When the USS Indianapolis went down on July 30, 1945 right after midnight, 300 men sank with the ship.

The other 900 men were left stranded in the ocean to survive without food, water, or sun protection, and most of them without life rafts.

When the sun came up the next day, the men were discovered.  Not by rescuers… but by hungry sharks.

For the next 5 days before a rescue vessel arrived, a horror story in the Pacific came alive.  Once this jackpot of living flesh was found by the ocean’s starving predators, the shark attacks multiplied.  By the time a rescue crew finally found them, 579 men were dead from dehydration, starvation, sun exposure, drowning, or being devoured alive by sharks.

Ultimately, only 317 men survived to tell the tale.

“The day wore on and the sharks were around, hundreds of them. You’d hear guys scream, especially late in the afternoon. Seemed like the sharks were the worst late in the afternoon than they were during the day. Then they fed at night too. Everything would be quiet and then you’d hear somebody scream and you knew a shark had got him,” said survivor Woody Eugene James.

Click here to read the rest of his story.