by Peter Nelson
Few of the men who went into the water after the ship sank had anything with them to drink. The men with severe burns would have become dehydrated from their injuries, since the chief function of the skin is to keep fluids in and everything else out, and fluids leak out where the skin is damaged. Third-degree burns ooze lymph fluid, a yellowish substance that is essentially blood without the red blood cells. Lymph fluids can in some cases dry to form a seal over a burn wound, but they won’t do that in water.
The pressure of the water alone can cause dehydration because water pressure increases as depth increases. The pressure a man treading water feels below his waist is greater than the pressure he feels above the waist. That pressure squeezes the blood from the legs and forces it back up into the torso, where once again the brain senses excess fluid levels in the core. It’s the same reason some people feel the urge to urinate when they swim in a lake or a swimming pool.
Without fresh water to drink, the survivors experienced unimaginable thirst. First your mouth turns to cotton. Your saliva turns thick and bitter, until it disappears altogether. You become aware of your tongue as a fat dry thing barricading your air passage. Your throat dries out until you can’t talk, and you feel a massive lump in your windpipe, forcing you to swallow again and again, and every swallow is painful, but the lump won’t go away. Without tears in your tear ducts, your eyelids begin to crack, and you might weep blood. The lump in your throat grows as your air passage swells up, until you feel like you’re drowning. You can’t breathe. The sun cracks your lips, but passing your tongue over them does no good. The skin around your mouth and nose pulls back and shrivels. Your lungs rattle when you inhale. Severe dehydration feels like every cell in your body is crying out for water, largely because every cell in your body truly is. All the normal metabolic processes continue to function as best they can, each cell taking in oxygen and metabolizing it to produce waste products, which the body then has to get rid of by producing urine in the kidneys. Without an intake of fresh water, the body essentially begins to drink from itself. It wouldn’t help for a man to be overweight because there’s very little water in fat. The kidneys have to keep functioning to flush the toxins in the body, so they take water from wherever they can find it.
The cellular craving for water affects the mind as well. The cells in the brain need water to function just like any other cell in the body. Mineral deficiencies and chemical imbalances created by the buildup of toxins and waste products short-circuit the electrical activity in the brain and can cause hallucinations at worst and poor judgment at best, a lack of reason or temporary insanity. The men in the water suffered a variety of delusions. Some believed that the water at their feet had to be fresh water because it was colder than the water nearer the surface, and that it would be safe to dive down and take a drink, as long as the water they drank was cold. Others came to believe that the Indianapolis had sunk in a very shallow place in the ocean and that she was just a few feet below them, with plenty of fresh water still on board for anybody who wanted to dive down and get it. Many believed they saw sources of water in the distance, islands with streams and waterfalls, even hula girls in grass skirts offering them cool drinks. Still others believed they could hold seawater in their cupped hands for a few minutes until the salt evaporated and they could drink what remained, when in fact just the opposite was true—the water in their hands would become saltier as the potable water evaporated. Some men thought they could just hold a little water in their mouths without swallowing it, and that maybe that would satisfy them. As one day turned to two, then three, then four, many found it harder and harder to resist, until they finally succumbed to the temptation and took deep drafts of salt water, expecting a great quenching and blessed relief.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. The result of drinking salt water is hypernatremia, an excess of salt in the body. It’s something like pouring gasoline on a fire to put it out, because a dehydrated body is already having a difficult time ridding itself of toxins, and salt is a toxin. Imbibing seawater dramatically increases the amount of toxins the body has to expel, forcing the kidneys to extract additional water from the fluids around the cells and from the cells themselves. Hypernatremia can damage nerves and cell membranes and cause severe muscle cramps, intestinal cramps and convulsions, as well as neurological problems and hallucinations. Men who drank salt water died extremely uncomfortable deaths. How long it took depended on how much they drank, but death was virtually guaranteed once they imbibed the poison.
Many of the men went “out of their heads,” to varying degrees, for varying lengths of time, from simple sleep deprivation. Hallucinations, compelling fantasies, obsessive thoughts, uncontrollable fears and emotions, delirium, hopelessness and despair are all expressions of psychic damage, and during sleep is the time when the psyche heals and repairs itself by dreaming. Without sleep, microscopic psychic injuries can rub and chafe and become infected too.
It’s not just any kind of sleep that the mind needs to repair itself. The deepest sleep we experience, perhaps a dozen times a night, is called Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, sleep. It’s also the time when our muscles become totally relaxed, to the point where we can no longer move. REM sleep is absolutely essential to our well-being. In a pioneering study of REM sleep done at Stanford University, rats were deprived of REM sleep when they were placed on an overturned flowerpot in the middle of a bucket of water. The rat being studied could balance on the pot as long as it had muscle tone, even fall asleep, but as soon as it entered REM and lost muscle tone, it fell off the pot and into the water. After a few days, the formerly docile laboratory rats turned into hyperaggressive, psychotic rats that fought with one another and bit the lab workers who were trying to handle them. What happened to the men in the water was similar to what happened to those rats. The men wearing life jackets who tried to sleep found that as soon as they lost muscle tone, their faces would fall forward into the water, waking them up and depriving them of REM sleep.
When men could doze off (and never for more than a few minutes at a time) they experienced a much lighter, less restorative kind of sleep called hypnagogic sleep. Whereas REM sleep brings with it dreams unrelated to current experience or daily life, hypnagogic dreams at the onset of sleep take place in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, and correspond more closely to recent events in the subject’s life, fusing reality and fantasy. Hypnagogic dreams tend to be primarily visual in quality, hallucinations that seem, to the dreamer, to be quite well organized and internally coherent, bizarre fantasies that nevertheless make perfect sense somehow. They are also dreams we feel we can participate in rather than simply observe. Hypnagogic dreams also tend to express a heightened awareness of the body’s position or condition, dreams where, for example, if your arm has fallen asleep in bed, you might dream your hand has become encased in concrete and you can’t lift it.
No wonder, then, that men saw islands in the distance, or hula girls in grass skirts and coconut bikinis offering them tall, frosty glasses of lemonade. Little wonder either that so many survivors seemed to share their hallucinations or hold delusional thoughts in common, because in a hypnagogic state, suspended in the borderland halfway between sleep and wakefulness, a man is also extremely suggestible, which explains how when one man hallucinated and said he saw an island in the distance, or a hula girl, or a ship, other men agreed and said they saw them too. It also explains why, when one man shouted out, in fear and anguish, “Jap! This guy’s a Jap—kill him!” other men picked up the cry and used their knives to protect themselves or to avenge the deaths of their shipmates. Some men broke. Some didn’t. Some stayed in control of themselves and some lost control. Many men found strength in their religious faith. Some men found strength in their families and loved ones, living for the wives or the children or the girlfriends they had left behind, even living because they knew how sad their siblings would be or how disappointed their parents would be in them if they didn’t.
Men who didn
’t die from burns, injuries or exposure died from shark attacks; it’s impossible to estimate how many. They were scattered across the sea over a distance of about twenty miles, out of sight from one another, many dying alone and unaccounted for. Some survivors never saw sharks. Others saw them in great numbers. By the first morning, men saw fins breaking the surface, circling them. Men tipped their heads forward and gazed into the waters, where they saw large groups of sharks swarming beneath their feet, as far down as the light penetrated.
It’s also impossible to estimate the total number of sharks on the scene, but it is possible to guess the type. Some survivors reported seeing fins “white as a sheet of paper,” indicating the presence of oceanic whitetips (Carcharhinus longimanus). Blue sharks (Prionace glauca), one of the widest-ranging of all sharks, would also have inhabited the area, recognizable by their pointed snouts, long narrow pointed pectoral fins and slender bodies. Silky sharks would have been present as well. Both whitetips and blues are known to be dangerous to humans.
Sharks arriving on the scene to investigate would have found a number of things telling them that prey was about. First, as opportunistic predators, sharks seek out prey that is the least likely to flee or fight back. In the ocean, sharks will look for injured fish before they look for non-injured fish. To do that, they have extremely sensitive hearing and specialized organs along their lateral lines and on their snouts. Consequently, although splashing and kicking in the water was a strategy some survivors deployed to drive sharks off, it may have had the opposite effect of drawing them closer by imitating the sounds and motions of a wounded fish.
Sharks also possess an acute sense of smell, able to detect minute amounts of organic material in seawater and follow those trace elements back to their source. Blood is one of those organic materials, detectable by sharks at as little as one part blood per 1,000,000 parts seawater. Survivors who pushed away the wounded from their midst, figuring the blood from their wounds was attracting sharks, were essentially correct. Blood was not, however, the only thing attracting sharks. Urine did too, and survivors who weren’t bleeding were involuntarily discharging urine as dehydration increased, in which case the strategy of pushing away the wounded had no effect. Sharks would also have been attracted by the vomit in the water. Once at close range, sharks would have used their eyes to zero in on their prey, as well as organs located at the front of their heads called ampullae of Lorenzini, which detect the minute electrical fields given off by all living things. In effect, any shark investigating the explosions that night would have been virtually overloaded with sensory information telling him a substantial feeding opportunity had presented itself. For the men in the water, playing dead made no difference. Men in groups were marginally safer than men who found themselves alone in the sea, but no one was truly safe. The first bite of a shark would have been comparatively gentle, as the predator mouthed its prey, testing to see if it contained sufficient nutritional value. The second and third bites were the ones that killed.
By the second day, Lieutenant Redmayne was feeling better and made an effort to establish order. Twible welcomed the help. He’d begun to feel himself weakening, and turned increasingly to prayer. He never felt like he was going to die, and he’d been too busy to hallucinate, but he was so tired. Perhaps the navy had let him down, but he knew that God would not. He thought of his brothers, and of his kid sister, Joyce, who at fifteen was still living at home with their parents. Some of the men in the water weren’t much older than Joyce, boys who’d gotten their parents’ permission to join at seventeen. It didn’t take long for Twible to feel like he was no longer a green ensign fresh out of the academy. He thought of his wife, Alice. He thought of the words to the navy hymn he’d learned at Annapolis: “Oh hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea. . . .”
Around him, he saw men barely able to hold their own heads up who were still trying to help their shipmates, speaking words of encouragement that perhaps they themselves did not believe. He saw men risk shark attacks by swimming out to retrieve a shipmate who’d drifted off or lost his mind chasing hallucinations. He also discovered men who were hoarding rations, two rafts where a rebel contingent ate Spam and malted milk tablets without regard for the others. Twible was outraged, and suggested to Redmayne that they had to be stopped. Redmayne did his best, identifying himself as the senior officer in the group and ordering the hoarders to turn their rations over to him for safekeeping and equitable distribution—a few swam over to Redmayne’s raft and obeyed him, but the majority did not. Twible feared the rebel actions would harm discipline and knew they might attack him with their knives, even kill him, but he wasn’t afraid of them when he swam to the rebel rafts, saw the provisions they’d stashed away and shouted, “Give it all back!” When his command was ignored, he reached in and physically seized the food and water, first from one raft, then the other, removing them to Redmayne’s command raft.
The next day, Wednesday, there was a new uprising as four men, joined by Ensign Blum, decided they wanted to take one of the rafts and some of the provisions and try to paddle to the island of Yap, several hundred miles to the south. It was a lunatic idea, but Redmayne put it to a vote and the raft was allowed to leave. Until Blum came forward, Redmayne and Twible had assumed they were the only officers in the group. The raft set off, the men in it paddling only a few hundred yards before exhaustion set in. The men who stayed behind weakened and died in increasing numbers that night.
Jack Miner didn’t much care for Lieutenant Redmayne’s interference after he’d ordered Miner out of a raft, even though it was Miner’s turn to rest. Why was this idiot officer trying to tell people what to do? It was true that things were deteriorating rapidly. Vicious fights had broken out. Men used their knives against one another. Maybe Redmayne was just trying to get control of the situation, but it seemed like he was commandeering a raft for his own personal use. He was screaming, “Get off the raft—off the raft and into the water—get away from the raft!” He was just making things worse.
Miner vowed to himself, If I ever get Redmayne alone, I’m going to beat him to death.
Some who agreed with Miner’s sentiments were mollified when Redmayne drank a small amount of salt water and went out of his head and Twible had to crack him over the head with a tin of malt tablets, knocking him out, an act that may have saved Redmayne’s life. Miner was sad, not angry, when his friend Ray died in his arms. The kid had just gotten engaged in Vallejo. He’d shown everybody the ring. Miner had even met the guy’s fiancée before they sailed from San Francisco, a real nice gal. Ray was going to be happy. It was all laid out for him. Then he died. Miner just couldn’t hold him anymore, and Ray wasn’t trying to save himself. He was saying crazy things, really tormented. Miner tried to hold him up, but he couldn’t do it.
Morgan Moseley heard Redmayne and Twible giving orders, but mainly, he was just trying to mind his own business and avoid the insanity all around him.
“Hey, Moseley,” a shipmate said to him on the third day. “Guess where I was last night? I went home. I’m going home again tonight and I asked my wife and she told me it would be all right if I brought you home with me to stay in the guest room. What do you think?”
Moseley knew the guy was bananas, but to the kid, what he was saying was entirely real. Moseley declined the offer, but he couldn’t judge the guy, because he’d had something of a vision himself—he’d seen the inside of a motel room, right in front of him, maybe ten or twenty feet off, with a single bed in the middle, the covers pulled back invitingly. He shook his head, but the vision didn’t go away. He was so thirsty his teeth were coming loose. He tried to pass his tongue over them, but his tongue was swollen to twice its size. The men around him were drinking salt water, but Moseley had the sense to know they would soon be gone.
On Wednesday night, the fighting worsened, men cursing and scratching, wielding their knives, but it wasn’t happening anywhere near him, and he didn’t turn to look, and there was noth
ing he could have done about it anyway. Everything felt hazy, dreamlike, confusing and unclear, until he knew he was in a group of men in the water somewhere, but that was about it. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t much care one way or the other—he could feel his ability to reason slipping away. Then, somehow, he came out of it on his own when a small group of sailors, three or four men, approached him and asked him if he wanted to come with them—they were swimming to a nearby island. He knew they wouldn’t get 100 yards. When he looked in the water below him, he saw a swarm of sharks clearly enough to distinguish between the different types, sharks of two or three different colors, idly circling. He decided not to swim to the nonexistent nearby island.
Maurice Bell thought of his wife, Lois. He remembered how he and his buddies had gone into the restaurant where she worked and ordered as many glasses of water as they could, just to see how many she’d bring before she said anything. Sixteen glasses of water on the table. Imagine that. What he wouldn’t give now for sixteen glasses of water.
Mike Kuryla’s group of four rafts had been spared the kind of fighting that afflicted some of the other groups, but that didn’t mean they weren’t feeling desperate. On the morning of the fourth day, Thursday, the decision was made to split up, with one raft heading north, one south, one east and one west in search of shipping lanes and possible rescue. It seemed like a foolish idea to Kuryla—surely the more of them who stayed together, the greater their chances of being spotted from the air. Then again, he understood the desire to do something rather than just sit and wait.