“Anyway, We Delivered the Bomb”: Dredging the Disaster of the USS Indianapolis from History to Hollywood

“Anyway, we delivered the bomb” is an analysis of the significance of the inclusion of the critically acclaimed “Indianapolis speech” within Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, whereby the shark hunter Quint delivers a chilling first-hand recollection of the disaster of the USS during the Second World War. As Quint tells it, after transporting components of the atomic bomb to the United States air base at Tinian Island, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine whilst on route to the island of Leyte, leaving Quint and his surviving shipmates to fend for themselves in shark-infested waters. Contextualizing the speech within the confidence crises and “disaster” film genre cycle of 1970s America, I shall analyze how Jaws’s representation of the Indianapolis disaster posits a direct challenge to the orthodox Hiroshima narrative (that the bombing was morally justifiable on the basis that it saved American lives) by foregrounding the suffering endured by the crew of the Indianapolis at the expense of delivering it, preying upon audience fears that an America reeling from the Watergate scandal and military defeat in Vietnam was now susceptible to moral ‒ and nuclear ‒ retribution for Hiroshima thirty years later.