USS Indianapolis slips out of San Francisco, alone, carrying the bomb's uranium core

By July 1945, the Manhattan Project had a bomb but no way to get its parts to the Pacific fast enough. On July 16, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis slipped out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard carrying uranium and components for "Little Boy," racing unescorted toward Tinian Island. Captain Charles B. McVay III pushed her to Pearl Harbor in 74½ hours, a speed record, before continuing on to deliver the cargo on July 26. Fourteen days later, the same ship would sink in twelve minutes, and the men who carried the bomb would spend days fighting sharks in open water…