More Shadows Attack 31 



time disasters, such as the torpedoing of the troopship Nova Scotia at 

 ni^ht off Delagoa Bay, southeast Africa just north of Durban, or the 

 sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine in the Philip- 

 pines. 



A thousand men were lost in the Nova Scotia tragedy. Next morning, 

 when rescue ships arrived, they found numerous corpses in lifejackets. 

 The lifejackets had saved the men from drowning. But their dead bod- 

 ies were legless. Nothing could have saved the men from the hordes of 

 sharks that swarmed the sea. 



In the sinking of the bidianapolis, 316 men survived and 883 died, 

 most of them in the water, awaiting a bungled rescue that did not come 

 for four long torturous days. The number of men killed by sharks is 

 not known. Many of the men who survived bore shark bites. And 88 of 

 the bodies recovered had been mutilated by sharks. 



Despite the earher known shark attacks, U.S. survival manuals pub- 

 lished at the start of the war dismissed the shark as "slow-moving, cow- 

 ardly, and easily frightened off by splashing." The shark was described 

 as "a warv fish, suspicious of noise, movement, unfamiliar forms. This 

 trait alone would restrain a shark from attacking a swimming person." 

 The shark described in the survival manual appeared to be a creature 

 akin to the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, and the recommenda- 

 tions for fighting off a shark read like something out of a fairy tale. After 

 "striking him on his tender, vulnerable nose, in the eye, or knifing the 

 more vital gills," the manual writers bravely advised, "swim out of the 

 line of his charge, grab a pectoral fin as he goes by, and ride with him 

 as long as you can hold your breath."— Probably the silliest armchair 

 advice that could be offered. 



But this was only the beginning. "If you can attach yourself to him," 

 the manual went on, "the shark may lose his viciousness and become his 

 usual cowardly self. If you have a knife, cut the shark's belly open. By 

 opening the shark's belly, you let water inside; this will kill him almost 

 instantly."— Alore absolute nonsense. 



A reader of the manual, who did manage to survive a shark attack 

 despite the book's advice, told how he pounded his unloaded .45 pistol 

 on an attacking shark's "vulnerable nose" and "soft" belly. "He turned 

 over then," the pilot reported, "and I started to pound him on the top 

 of his head. He was as hard as steel there, and I later discovered I'd 

 partially flattened the little steel eyelet on the butt of the gun, where the 

 lanyard is attached." 



Life-raft occupants were also attacked, and what happened to some 

 of them was certainly not covered in the survival manual. "Late in the 

 afternoon," a man who lived through 17 days on a life-raft recounted, 

 "a shark about four feet long struck at the raft, and, going right over 



