SURVIVED SINKING OF USS INDIANAPOLIS
Maurice Glenn Bell was a native of Golden, Mississippi, and grew up in the northeast corner of the state. As World War II commenced, he traveled around the country with his father on a construction crew that built army camps. In early 1943, Bell went to Mobile, Alabama, where he obtained employment in a shipyard as an electrician’s helper. Knowing that he was about to be drafted he enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1943 because, he said, he did not want to sleep in a hole in the ground.
In September 1943, Bell was assigned as a gunner on the heavy cruiser USS INDIANAPOLIS, flagship for the 5th Fleet and participated in the invasions of Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu and Iwo Jima, as well as the naval battle of the Philippine Sea. During March 1945, INDIANAPOLIS was severely damaged by a kamikaze attack and was sent to California for repairs. On July 16, 1945, she headed back to the South Pacific bearing a top-secret cargo bound for the American air base on Tinian, a cargo that Bell reportedly personally helped to load. He later recalled, “There was all kinds of rumors on board ship about what we was delivering. There was one rumor that just flew all over the ship that we was delivering scented toilet paper to General MacArthur.” Unbeknown to the crew, the top-secret cargo was the atomic bomb which was later dropped on Japan. After delivering its cargo, INDIANAPOLIS sailed for the Philippines but on the night of July 30, 1945, the ship was unexpectedly struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58. The first torpedo blew away the bow and the second struck near amidships adjacent to a fuel tank and a powder magazine. The resulting explosion split the ship to the keel, knocked out all electric power and within twelve minutes she sank trapping approximately 300 sailors aboard.
Bell later said, “A few minutes after midnight, there was a loud explosion. It knocked me out of my bunk. I didn’t know what had happened and the first thing that went through my mind was that a boiler had blown up.” As INDIANAPOLIS sank, about 900 men abandoned ship. Bell remembered, “I estimate that I was about twenty-five to thirty feet in the air when I jumped. I put my foot against the side of the ship and pushed and started swimming, because I’d been told that the best thing to do is to get away from a ship, because as it went under it would create tremendous suction. So, as I pushed with my foot and started swimming, the ship just shot away from me as it was going under. The first thing that was so horrible was the fuel oil that covered the water. Every breath I took made me so sick I vomited everything I had in my stomach.”
Soon survivors were alone, scattered across the empty sea and they did what they could in the dark, tying together life rafts to fashion floating beds. Morning brought worse horrors, Bell recalled. “When daylight came, I looked around and all I could see was just the group that I was in. There was probably over a hundred men in that group to start with. Shortly after daybreak, somebody yelled out real loud, ’Sharks!’ And sure enough, there were sharks swimming all around us. And those sharks would swim around and all of a sudden they would dive in on us and start attacking guys. And you’d see them attack somebody just a few feet from you. And of course, they’d grab them and down they’d go and you’d never see that man again. All you would see then would be the water turning red around them. They attacked us every day, several times a day. Some of the sharks swam three or four feet from me, but none ever touched me. I stayed in the water for four days and five nights. A little over one hundred hours altogether, with nothing to eat or no fresh water to drink. Some of the guys just went completely out of their head. Didn’t even know where they was at. They would feel that cold water down at their feet and they’d dive down there and drink it, thinking they was back aboard ship and they’d come back up and say, ‘Come on down below. Come on down to the officer quarters, there’s water fountains down there with ice water all the time.”
Eventually a Navy plane on antisubmarine patrol spotted the survivors and a rescue effort brought 321 men to safety. Some 880 crewmen died. Bell remembered, “It just seems more like a dream sometimes. I wonder how I made it through that time. I tell everybody now that I was too sour for the sharks to eat.” Bell returned to the United States for discharge after the end of the war and settled in Mobile, Alabama, where he became very active in the American Legion, becoming a popular and moving speaker at schools and civic clubs, enthusiastically telling his story of fortitude and to give others hope and motivation, never to quit, always to have hope, to have faith. He retired from the Mobile County Public School System as a Maintenance Supervisor and died on December 4, 2009. He was survived by his wife of 65-years, three children, six grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. He was buried at Mobile Memorial Gardens in Mobile, Alabama.
Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)
