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The USS Indianapolis (and Iron Man 3)
The USS Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser that in July 1945 delivered crucial components (including what was then half the world’s supply of enriched uranium) to the Philippines for the construction of the atomic bomb. Four days later it was torpedoed and went down in open water halfway between Guam and the Philippines. 300 men went down with the ship and the other 900 were left in shark-infested waters waiting days for rescue because their distress calls–sent in the twelve minutes before the ship went under–were not received by Navy command.
On the fourth day they happened to be spotted from the air by a routine patrol, which radioed for all nearby vessels to rescue the men seen in the water. A seaplane in the vicinity was the first to arrive and started dropping rafts and supplies to the survivors. But when they saw men being attacked by sharks, they LANDED IN OPEN WATER ON THE OCEAN in defiance of standing orders, and taxiied around the area gathering stragglers into the plane. When they ran out of room inside they started lashing men to the wings; they wound up damaging the plane so badly that it never flew again and had to be scuttled–but they saved 56 men until ships could arrive to pick them up.
(If, at this point, you are thinking “this sounds like something Tony Stark did in Iron Man 3″: hold that thought.)
The first ship on the scene arrived in the dark, and stopped well short of the debris to keep from injuring survivors in the water. They took aboard the men from the seaplane, and turned their largest searchlight to the sky–making themselves a target for any bombers in the vicnity–to serve as a beacon for other rescuers. That searchlight was the first that most of the scattered survivors knew of rescue arriving.
All told, 317 men survived–two thirds of those who were left after the sinking succumbed to dehydration, exposure, and shark attacks in those four days while they waited for rescue. One of the survivors was the ship’s captain, Charles McVay.
Unlike any other captain of a ship lost in the entire history of the US Navy, McVay wound up facing a court martial, accused of failing to take evasive action and putting his ship in danger. He maintained that he wasn’t at fault and instead asked why it took so long for his men to be rescued; the Navy insisted that no distress call was ever sent. He was convicted but his sentence was remitted so that he could return to duty; nonetheless he was blamed by many of the families of the men who died. He never shed the guilt (and, no doubt, the horror of being one of the men who spent those days in shark-infested waters). McVay committed suicide in 1968 with his Navy-issue revolver; he was found holding a toy sailor in his other hand. In 1975, President Gerald Ford refused to honor McVay with a Presidential Unit Citation despite the ship’s crucial role in the construction of the atomic bomb.
In 1996, an 11-year-old boy named Hunter Scott who heard about the disaster from Jaws started researching the sinking, including interviewing 150 survivors. By then 50 years had passed and documents had been declassified revealing that distress calls WERE received, by not one station but THREE. One station’s commander was drunk, another had ordered his men not to disturb him, and the third thought it was a Japanese hoax. Additionally US military intelligence had cracked Japanese codes by then; they both knew of the sinking from the Japanese side, but did not dispatch a rescue, and knew prior to the sinking that there were subs in the vicinity, but didn’t warn McVay.
Hunter Scott wound up testifying before Congress with survivors of the Indianapolis, and won an exoneration for Captain McVay. A book was written about his efforts to uncover the truth…
And in 2011 Warner Bros bought the movie rights to Hunter’s story… with Robert Downey Jr Who Does Not Know He Isn’t Really Tony Stark attached as a producer.
So in conclusion Hunter Scott is real life Harley Keener and the seaplane rescue of survivors from the USS Indianapolis totally inspired the barrel of monkeys rescue and YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.