CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – USS Indianapolis survivor and local Clarksville resident Edgar Harrell is among those whose story is told in the new book INDIANAPOLIS.

According to publisher Simon & Schuster, the book recounts the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during WWII in 1945, but for the first time uses interviews with 107 survivors to tell the untold story of the worst sea disaster in U.S. naval history.

Harrell, 93, 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. Only 316 people survived, including Harrell.

Harrell, who has spoken to multiple Clarksville organizations, said the ship sunk in 12 minutes. No distress signal was sent out, so the Navy was not aware of the sinking until it was discovered by an aircraft on a routine patrol flight.

Harrell has spoken all around the country about the sinking of the Indianapolis and has written his own book titles Out of the Depths.

The authors of this latest book, NYT bestselling author Lynn Vincent and National Geographic Historian Sara Vladic, will host an author event July 29 at 2 p.m. at Parnassus Books in Nashville.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Lynn Vincent, a US Navy veteran, is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and coauthor of eleven nonfiction books with more than sixteen million copies in print. Her best-known titles are Same of Kind of Different as Me (with Ron Hall and Denver Moore) and Heaven Is for Real (with Todd Burpo). A veteran journalist and author of more than 1,000 articles, her investigative pieces have been cited before Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. She lives in the mountains east of San Diego with her husband and their three Labrador retrievers.

Sara Vladic, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is one of the world’s leading experts on the USS Indianapolis, having become obsessed with the story at the age of thirteen. Over the next two decades, Vladic met and interviewed 108 of the ship’s survivors, and in 2016 she released an award-winning documentary film on the disaster, USS Indianapolis: The Legacy. She has published new research on Indianapolis in Proceedings, the official journal of the US Navy, and appeared as an expert commentator on PBS’s USS Indianapolis: Live from the Deep, which explored the ship’s wreckage. She and her husband, Ben, live in San Marcos, California.