Peter Nelson

At the end of World War II, a Japanese submarine sank the USS Indianpolis in the South Pacific, six hundred miles from the closest land. About 400 men died when the ship went down. Another 880 men went into the water.

The navy tried to bury the story. They had ignored 3 different SOS messages sent from the doomed ship. They'd failed to report the ship overdue. For four days and five nights, the men of the USS Indianapolis went without food or water, some of them hallucinating. They attacked each other with knives, crazed and beyond reason. Worse still were the sharks, thousands of them, circling below. The sharks killed nearly 500 men.

Only 317 survived, including the captain, Charles Butler McVay. The navy decided to court-martial McVay, rather than take the blame for the losses (they knew Japanese subs were operating in the area of the sinking but chose not to inform the crew). The court-martial board found McVay guilty, in a nationally publicized post-war show trial. For 50 years, the survivors sought to change the verdict.

They had no luck, until an eleven year old boy in Florida named Hunter Scott began a Middle School history fair project. Hunter Scott eventually ended up testifying before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, bringing them new evidence to exonerate Captain McVay and bring closure to his crew.