PBY saves sailors of the USS Indianapolis

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I was finally able to get to work on this piece again and tried to get the mood, lighting right. Thanks for all your feedback at the sketch stage, it helped a lot - hope you like it.

Trivia
At 10:25 on 2 August a PV-1 Ventura flown by Lt. Wilbur «Chuck» Gwinn and co-pilot Lt. Warren Colwell spotted a large number of men adrift while on a routine patrol flight over the Philippine Sea. They dropped a radio transmitter and life raft and called their position in.

A PBY Catalina flown by Lt. Adrian Marks and his crew were first on the scene. His crew dropped rafts and supplies, but noticed that some of the more than 300 men in the water were being attacked by sharks, defying orders forbidding him to land in heavy seas he brought his flying boat to a rough landing amid 12-foot (4 m) swells. He and his crew then filled the fuselage with sailors, then running out of room inside they began using parachute cord to lash more survivors to the top of the aircraft's wing, damaging it severely. With the arrival of the destroyer USS Cecil J. Doyle, Marks and his crew were rescued along with the 56 sailors they saved. The un-flyable Catalina was sunk by gunnery from the Doyle the next morning.

The rescued crew were from the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) a Portland class heavy cruiser which had been sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-58, sinking in 12 minutes. Of 1,196 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship.

The Indianapolis sinking resulted in the most shark attacks on humans in history, and attributes the attacks to the oceanic whitetip shark species. Tiger sharks might have also killed some sailors.

Of the 880 who survived the sinking, only 321 men came out of the water alive; 317 ultimately survived.

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Text-Source: WW2 Stories