Enfield Sailor Remembered On 75th Anniversary of Loss At Sea

ENFIELD, CT — One of the most dramatic monologues in movie history took place during the 1975 blockbuster "Jaws," where Robert Shaw's character, Captain Quint, tells Matt Hooper and Chief Martin Brody a story of serving on the USS Indianapolis during World War II. The story is based on actual events involving the U.S. Navy warship, which had just completed a top-secret mission delivering the elements needed for assembly of the atomic bomb (eventually dropped on Hiroshima, Japan) to the Pacific island of Tinian on July 26, 1945.

After a brief stop on Guam, the Portland-class heavy cruiser set out for the Philippines. However, just after midnight on July 30, a Japanese submarine struck the ship with a pair of torpedoes, sinking it in just 12 minutes. About 300 of the 1,195 crew members aboard went down with the ship, leaving the rest adrift in the ocean for more than three days. By the time rescue forces began arriving, only 316 sailors were still alive, the rest having succumbed to exposure to the elements and shark attacks.

The wreckage of the Indianapolis was not discovered until the summer of 2016, when an expedition crew found it in 18,000 feet of water. Respecting the sunken ship as a war grave, the site will not be disturbed, and its exact location will remain confidential and restricted by the Navy.

As of Nov. 2019, only 11 survivors from the wreck are still alive.

Among the more than 800 crew members lost was Seaman First Class Clarence Hicks, a 20-year-old Enfield resident whose remains were never recovered. He is memorialized at Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, and was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, Combat Action Ribbon, World War II Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal, Navy Presidential Unit Citation, Navy Good Conduct Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and Navy Expeditionary Medal.

On the 75th anniversary of Hicks' loss Thursday, a notice of remembrance was posted on the Enfield CT Heroes website, created two years ago by Enfield resident and veterans advocate Kelly Davis as a way of "honoring those from Enfield that made the ultimate sacrifice."

Davis said she began researching the histories of those Enfield residents killed in action about five years ago. "I started gathering the info, not knowing what to do with it," she said, ultimately creating the website.

The site contains meticulously-researched biographies of 126 Enfield military members killed in action, in service or as prisoners of war during the last six U.S. conflicts: the Civil War (57 from Enfield), World War I (10), World War II (49), Korea (4), Vietnam (4) and the Global War On Terror (2).

More information about Enfield's war heroes may be found at www.enfieldheroes.com.

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