D. Sampson

An 11-year-old boy watched the movie Jaws. Then he helped clear the name of a dead man the US Navy had blamed for a terrible disaster. In 1996, a boy named Hunter Scott was watching the film Jaws at his home in Florida. One scene particularly fascinated him. The shark hunter Quint recalled the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during the Second World War. Hunter had never heard of the ship. He asked his father whether the story was true. It was. On July 30, 1945, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the USS Indianapolis in the Pacific Ocean. The American warship had just completed a secret mission delivering components for the atomic bomb that would devastate Hiroshima. Within approximately 12 minutes, the ship sank. Of the 1,196 men aboard, only 316 survived. Hundreds had escaped the sinking, only to spend days floating in the ocean, suffering from dehydration, exposure, injuries and shark attacks. Nobody had raised the alarm when the ship failed to arrive at its destination. The survivors were discovered almost by accident. And then came another tragedy. The US Navy court-martialled the ship's captain, Charles McVay, accusing him of negligence for failing to steer a zigzag course to avoid enemy torpedoes. Yet McVay had not been informed of important intelligence concerning Japanese submarines in the area. His request for an escort had been denied. Even the Japanese submarine commander testified that zigzagging would not have changed how he fired his torpedoes. Many survivors considered McVay a scapegoat. He carried the burden of the disaster for the rest of his life. In 1968, he died by suicide. Almost three decades later, an 11-year-old boy decided to investigate what had happened. Hunter began what was supposed to be an ordinary school history project. He read books and military documents. He contacted survivors, asking them to describe the disaster and what they thought of their captain. Eventually, he reached out to all 154 survivors still alive in 1996. More than 80 responded. Many were elderly. Some had rarely spoken about their experiences. They told Hunter about the men they had watched die. About their captain. About the injustice they believed had been done. The boy kept investigating. He wrote to President Bill Clinton. He assembled documents. He challenged the official version of events. His research attracted national attention and helped persuade members of Congress to take up the case. In 2000, Congress passed legislation calling for McVay's exoneration. In July 2001, the Secretary of the Navy ordered that the congressional declaration of McVay's innocence be placed in his official military record. More than half a century after the sinking, the captain's name had finally been officially vindicated, although the original court-martial conviction was not formally overturned. And the boy? Hunter Scott eventually became a US Navy officer himself. There is something profoundly moving about this story. Hundreds of sailors survived a nightmare. For decades, they struggled to get their captain's name cleared. Then an ordinary schoolboy watched a film, became curious and refused to stop asking questions. Sometimes history changes because someone powerful makes a decision. And sometimes it changes because a child refuses to accept that the adults have already established the truth.