Entertainment, TV, Television - Navy Times

Men recall horror as sharks closed in

LOS ANGELES — For the men of the USS Indianapolis everything disappeared in 12 minutes.

Two Japanese torpedoes tore into their cruiser during the Second World War, just after the crew had helped deliver an atomic bomb.

Of the 1,197 men onboard, 900 survived the torpedo blasts.

But the horror was just beginning. The survivors of the topedo attack would spend more than four days in the Philippine Sea, sometimes fighting off sharks. Two-thirds of the men would die. Only 316 were plucked from the water alive.

“This was declared the greatest naval disaster in history by Adm. Nimitz,” Harlan Twible says.

It was also a measure of the men who survived it. Twible and Michael Kuryla, now in their 80s, are featured in “Ocean of Fear,” a Discovery Channel documentary. Talking to the Television Critics Association, they showed an uncommon sense of calm.

“I got nothing against sharks,” Kuryla says. “We were in their territory. And that’s where a shark belongs, not us.”

That calmness may have been what saved them on July 30, 1945.

“The men out there, some of them would give up,” Kuryla says. “They didn’t think that they would survive ... I knew I was going to come out.”

Twible’s job was to get others to feel that way. He was a young officer, fresh from the Naval Academy.

“Being a leader means keeping people alive,” he says, “keeping them thinking in a positive direction.”

The trouble started, Kuryla says, because the ship didn’t have sonar or a destroyer escort. It was vulnerable to attack.

Afterward, many men were confident there would be a quick rescue. None was on the way.

An S.O.S. apparently didn’t make it through. Americans did intercept a Japanese report of sinking a ship, but dismissed it as an idle boast or a trap. The Indianapolis was late, but that was common in wartime. Warplanes were overhead but the ship sank so quickly there was little to be noticed.

So this became a long stay. Twible urged his men to keep together, alternate on shark watch, pound sharks whenever they came near and stay calm.

For some, calmness was natural. When Kuryla saw men throwing away money, he promptly gathered it.

“I told them, ‘When they pick me up, I’m going to go to church first and pray for all of them,’ ” he says. “And then I’m going to go to the tavern to get drunk. That’s what I did.”

Twible was also careful to keep his wallet. “I had a picture of my lovely wife and a four-leaf clover from my mother,” he says. “She said, ‘This will keep you through the war.’ ”

It did, he says. He still has his wife, Alice, some 62 years later. He had the wallet until he donated it to an Indianapolis museum this spring.

Twible had struggled to keep his men safe and sane. After more than four days, they were spotted from a low-flying plane. A Navy transport ship, the USS Register, retrieved the survivors.

For Kuryla, the war was over.

“I was ready to go out to sea again,” he says. “And the doctor gave me a medical discharge and said, ‘Mike, go home. Find yourself a gal. Get married and raise a family.’

”So that’s what I did. No sharks.“

For Twible, there was more ahead. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal; he saw new efforts to teach sailors about sharks.

”They developed shark repellents and all those other things that go along with it,“ Twible says. ”But the main thing was that they instilled in the men the idea that they had to stay together.“

The story seemed to fade until the Navy declassified reports. Steven Spielberg heard about the Indianapolis. He added that to his 1975 ”Jaws,“ having one character give an account of survivors’ terror.

Hesitantly, these two survivors saw ”Jaws“ with their families. ”I ended up on the top of the seat when the sharks came out of the water,“ Kuryla says. ”It kind of ran some chills through me.“

Good things came from the film, Twible says. There was a fresh interest in World War II and the Indianapolis. Fresh studies, he says, ”led to a lot of wonderful things like the exoneration of our captain.“

New studies show that sharks weren’t the main reason for the almost 900 deaths, says producer Phil Craig.

”(There) may only be a couple of dozen who were actually killed by sharks,“ he says. ”A lot of these men were ... facing thirst, exposure, dehydration. That took more lives than the sharks.“

On the tube:

What: ”Ocean of Fear: The Worst Shark Attack Ever“

When: 9-11 p.m. Sunday, July 29.

Where: Discovery Channel. This is its 20th annual Shark Week. Shark films start at 9 a.m. Sunday and continue through Aug. 4. Most films are reruns, but there will be new ones at 9 p.m. each day.

-Did you know?: ”Ocean of Fear“ airs one day prior to the 62nd anniversary of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.

On the Web:

www.discovery.com/exp/indianapolis/indianapolis.html, Discovery Channel’s site on the event.