The Sharp Side

I’m a bit more alert to sub-texts than I used to be. The first time I saw Jaws I thought it was a terrific entertainment but no more than that.

Seeing it again recently I was struck by the Hiroshima references. They occur in that scene on the boat at night where Robert Shaw (as Quint, the grizzled old sea dog) and Richard Dreyfuss (as Hooper, the young oceanologist) show off their scars to each other. Roy Scheider, playing police chief Brody, asks what the mark on Shaw’s arm is. Shaw gruffly says that it was a tattoo he’s had removed. Dreyfuss, who is mildly inebriated, quips that he can guess what it said: “Mother”. Dreyfuss roars with merriment at his own joke. Shaw goes very quiet and says that the tattoo was of the USS Indianapolis. Dreyfuss, who understands the significance, is awed and suddenly very serious and respectful. Brody has never heard of the Indianapolis and asks “What happened?”

What follows is a monologue by Robert Shaw. For me it’s the most powerful scene in the whole movie as Shaw tells the story of the sinking of the Indianapolis:

“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief… Just delivered the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by looking from the dorsal to the tail… Well we didn’t know that our bomb mission had been so secret no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue fir a week. Very first light, chief, sharks came cruising, so we formed ourselves into tight groups… you know, kind of like old squares in a battle like you see in a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man and then you start pounding and hollering and screaming. Sometimes the shark goes, sometimes he wouldn’t go away… I don’t know how many sharks. Maybe a thousand, I don’t know how many men, they averaged six an hour…
Noon the fifth day, Mr Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low… and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down, starts to pick us up…
So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out and the sharks took the rest, June 29th 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

It’s a brilliantly choreographed scene, almost Shakespearean in its intensity and in its shifts of tone. Everything clicks perfectly – the camerawork, the dialogue, the soundtrack, the acting. Shaw’s performance at this point is dazzling. A lesser actor would have played it sombre and tragic, but Shaw tells the story with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face. The abbreviated sentences hint at the emotions churning below the surface of Shaw’s composure; the chopped off dialogue is brilliantly appropriate to the tale being told. The thudding repetition of the word “chief” is like a drum beat, and it becomes almost mocking. On land, chief Brody is an important man, in control of law and order. Out on the ocean he’s an inexperienced ignorant landlubber, subordinate to the expertise of the two men he’s with.

But as I watched and listened I thought: is this true? Like chief Brody I’d never heard of the USS Indianapolis. Is Shaw’s monologue rooted in historical truth or is it just a fiction?

The answer turns out to be though there really was a USS Indianapolis which sank with massive loss of life, Spielberg alters the historical reality in various ways. The USS Indianapolis did not deliver the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, because the bomb was not assembled in the USA but on the captured Japanese island of Tinian. The Indianapolis sailed from the USA and on July 26 1945 delivered two important parts of the Little Boy bomb – the gun and bullet (as they were called). But there were other components, which were delivered separately by air, including the three parts of the target assembly, the initiator and plutonium core. Little Boy was not ready until July 31. The full story is in Richard Rhodes’s excellent and authoritative book The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986).

After unloading its cargo at Tinian, the Indianapolis sailed on to Guam. From Guam it continued on towards its destination of Leyte in the Philippines, where the 1,196 combat troops it was carrying were to undergo training. It sailed unescorted, which was not unusual following the destruction of the Japanese surface fleet and airforce. At midnight on Sunday July 29 a Japanese submarine, mistaking it for a battleship, fired six torpedoes at the Indianapolis.

Is it true, as Quint says, that “our bomb mission had been so secret no distress signal had been sent”? Absolutely not. The torpedoes destroyed the ship’s power system; the radio officer was simply not able to send a distress signal.

The ship went down, but 850 men escaped. Most of the survivors had lifejackets. During the night 50 men died of their injuries. The survivors then spent three days and three nights afloat until on Thursday morning, 2 August 1945, a Navy plane spotted survivors, and a massive rescue operation began. There were 318 survivors.

Is it true that around 500 men were devoured alive by sharks? No. Some were killed by sharks, but others died in a variety of ways. Some of the survivors were so thirsty they drank seawater, became deranged, then comatose, and drowned. Some men hallucinated and removed their lifejackets, believing they could see an island, or the outline of the Indianapolis just below the surface, or fountains of fresh water. They also drowned. Some survivors believed that there were Japanese infiltrators among them. Fights broke out. Men frenziedly stabbed each other to death with their knives.

According to one detailed analysis of the events surrounding the loss of the Indianapolis:

“A great deal of attention has been given in various
books and articles to shark attacks on the survivors of the
Indianapolis. While some men were attacked and killed by
sharks as they floated helplessly in the water, most writings
place more emphasis on the fact that sharks attacked the re-
mains of those who had already expired. While no one will
ever know for sure, the latter observation appears more
plausible.”

The loss of the ship should have been known at once but because of gross negligence (not hush hush secrecy) no action was taken.

The truth about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis was therefore significantly different to how Spielberg represents it (most overtly when Quint is one month out with his date of the sinking). His terrifying image of 800 men being slowly eaten by 1,000 sharks is nonsense.

Why does Spielberg exaggerate and twist the historical truth? Partly, I suppose, because it makes a great shark scare story even scarier for being supposedly true. And partly for ideological reasons. Spielberg wants to remind his audience of the sacrifices made by US servicemen to win the war. The grisly horror of Shaw’s shark story distracts us from that other reality represented by Hiroshima. Hiroshima becomes just a word signifying nothing more than the ultimate victory of the Allies. History in all its complex ugliness and horror is smoothed out and simplified. The reality of military incompetence which left the survivors needlessly stranded in the ocean for three days and nights is airbrushed from the record. The horror of deranged American troops killing each other is excised.

None of which bodes well, I think, for Spielberg’s forthcoming movie about the Munich Olympics of 1972, when eleven Israeli athletes died as a result of an attempt by a fringe Palestinian group to hold them as hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Spielberg has been reported as calling the episode “a defining moment in the modern history of the Middle East” (Guardian, July 10 2005). In reality it was of little historical significance for either Palestinians or Israelis.

Most of the movie (which may be called Vengeance, or, possibly, Munich) will apparently portray how Mossad agents carred out political assassinations across Europe and the Middle East in revenge for the deaths of the athletes. Mohammad Daoud, the only Palestinian left alive who had any involvement with the Munich hostage-taking, told the Guardian last week (8 September) that the Mossad killings “carried out vengeance against people who had nothing to do with the Munich attack, people who were merely politically active or had ties with the PLO. If a film fails to make these points, it will be unjust in terms of truth and history."