re: Here’s the tale of the Ship Indianapolis, The torpedoes got some, the sharks got the rest

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Been a long time since I read up on that, I get the secrecy of her mission on the way to deliver, not so much afterwards. Plus the radio silence afterwards. As the other ships in the group saw her fatally torpedoed, don’t you think the Japs knew where they were? But radio silence was the order.

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They delivered the bomb to Tinian on July 26. The device wasn't used until August 9. Indianapolis was sunk on July 30. The crew couldn't do anything that would indicate her mission was anything but routine until the device was used. Otherwise, they'd risk the security of the mission and invite an attack on relatively poorly defended Tinian that would destroy the only ready nuclear device on the planet. So, when Indianapolis was attacked, she radioed for help the same way any other normal ship would. They went down so quickly and were so far from anywhere, though, that few people heard the SOS and nobody acted on it.

I'm pretty sure that she was alone, too. She split off from the rest of her battle group as soon as they left port, again to avoid sailing a large battle group to a tiny island in the Pacific and tipping off the Japanese that something was going on there. One ship heading out is a simple resupply; An armada is defending something important. After she dropped the device off, she made a stop in Guam and then was sailing to join up with another battle group when she was attacked and sunk.

ETA: August 6th was when the bomb was used. The 9th was Nagasaki. The survivors were out of the water by the time the first bomb was used.