Chuck Gwinn, pilot of PV-1 plane that spotted the Survivors
Survivor Murphy, in the podcast interview, speaks about Chuck Gwinn, the pilot who discovered the survivors by accident: Chuck Gwinn was a pilot of a PV-1 plane on a routine submarine patrol. He had problems with the plane antenna that was flopping around. He was trying to reconnect the radio antenna. When he was looking straight down, he saw an oil slick.He thought immediately that there was a Japanese submarine in trouble. He ran back to his pilot seat, dropped down to about 1000 feet, opened his bomb bay doors and was making a bombing run on this oil slick. As he got down closer to the surface, he and his crew saw heads bobbing in the water -- "Ducks on the Pond." This man’s name was Chuck Gwinn, from California. Later we always called him “our angel.” He radioed back to his base in Peleliu, and asked for immediate assistance........ It was the first time that anybody knew the USS Indianapolis had been sunk.