anymore. I have to fish.
1:16:47 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:16:48 Jeff Larson? So I'm excited to go fishing for a week straight.
1:16:51 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's gonna be great. The thing I'm stoked about, we are planning a couple more trips. We're doing Thailand and China next fall sometime.
1:16:59 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah.
1:17:00 Wes Larson? And I, the more I look at the itineraries, the more stoked I get about them. We're gonna see pandas in China. I'm really excited about that. And just so everyone knows, with those trips, we do tend to, to give our, our people on Patreon first crack at that. So if you are, if you are thinking you would love to go on a trip with us at some point, it's another good reason to join our Patreon, is, that is where people hear about them first. Okay, a couple listener questions. A few days ago, we asked for questions specifically about the Indianapolis or sharks. We got some more good ones. So this first one is from TresD016. And he, uh, they say, "If Jeff is elected president, what will be his first act to protect sharks?"
1:17:43 Jeff Larson? I mean, my politics is sharks.
1:17:46 Wes Larson? Yeah, but what's your policy?
1:17:49 Jeff Larson? I don't know if I've really gotten too deep into that.
1:17:52 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:17:53 Jeff Larson? Probably, I'll probably elect you. I'll probably put you in charge of that.
1:17:57 Wes Larson? You sound like a politician.
1:17:59 Jeff Larson? Like, I'll put you in charge.
1:18:00 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:18:00 Mike Smith? Surround yourself with confident people.
1:18:02 Jeff Larson? I got a shark guy. That guy knows more about sharks than anyone. He's gonna take care of these sharks.
1:18:07 Wes Larson? I would take care of them, but I don't know more than anyone.
1:18:10 Mike Smith? So what we're asking really is, what is Wes's first policy?
1:18:13 Jeff Larson? Shark Man Dan. I'll bring him over.
1:18:15 Wes Larson? Shark Man Dan. My first policy would be to completely outlaw the, like, transport, traffic, eating, anything, any part, any shark, not allowed.
1:18:25 Jeff Larson? And then, once you're done with that, you're fired, so that I can start my own panda island in Hawaii.
1:18:31 Wes Larson? Okay.
1:18:32 Jeff Larson? Because you wouldn't allow that.
1:18:33 Wes Larson? I wouldn't allow that. Yeah. All right. Uh, next question. This is from Yachata's, Yachata underscore. What's your favorite sub? I like Italian. Favorite subs?
1:18:46 Jeff Larson? Italian sub's good. The spicy Italian.
1:18:48 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:18:49 Jeff Larson? Uh, I mean, the one when it's the best is my favorite is a Philly cheesesteak.
1:18:55 Wes Larson? Or meatball. You like meatball quite a bit, don't you?
1:18:57 Jeff Larson? I like cheaper meatballs better than nice meatballs.
1:19:00 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:19:00 Jeff Larson? Like, nice meatball subs, the meatballs are too big, but if you go to Subway, the meatballs are perfect size.
1:19:07 Mike Smith? Yeah. Uh, sub's a weird one. I mean, I love chopped cheese sandwiches, but I don't know if that's really quite a sub. I don't even know if a Philly cheesesteak is technically a sub.
1:19:17 Wes Larson? It's more of like a hoagie, probably. Yeah.
1:19:18 Mike Smith? So I'm, I'm, I recuse myself.
1:19:21 Wes Larson? All right.
1:19:21 Jeff Larson? I love a ninety-nine at Jersey Mike's.
1:19:24 Wes Larson? Jersey Mike's. Yeah, I like their, um, pig one. It's, it's mostly like.
1:19:29 Jeff Larson? Do you get it Mike's way?
1:19:30 Wes Larson? I don't think so. Yeah. What's that mean?
1:19:34 Jeff Larson? Uh, I think it just means like extra sauce, but then there's like a TikTok thing where they make them put on the sauce until the bread's just like wet.
1:19:46 Wes Larson? I like, uh, I like an Italian, actually. That's my favorite sub. All right.
1:19:50 Jeff Larson? Really?
1:19:50 Wes Larson? Yeah. I do.
1:19:51 Jeff Larson? Hmm. Do you like Italians?
1:19:53 Wes Larson? Yeah, I love Italians.
1:19:55 Jeff Larson? Really?
1:19:55 Wes Larson? Yeah. Like the people?
1:19:57 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:19:57 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:19:57 Mike Smith? Which one's your favorite?
1:19:58 Wes Larson? Forget about it.
1:19:59 Mike Smith? What? That's like American Italian.
1:20:01 Wes Larson? Yeah, but I like Italian Italians, too.
1:20:04 Mike Smith? What do they say?
1:20:05 Wes Larson? You.
1:20:06 Mike Smith? Ni amor.
1:20:06 Wes Larson? Forget about it.
1:20:07 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
1:20:08 Wes Larson? I don't know.
1:20:10 Jeff Larson? I mean, in the last tennis tournament, you
1:20:12 Mike Smith? Don't touch my spaghetti.
1:20:13 Jeff Larson? You bet on Alcatraz.
1:20:15 Wes Larson? Alcatraz. Yeah, he's not Italian singer is Italian. I'm not saying that in every way I love Italians, but I do like Italians. All right. Would you guys rather be, this is from cam dot stack? Would you rather be one of the Indianapolis boys or the soccer team stranded in the Andes?
1:20:33 Mike Smith? Ooh.
1:20:34 Wes Larson? I'm gonna pick the Andes because they didn't have animals attacking them. Like, I know theirs was colder and probably, I don't know, in some ways worse, but I'm picking the Andes.
1:20:43 Mike Smith? How quickly were those people discovered?
1:20:46 Wes Larson? That was the big difference. It was like months for them.
1:20:49 Mike Smith? Oh.
1:20:49 Wes Larson? And Indianapolis was like days, but
1:20:52 Jeff Larson? So five days, but it's way worse or?
1:20:55 Wes Larson? Months, but yeah.
1:20:57 Mike Smith? I might go, I mean.
1:20:59 Wes Larson? And she, they said soccer team, but it was a rugby team.
1:21:01 Jeff Larson? Can I choose both? I want both.
1:21:04 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:21:05 Jeff Larson? Hardest path for me.
1:21:07 Wes Larson? Let's see.
1:21:07 Mike Smith? You want to get be involved in both?
1:21:09 Wes Larson? Seventy two days.
1:21:10 Jeff Larson? I mean.
1:21:10 Wes Larson? For them, for the Uruguayan rugby team.
1:21:13 Jeff Larson? The harder life you have, the better you turn out. I want both.
1:21:17 Mike Smith? Yeah. I just feel like it'd be crazy after hearing about this story for three hours to go with.
1:21:23 Wes Larson? Sixteen, sixteen out of the forty five were rescued, but a lot of those people died in the crash. So, anyway.
1:21:31 Jeff Larson? You think it's cooler to survive a plane crash or a boat being torpedoed?
1:21:36 Wes Larson? I think the boat, I think like the Indianapolis story is the best story you could ever tell.
1:21:41 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:21:41 Wes Larson? Have you guys watched Society of the Snow yet?
1:21:43 Mike Smith? No.
1:21:44 Wes Larson? That's such a good movie.
1:21:45 Mike Smith? Hmm.
1:21:46 Wes Larson? I've watched that one. It'll give you a better insight into the rugby team. Okay, uh, this one is from Focus twenty two Photography. Do sharks lose interest in prey after a while? Would they just keep picking them off if the Navy hadn't have rescued them? It, I think in this situation with these pelagic sharks, these open ocean sharks, they would just stick with them for a very long time. And they probably did with a lot of the corpses.
1:22:10 Jeff Larson? Probably new sharks coming in each day.
1:22:12 Wes Larson? I don't think they ever would have been free from sharks, but other sharks do lose interest for sure. Like if you're out in the ocean, there's a good chance sharks aren't even gonna have interest in you. Like Dan said, there's so many videos now of people swimming with great whites passing directly underneath them and not even recognizing the person. Or like caring about them at all. So often sharks have no interest in us whatsoever. But these particular sharks probably wouldn't lose interest. Alright.
1:22:41 Jeff Larson? I agree.
1:22:42 Wes Larson? Great. Uh, this is from B. Cortina 23. Would you rather have a shark head or shark body? You keep your other half.
1:22:51 Mike Smith? Head.
1:22:52 Wes Larson? Head.
1:22:52 Jeff Larson? Body.
1:22:53 Wes Larson? Explain.
1:22:54 Jeff Larson? Well, I mean, you guys aren't kissing anyone. And, uh, I'll be so.
1:22:59 Wes Larson? Comes down to kissing with you.
1:23:00 Jeff Larson? I'll be so fast at swimming. You guys will be slow at swimming.
1:23:04 Wes Larson? Yeah. Uh, you're gonna be bad at walking.
1:23:06 Jeff Larson? What are you gonna do with a shark head?
1:23:08 Wes Larson? Chomp stuff? Eat hot dogs, beat Joey Chestnut?
1:23:13 Mike Smith? You didn't think of that, did you? What part of the body would you? What part of the body would you say the gills are on? Is that a head or a body?
1:23:20 Wes Larson? I'd say that's head.
1:23:21 Mike Smith? Okay, cuz I don't want to live it. Oh, shoot.
1:23:24 Wes Larson? Well, but I think.
1:23:25 Mike Smith? It seems like either way, you're gonna have to live in the water.
1:23:26 Wes Larson? I think you have both. You have gills and lungs if you're a shark head and human body.
1:23:30 Jeff Larson? I think I could claim the gills as part of the body.
1:23:33 Wes Larson? Let's say we both have gills and lungs.
1:23:36 Mike Smith? Okay. Yeah, shark head. I wanna live on land. It seems like you'd primarily have to be in the water if you got a shark body.
1:23:43 Wes Larson? Yeah, who was in Harry Potter that had the shark head? That was sick.
1:23:46 Jeff Larson? Crom.
1:23:46 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:23:47 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:23:47 Wes Larson? Cronk. Cronk. No, that's.
1:23:49 Jeff Larson? Grom.
1:23:50 Wes Larson? Grock.
1:23:52 Jeff Larson? Isn't it Crom?
1:23:53 Mike Smith? Victor Crum?
1:23:54 Wes Larson? Crum. I thought it was Crum, yeah.
1:23:55 Jeff Larson? Victor Crum, okay, yeah.
1:23:57 Wes Larson? Yeah, K R U M.
1:23:58 Jeff Larson? Crum, crum, crum, crum.
1:24:01 Mike Smith? Grand.
1:24:02 Wes Larson? Grand.
1:24:04 Wes Larson? Yeah, okay.
1:24:04 Jeff Larson? He had more than just a shark head, though.
1:24:06 Wes Larson? No, it was just a head.
1:24:07 Jeff Larson? He used it to swim. Or no, you're right, because he's using it to breathe.
1:24:12 Wes Larson? Yes, he hears this. It's just his head. Oh, and he had the dorsal fin too, but his arms are human. That's pretty sick.
1:24:18 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's pretty good.
1:24:19 Mike Smith? That's what I want. I want the Crum special.
1:24:22 Wes Larson? Alright. R. Martinez's X. What is something the average person can do to help protect sharks? It's a great question. Uh, I think the biggest thing an average person can do to help protect sharks is be really conscious about your seafood decisions. So, only buy seafood from verified sustainable sources. The brand that we rep, Wild Alaska, I really looked into them. There's stores that only sell sustainable seafood. There's restaurants that only sell it. So you can do your research and just make sure you're not eating stuff that is fished unsustainably. And, and that whole like. Those classifications, they look into like how they're catching fish. If there's lots of bycatch,
1:25:04 Wes Larson? if they're catching fish they're not supposed to be. So a lot of sharks get caught by these operations on accident and then they're just killed and wasted. And then some are targeted too. So you just gotta be smart about it.
1:25:16 Jeff Larson? Avoid it altogether.
1:25:18 Wes Larson? That's also an option.
1:25:19 Jeff Larson? That's like probably best thing anyone can do, but if you're going to eat seafood, do it sustainably.
1:25:25 Wes Larson? Yeah. I, with the one, with the one that we've been running ads for, I talked to friends about it and they, that are in fisheries and they said they're really good. So I do eat that. Outside of that, I don't really eat any seafood because it's just, it's so problematic. But, all right. I think that's it for listener questions. That leads really well into our last little bit, which is about conservation. Again, we've talked about this in all these episodes so far. Sharks are, as you know, as a group of species, these are some of the animals that are at most risk on the planet right now. People don't really like them often. And because of that, people don't really care when they're being slaughtered wholesale.
1:26:06 Wes Larson? And the shark finning industry, bycatch, targeted sharks, people that are just commercial fishing for them. Sometimes it's wreaking havoc on their populations. They're, they've seen huge drops in populations like oceanic whitetips and they do a lot of good for the ocean in general and they're beautiful, important animals. So we really need to do better. Jeff for president. Anything to add?
1:26:31 Mike Smith? Love sharks. I love them.
1:26:33 Wes Larson? We really do. I feel like when we've gone scuba diving together, the thing that we want to see is sharks. Like that is like the highlight. And it's not just because there's an element of danger. It's because they are so incredibly beautiful. When you get underwater with them, the way they swim, the way they're just like, their presence underwater is entrancing. And they're amazing, just incredible animals. So we love sharks here.
1:26:58 Jeff Larson? I think if I saw like a hot mermaid underwater while I was scuba diving, like aerial type of a mermaid, I'd still think the shark was more beautiful.
1:27:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, I probably agree. I probably wouldn't think it's more sexy, but I think it's more beautiful. Yeah.
1:27:14 Mike Smith? Okay.
1:27:15 Wes Larson? What about you, Mike?
1:27:16 Mike Smith? Well, I'm like, yeah.
1:27:18 Jeff Larson? Break the tie?
1:27:20 Mike Smith? Shoot. Wes got me thinking about sharks in a whole new way last episode when he was talking about sticking his finger in one.
1:27:29 Mike Smith? So I don't know. Let's revisit this in the next episode.
1:27:32 Wes Larson? End this series on that.
1:27:37 Wes Larson? But we're going to. All right. Thanks, everyone for listening. This was part three of the USS Indianapolis story. I'm really glad we finally did it. I learned so much. And if any of you had, I know we've already had people telling us that they had relatives that were involved with this. And I have so much respect for them and what they went through. And yeah, it's just amazing what people can do to survive. So I'm glad we got to tell it.
1:28:04 Mike Smith? You did great, Wes.
1:28:05 Wes Larson? Thanks.
1:28:05 Mike Smith? It was amazing to learn all of that.
1:28:08 Jeff Larson? Thank you to all the sailors of the USS Indianapolis.
1:28:13 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:28:13 Jeff Larson? For giving us this story to tell.
1:28:15 Wes Larson? I don't know if any of them are still around, to be honest, but they might, they might be.
1:28:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Thanks for listening.
1:28:22 Wes Larson? All right. We'll see you guys later. Love you.
1:28:23 Jeff Larson? Love you.
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