TV Reviews : ‘Mission’ Recounts Tale of WWII Naval Horror

The sinking of the U.S. cruiser Indianapolis at the end of World War II still haunts our military history. The agonizing loss of life has remained so buried and conveniently forgotten that most Americans first heard about it in the horrifying World War II shark story recounted by Robert Shaw in “Jaws.”

Now, finally, the naval disaster in which hundreds of delirious men bobbed in shark-infested waters for five days has reached the screen in CBS’ “Mission of the Shark” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

The yarn’s parameters and themes are classic stuff, and writer Alan Sharp keenly frames them around an emotional 15-year reunion of the ship’s survivors, who are led by co-stars Stacy Keach and Richard Thomas.

The time is July, 1945. The Indianapolis has dropped off components for the first A-bomb to the Enola Gay assembly team on Tinian Island in the Pacific and is en route home. Ahead awaits a deadly Japanese sub, sharks, a Navy court martial and a scandal that changed naval policy regarding secret missions.

As the commander, Charles McVay, whose career was ruined by the events, Keach is a heroic figure doomed to be a scapegoat. Thomas is the gutsy ship’s doctor but is almost overshadowed by a vivid supporting cast, notably Don Harvey’s cocky swabbie and Robert Ciccini’s erstwhile engineer. Carrie Snodgress makes a late appearance as McVay’s wife.

The script’s minor licenses are dramatically plausible (a lonely sailor writing home to a girl he’s never met). And the story’s greater speculations--did McVay and the Japanese sub commander really have that tremulous, private, postwar meeting in a Washington hotel room?--are intriguing. In any event, director Robert Iscove illuminates a tale not of glory but of infamy.

The agonizing statistic is this: Of the 1,196-man Indianapolis crew, about 850 survived the sinking, floating on flotsam, inflatable jackets and rafts. Five days later, only 317 were left, spotted accidentally by a routine Army Air Corps patrol. Navy policy at the time dictated against the tracking of top-secret missions, even those en route home, so no rescue had been launched. It was a fluke the men were found at all.

It is this story, too shameful and hot for postwar euphoria, that was kept under wraps, pushed to the bottom or back pages while the banner headlines, as we see, trumpeted the A-bomb strike on Hiroshima.