Stranded in Shark Infested Waters (Part 4) - Ed Harrell

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Out of the Depths
Day 4 of 4

Guest: Ed Harrell

From the Series: Ducks on the Pond: Rescued at Last

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Bob: Sixty years ago this week, Ed Harrell and a number of other sailors were pulled from the Pacific. They had survived four-and-a-half days afloat after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It's four days that, as you might imagine, Ed Harrell has never been able to forget.

Ed: I have not had nightmares. I've had many times that I've awakened and have a vivid scene of the happenings, and yet I think my counteraction to that is "Thank you, Lord, for sparing my life and for bringing me through all of this."

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Thursday, August 4th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We'll hear how God spared Ed Harrell's life today, and we'll hear a remarkable story about a rescue in the middle of the Pacific.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us. You know, Hollywood has told some tales of castaways left on a desert island, folks surviving in the middle of nowhere, and I've seen some of those movies, and you watch them, and they're interesting. They have never come close to telling the story that we've heard this week.

Dennis: No, I agree, Bob. Ed Harrell has been with us all this week and has told a story, a compelling story of how God enabled him to survive an ordeal at sea after being a crew member on the USS Indianapolis, which was sunk on the night of July 30, 1945, by a Japanese submarine, and, Ed, I want to thank you again for your service as a veteran, but also for writing this book and for taking us there and giving us a greater appreciation not just for veterans and what they've done to protect our freedom as Americans but also for taking us there and showing us what tough-minded faith in Almighty God looks like. Because time and time again you've taken us to vivid scenes where you've been at a fork in the road where you've had to trust God, and you'd been at sea for four days in a life jacket. You'd only had a few tablespoons of water. You had some rotten potatoes that had come after you'd prayed for some food; been separated from your buddies, and on the fourth day you are virtually alone.

Ed: No question. Even with my buddy at the time and, in fact, there were three of us at the tail end there that fourth day and the one then dropped his head in the water, and he's gone, and then it's just McKissock and myself. And my mind, by now, is beginning to fail me somewhat in that – McKissock, I know, would say to me, "Hey, Marine, you ever been to the Philippines?" And, "No, I've never been there." Well, he had, and he promised to kind of take me under his wing when we got there.

And yet I knew him. I knew who he was. I'd served under him, and he was a peach of a guy, and yet, to me, he was Uncle Edwin, and I called him Uncle Edwin. I had an uncle two years older than me. I guess I was thinking of the good times in my mind with someone back home, and yet McKissock was Uncle Edwin to me.

And then it was sometime then that afternoon, you know, we had seen the planes, heard them at 30,000 feet, and I say to McKissock, "I hear a plane." And he said, "I hear one, too," and if you can imagine somewhat that you hear a plane, and you know that it's somewhere coming closer, and yet you don't know which direction it is. And we began to look all around and, finally, we could detect that it's coming from that direction.

Dennis: Was it coming toward you?

Ed: It was coming toward us, and it was flying about 8,000 feet and, well, what do you do? I tell you what you do. You scream, you splash water, you make all kinds of contortions there in the water, hoping and praying that he can see you. But here he is flying over us, and had he come any further, he would have gone over us, but when he got, like a quarter of a mile or so out here, flying at 8,000 feet, he headed it straight down toward us as if he knew we were there. But he didn't know we were there – impossible for him to see us. If we'd had on deer-hunter orange, and he knew we were there, he could not have seen us.

In fact, the pilot that later picked us up, he said the possibility of him seeing you would be the equivalent of taking the cross-section of a human hair and looking at the end of that human hair at 20 feet. He said impossible for him to see us.

Dennis: So why did he go into the dive?

Ed: Why did he go into the dive – that's the miracle of the angel coming for us, and that is the end of the fourth day. Well, I've talked to Lieutenant Guinn [ph] at different times, and …

Bob: He was the pilot?

Ed: He was the pilot, and he was flying out of Pulau, and he was flying a land-based plane, something like a B-20, a twin-engine plane, and as he was flying, he had left out that morning, and he had a problem with his antenna that kind of trails at the back of that aircraft. And the stabilizer on that antenna had come off, and they had put something on, and he went out and tried it, and it didn't work. They came back in, and then they put something on, and here they go again.

So as he is flying over us, and here, as I mentioned, here he's coming just at a point that he could nearly dive right down to us, at that point he had gone back to the bomb bay door, and he'd opened...