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>> Quint: Japanese Submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief.
We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb.
Eleven hundred men went into the water.
Vessel went down in 12 minutes.
Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour.
Tiger
13-Footer
You know how you know that in the water, Chief?
You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail.
What we didn’t know
was that our bomb mission was so secret,
no distress signal had been sent.
They didn’t even list us overdue for a week.
Very first light, Chief, the sharks come cruising.
So we formed ourselves into tight groups.
You know...
it was kinda like old squares in the battle like you see in the calendar
Like in the battle of Waterloo and the idea was that shark come to the nearest man
That man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin'
and sometimes that shark he go away
but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
Sometimes that shark looks right at you.
Right into your eyes
And the thing about a shark is he’s got
lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.
When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’…
until he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then…
ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.
The ocean turns red
and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ they all come in
and rip you to pieces
You know by the end of that first dawn
lost a hundred men.
I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand
I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour.
Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland.
Baseball player. Boson’s mate.
Thought he was asleep
I reached over to wake him up.
He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top.
Upended.
Well
He'd been bitten in half below the waist
At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura
swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here,
Anyway he saw us and he come in low and three hours Later a Big Fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up
you know that was the time I was most frightened
Waiting for my turn
I’ll never put on a lifejacket again.
So, eleven hundred men went into the water.
316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.
Anyway, we delivered the bomb.