Occurring just twelve days before the end of the war, the loss of the USS Indianapolis to torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 represented the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. The event has been dramatized and eulogized, perhaps most famously in a chilling scene from the 1975 film Jaws. But in the face of mistakes and incompetence came self-sacrifice and heroism that deserves to be remembered.
The unsung heroes of the naval war in the Western theater weren’t the city class casemate ironclads, but a much larger and more active fleet of more than seventy, much smaller, lightly armored vessels. The “Tinclads” of the US Civil War deserve to be remembered.