EDGAR Harrell could still hear the screams of his friends who were clinging to each other as a school of hungry sharks began tearing chunks out of their legs.
The blue Pacific waters turned red with bloods as, one by one, hundreds of men were eaten alive.
Harrell was one of the 1,195 men onboard the USS Indianapolis in 1945 when it was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine, leaving him and hundreds of others fighting for survival in shark-infested waters.
Over four days, survivors were attacked by the beasts in the middle of the Philippine sea before they were accidentally found by a bomber plane.
"All we heard was men being eaten alive. Everyday every night", Harrell told sun online in 2019.
"You would find your buddy and check him and find out that he's disembowelled, or the bottom was gone."
Harrell was 20 years old at the time of the attack - he passed away in may this year at the age of 96.
It has since become known as the worse attack in history and inspired the character of captain Quint in the block buster jaws, who said he had survived the attack.
900 people in shark-infested waters on the night of July 30, 1945, the Indianapolis was sailing from the Tinian island to the Philippines after completing a secret mission delivering uranium for Hiroshima atomic bomb, which was dropped one week later.
At 12:14am, A Japanese submarine fired six torpedoes at the Indianapolis, at two hit it directly.
Sergeant Harrell who was on look out that night told, Sun online : "one of the torpedoes cut the blow of the ship off.
"The second exploded under a turret. I could see and feel the water coming below me and the ship began flooding."
He scrambled to get a live jacket and clung on to a rail as the sinking ship began to go down, watching in horror as badly burned men ran screaming out of the vessel.
Harrell said: " I hung on to that rail looking out into the blackness of the night.
"May I say that they're times when you pray and they're times when you pray".
He then leapt into the sea as the ship went down.
He said:" I swam away from the ship and towards a group of Marines who has already fled the boat.
"One was badly injured and he died in my arms before the next hour".
Three hundred men went down with the ship, leaving another 900 bobbing in the pitch-dark waters.
Sailors eaten alive, while Harrell and his combrades were thankful to have survived the torpodoes, it even became clear they faced an even more terrifying enemy - hundreds of oceanic whitetip and tiger sharks which prowl the Pacific.
In the next few hours as they broke, Harrell was floating with a group of roughly 80 men when dorsal fin started to cut through heavy waves around them.
The clung to each other in a bid to intimidate the predators-but those weakened by injury would lose their grip.
Check out some pictures of Edgar Harrell:
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