Top Photo: Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss. Jaws. Januay 12, 1975. Universal Pictures / Zanuck Brown Productions / RGR Collection 

During the first week of August 1975, surviving veterans of the USS Indianapolis held a reunion to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of their ship’s sinking and their horrific ordeal in the final months of World War II. In addition to recounting shared experiences of the attack on their ship by a Japanese submarine, survivors of the Indianapolis also discussed the recent release of Jaws, a blockbuster film about a series of shark attacks on the fictional Massachusetts town of Amity Island. The film included a powerful scene where a character recalls surviving the very same events they endured 30 years before.

The Indianapolis crewmen, including many who had survived wounds, dehydration, and hungry sharks while waiting for rescue in the Pacific Ocean, were divided in their views on the film. Some, like James E. Reid of Middletown, Ohio, were looking forward to seeing it: he told the Associated Press that he “would really like to see how they deal with the shark attacks.”1  Others took a different view. Harold Schecterle of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts told the AP, “You couldn’t get me to see that picture for love or money. I’ve already had enough nightmares without seeing that.”2  
 

Promotional image for the movie Jaws. ©1979 Universal City Studios, Inc. 

By making the Indianapolis story a central plot point in the film, director Steven Spielberg introduced the story of the ship and its survivors to a wide audience, and with that larger audience came close scrutiny of how filmmakers told the story. Observers at the time and since pointed out numerous inaccuracies in the film’s telling of the Indianapolis story. But more than a simple revision of the historical record, those inaccuracies reveal a great deal about Americans’ memory of World War II in 1975 and their anxieties in a pivotal decade that was very different from the 1940s. 

The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis

By the final year of World War II, the USS Indianapolis, a heavy cruiser completed in 1932, had seen extensive service in the Pacific theater. She and her crew supported numerous combat operations, including amphibious landings in the Aleutian Islands in 1942–43, the assault on Tarawa Atoll in November 1943, and operations throughout 1944 in the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands campaigns. On March 31, 1945, while shelling beach defenses on Okinawa in preparation for the American invasion, the Indianapolis was badly damaged by a Japanese bomb but returned to Mare Island Navy Yard in California under her own power for repairs. 3

It was in San Francisco that the Indianapolis was tapped for a new, classified mission: her orders were to deliver vital components for the new, secret atomic bomb to Tinian Island in the Marianas, where the bomb would be assembled, loaded aboard a B-29 bomber, and dropped over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6. Under the command of Captain Charles McVay, the Indianapolis and her crew left San Francisco on July 16 and arrived on July 26, covering more than 5,000 miles in just 10 days. Two days later, they departed for the Philippines to train for the looming invasion of the Japanese home islands. But the Indianapolis and its crew never made it to their destination at Leyte Island. 
 

The U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California (USA), on 10 July 1945, after her final overhaul and repair of combat damage. The photo was taken before the ship delivered atomic bomb components to Tinian and just 20 days before she was sunk by a Japanese submarine.
Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

Late in the war, with the Imperial Japanese Navy severely weakened, American commanders did not believe that the Indianapolis was in any danger; as a result, she was sailing unescorted and had ceased following a zig-zag course that would have made her a more difficult target for enemy submarines. Around 12:15 on the morning of July 30, an undetected Japanese submarine fired a volley of torpedoes at the Indianapolis. At the moment of impact, the Indianapolis was sailing in clear conditions in a moderate sea at a speed of 17 knots. Two torpedoes struck the ship’s starboard side, and she began to sink rapidly as crew members scrambled to escape into the surrounding waters. After only 12 minutes, the Indianapolis had slipped completely beneath the waves of the Pacific, leaving hundreds of helpless Americans floating in the ocean, hundreds of miles from friendly vessels and bases.

While waiting for rescue, the surviving Marines and sailors floated in the water for nearly four days, during which time hundreds died from wounds, dehydration, drowning, and, in some cases, shark attacks.4  On the morning of August 2, the survivors were finally discovered, accidentally, by a US Navy plane flying unusually low on an unrelated mission. More planes and ships soon arrived to rescue the survivors. In all, of the ship’s nearly 1,200 crew and passengers, only 316 came out of the water alive.  

The first major account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis appeared in 1958 when journalist Richard Newcomb published Abandon Ship. He was the first author to extensively research the events surrounding the loss of the Indianapolis and to conduct extensive interviews with the surviving crew members. Two years later in 1960, the survivors held their first reunion, with subsequent reunions every five years. In addition to giving them a chance to reconnect, the reunions also hosted closed-door sessions where survivors could voice their private demons to the only other people in the world who would understand them.

The 1975 reunion was the first time that ship’s bugler played taps in 30 years. Reporting on that year’s reunion for the Associated Press, journalist Mike Harris wrote that “The stories are basically the same at each reunion and none of the survivors has completely shaken the scars, mental and physical, of the ordeal.” 5 

The Indianapolis Story Reaches a Large Audience on Screen

Besides the round anniversary of 30 years since the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, there was another reason that the ship’s story attracted attention in the summer of 1975. On June 30, just a month before the Indianapolis reunion, Universal Pictures released Jaws, a film that told the story of how a small coastal community, dependent on beach tourism, was terrorized one summer by a series of deadly shark attacks around the Fourth of July. Directed by a young Steven Spielberg and based on the book of the same name by Peter Benchley, Jaws culminates in a battle at sea between the murderous shark, an unusually large and aggressive great white, and the film’s three main protagonists, police chief Brody, shark researcher Hooper, and local shark-hunting fisherman Quint. 

Jaws English Movie Poster. Wikimedia Commons

Jaws was an immediate commercial success, earning more than $100 million at the box office in under two months, making it the highest-grossing film ever for such a short period of time in 1975.6  The film also received accolades from some of the most prominent film critics of the day: Washington Post film critic Gary Arnold called it “a new classic of cinematic terror” and The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael praised Jaws as “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made.”7  Even 25 years later, film critic Roger Ebert labeled the film “one of the most effective thrillers ever made.”8 

One of the most powerful scenes of the entire film comes shortly after Brody, Hooper, and Quint set out to kill the shark. During a dramatic conversation aboard Quint’s boat, Quint (played by Robert Shaw) delivers a compelling monologue describing how he survived the Japanese attack on the Indianapolis and attacks by sharks in the water afterward. In descriptions that mirror real survivor accounts, Quint recalls that the sailors would form themselves into groups to defend against the sharks. He describes a shark’s eyes as black and lifeless right up until the moment it bit into human flesh, “when and those black eyes roll over white, and then you, ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’, the ocean turns red, and in spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’, they all come in and rip you to pieces.” 9

Quint’s monologue on the Indianapolis did not appear in Benchley’s novel; instead, it was added later by writers who sought to improve the film’s narrative by providing a concrete reason why the character Quint hated sharks so much and was so willing to go out and kill the shark that was terrorizing Amity Island. Shaw’s on-set revisions to the script and his brilliant performance of the material made this scene into one of the film’s highlight moments.

For all the speech’s dramatic and emotional power, however, it is not a completely accurate depiction of the events surrounding the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. In July 1975, after Jaws had been in theaters for nearly two months, survivors Joseph Klaus and Frank Lucca took issue with Quint’s implication that most of those who died were killed by sharks (some certainly were, but more were killed by the initial explosion or died in the water from dehydration) and that the reason it took so long for the Americans to find the survivors was that the Indianapolis’s secret mission had prevented them from sending out any distress signals (in reality, the Japanese torpedoes damaged the ship so badly that there was not enough time for them to send out a call for help).10  The two survivors’ critiques were borne out by the Navy’s official report on the sinking of the Indianapolis as well as accounts by Captain McVay and by Lewis L. Haynes, the senior medical officer aboard the vessel. 11 

Quint’s date for the attacks is also wrong—he states that the Indianapolis sank on June 29, 1945, but it was actually July 30. Given that Jaws first appeared in theaters on June 20, 1975, perhaps it was no accident that the filmmakers moved up the date by a month. But if the facts of the Indianapolis sinking were available to the writers and filmmakers of Jaws in 1975, what explains these discrepancies between the film and real historical events? The answer is that, in depicting historical events, Jaws, like all literature and art, is as much a reflection of the historical moment in which it was made as it is an effort to portray events in the past.  

“Anyway, we delivered the bomb:” The Indianapolis and Jaws in 1970s America

In his history of the “New Hollywood” era of filmmaking in the 1970s, when the upheavals of the 1960s inspired young directors like Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to make generation-defining movies, journalist Peter Biskind wrote that Jaws “was very much a picture of its time, a post-Watergate look at corrupt authority.”12  In the summer of 1975, Americans were barely a year removed from the shocking events of the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. They were also reeling from troubling revelations about American foreign policy, from costly military operations in Vietnam to efforts by the intelligence community to spy on American citizens and overthrow foreign governments. In light of these events, the film’s depiction of a politician (the mayor of Amity Island) more interested in preserving the island’s tourist season than saving lives resonated with an American public whose confidence in public officials had been badly shaken.  

In his 2012 study of the United States in the 1970s—a decade where the country was grappling with massive cultural, economic, and political change—historian Tim Borstelmann noted that Jaws’ “extraordinary success stemmed from its ability to tap into a range of popular fears.”13  In addition to reflecting Americans’ anger about recent events, it also signaled  their ongoing anxiety about an omnipresent threat to life in the post-WWII era: nuclear weapons.

Just as Americans were increasingly aware of the Indianapolis’s story as the 30th anniversary approached, they could not escape another significant anniversary that summer: 1975 marked thirty years since the dropping of the atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those attacks helped end World War II but also killed tens of thousands of Japanese civilians and ushered in a new era in human history where nations could annihilate entire cities with a single bomb. 30 years later, no more atomic bombs had been dropped, but Americans’ fear of nuclear warfare persisted.  

The Little Boy atomic bomb (L-11) being assembled at Tinian a few days after its arrival aboard the Indianapolis. Wikimedia Commons

In his study of the impact of nuclear weapons on post-1945 American culture, historian Paul Boyer observed that “One cannot begin to understand the early postwar era without grasping how thoroughly the United States was held in thrall to the new superweapon.”14  By 1975, American anxiety about the threat from nuclear weapons was nothing new. It appeared in popular television programs of the post-WWII era, including a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone called simply “The Shelter” and films such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

In the 1970s, the world’s two foremost nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, made significant progress towards reducing the danger of nuclear war through treaties such as the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. But events such as the 1973 October War between Israel, Egypt, and Syria showed how conflicts could escalate into a nuclear exchange. Unbeknownst to the American public at the time, when US officials feared that the Soviet Union was preparing to intervene in the conflict, they raised the US nuclear alert level to DEFCON 3, bringing the nation one step closer to nuclear war. Although the crisis passed, it underscored how miscalculation could lead to the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

In this context, it is no accident that Quint’s monologue about the Indianapolis begins and ends with the atomic bomb. Like the shark that terrorized the residents and tourists of Amity Island, nuclear weapons represented an unseen threat that could appear out of nowhere to inflict deadly violence on unsuspecting Americans. In the political climate of the 1970s, a world in which political leaders lied to the American public about decisions they were making to protect them was all too familiar. In this light, Quint’s assertion that the Indianapolis did not send a distress signal after it was hit by Japanese torpedoes because of its secret mission involving the atomic bomb is not a simple factual error, but a deliberate choice by the filmmakers. At the end of his speech, Quint does not celebrate his ship’s mission or the decision to drop the atomic bombs; instead, his silence conveys his own and others’ profound discomfort in the part the United States played in ushering in the nuclear age.

Director Steven Spielberg would of course go on to make WWII films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). His allusions to World War II in Jaws are a reminder that, whenever history is depicted on screen, we need to understand it not only as an attempt to recreate the past, but also as a reflection of the historical moment in which that film was written, produced, and released. 

• 1

  Associated Press, “Survivors may relive ‘Jaws,’” reprinted in Chronicle Tribute, July 29, 1975. 

• 2

  Associated Press, “Navy Survivor Shuns ‘Jaws,’” The Times, Hammon, Indiana, July 28, 1975

• 3

  For a detailed account of the Indianapolis’s service in World War II, see “Indianapolis II (CA-35), 1932-1945,” Naval History and Heritage Command (URL: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/i/indianapolis-ii.html). Accessed 7/31/2025. 

• 4

  This account of the sinking of the Indianapolis draws on the US Navy’s official press release “Narrative of the Circumstances of the Loss of the USS Indianapolis,” February 23, 1946, Naval History and Heritage Command (URL: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/sinking-ussindianapolis/narrative-of-the-circumstances.html). Accessed 7/30/2025. 

• 5

  Mike Harris, “USS Indianapolis dead remembered,” AP article published in the Chronicle Tribute (Marion, Indiana), August 2, 1975.  

• 6

  Rober Lindsay, “‘Jaws,’ Setting Records, Helps Revitalize Movies,” The New York Times, July 8, 1975, and “‘Jaws’: Grabbing the Box Office,” The New York Times, August 22, 1975. 

• 7

  Gary Arnold, “In the Terrifying Grip of a Sensational ‘Jaws,’” Washington Post, June 15, 1975, and Pauline Kael, “Jaws (1975)” in 5001 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A to Z (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 289. 

• 8

  Roger Ebert, “Jaws,” August 20, 2000, RogerEbert.com (URL: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-jaws-1975). Accessed 7/30/2025. 

• 9

  For Quint’s full speech, see “Jaws (1975) - The Indianapolis Speech Scene (7/10) | Movieclips,” (URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9S41Kplsbs). Accessed 7/31/2025. 

• 10

  See Robert Dolgan, “Jaws? 2 who were there dispute shark tale,” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), July 21, 1975. 

• 11

  See the oral histories “Recollections of Captain Charles B. McVay, III, USN, Commanding Officer of USS Indianapolis (CA-35)” (URL: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/oral-histories/wwii/sinking-of-the-uss-indianapolis-capt-charles-mcvay.html) and “Recollections of the sinking of USS Indianapolis (CA-35) by CAPT Lewis L. Haynes, MC (Medical Corps) (Ret.)” (URL: https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/oral-histories/wwii/uss-indianapolis.html), Naval History and Heritage Command. Accessed 7/31/2025. 

• 12

  Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 279. 

• 13

  Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 19. 

• 14

  Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), xi.