Hello everyone,
I am currently listening to an audiobook entitled "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand." The story seems fairly well researched and the timeline is pretty accurate to history.
The only thing that surprised me was how much she talks about the fear of sharks. She describes people being afraid of ditching out of their planes in the ocean because they would likely be eaten by sharks.
When some of the characters are stuck on a raft the sharks keep swimming with them for days on end. She describes the sharks as rubbing their fins gently on the bottom of the raft (but never trying to flip the raft over). Then there is scene where they are getting shot at and have to go under water and the sharks immediately try and attack so they kick them in the nose.
Is this at all accurate? I can understand if there was a fear of sharks during this time as people still fear them today... but this seems really far fetched. I've heard that a very small amount of people die from shark attacks a year so I am not sure why sharks would be more hungry in WWII.
I'm guessing the sharks stuff is just over exaggerated to make the story seem more scary but it just seemed weird.
Thanks!
Yes, it's entirely accurate. Sharks were dangerous predators. The reason people seldom are killed by them is that people take lots of precautions against being in a position of danger. People try to avoid being stuck in flimsy boats designed to last only days, as Zamperini was. People who do end up in such dire circumstances seldom survive, and so if they were attacked by sharks, no one would know because there would be no survivors to tell the tale. In Jacques Cousteau's first book, The Silent World, published in 1953, he writes (and has photos of) some dangerous shark encounters, and tells about how much his crew fears and loathes sharks, that's about 10 years after Zamperini was downed, but it's clear it's not a new feeling. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway writes a fiction about a shark encounter. That was written in 1951. I think what we typically see is that people are vastly more afraid of sharks than is warranted, because they kill people so seldom. So you're right about that. Many are terrified (from Jaws) that they're going to be killed during a casual beach visit. But that happens only a couple times a year around the entire globe. But in reality, there are more dangerous situations you can be in when risk of shark attack is serious, and Zamperini was in one of them.
The fear is certainly accurate. Winslow Homer's 1899 The Gulf Stream depicts the horror of a shark attack at sea. The Matawan shark attacks of 1916 certainly popularized the fear of sharks. The behavior of Hillenbrand's sharks is congruent with how some pelagic (open ocean) sharks behave. Compare the audiobook's passages to Planet Earth's filming of the Oceanic White Tip. An important thing to realize about shark attacks and World War Two is that most of the stories of large scale shark attacks come from such open ocean areas where sharks tend to be more aggressive (Cousteau considered the Oceanic Whitetip an exceptionally dangerous shark). Large numbers of wounded or dead men as from the Indianapolis of Nova Scotia acted like human chum lines. The Global Shark Attack File actually differentiates between air/sea disasters and other types of attacks.
In the book In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (by Doug Stanton), there is the horrific recounting of how 900 sailers we cast into the sea after their ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. In the water, they had to deal with sharks attacks in addition to hypothermia and losing their minds. Over 300 sailors didn't make it.
My point is that I don't think sharks were any more hungry during WWII than any other time, but the risk of a ship being sunk or a plane being downed over open waters, and the crew becoming a shark's dinner, was greatly increased.
EDIT: 08/31/2014 - To add "or a plane being downed over open waters" in the last sentence; grammar
I would also add that shark behavior in open waters is far different than shark behavior near shore or at the beach. A shark hunting along a beach or along a reef has an abundance of food options verses a shark in the open water where they are hundreds of miles from land. A shark hunting in open water is going to have very limited feeding options and will be far more likely to view a downed and stranded airman for an example as a source of food.
