Comparison Of The Cole To The Indianapolis

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Critical Comparisons of the USS Cole and USS Indianapolis Attacks In times of both war and peace, America has suffered from several attacks by groups ranging from conflict enemies to radical terrorists. Many of these attacks occurred on land; however, there were several attacks that took place on the water. Some examples include Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania (although it was a British ship, 128 Americans were killed) and the USS Stark. In this essay, however, two other attacks will be covered: the USS Indianapolis sinking and the attack on the USS Cole. Although these two attacks occurred under separate circumstances, were 55 years apart, and had significantly different outcomes, both ships shared certain similarities regarding what they experienced. On July 26, 1945, the USS Indianapolis arrived at the Tinian island of Guam in order to deliver the world's first operational atomic bomb. Four days later, subsequent to departure from the island headed towards the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines to rendezvous with the USS Idaho, the ship was attacked by a Japanese submarine called the I-58. Within twelve minutes the whole ship was sunk with only 900 survivors of the original 1,196 man crew left floating in the water. For the following four days , the crew was left to fend for themselves in the water suffering from starvation, dehydration, body wounds, and possibly the worst of all, shark attacks. Finally, on the fourth day the crew was discovered accidentally by Lt. Wilbur Gwinn and rescued by the USS Cecil Doyle. Of the 900 original survivors, only 317 made it out of the water. Fifty five years later, on October 12, 2000, the USS Cole also suffered a fatal attack. While in port at Aden, Yemen, the Cole was refueling when a small craft operated by two al-Qaeda radicals approached its port side and detonated around 1000 pounds of explosives resulting in

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