CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – (CLARKSVILLENOW) The Downtown Kiwanis Club welcomed a very special guest speaker at their weekly meeting Tuesday. Edgar Harrell shared the amazing and tragic story about the sinking of the U.S. Navy Cruiser, USS Indianapolis in World War II.

Harrell, who is 92-years-old, lives in Clarksville and served as a U.S. Marine in the Pacific during the war and was on board the ship when it was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945.

The story of the Indianapolis involves the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. There were 1,197 men aboard the Indianapolis, approximately 300 went down with the ship while close to 900 went into the water and spent four days suffering from exposure, saltwater poisoning, dehydration and shark attacks.

Harrell said the ship sunk in 12 minutes and no distress signal was sent out so the Navy was not aware of the Indianapolis sinking until it was discovered by an aircraft on a routine patrol flight. Later a PBY Catalina flying boat landed near the survivors and picked up 56 men and Harrell was one of them.

All total, 317 survivors of the USS Indianapolis were rescued and Harrell said of those survivors, less than two dozen are still living today and said he is the last surviving Marine who was aboard the Indianapolis when it went down.

Harrell also shared with Kiwanis members another side to the story of the USS Indianapolis that is a very important part of American history. The ship transported components and enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, Little Boy, which was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6 1945.

Harrell has spoken all around the country about the sinking of the Indianapolis and his story is chronicled in his book “Out of the Depths”.

The Kiwanis Club also presented a donation of $2,500 to the Imagination Library at the meeting. Kiwanis President Dan Black said with their Reading Rodeo the club is always looking for ways to promote literacy and the Imagination Library does great things for the children and the community. Director of the Clarksville-Montgomery County Public Library, Martha Hendricks thanked the Kiwanis for the donation.

“I especially want to thank you all for this incredible gift. We have about $120,000 a year, about $10,000 a month that we have to raise to support Imagination Library and it touches over 60 percent of children under five in the county. Aside from putting food in the mouths of children I don’t think there’s a much more important thing to do than to put a book in the hand of a child. I think that represents our future and the future of Montgomery County,” Hendricks said.