JAMES M. ENNES JR.
ASSAULT ON THE LIBERTY
The True Story of the Israeli Attack
on an American Intelligence Ship
Chapter 7
TORPEDO ATTACK
Nobody can actually duplicate the strain that a commander
is under in making a decision during combat.
Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, 1901
The
ship's general announcing system came alive to warn, ''Stand
by for torpedo attack, starboard side."
Lieutenant Golden, in the engine room, had heard such warnings
before. In October 1942, Golden was seventeen years old and in the
Navy for less than three months when his ship, destroyer USS Lamson,
fought off Japanese air attacks to help sink a pair of enemy
picket boats. A month later, with Task Force 67 during the battle
of Tassafaronga, he saw an American cruiser go down. Nearby, a
Japanese destroyer sank. Hundreds of men were lost, and Golden
knew that many of the casualties were in the engine rooms. Low,
large, difficult to evacuate, the engine rooms usually flooded first.
Blast easily snapped high-pressure steam lines. Pipes, machinery, oil
and steam prevented escape. Always before he had been in other
parts of the ship, but now he was in the very heart of the engine room.
Golden was a professional. He could perform every job here, and
if pressed he could do several jobs at once.
"Evacuate the engine rooms!" he ordered.
Greasy, sweat-soaked engine men raced up the steep ladders, eager
to leave the 120-degree room before the sea rushed in. Golden
did not move. Orders from the bridge had to be acknowledged;
gauges had to be watched; the plant had to be operated. He could
do it alone.
Chief Brooks stayed too. It would never have occurred to Brooks
not to stay.
Fireman Benjamin Aishe also stayed. "You'll need help, sir. If you
stay here, I'll stay."
Together these men ran the engineering plant while they waited
for the torpedo to arrive.
****************
"Where are those god damned jets?" someone near me begged.
I thought of the ship's thin steel skin, bowed between each rib and
frame like the paper covering of a model airplane. I thought of the
water outside, of sharks, of swimming with a broken leg. I wondered
if the water would feel warm. Someone put an inflatable life jacket
around my neck, but the swelling on my left side was now so great
that the straps would not reach, could not be tied. I kept the life
jacket. It would keep me afloat as long as I could hold on to it. Would
the shock of hitting the water wrench it from my hands? What about
the stretcher? I was still tied to the stretcher!
Twenty men crowded together around me. One man cried. He was
not ashamed, and cried loudly; his body shook with sobs. Someone
called for his mother. Men really do that, I thought, surprised; men
really do call for their mothers. "Hail Mary, full of grace ... "
someone murmured as he knelt on the linoleum floor. Several men
prayed silently, hands tightly clasped, lips moving in unintelligible
murmur.
"Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side!" a messenger repeated
as we huddled in our starboard passageway. How dumb, I
thought. We could move to a port passageway, maybe near a door;
that would be safer than a starboard passageway. I should tell these
men to move, I thought. No. They would pick me up and take me
along. No. I'll take my chances right here.
****************
''Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side," spoke the announcing
system in Co-ord and in the adjoining Crypto and Communication
spaces.
The men in these rooms were calm. The sounds of warfare were
muffled and unreal in these third-deck spaces below the waterline.
These men routinely spent hours at a time waiting out the drills
elsewhere in the ship, so today's ordeal was not unlike the drills they
knew so well. They had been told that this was not a drill, and they
heard the sounds of gunfire above them, but for the most part they
assumed that things were under control and that most of the firing
was our own.
Men sat, as they had been trained to do, on the deck, along the
edges of the room. They wore battle helmets. Sleeves were rolled
down, collars turned up, trousers tucked into socks to protect against
flash bum. This had all been done so many times before that it
seemed routine.
Petty Officer Ronnie Campbell stretched, got up and placed fresh
paper in a typewriter. "You guys can stay there if you want. I'm
gonna write a letter home."
Dear Elizabeth, You won't guess where we are, he wrote to his
Scottish-born wife. He continued to hammer away, ignoring the
gunfire above him.
Meanwhile, Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter, concerned about preparing
classified material for destruction, organized a team to collect
things to be destroyed. Carpenter realized that some sensitive material
remained in Lieutenant O'Connor's desk. The desk was locked
and O'Connor was not there, so Carpenter called Seaman Lenau in
the typewriter repair shop on the deck below, and asked him to bring
a sledge hammer.
Lenau appeared promptly, and Carpenter used the sledge to deliver
one smart underhand blow that neatly popped the top from
O'Connor's desk, laying bare all the material within. It was not until
this moment that many of the men in these rooms seemed to fully
realize that the ship was in serious danger.
Stan White heard the torpedo attack warning and thought of
Lenau alone in the fourth-deck repair shop. A week ago he
would have been with Lenau, but now Lenau was alone. White
started below to reassure him, but all compartments were sealed
to control possible flooding. No doors could be opened until the
danger passed. White called by telephone, reaching Lenau just as
he returned from the sledge-hammer assignment. Lenau was
frightened, but in good control of himself. "No sweat, Chief, I'm
okay," he said.
****************
Petty Officer Joseph C. Lentini, working nearby in crypto, saw a
small hole open in the bulkhead next to him. He felt a blast of air
push through the hole and brush his leg. Then, as his shoe filled with
blood, he realized that what he felt was not air at all: a bullet had
grazed his leg, opening a wide gash in the left thigh.
Chief Melvin Smith
Lieutenant Commander Lewis, in an adjoining room, removed a
large bandage from a battle-dressing kit at his feet to cover the
sailor's wound. As Lentini stepped toward him, Lewis's attention
was drawn to his right, through a door, to the exterior bulkhead of
the coordination center. Looking past Chief Melvin Smith in the
doorway, Lewis was transfixed by a slow-motion scene that few men
have lived to describe. As he watched, the seaward bulkhead bulged
toward him; the light-green standard Navy interior paint crackled
into bright flame, then became black ash along with hundreds of
decorative pinups; the now-bare steel beneath turned red with heat,
then white. Blackened paint particles flew across the room as the
bulkhead dissolved to admit the sea.
With a great crunch, flesh and steel were compressed into a distant
comer as the blast hurled men and equipment the width of the ship.
Steel walls vanished to make large rooms of smaller ones. Typewriters
and staple machines moved with such force that some continued
through the ship's opposite side and into the sea beyond.
Chief Melvin Smith
Lewis, blinded by burnt paint chips, deafened by the blast of a
thousand pounds of high-energy explosive packed into the head of
an Italian-made torpedo, floated in neck-deep water admitted
through a forty-foot hole opened in Liberty's starboard side. Smith,
a mere arm's length away, was thrown to his death.
Ronnie Campbell
Ronnie Campbell died at his typewriter.
The terrified Teletype operator died at his Teletype machine.
Jim Pierce died while burning code lists.
Dick Keene
Duane Marggraf
Dick Keene and Duane Marggraf died together as they destroyed
a crypto machine.
Chief Raymond Linn
Chief Raymond Linn died a few feet from where he had discussed
with me the irony of dying this way in this place.
Seaman Lenau
Jim Lenau, alone
in the Teletype repair shop, died quickly and still alone.
Civilian
Technician Allen Blue died suddenly, never to hold the new baby
that waited for him in Rockville. In an instant, the torpedo had killed
twenty-five men.
****************
The single exit from this flooded room was a narrow ladder leading
through a hatchway to the deck above. The hatch was closed, as was
a manhole in the hatch cover. Lewis was thrown to the top of the
ladder and found himself waist-deep in swirling water, hanging on
to the quick-release wheel for the manhole. He couldn't see or hear.
He didn't know where he was or what he was hanging on to. He was
simply trying not to be swept away in the water that was around him.
With Lewis were roly-poly Robert "Buddha" Schnell and John
Home. Home pried Lewis loose from the handle so that the door
could be opened. Schnell exited first and joined the group around the
hatch. Then he helped Lewis, Home and the others through.
Jeff Carpenter, a self-described fatalist, found himself trapped
under water by an overturned desk. Unable to break free, he soon
ran out of air. Certain that he would drown and true to his philosophy,
Carpenter relaxed to accept his fate; but before death could
claim him, the heavy desk shifted in the churning water and he
drifted to the surface, unhurt.
Lentini, stunned, pinned under water at the base of the escape
ladder, with a broken leg, clawed wildly, straining to hold his head
above the oily and rapidly rising water to cry for help. The ship was
rolling and, as it did, ever-larger portions of the room went completely
under water. A single battery-powered battle lantern burned
under water near the ladder, and men moved toward that light,
trying to get there before the water covered the manhole to block
their only chance of escape.
Douglas C. "Doug" Ritenburg, Jeff Carpenter and some others
came upon Lentini in the darkness, helped free him from the twisted
steel that held him, and pushed him toward the manhole where
shipmates above helped pull him through.
The battle lantern burned out, leaving only the dim light coming
through the hatch to guide scores of men out of that compartment.
Men swam, climbed and clawed their way through an impossible
jumble toward the single manhole. Where moments before had stood
a wall, now hid jagged metal beneath black water in a dark room.
Men fought their way toward the hatch and were blocked by cables,
by equipment, by misshapen steel, by upended desks.
Lean, tough Marine Staff Sergeant Bryce Lockwood felt flesh
underfoot, then movement, and ducked underwater to find a man
pinned under a section of doubled-back plating that had been the
third deck. Lockwood found the time and the strength to free him.
He pushed the lucky survivor toward the hatch, then stopped to help
someone else.
As he turned toward a man who seemed to be in trouble, water
finally reached the manhole. Lockwood was too busy to realize that
his only exit was now covered with water. Water gushed through the
hole in a great torrent onto the deck above. It took three men fighting
the flow of water to force the cover shut, but Lockwood knew of none
of this. He knew only that the man he had hoped to help was already
dead and that the room was suddenly dark.
In blackness, he tried to remember the direction toward the light.
As he moved toward the hatch, sometimes swimming, often pulling
himself hand-over-hand along the pipes and cables that spanned the
ceiling, the ship completed her roll back toward the starboard side,
once again placing the hatch above water. Finally, Lockwood's leg
struck a rung of the warped but still-familiar heavy steel ladder.
From there it was easy to find the manhole in the darkness.
He reached it quickly, but the handle would not turn. Was it
locked? Stuck? Water churned around him as he cursed the devil
sailors who had closed the manhole and who doubtless stood over
it. Where other men might be afraid, Lockwood reacted with rage.
Was the ship sinking? Would he go down with it? He could only
guess as he pounded on the heavy door. And as he pounded, his rage
increased.
Finally, white light shone around the heavy rubber gasket as the
manhole opened. Pulled through, he yelled angrily at everyone near:
"Who was the stupid son of a bitch who closed the hatch? Couldn't
you hear me yelling? Didn't you see me coming? Didn't you hear me
knocking? Stupid son of a bitch!" He bellowed until, catching his
breath, he ordered a sailor to keep the manhole open and reentered
the terrible room. Water covered much of the overhead as he
searched for life in the treacherous water. Men shone battle lanterns
through the hatch and Lockwood continued his search with the aid
of a waterproof light that he took into the water with him, but he
could find no one in need of help. Finally, he crawled back through
the manhole for the last time to testify in a sick whisper, "No one
is alive down there."
****************
Captain McGonagle was almost alone on the bridge when the torpedo
struck. His navigator was dead, the executive officer dying; the
officer of the deck and junior officer of the deck were both badly
wounded and out of the action; the helmsman was wounded; the
quartermaster dead; lookouts, messengers, signalmen, all were dead
or wounded, all below, all away from the holocaust on the bridge. Except for Ensign David Lucas and telephone talker John LaMar,
Old Shep was alone.
"But Old Shep was right there,
to the rescue he came.
He jumped in and helped pull me out."
He didn't see the torpedo coming, but he would never forget the
sound it made. It exploded with a muffled roar, like rolling thunder;
then it covered the scene with a blanket of smoke. Impenetrable
black smoke hid the ship, spread over her length, and extended up
her mast. Through the smoke came a torrent of water, thrust up by
the explosion to fall as dirty rain upon Old Shep and his ship.
McGonagle and Lucas clung to a starboard rail while Liberty rolled
away from the blast.
"Shall I pass the word to prepare to abandon ship?" Lucas
asked.
McGonagle, not yet aware of the extent of flooding, knew that he
was lucky to be afloat in a torpedoed Victory ship. Liberty might
sink, he knew, but he remembered shoal water was nearby and he
resolved to run her aground first if necessary.
"No," he told Lucas, "we're not going to sink."
****************
I shuddered as the torpedo explosion directly below quieted the
murmur around me and briefly overcame the sound of machine guns.
Liberty rolled heavily to port, away from the explosion. The roll
increased. Someone cried louder for help from his God as it seemed
we would roll onto our side. Near me a sailor lost his footing and
tumbled headlong down a wildly slanted athwartships passageway.
Ensign John Scott was one deck above the torpedo and perhaps
sixty feet forward of it. As damage control officer, he was responsible
for all of the damage control effort everywhere in the ship, and to
accomplish this he worked in Damage Control Central where, with
the aid of two telephone talkers, he kept in touch with the bridge,
main engine control and several repair parties. As damage occurred,
it was reported by telephone to Scott who assessed its seriousness and
the urgency of need to repair it, and dispatched men to repair it
whenever that was called for.
The telephones were manned by Yeoman Stephen Gurchik and by
the ship's red-haired barber, Thomas Moulin. These three men received and acted upon all of the damage reports, and they knew
better than anyone else that the situation was not good, even before
the torpedo explosion. For these men, the torpedo attack warning
came over the general announcing system first, and was confirmed
by Seaman John Lamar on the bridge telephone circuit.
Gurchik recited the Lord's Prayer.
Fireman John Beattie called by telephone from the emergency fire
room, where he was standing by the emergency fire pump, and asked
permission to come out of that vulnerable lower-deck space. Permission
was quickly granted.
Ensign Richard P. Taylor, the supply officer, appeared suddenly
in a doorway, bleeding and dazed, on his way to a battle. dressing
station. Chief Harold Thompson had taken charge of Repair Two,
he reported, so that Taylor could dress his wounds and try to stop
the bleeding; then he stumbled on down the passageway and out of
sight, leaving a trail of blood. Scott called Painter and asked him to
send help, as Taylor didn't look as though he could go much further
on his own.
A stray bullet, the only shot to penetrate this space, struck a
sanitary discharge vent on the outboard bulkhead, neatly breaking
off a valve and rupturing a pipe to add the smell of sewage to the
smells of warfare. The machine-gun fire was louder now, heard
through the opening made by the bullet.
The impact of the torpedo sent all three men sprawling across the
room.
"Our Father, who art in heaven ... " The prayer grew louder and
more urgent.
As the ship rolled sharply away from the torpedo, Scott, Gurchik
and Moulin scrambled to get back on their feet. The ship's roll
increased. Helplessly, they slid against the inboard bulkhead in a
jumble of men, telephone equipment, telephone cables, a stool,
charts, publications. As the ship's roll increased, they tried to regain
their footing. Now, on a wildly canted and rapidly moving deck,
frightened and almost helpless, they saw the lights go out.
Scott knew that the emergency generator located in a forward
deck house had already been disabled by a rocket, so it would never
serve its intended purpose; but battery-powered emergency lights did
switch on automatically, and as the ship recovered from her roll,
Scott found his footing.
Above his desk was the ship's inclinometer, a device that measures
the degree of roll, and Scott's eyes were glued to this as Liberty completed her initial reaction to the blast and rolled back toward the
starboard side. Eight ... ten ... eleven degrees ... Slowly, the ship
stopped rolling at twelve degrees starboard list, hung there a moment,
then settled back to nine degrees starboard list.
"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done . . ."
The bridge telephone circuit came alive. "Repair Three, this is the
bridge. The torpedo has wiped out Damage Control Central. You are
to take charge of damage control."
Scott quickly advised the bridge that Damage Control Central was
still in operation. Meanwhile, he dispatched runners throughout the
ship to report to him on the extent of flooding so that he could keep
the bridge informed and at the same time do whatever could be done
to repair the damage.
****************
In the forward deck house, Petty Officer John Randall was knocked
off his feet by the impact of the torpedo. His battle station was here,
in the electrical shop. The lights had gone out early in the attack and
he had no working intercom or telephones, so he had only a vague
idea of what was happening. But it was clear that the ship had been
torpedoed.
Randall burst out of his shop and onto the main deck in time to
see torpedo boat Tahmass drift slowly down the ship's starboard
side, her guns trained on Liberty's bridge. Impotent with rage, Randall
extended the middle finger of his right hand in a universal
gesture of contempt-and then watched the 40mm cannon swing
around until it came to bear squarely on his chest. But Randall was
too angry to be frightened and too proud to move; he stared defiantly
at the gunner while the boat drifted past. Luckily for him, that
gunner had no stomach for firing at such an easy target. Moments
later all three boats commenced circling Liberty at high speed while
firing at the waterline and at any men they could see moving.
****************
When Scott found he could not reach Research by telephone, he
dispatched Ship fitter Phillip Tourney from the forward repair locker
to check Research for damage. And Tourney found damage. At first
the men who worked in Research weren't going to let him in, as he
lacked the required security clearance, but cooler heads prevailed
and Tourney was admitted in time to see the last of the survivors crawl, wet with seawater and black with dirty bilge oil, through the
tiny scuttle to the safety of the still-dry second deck.
"Bridge, this is Damage Control Central. Flooding is confined to
the third deck and below, frames fifty-two through seventy-eight.
The Research spaces are totally flooded below the second deck. No
other serious flooding is reported. The ship appears to be in no
present danger of sinking, but we cannot take another torpedo and
stay afloat."
"Roger, DCC," responded a telephone talker from the bridge.
Inexplicably, the same talker then announced, "All stations, bridge.
Prepare to abandon ship." Other telephone talkers received that
advice and repeated it on other circuits.
"Prepare to abandon ship!" spoke the general announcing system, now working only in parts of the ship.
"Oh, goddamn," a sailor near me cried as he looked out through a rocket hole at the torpedo boats. "We can't go out there. They'll kill us out there."
A messenger paused briefly at the end of our passageway to yell, "Prepare to abandon ship! Prepare to abandon ship!"
No one moved. The ship might be sinking, but it was a lot safer aboard a sinking ship than in front of those machine guns.
An engine man brought the news that bullets were whistling over the ship's boilers: "The boats are firing at the waterline. They're trying to explode the boilers!" he yelled. But most of the bullets were passing harmlessly through the ship.
We had no way of knowing that "our" jet fighters waited lifelessly on the flight decks of the Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier force, crippled by diplomacy and inept planning.
"Where are our jets?" we asked each other. We were promised help and we were told that help was on the way, but no friendly forces were anywhere near us while an enemy-we still didn't know who-machine-gunned us. Through tightly clenched teeth men called for help as though they were playing cards or dice: "Come in, jets! Now, Phantoms! Right now! Come in here and get these bastards before they sink us," they begged.
Although carriers America and Saratoga carried more than 150 aircraft between them, this potent force found itself incapable of coming promptly to our aid with conventional weapons. Having recalled the ready aircraft that might have defended the ship, the administration in Washington eventually granted permission to send conventionally armed aircraft. But, incredibly, nearly every aircraft was disabled, was restricted to a nuclear mission, was reserved for some other mission (protection of the force, air-to-ground strikes, antisubmarine warfare, reconnaissance) or was otherwise grounded. In any case, before aircraft could be sent to defend Liberty, it was necessary to replace the nuclear bomb racks with conventional bomb racks, gun pods and air-to-air missile racks, and to bring up conventional weapons from the magazines far below decks. All this takes an interminable amount of time.
While carrier sailors began the tedious job of changing bomb racks, two more messages arrived from Liberty. Saratoga relayed, GUNBOATS ARE APPROACHING NOW, 1 followed moments later by, HIT BY TORPEDO STARBOARD SIDE. LISTING BADLY. NEED ASSISTANCE IMMEDIATELY.2 Then silence. Nothing more was heard from the ship. An hour later CINCUSNAVEUR in London would order Liberty, ESTABLISH IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATIONS ... CONFIRM REPORT OF ATTACK. 3 Three Naval Communication Stations listened on every frequency, but Liberty was no longer on the air.
I heard the steady thu-runk, thu-runk, thu-runk of the feed pump as it drew water from the feed water storage tanks and fed it to the always-thirsty boilers. The sound never stopped while the ship was underway. Thu-runk, thu-runk was an ever-present musical background to wardroom meals, to the evening movies. Now the sound changed. Thur-runk, thuur-runk Slower. Thuur-ruunk Thunk.
The ship was still shuddering from the torpedo blast when the pump stopped. The boilers, lacking water, ceased to produce steam, and the engines, lacking steam, ceased to tum. A great cold wave of nausea swept over me as, one by one, vital equipment ceased to operate. The engines stopped. Lights dimmed and went out; emergency lights switched on. Fire main pressure failed. A firefighter swore loudly as his hose went limp, forcing him to retreat quickly from a barely under control river of flaming napalm. Air blowers and air-conditioning equipment stopped. Silence. We heard only footsteps, voices and the incessant clatter of the torpedo boat's machine guns as they relentlessly punched holes in our sides.
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter emerged from the flooded research compartment to find the passageways filled with choking black smoke. Having been spared the force of the explosion, having escaped from drowning, still dripping with water, and with the voice of the torpedo ringing in his ears, Carpenter groped his way along a dark passageway. Stay low, there's air near the deck, he remembered from firefighting school, and he tried to stay low, but the deck slanted precariously, moved treacherously, was slippery with oil tracked by the men ahead of him, and he couldn't make good time staying below the smoke anyway, so he plunged on toward the ladder he knew to be ahead of him somewhere. Finally, he emerged on the main deck, just forward of the bridge, and stood alone under a blue sky that he had thought he might never see again. Above him, leaning over the forward railing on the starboard wing of the bridge, was McGonagle.
"Hey, we need more firefighters up here," McGonagle yelled. Carpenter, choking from the smoke, spitting the taste of oil and explosives from his mouth, charged up the congested ladders toward the fires that needed to be fought.
He found flames everywhere. The port-side gasoline fire raged out of control, and napalm burned in gun mounts and in the motor whaleboat. Carpenter found "J" "C" Colston and James Smith on the port side, fighting fires with water and with CO2, He quickly carried another CO2 bottle to the inferno, and almost immediately had to retreat under machine-gun fire from the still-circling torpedo boats. This time the machine guns punctured the fire hose in several places, sharply reducing the flow; and a few minutes later the hose went completely limp as Lieutenant Golden in the engine room, unable to communicate with the bridge and forced to choose between supplying water to the boilers and to the fire mains, chose to supply the engines in the hope that he could get them to operate. Water wouldn't extinguish a gasoline fire, but it would cool down the area, helping to prevent flashbacks and protecting the men. Now the fires radiated heat like a blast furnace. There were plenty of CO2 bottles, but the men couldn't get close enough to use them. The best they could do was lay a blanket of foam around the periphery.
Carpenter had an idea. Opening the valve on a new bottle of CO2, he locked the valve in the open position and heaved the entire bottle into the middle of the inferno. It worked. For the first time the men were able to make headway against the flames.
Again the word "Prepare to abandon ship" was circulated. Lieutenant Golden in Main Engine Control had heard that before too. During the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945, Golden was in destroyer USS Hazelwood when three Japanese kamikazes dove out of low cloud cover. Hazelwood maneuvered to avoid two, but a third, coming from astern, hit the number-two stack on the port side and crashed into the bridge. Flaming gasoline spilled over the decks and bulkheads as the mast toppled and the forward guns were put out of action. Ten officers and sixty-seven men were killed, including the commanding officer, and thirty-five were missing. Hazelwood rolled over on her side and had to be abandoned.
Golden remembered being plucked out of the water that day. Hazelwood's engineer officer took command and led a crew that went back aboard to extinguish the remaining flames, pump out the flooded spaces and save the ship. Golden was one of that group. Now Golden was Liberty's engineer officer. He was Liberty's third-ranking officer, and he was a "plank owner," having been aboard since the ship was commissioned.
"Disable the main engines and scuttle the ship," Golden was now told by sound-powered telephone from the bridge. The order seemed to come in the captain's voice, but Golden wanted confirmation. All of the crew should be removed before anything was done to scuttle the ship, and Golden had not heard any orders to go over the side. Men had been told only to prepare to do so. He asked the bridge to confirm the scuttle ship order, but got no answer. He called again. Finally he decided to ignore it.
Men everywhere now reacted with enthusiasm to a "demolish ship" order, which echoed over the announcing system. Equipment that had not been destroyed by the attackers fell to "demolition" teams. In the radar room, a sailor threw a heavy coffee cup through a cathode-ray tube, which burst with a satisfying sound. Aft of the bridge someone attacked a cluster of electrical cables with a fire ax. Elsewhere, men took fire axes to the already disabled gyro compass.
In Damage Control Central, Ensign John Scott received the prepare-to-abandon-ship order over his telephone circuit from the bridge, and relayed it to the repair parties. Repair Three, headed by Lieutenant Painter and located in the crew's mess hall, was now the main battle dressing station and was crowded with wounded and dying men. Scott suggested that Painter start moving some of the wounded up to the next deck, closer to the life rafts. Painter checked the situation topside, saw no attackers, and began the difficult task of moving wounded men up the steep ladder. Many of the wounded could walk with help, and these were no problem. The more seriously wounded, those who had to be moved in their stretchers, required backbreaking effort as two, three or four men hauled each of the awkward stretchers up the narrow and nearly vertical ladder leading to the main deck.
Painter organized a reasonably orderly exodus from this place, under the circumstances, and in a few minutes had assembled most of the wounded in and around the after deck house near the abandon ship stations. As the men caught their breath they, too, realized that they would not be able to abandon ship. They were still being machine-gunned by the torpedo boats. Armor-piercing projectiles were passing easily through the ship. Liberty didn't seem to be sinking. Her heavy list to starboard was getting no worse. No word was coming from the bridge. Nothing had been heard from the bridge since the orders to prepare to abandon ship, to disable engines, and to demolish and scuttle ship, and those orders were still in effect; the order to go over the side had not been given. Painter elected to return the men to the mess deck. There would be time enough to move them when the abandon-ship order came, if it came. In the meantime, there would be more protection from the bullets that continued to whistle so easily through the upper decks.
Thomas Smith, the ship's laundry operator, heard the orders to prepare to abandon ship, and with a group of seamen began making preparations. Smith hoped that he would not have to go over the side; but this order was to prepare to abandon ship--it required men to assemble at their assigned life-raft stations with their equipment and life jackets and to be prepared to go into the water if it became necessary.
Smith waited for the sound of the machine guns to stop. When the torpedo boats finally pulled back, he raced to his abandon-ship station where he was alarmed to see sticky rubber sealant leaking from the life rafts. All of the rafts in' his area had been charred by fire or punctured by bullets or rocket fragments. Finally, at a life-raft rack on the ship's port quarter, Smith found several apparently sound rubber rafts. When he pulled cords on the CO2 cylinders, only three rafts held air. These he secured with heavy line and dropped over the side, where they would be ready if the abandon-ship order came.
Lurking lazily a few hundred yards away, patiently waiting for Liberty to sink, the men on the torpedo boats watched the orange rafts drop into the water. Smith saw someone move on the center boat as her engine growled and her stern settled lower in the water. The boat moved closer to Liberty. When within good machine-gun range she opened fire on the empty life rafts, deflating two and cutting the line on the third, which floated away like a child's balloon on the surface of the water.
Smith cursed helplessly as a torpedo boat stopped to take the raft aboard. Then the boats added speed, taking the raft with them, and turned toward their base at Ashdod, sixty-five miles away.
As the torpedo boats faded in the distance, helicopters could be seen approaching the ship. ''Stand by to repel boarders!" barked the announcing system while messengers ran through the ship crying, "Helicopters are coming! Helicopters are coming! Stand by to repel boarders!"
"Oh, shit!" a sailor near me cried as men raced off to previously assigned repel-boarder stations. "Repel boarders" is a frequently drilled shipboard exercise, reminiscent of wooden sailing ships, in which the crew man the sides with rifles and side arms. The men who responded to the call found themselves facing two large Israeli Hornet assault helicopters, each heavily loaded with armed men in battle dress. A sailor broke away from his station and ran screaming through the ship. "They've come to finish us off," he yelled. But the helicopters did not attempt to land and made no effort to communicate. Clearly marked with a blue or black Star of David on a white circular field, Israeli helicopters H 4 and H 8 circled the ship several times at a comfortable distance, then came in for a closer look, and departed.4
Men used the lull in the shooting to fight fires, repair damage, string emergency telephone lines, care for the wounded and, as time permitted, collect the dead. Nothing more was heard from the bridge about the order to abandon ship, and at one point Captain McGonagle leaned over a bridge railing to order some men to leave the life rafts alone. The various doomsday orders were soon forgotten as full attention was paid to staying alive and remaining afloat.
Lieutenant Golden and Chief Brooks in the engine room fought to keep the ship's engines on the line, but it became a nearly impossible job as machinery surrendered to combat damage and vital gauges rendered false readings. These men supervised an eager and able force. Engines growled, started, ran for a few minutes and then died; lights and auxiliary equipment went on and off. By 1520 the engines were back on the line, but McGonagle could not control the rudder from the bridge. In another oft-drilled and ancient procedure, men were dispatched to the after steering station to manipulate the rudder by hand. More emergency telephone wire was strung to keep these men in communication with the bridge, as the regular telephone circuit was out of order. Ordinarily, the men would have been given a course to steer; but the compass was out of order, so McGonagle was reduced to giving rudder orders. With great effort, the men were able to force the rudder through an arc of about ten degrees. "Right five degrees rudder," the bridge ordered. Slowly the rudder responded. Even more slowly the ship began to tum. "Rudder amidships," the bridge ordered. In this manner USS Liberty commenced a zigzag movement toward deeper water.
At 1530, more than an hour and a half after the first strike, it began to look as though we would survive. For the moment, at least, no one was shooting at us. The crew was advised by messengers and, where it worked, by the general announcing system that ''the attack appears to be over. The attack appears to be over. "
We still didn't know who was shooting at us or why; only a few men had seen the Israeli markings on the helicopters, and no one was certain that the helicopters were associated with the aircraft or torpedo boats. One officer gave me his solemn opinion that the Soviet Union was responsible and that World War Three would surely follow. Others were certain that the attackers were Egyptian. Hardly anyone suspected Israeli forces.
Word of the attack finally reached President Johnson in the White House about two hours after it all began. Pentagon officials had apparently been aware of the situation for nearly forty minutes when National Security Advisor Walt Rostow telephoned the President to tell him that a U.S. Navy ship was in trouble.
Johnson ordered an emergency meeting to be held within the hour in the White House Situation Room. He called Rostow and McNamara personally; his staff summoned Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Chairman Clark Clifford, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach and Special Consultant McGeorge Bundy. Then, because the President feared that the Soviet Union might be responsible for the attack, he summoned our ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Llewellyn Thompson, who happened to be in Washington.
Unruffled, the President went about his ordinary business while he waited for his advisers to assemble. "Get me in twenty minutes how many states I have been in since I became President," he told his secretary on a private line. That report took just fifteen minutes to prepare; he had visited all but four states.
Meanwhile, near Crete, Sixth Fleet sailors completed the rearming of Liberty's much-delayed air support. "General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill, " cried the general announcing systems as pilots raced to their airplanes. Four F-4B Phantoms armed with Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles and four A-4 Skyhawks with air-to-ground missiles were launched from America. Four piston-driven Douglas A-I Skyraider "Spad" bombers were launched from Saratoga. As before, the pilots were instructed to clear the air and water around the ship, but under no circumstances to approach the nearby land. They were reminded, however, that Liberty, 400 miles from the carrier task force, was beyond the ordinary combat range of the aircraft and that it would be necessary to refuel. One tanker was in the air and would provide fuel for four of the defending airplanes. Another tanker might be launched in time, the pilots were told. But at least four aircraft and possibly eight could not be refueled and would necessarily ditch at sea when their fuel was exhausted.
Aircraft from three squadrons were involved. Because of the danger of the mission and the prospect of losing the aircraft, each squadron commander elected to fly. 5 Thus-"a day late and a dollar short" -help finally streaked toward Liberty.
By this time, the Israeli government had hastily summoned the u.s. naval attache to report that an unidentified "maybe Navy" ship had been erroneously attacked. At 1614, Liberty time, a Flash precedence message from the American embassy reported the Israeli apology to everyone concerned, including COMSIXTHFLT, the White House and the Department of State.
Admiral Martin received the message only moments after his twelve jet aircraft vanished in the distance and well before they were due to arrive over Liberty. No doubt influenced by the "ditch at sea" contingency order given to the pilots, he promptly recalled the all twelve of them. Not one-not even one of the few that could have been refueled-was permitted to approach Liberty to verify her condition and reassure her crew.
President Johnson received the Israeli apology just as his emergency meeting was getting started; he took time to dispatch a message to Premier Kosygin on the Moscow /Washington hot line to advise the Soviets that our aircraft were en route-and, presumably, that they were being recalled. Then, with much of the tension relieved, he made a quick trip to the Oval Office with Press Secretary George Christian before popping into the Situation Room just six minutes behind schedule.
Christian was left to fend off a hungry Washington press corps. Reporters sensed trouble when they learned that Rusk had been called away from a committee hearing-an unprecedented event and they descended immediately upon the press secretary for answers. They found him close-mouthed.
Q. George, is Secretary Rusk in the building?
A. Yes.
Q. Seeing the President?
A. Yes.
Q .... he was called away from the Hill for an "emergency meeting." Is that true?
A. Secretary Rusk is here.
Q. There is some grumbling on the committee . . .
A. The Secretary is here in the White House seeing the President.
Q. Can you say anything more?
A. No, I cannot.
Q. Are you aware of any emergency, George?
A. I am not going to comment on it.
Q.You can't give us any help on this situation?
A. No.
The immediate White House reaction to the attack, I am told by a former staff member, was to accept Israel's apology at face value even though there was considerable skepticism that the attack was entirely accidental. The feeling was strong that Israel had nothing to gain and much to lose in attacking a United States ship; consequently, it was felt that if the attack was deliberate, it resulted not from a premeditated act of the Israeli government, but rather from a tactical decision of some local military official-and no evidence supported even that suspicion. Besides, the President could ill afford a confrontation with Israel. His major concern was to bring about an end to the war before the Soviet Union stepped in; a confrontation with Israel would likely destroy the leverage he needed. After some discussion, Johnson detailed Clark Clifford to head an investigation into the circumstances of the attack, and the White House resolved to bite its collective tongue until the Clifford report came in.
Johnson and his advisers drafted two more hot-line messages to Premier Kosygin-one concerning Liberty and one concerning cease-fire negotiations. Then the President went off to a long diplomatic luncheon and upon his return consulted briefly with Bundy and Rostow before sending still another hot-line message concerning Liberty. In all, the hot line was activated five times during the day: three times to convey messages to Kosygin concerning the Liberty attack and twice for messages concerning cease-fire negotiations.6
When the Clifford report eventually came in, it contained no evidence that the attack was deliberate, and White House tolerance of the affair as a "feasible" error of war thus became permanent.
In Liberty's main battle dressing station Corpsman VanCleave administered first aid to the many wounded. Dr. Kiepfer checked all of the men and left orders for several to be given morphine or for intravenous solutions to be started. He assigned men to stay with some of the most seriously wounded, keeping a close watch for changes in pulse or respiration, and then headed for the bridge to check on the captain's condition.
A messenger ran through the ship shouting that "friendly fighters are in the area," but the report was wrong. The aircraft, reconnoitering from a distance, were soon identified as the same swept-wing jets that had been attacking us.
Lieutenant Painter was helping VanCleave hang an i.v. bottle from an overhead fluorescent light fixture when the general announcing system suddenly cried: ''Aircraft and torpedo boats approaching, starboard side. Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side. "
Pandemonium broke loose in the room as men raced for the ladder. Every table bore a wounded man, and those who had the strength burst from their tables, lurching, falling, stumbling toward the ladder. Men tore freshly inserted i.v. tubes from their arms in a wild effort to leave the place before it filled with water as they knew the Research spaces were filled. Men too sick to move, men too weak to be driven to their feet even by the fear of instant death, cried out: "Help me!" "Please, oh, please help me!" "Mama, Mama!"
Lieutenant Painter, fearing the panic as much as the torpedo, reached the ladder ahead of most of the men. With a great leap he landed on the third rung, then turned to face the fear-crazed throng behind him.
"Stop it, goddamn it, knock it off!" he screamed as a wall of frightened sailors piled up against him. Someone grabbed at his foot in trying to pull him from his perch, but he sent the man flying with a kick to the neck.
Having slowed the momentum, he ordered the men to move away from the ladder. "No one leaves here until every wounded man is safe! No one leaves!" he bellowed.
He was afraid they would tear him apart, but they moved back. With haste, but this time without panic, men helped other men leave the space that they were all certain would collapse at any moment. The strain was everywhere. Men trembled. Their voices cracked. But they controlled their panic. A senior petty officer with more than fifteen years in the Navy, a man who had long instructed others in the use of life-saving equipment, trembled uncontrollably as he realized that he had forgotten how to inflate his life jacket. He was embarrassed as a younger man reminded him to twist the air tube to open the valve.
A flight of Israeli jets passed over the ship at low level without releasing ordnance. Men who had braced for the arrival of more rockets exhaled slowly. Perhaps it was over, they hoped. Perhaps the torpedo boats that were approaching at such high speed would not attack. Maybe, just maybe, it was over.
As before, the three boats arrived with signal lamps flashing. The signals, unobstructed by smoke this time, were clearly seen; but no one on the bridge could read the flashing light. Word was passed for a signalman or a radioman to report to the bridge. Although several men reported, none could read the signals.
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter was on the bridge now, serving as messenger, steward, hospital corpsman, lookout and jack-of-all trades as needed. Soon he became combat photographer, taking pictures of the torpedo boats with the ship's 35mm Canon that I had selected and placed on the bridge only a few days before. "Take pictures as long as you can," McGonagle directed. "If you have to, destroy the camera and try to hide the film."
A small flag with the Star of David could be seen. "They seem to be Israeli," commented McGonagle.
At 1632, more than two and a half hours after the first rocket was launched against Liberty, radarman Cocnavitch entered in his log the first identification of the attacking force: "1632-Boats flying Israeli ensign. 'Torpedo boats seem to be Israeli' Captain's statement."
Radioman Chief Wayne L. Smith regained power in the radio room and quickly raised Commander Sixth Fleet. "The torpedo boats are flying the Star of David. They seem to be Israeli," he reported.
The boats came closer.
McGonagle strained to read the hull numbers, partially obscured by bow waves. "Two oh four one seven," he read aloud to a quartermaster, who recorded the numbers that would be reported to Admiral Martin and to newspaper reporters around the world. Israel had no boats numbered 204-17. McGonagle misread as Arabic numerals "17" the Hebrew letter "T" of Israeli motor torpedo boat Tahmass, hull number 204T, which now stood close to Liberty.
Chief Thompson came up from the forward repair locker. Harry Thompson had once been trained as a signalman, so he tried to help, but the lights from the boats made no sense. He tried semaphore. Standing in the open with semaphore flags, he tried to talk with the boats. Still there was no response.
The Tahmass commander came closer in order to use a bullhorn. Slowly, enunciated carefully, the message came across the water in English: "Do you need any help?"
Enraged, McGonagle specified to his quartermaster the particular profanity that he thought most appropriate for reply under the circumstances and that short message, uncharacteristic of McGonagle, was obediently relayed to Tahmass. The torpedo boats withdrew in silence and resumed their observation from a safer distance. A few minutes later they turned away for the last time and disappeared over the horizon.
Listing heavily to starboard, canted toward the bow, most of her vital equipment destroyed, two thirds of her crew wounded, thirty two men dead and others dying, a quarter of the ship flooded, and with her captain severely wounded, Liberty traced an oily serpentine path upon the water.7
Recovery of the dead and collection of the wounded continued as the ship fitters, engine men and damage control parties fought to keep control of the heavily damaged ship. Ensign Scott in Damage Control Central received dozens of reports of flooding from bullet and rocket holes near the waterline. Men packed these with rags, then hammered cone-shaped pieces of wood into the openings to force a tight fit. Larger holes were sealed by using giant timbers to force blocks of wood or waterproof boxes against the holes.
Scott received a report of a large leak just aft of Damage Control Central in the crew's gym and weight-lifting room. Two feet of water swirled through the room in a great torrent admitted through a huge underwater hole. The usual methods would not work here. Men raced through the ship to gather mattresses from the crew's sleeping compartment. Three mattresses were stuffed into the hole, where they slowed but failed to stop the flooding, then were swept away and into the sea.
The list of the ship kept the flooding contained within the one room. Water, which was at shoe-top level near the door, became more than two feet deep in other parts of the compartment. Using large plywood panels to hold mattresses against the opening, forcing these into place with jacks and braces, and holding the whole arrangement in place with timbers, Scott and his men plugged the hole. Pumping the room dry, they found only a small and controllable trickle of water coming through the apparatus.
Not far from where I lay in the passageway outside the wardroom was the chief petty officers' lounge. This room, never intended as a battle dressing station, was relatively safe from rockets, bullets and napalm due to its location near the ship's centerline. It became a collection station for the wounded. Painter found the XO in the passageway outside-bleeding, coherent and angry. Painter lit a cigarette for him, then broke the seal on a bottle of Johnny Walker that he had brought down from the XO's stateroom. Armstrong poured a comforting quantity down his throat, then tucked the bottle under his brown Navy blanket where it nestled alongside his left arm. The bottle remained there as, a few minutes later, a group of men lifted the stretcher for the arduous journey to the main battle dressing station in the crew's mess hall. Philip complained bitterly as the stretcher stood nearly on end to make a sharp tum in the narrow passageway, but he didn't let go of the bottle.
Soon it was my tum. My leg was grotesquely swollen now as I was carried, none too gently, through circuitous passageways. It was dusk as I was lifted over a section of the main deck alongside the after deck house. Above me at very low level hovered a small green helicopter with two men visible in the bubble that was its nose. Then the green bird disappeared from my view as someone covered my face with a blanket to protect me from the strong prop wash.
On the bridge, one of our sailors appeared at the captain's side with an Ml .30 caliber rifle. "Captain," he said, "I can pick off the pilot easy."
"No," McGonagle answered quickly, "they'd only return to finish us off."
As the helicopter continued to hover near the bridge, its occupants attempted to signal by gestures and hand signals that they wanted to land. In no mood for visitors, McGonagle waved them away.1
Moving closer to the forecastle, the men continued to signal their wish to land, and McGonagle remained firm in his refusal. Finally, a message packet dropped from the helicopter. Retrieved and brought to the bridge to be opened, it was, McGonagle found, the calling card of the naval air attache of the United States embassy at Tel Aviv-Commander, U.S. Navy, Ernest Carl Castle. Written on the back of the card was the terse query, "Have you casualties?"2
"Yes," replied McGonagle, again using the hand-held Aldis lamp. But Commander Castle seemed not to understand, and in a few minutes he, too, departed toward Tel Aviv. "The entire helo trip," he reported later by message, "was a frustration."
I finally arrived at the main battle dressing station to find a bloody scene that seemed somehow reminiscent of the American Civil War. Eased out of my stretcher and onto the cold Formica of a table top, I could see other wounded men lying on top of other tables. About two dozen mess-hall tables, each welded to the deck as is customary for tables aboard ship, now served as hospital beds. From fluorescent light fixtures hung glass bottles, which dripped vital fluids through plastic tubes into the arms of the men below. Thin mattresses from the crew's sleeping compartments had been placed on deck between and under the tables, and these held still more men.
Everywhere were wounded men. Most lay silently staring at the overhead. Some chatted quietly with friends. Several were in obvious distress as they awaited the arrival of Dr. Kiepfer or a corpsman, and these were being comforted by shipmates. Bandages, slings, compresses of all sizes and shapes cluttered the room.
Men filtered through the room offering water, fruit juice or coffee. Medicinal whiskey had been authorized for issue, we learned, and brandy, wine or bourbon was available. I accepted a quart can of chilled grapefruit juice and drained it without stopping for breath.
"Anything else, sir?" asked a startled sailor.
"Yes, more juice, please," I said, as surprised at my own capacity as the sailor was at my performance.
On a table near me I could see Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, my department head. No wounds were visible, but Dave's face was the color and texture of fresh asphalt paving. "Dave!" I called, but got no answer.
"He's deaf," I was told, "and he's blind. He was in the room with the torpedo. Saw it coming through the side of the ship. The explosion burnt his eyes and burst his eardrums." I thought of the story of Medusa.
Chief Benkert sat with me and brought my first detailed news of casualties. "Your roommate is over there," he said, pointing over my left shoulder with obvious pleasure.
"No, he's dead," I insisted. But O'Connor was alive. He was clearly very ill, lying on a blood-soaked mattress between two mess hall tables. When I caught his eye he smiled and waved.
Across the room I could see the XO atop a table near the serving line. Pale but alert, Philip lay on his side and raised himself on one elbow to survey the room. He, too, had just arrived, and he wanted to know who had survived with him. I waved. Philip waved back.
"Thank God the XO is okay," I said.
The serving line, where men ordinarily carried meal trays, was now stocked with bandages, drugs, i.v. bottles, syringes and a host of other medical supplies. Dr. Kiepfer stopped to see me a few minutes after I arrived.
"How do you feel, Jim?" he asked.
Calm, unhurried, seemingly unflustered by the chaos and carnage around him, Kiepfer projected self-assurance. He reminded me of a hospital physician making routine rounds.
"I feel pretty lucky. I'll be okay, Dick."
"Let me know if you need any help," he said, moving on to look after men who obviously were in trouble.
"How do you feel, XO?" he asked Philip Armstrong.
"I'm okay, Doc," he lied as the doctor started to examine the bleeding near Philip's groin. "Some of the guys are a lot worse off than I am. Cup of coffee and I'll be fine."
"Okay, XO," the doctor promised after examining his wounds and checking pulse and blood pressure. "I'll be back to see how you're doing."
Moving to Seaman Salvador Payan, Kiepfer found him unresponsive and apparently dying. Gray matter dribbled into Payan's left ear as he stared at the ceiling, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, but with a grimace of distress on his face.
Kiepfer knew he couldn't save the man. If Payan lived, it would not be Kiepfer who saved him. Kiepfer could only help to make him more comfortable. With that mixture of science and sixth sense that came to characterize the doctor this day, he guessed that much of Payan's distress came from a simple need to urinate. Inserting a catheter to drain the bladder that Payan's own system could not control, he heard a giggle of pleasure that confirmed the diagnosis. Prescribing morphine, Kiepfer moved on.
Steward's Mate Troy Green sat with Armstrong now. Green was the XO's room steward, but he was also his friend, a drinking companion and a confidant. Green brought the coffee that Armstrong asked for, and stayed to comfort him.
McGonagle, unaware of the extent of his executive officer's injuries, came on the general announcing system to ask, "Will the executive officer please come to the bridge?"
Enjoying the irony of his position, Armstrong laughed. "Tell the captain that I can't come to the bridge right now," he said, swallowing more coffee. Green laughed with him. Others who heard the exchange chuckled. One simply doesn't send word to the captain that one can't come to the bridge. One goes.
Abruptly Armstrong began to cough, then to vomit. Green was alarmed at the deep red color of the vomit; Armstrong was calm. "I'll get the doctor," Green said. "Doctor! Corpsman!"
"No, no, no," Philip cautioned. "I'm okay. A little blood. No big deal. Now, look," he said, removing his wristwatch, "look, I want you to have this.
No. Please. Keep it. And this," he said, removing
his wedding band. "See that Weetie gets this."
"C'mon, XO," Green begged. But Armstrong was gone.
Looking across the room a few minutes later, I found his table empty and sobbed for the first time that day. Philip Armstrong was an enigma. We all loved him. Probably even McGonagle loved him. Now he was gone.
We learned much later that a tiny shrapnel wound in Armstrong's back had caused severe internal damage and extensive bleeding near his heart; finally, the pressure around the heart became so great that the heart could no longer pump.3
McGonagle worried about running aground in shallow water. His bleeding was under control, thanks to a tourniquet that had been applied by Petty Officer Carpenter, and now the leg was numb. The tourniquet should have been loosened every few minutes to maintain circulation, but too much was happening.
He was headed toward open sea. The gyro compass was out of order and the magnetic compass was not reliable, but he headed the ship toward where he thought deeper water should be. The Fathometer was one of the few items of auxiliary equipment that continued to work, and the reports it gave were not reassuring. Where he expected to find fifty fathoms of water, he found forty. As he slowed the ship from eight knots to four, the depth of water dropped to thirty-five fathoms.
Summoning the deck department officer, Ensign David Lucas, McGonagle directed Lucas to set the anchor detail. He knew that several of the men who had been assigned to this detail were dead or wounded. "Just round up as many of the men as you can," he said, "and hurry!"
In less than five minutes Lucas reported by sound-powered telephone from the forecastle that the anchor detail was set. Golden reported from Main Control that power was available to the anchor windlass. McGonagle waited.
"Thirty fathoms," reported a quartermaster who stood near the Fathometer.
"All engines stop," ordered McGonagle.
"Twenty-eight fathoms."
"All engines back one third!" cried McGonagle.
"Twenty-eight fathoms," repeated the quartermaster as the ship shuddered from the sudden exertion of trying to reverse her direction in the water. Water in the flooded spaces added to the strain by resisting the change. Bulkheads bordering Research heaved and bulged as they threatened to give way under the pressure. In the supply department, behind a small-parts stowage cabinet in number four storeroom, a small crack admitted a stream of water from the adjacent room.
"Twenty-eight fathoms."
On the forecastle, Lucas had prepared the anchor for letting go. The anchor windlass friction brake gripped the heavy chain only lightly, as the main weight was taken by a large pelican hook. A boatswain's mate stood with a sledge, ready to knock the retaining shackle from the pelican hook upon command.
"Let go the starboard anchor," directed McGonagle.
"Let go the starboard anchor," repeated Lucas by sound-powered telephone from the forecastle.
The boatswain's mate hoisted the heavy sledge.
"Belay that," snapped McGonagle over the phones as he countermanded his order. Catching the sledge in mid-swing, too late to stop, the boatswain's mate directed the blow against the steel deck, missing the shackle. The blow, sounding to those in the area like the report of a rocket, caused some to wince, others to duck for cover. The anchor stayed in the hawsepipe.
McGonagle had decided against anchoring and to attempt instead to back out of the ever-shallower water in which he found himself. For twenty minutes the ship backed. Rudder control while backing is poor under the best of conditions; now there was almost no control at all as the rudder reacted slowly within the narrow arc the men could manually move it. Still, the ship did move generally in the direction that McGonagle wanted it to go.
"Thirty fathoms," repeated the quartermaster. "Thirty-eight."
Finally, McGonagle found deeper water.
Resuming forward motion and changing course to the right, he maneuvered around the shallow water. "Forty-eight fathoms."
One emergency seemed only to lead to another: the ship's engines stopped.
"Lost lube-oil pressure," came the report from Golden in the engine rooms. The sudden loss of momentum again caused water to surge wildly through the flooded compartments and to pound heavily against the weakened forward bulkhead. The steel bulkhead plating showed a decided bulge now from the weight of water pushing against the other side. Seamen described the movement as "panting" as the steel rippled like thin paper from the relentless push of the churning water. The small crack enlarged; the trickle of water became a small, but ominous, spray.
Golden quickly brought the engines back on the line, and the ship continued to move toward deeper water. Within minutes she was in more than eighty fathoms of water and McGonagle determined that there was no longer a danger of grounding. The engines were performing well now and responded to his call for ten knots.
At 1725, the COMSIXTHFLT order to move Liberty away from Gaza was broadcast to the ship from the Naval Communications Station in Asmara. The message was now more than six hours old and had long since been overtaken by events. The receivers that would have received the message were out of order; the decoding equipment that would have unscrambled it was underwater; the men who would have processed the message were dead. But the ship seemed to be relatively free of danger for the first time in several hours.
In Main Engine Control, Golden allowed himself to relax. Fireman Aishe brought a large pitcher of cold water, which he slowly poured over Golden's head. Then he handed Golden a towel and a lighted cigarette.
On the bridge, McGonagle moved to the port wing where he lay on deck and propped his injured leg on part of his "captain's chair." Identical chairs-large, comfortable and elevated for good view were permanently affixed to each wing of the bridge. From his supine position, McGonagle could see aft over the fantail, where he could judge the ship's progress from the wake she left and could easily give orders to the men on watch in the pilothouse a few feet away.
A plain-language voice radio message from COMSIXTHFLT told him to steam almost due north for a hundred miles, where he would be met by two destroyers with medical aid. Nearly everyone aboard was wounded to some extent, and about a third of the crew were more or less seriously wounded. McGonagle was proceeding toward a rendezvous with friendly forces, but with only tenuous control of ship's equipment and with a weakened bulkhead whose collapse would almost certainly cause the ship to sink.
When Lieutenant Bennett appeared on the bridge, McGonagle dictated a report of the attack for Liberty's seniors in Washington and London and in the Sixth Fleet. Bennett transcribed the captain's words, then typed the message himself in the ship's office, returned the completed message to the bridge for the captain's signature, and delivered it to Chief Smith in Main Radio for transmission. 4
Next, the captain summoned Ensign Malcolm "Patrick" O'Malley and directed that a report of personnel casualties be sent to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Finally, he called Dr. Kiepfer, assured himself that everything possible was being done for the wounded and that the dead were being properly cared for, and at last permitted the doctor to examine his wounds. These things completed, McGonagle succumbed to fatigue.
He had lost a large amount of blood. He had wounds in his right arm and leg and over much of his body from flying rocket fragments, mostly aluminum and magnesium particles. The leg was numb. He was exhausted. Soon he was barely conscious.
When Kiepfer asked his name, McGonagle could not answer. He could not tell who he was, where he was, what had happened, where he was going. Kiepfer considered declaring the captain physically unable to retain command and consulted with Lieutenant Golden. The captain had lost so much blood that he could no longer think clearly. Certainly he was in no condition to make important decisions concerning the ship. Kiepfer and Golden decided that since he was in no condition to make any decisions at all, he was unlikely to make any dangerous ones. Most of his problem, the doctor decided, was caused by fatigue and great loss of blood, and this would soon start to correct itself with rest and the passage of time. Kiepfer left the captain unconscious on the deck and sent Signalman David to locate an officer who could come to the bridge and take control of the ship.
Just before dusk, Signalman David found Lieutenant Painter helping look after the wounded in the after battle dressing station.
"You're it for tag, sir," he said.
"Huh?"
"Mr. Golden's busy in Main Control. You're the next senior line officer. Captain's alone on the bridge and needs help."
Painter went directly to the bridge, where he found a lightly manned watch. McGonagle was unconscious. Painter assumed the "conn," advised the pilothouse watch that he was in control of the ship, and thus took over for the stricken captain. When no new emergencies arose immediately, he dispatched a messenger to his stateroom to bring his Instamatic camera, which he used to take several pictures in the remaining rays of light from the setting sun, including a view of the unconscious commanding officer.
During the evening, Commander Sixth Fleet advised that he was sending an airplane to provide navigational support,5 and lookouts were instructed to search carefully for such an airplane, but it failed to arrive. Once, a light was seen at great distance, but it came no closer and did not respond to calls by radio. We never learned what happened to the airplane, but the search for it helped keep the conning officer and lookouts occupied.
Meanwhile, Dr. Kiepfer worried about Seaman Gary Blanchard, a very young sailor who had suffered serious wounds from the full force of an exploding rocket at his midsection. Kiepfer had several patients whom he could do nothing for. Blanchard's injuries were to his kidneys. Although the damage was serious, surgery might save him.
"How is it? Will I die, Doc?"
"It's not good, Gary," Kiepfer said. "If I don't operate, I'm sure you'll die. If I do operate, you may die anyway. Your chances are not good either way, but if I operate we may be able to save you."
Lieutenant Painter, who had been relieved on the bridge and was again helping with care of the wounded, turned away from the poignant scene and tried to hide the emotion he felt. Young Blanchard showed no fear.
"Well, then, I guess we better operate," he said.
An hour later Kiepfer performed major surgery under emergency conditions on the wardroom mess table. Blanchard, both kidneys riddled with rocket fragments, never regained consciousness.
Lieutenant Maury Bennett stopped to see me quite early in the evening. I knew that his battle station was in the flooded space, and I had been told that he had died there. I had been thinking of his wife, Joy; his son, Maurice III; and his unforgettably named daughters, Heidi, Holly, Heather and Hilary. And as I mourned for them, Maury appeared in front of me.
"My God, Maury, I thought you were dead!"
I don't think he ever understood how glad I was to see him, or why my voice cracked, or why I wiped my eyes.
"I just sent the battle report on this thing to the Chief of Naval Operations," he told me. "I hope you get to see it. You won't believe what Shep said."
"What did he say?"
"From reading the report, you'd think almost nothing happened at all. The report says there were just one or two airplanes that made a total of maybe five or six strafing runs over a period of maybe five or six minutes. Then, bam, the torpedo, and it was all over. Clean. Simple. Just like that."
"For Christ's sake! Who wrote the god damned report?"
"Well, I did. Shep dictated it to me."
"Jesus Christ, Maury, what did you let him send a crazy report like that for? He's pretty sick. Doesn't he know what really happened?"
"What do you mean, 'let him'? He's the captain. I couldn't sit up there and argue with him about the details of his battle report. He told me what to say and I said it."
"For Christ's sake, Maury!"
I didn't see Maury again that night. When I mentioned the report to Lloyd Painter and others during the night, they reacted with bewilderment. No one could understand why the report so minimized the incident. But that message was the first detailed report to leave the ship, and it was subsequently released by the Pentagon, essentially verbatim, to the press.
Pat O'Malley compiled the casualty report. He drafted the message in three headings: KILLED IN ACTION; MISSING IN ACTION; WOUNDED IN ACTION. A few hours later he told me the story.
Pat was a small man. Only a few weeks out of Officer Candidate School, he was Liberty's most junior officer and consequently the butt of every ensign joke ever known. "You'll always be an ensign to me, Pat," he was told, as are all ensigns, and he took the kidding well, but now he was angry.
"God damned stupid Bureau," he said. "They got my casualty report okay. And do you know what they said? They sent a message back, and they said, 'Wounded in what action?' 'Killed in what action?' They say it wasn't 'action,' it was 'an accident.' I'd like to tell 'em to come out here and see the difference between 'action' and 'accident.' Stupid bastards!"
Pat stayed with me for a while, brought me yet another chilled can of grapefruit juice, which I drained, and filled me in further on what was happening in the ship and in the Sixth Fleet and how the world was reacting to the attack.
Finally, he wandered off, still angry over having to.respond to what seemed an insane query from the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
When Damage Control Officer John Scott received reports of the weakened and leaking bulkhead in number-four storeroom forward of the flooded research compartment, he made a personal inspection. Alarmed, he mobilized the most experienced members of his damage control teams to "shore up" and support the weakened steel plating, but he was less than comforted with the result.
The flooded compartment was like a giant swimming pool, nearly filled, being hauled over rough ground by drunken teamsters. With each roll, water crashed crazily against the ship's sides, increasing her roll, delaying her return to equilibrium. Tons of water moved freely throughout this large compartment that had been "number three hold" when the ship was a merchantman; and with the water moved heavy desks, radio receivers, filing cabinets, battered doors and bulkheads, and the bodies of friends. All crashed relentlessly against the ship's sides and the already weakened and leaking forward bulkhead.
Scott did all that could be done. Heavy plywood was braced against the straining steel, and everything was held in place with timbers. The fury inside still howled to get out, but the barrier was now, if not secure, at least more equal to the task.
It was necessary to station a man near the shoring to warn by telephone of any shifting of the shores or of any new leaking. Ordinarily, men would have been assigned to such duty in four-hour shifts; because of the hazard and the terror of this task, volunteers were sought to rotate for ten minutes at a time. Typical of the Liberty crew, there were ample volunteers.
Chief Joe Benkert and Senior Chief Stan White spent most of the night with me, keeping me informed of what was going on and looking after my health and comfort. Although compresses had been applied to every important wound, blood continued to ooze through the bandages and to collect in a sticky mess in my clothing. The stuff collected under my body; it pooled on the table top and under the small of my back; and it dripped from the table onto the deck below.
"Be still, damn it," I remember Benkert saying. "I want you to be around for the next trip."
It didn't seriously occur to either of us that Liberty would not be making another trip. I was still high enough on morphine and on the happy accident of being alive that I was not terribly concerned about the continued bleeding, and my confidence was maintained by an occasional visit by Dr. Kiepfer or a corpsman who, after taking pulse and blood pressure, reported that these vital signs were within normal limits.
On the bridge, men continued to scan the sky and to search the horizon for American ships or airplanes. No American forces were sighted. The first sighting was not American, but Russian. Soviet guided missile destroyer 626/4 arrived after midnight-hours ahead of Martin's forces-to send a flashing-light message in English.
DO YOU NEED HELP? asked the Russian.
NO, THANK YOU, the conning officer replied.
I WILL STAND BY IN CASE YOU NEED ME, the Russian answered.
Thus the Soviet skipper celebrated his achievement discreetly by remaining near Liberty to wait with her for the arrival of American ships.
The night went slowly. The few officers who were able took turns on the bridge with the captain, who, regaining some strength, moved into the pilothouse at about 0200. He spent the rest of the night in a special captain's chair fashioned long ago from a discarded helicopter pilot's seat. The seat, comfortable yet small, fitted neatly next to the disabled bridge radar repeater and in front of a porthole. In it, the captain could see through the porthole, and he could lean on the radar repeater for support.
When Kiepfer found him here and gave him a report on the condition of the wounded, McGonagle remained incoherent and seemed not to understand what was being said to him.
Toward morning Benkert informed me that two destroyers from Destroyer Squadron 12, USS Davis and USS Massey, were approaching on schedule and would be alongside with additional medical help soon after sunrise. A few hours behind the destroyers were the Sixth Fleet flagship USS Little Rock; our newest carrier, USS America; carrier USS Saratoga; and other ships. Helicopters would begin transferring wounded to the carriers during midmorning.
Seaman Nathan Coleman had worked all night. He had helped plug rocket holes and had repaired damage wherever he could. He had helped man the rudder from the after steering station. He had raced through the ship, carrying messages. And he had helped look after the wounded. Now, with Navy ships on the way, he remembered his new 35mm Canon camera in his locker in the sleeping compartment. He was a serious amateur photographer in the midst of a great drama, and his new camera had yet to be loaded with its first roll of film.
He had not been in the sleeping compartment at all during the night. The room looked as it had never looked before. Usually spotlessly clean, it now had greasy footprints tracked everywhere. Bunks, suspended three-high from steel stanchions, were usually neatly made up, with clean white towels hanging near each pillow. Today, greasy rags hung in their place. A few men dozed in their bunks, half-dressed, shoes abandoned to the jumble on deck along with unrecognizable denim that had been clothing. Fully half of the bunks in this room were now stripped, the mattresses having been borrowed for the wounded.
Coleman found the camera undamaged in his tiny locker, loaded it with his only roll of Kodachrome II, and headed forward. Pausing in the battle dressing station, he took two quick shots by existing light.
"Hey, Nat, I don't think we're supposed to be taking any pictures."
He moved forward toward the bridge. The pilothouse on a Navy ship at sea is almost a sacred place. One doesn't go there unless one has business there. One doesn't joke or speak loudly. Idle chatter is discouraged. And on Liberty, McGonagle tolerated smoking on watch only by the conning officer.
Coleman entered the room through a rear door. He had preset the camera so that he would be ready to shoot, even though he didn't know what he might find here. He knew he should not be here at all, but there were pictures that had to be taken. The men on watch said nothing, seemed not to see him as he stood next to a chart table to the left of the helm. Steering control had been restored, and a helmsman stood behind the wheel, feet apart, learning that a heavy list and a belly full of water cause a ship to respond differently. Fully occupied with a very difficult task that had once been second nature, he seemed not to notice Coleman.
In silence, Coleman sensed that the captain now occupied his chair on the port wing of the bridge, perhaps ten feet from the pilothouse door. Moving to the door, he raised the camera to eye level and focused carefully. McGonagle sat stubbornly in the chair, a paper cup in his left hand, drinking black coffee. His khaki trouser leg had been tom away above the right knee to reveal the abuse it had suffered.
Clack, reported the single-lens reflex camera as shutter clicked, mirror moved.
Coleman saw the captain stiffen, but so far he had not been seen. He wound and snapped again. Clack.
"Hey, stop that man!" cried McGonagle.
Coleman spun, dashed past the startled helmsman, and nearly fell through the rear door. Holding the camera to his chest with his left hand, he bounded down the ladder to the 02 level. All ladders were slippery now with fuel oil tracked from the ruptured tanks. He lost his footing as he crossed the landing outside the captain's cabin, but his right hand caught a railing. He recovered his balance without damage to himself or his camera. Behind him he could hear a shipmate, dispatched by McGonagle. Coleman was faster and more determined. On the 01 level he made a top-speed dash down a long corridor through "officers' country," and burst through an open door onto a landing leading to the main deck. Two giant steps put him on the main deck, and a few more steps put him inside the after deck house near the barber shop.
He paused to listen for his pursuer and to catch his breath. "What have I done?" he asked himself, wondering what charges would be lodged against him when he was caught. Although he was no longer being chased, the men on watch knew him. It was only a matter of time before someone would report him. No matter. He had his prize and he would not give it up. He had a latent image, two latent images, of a U.S. Navy commanding officer on the bridge of his ship during a historic incident at sea.
He removed the film from his camera and hid it. He might be caught and punished, but he would never give up the film. 6
"Surface contact dead ahead," cried a bridge lookout. "Two contacts, sir, hull down on the horizon."
Forgetting the phantom photographer, McGonagle left his chair to scan the horizon with binoculars. He was on a westerly course now, with the rising sun at his back. In the distance he could see the superstructures of two ships, the hulls hidden by the curvature of the earth. Untrained eyes would have seen nothing at all. McGonagle, sick as he was, recognized the distant gray shapes as United States Navy destroyers.
More than sixteen hours after the onset of the attack, destroyers Davis and Massey came alongside. The ships nestled together, dead in the water, as Commodore Lehy of Destroyer Squadron 12 came aboard from his flagship, Davis, along with Navy doctors Peter Flynn from USS America and Joseph Utz from USS Davis. Also sent over were two medical corpsmen, fifteen damage control technicians and a host of other specialists.
Commodore Lehy was escorted to the bridge, where he found McGonagle conscious and on his feet, but sick and exhausted. Clearly, it was time for McGonagle to go below, to rest, to look after his own wounds. Gently, the commodore offered to assume command of Liberty. Even though McGonagle was so weary that he slurred his words, he refused to relinquish command. Lehy held a quick conference with Dr. Kiepfer and Lieutenant Golden, then resumed his conversation with McGonagle.
The two men leaned on the bridge railing for several minutes while they talked. Finally it was agreed: McGonagle would go below to his cabin to rest and recuperate. Lieutenant Golden, now Liberty's second-ranking officer, would handle the ship's business, keeping the captain informed and executing his orders, and Lieutenant Commander William Pettyjohn from Lehy's staff would come aboard to assist with navigation and ship handling.
Retiring to his cabin, McGonagle found the place a shambles. Fire from napalm had scorched the furniture and melted portions of his nylon carpet. Rockets had tom more than a dozen jagged eight- and ten-inch holes in his bulkheads. Portholes were shattered. A rocket had exploded in his pillow, and an unexploded eight-inch projectile lay quietly in his shower. Taking time only to have the projectile removed, McGonagle retired.
During midmorning, the first helicopter from USS America arrived to begin the slow job of removing the dead and wounded. I was slated to make the trip, along with about fifty others. Once again, the tireless Liberty crew started the muscle-wrenching job of hauling stretchers up the impossibly steep ship's ladders, and once again my stretcher stood nearly on end as men struggled to move me toward the helicopters.
The fresh air on the main deck was refreshing. The sky was blue and the weather mild as I waited in a row of identical stretchers to be hoisted into the air. Finally, my tum came. As the big blue Navy helicopter hovered over the forecastle, a wire and hook descended from a winch, grasped my stretcher, and hauled me into the sky. Although it couldn't have been more than twelve feet, it seemed higher as I was pulled into the heat, noise, oily exhaust, smoke and pressure of the helicopter's prop wash. A few minutes later we were deposited on the flight deck of USS America.
I was met on America by a civilian agent from the Office of Naval Intelligence, who walked alongside my stretcher as it was carried away from the helicopter and past a group of reporters and cameramen. "Don't answer any questions," the man warned as he hunched over the moving stretcher to show me his identification. "Don't talk to the press or anyone else until you are told it's all right."
More than an hour passed before the carrier reached Liberty. The ship was a pathetic sight. Her list could be seen from miles away. Her bow was several feet lower in the water than her stem. She was blackened with smoke, oil and blood, and punctured with hundreds of rocket and bullet holes. She was afloat and moving under her own power. And she flew her American flag.
As the ships came closer, every man not on watch was on deck. From my bunk in America's sick bay I heard the cry of several thousand men. "Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!" they cheered to honor our ship.
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter, weakened finally from loss of blood, occupied a stretcher on Liberty's main deck, where he waited for a helicopter. Stan White lifted the stretcher by one end so that Jeff could see the tribute being paid by the carrier.
"Now I know we'll be all right," he said.
The most seriously wounded were aboard the carrier now and in the hands of an expert and well-equipped medical team. The entire medical department sprang to life. The ship's senior medical officer, Commander John J. Gordon, spent more than twelve hours continuously in surgery, where he was assisted by Drs. Donald Griffith and, when he returned from Liberty, Peter Flynn. Drs. Frank Federico and George Lussier made ward rounds. The very seriously ill were attended constantly by corpsmen. Off-duty men from other departments volunteered to help with feeding, bathing, changes of bedding and other details. Carpenter's faith was well placed. Although doctors identified several men as probably beyond help, not a single man died.
An alert corpsman with the unlikely nickname "Smokey the Bear" adjusted a special splint that the America team made for my leg. For the first time I was relatively free of pain, thanks to Smokey. Recognizing that my primary need now was for sleep, he posted a sign over my bunk: DO NOT DISTURB. THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAYBE YOUR OWN. [signed] SMOKEY THE BEAR, MASTER-AT-ARMS IN CHARGE OF WARD. As long as that sign hung, I was never disturbed. 7
In Norfolk and elsewhere throughout much of the United States, friends, family and sweethearts of Liberty crewmen reacted to the news that Liberty had been mauled at sea. Most received the news first on radio or television. All lived through at least twenty-four hours of anxious misery before learning whether their particular man had survived.
My wife, Terry, received the news before noon on Thursday as she worked at home in the kitchen of our rented Norfolk townhouse. A neighbor, a Navy wife whose husband was at sea in a submarine, appeared at the patio door to tell of the news report she had heard on the radio.
Terry went straight to Sandy O'Connor, who lived half a block
away, but Sandy was at Weetie Armstrong's. She called Weetie. The
rest of the day was spent at one Liberty wife's house or another,
listening to news reports, hoping for information, knowing that messages
of death or injury would come before reports of survivors. And
as they waited, the news reports became more grim.
Initial reports listed ten dead, a hundred wounded. Soon reports were broadcast of fifteen seriously wounded. Then came a report that twenty-four were missing, trapped in the flooded space. Everyone knew that these men were almost certainly dead. Finally, later in the afternoon, the wives decided that they should go home and keep the telephone lines open so that they could receive any news that might come to them from Washington.
Paula Lucas was in Corriganville, Maryland, visiting her mother with the new baby when she heard Paul Harvey report on his news show that "a communication ship in the Mediterranean" had been torpedoed. Paula knew that Liberty was the only communication ship in the Mediterranean. A call to a friend at the radio station confirmed that Liberty had been hit. In a few minutes Paula's stockbroker cousin called to report that he had seen the story on the Dow-Jones ticker.
Pauline Pierce was en route to New York when she heard the
report on her car radio. She telephoned Weetie Armstrong from a
motel. Unsure of what to do, she waited for more news on the radio.
Finally, she reversed her direction on the turnpike and returned
home to await whatever news was coming.
Retired Navy Captain Joseph C. Toth heard the news while waiting
for a traffic light. He went directly home and waited with Mrs.
Toth. Steve was their only son, and Captain Toth was proud that
Steve had chosen to follow in his footsteps, had graduated from the
Naval Academy just as his father had, and was now a Navy lieutenant
and Liberty's navigator and operations officer. Captain Toth
didn't move from the television. Between television newscasts he
scanned the dial of a portable radio. Long after midnight Mrs. Toth
went to bed. Captain Toth finally fell asleep in his chair.
He awoke shortly after 0600 to the sound of his doorbell. The front door had a translucent fiberglass curtain, and through the curtain Captain Toth could see two figures. With mounting fear he rose from the chair. He could see that the visitors were naval officers. One was a chaplain.
Captain Toth told me much later that it was not necessary for the officers to speak. He had served as a commanding officer during his military career, and he had made such calls himself. He tried to wish them away, but they wouldn't go. He had a flash of hope that he was still asleep and the men were part of a very bad dream, but the vision remained. Finally, he opened the door, accepted the message in silence, thanked the officers for their courtesy, and closed the door very slowly.
Meanwhile, the officers and men of Liberty were fully occupied with keeping the ship afloat and keeping Washington informed of what was going on. Necessary reports were still being made; vital repairs were being accomplished; urgent messages from Washington and London were being answered.
Early Friday afternoon, while several ships of the Sixth Fleet stood
by, Vice Admiral Martin came aboard. He was escorted by Ensign
Lucas, who gave him a brief tour and then took him to the captain. 8
McGonagle, thoroughly drained, received the admiral in his cabin.
John Scott and his damage control crew by now had a satisfactory feel for the extent of damage and the size of the torpedo hole. They could see much of the hole through the clear Mediterranean water, and by probing the opening with a long fire nozzle they had determined that it was at least thirty feet wide. Clearly, such an opening could not be repaired at sea. Nevertheless, senior officers in the other ships pestered Golden and Pettyjohn with demands to have divers measure the hole and report what might be done to patch it.
Lieutenant Bob Roberts, commanding officer of the fleet tug Papago, donned scuba gear and led a small group of divers. Stretching nylon rope from one edge of the opening to another, they knotted each end, then cut the rope to the length of the opening and sent it up to the main deck to be measured. Several such lengths were cut, and they all told the same story: the opening in Liberty's side was more than forty feet wide. They didn't have to measure the height. They could see that it extended from above the waterline to the bilge keel twenty-four feet below. Any remaining hopes for patching the hole were quickly abandoned.
Golden was becoming increasingly concerned about an apparently undiscovered major leak in the forward part of the ship. The ship, already noticeably low in the water forward, was getting lower. Although her sharp starboard list was getting no worse, now she seemed to be sinking by the bow, and no flooding or other reason for this condition could be found. Golden pumped ballast around to try to improve the ship's trim; still, every hour she was a few inches lower. He resolved to jettison anchor chain if necessary to lighten the forward part of the ship, and continued to search for undiscovered flooding.
After borrowing a circular saw from Davis (to replace the ship's saw, which an officer had borrowed and failed to return), Ensign Scott rounded up a crew to replace the temporary shores that had been erected to support the panting bulkhead in number-four storeroom. This job took up most of the afternoon, required every available man and several Davis men as well, and used every remaining piece of shoring on the ship, all of the adjustable shoes and all of the plywood. Duilio Demori helped, as did Richard Neese, James Smith, Phillip Tourney and others, and when they were finished the bulkhead looked reasonably secure. Although it still leaked, the leak was small. The shoring was a sturdy complex of professionally fitted timbers that looked as though it would do the job. The men were proud of their work, and several of them posed proudly by the scaffolding like structure to have their pictures taken.
Golden never did find the reason for the ship's poor trim. Luckily, the condition stabilized during the afternoon, and it was not necessary to take any drastic action.
next
COVER-UP
footnotes:
Chapter 7
1. USS Saratoga message 081245Z June 1967.
2. USS Saratoga message 081254Z June 1967.
3. CINCUSNAVEUR message 081340Z June 1967.
4. A witness would later describe these helicopters to the Court of Inquiry as "Russian Sikorsky" models; Sikorsky is, of course, an American aircraft company, but the helicopters were neither Russian nor American. Photographs taken by McGonagle reveal that these were French-built Aerospatiale SA321 Super Frelon (Hornet) helicopters, designed for heavy assault and antisubmarine operations. This model is the largest helicopter made in France and can carry thirty armed troops; it has a boat-type hull and stabilizing fins to permit amphibious operations.
5. A squadron of carrier aircraft is comprised of about twenty aircraft under a commanding officer, usually a Navy commander. The squadron commander does not routinely lead each mission. In this case the squadron commanders were later chastised by the air wing and carrier air group commanders for having exposed themselves to risks that could have been taken by junior and presumably more expendable pilots.
6. The National Security Council has released two of these messages, but declines to release the text of a message intended for relay to President Nasser of Egypt.
7. See Appendix D, pages 237-41, for a discussion of efforts to send aircraft to Liberty's defense.
Chapter 8
1. Commander Castle later described McGonagle's gesture as a thumb-up signal, apparently meant to convey the message that the situation was under control. An officer who was on the bridge reports that the extended digit was not a thumb, but a defiant middle finger. Castle, in civilian clothes aboard an Israeli helicopter, was assumed to be an Israeli.
2. See Appendix F, page 243.
3. A pathologist who examined Philip's body told me later that his throat, bronchial passages, lungs, kidneys and liver were all in poor shape from his abuse of alcohol and tobacco. It was likely, the doctor told me, that Philip would have died within two years, as he had prophesied, even without help from Israel.
4. USS Liberty message 081715Z June 1967 (Appendix G, page 244).
5. COMSIXTHFLT message 0819S3Z June 1967.
6. The pseudonymous Seaman Coleman declines permission to reproduce his photograph of McGonagle. Despite the several years that have passed, he fears Navy or U.S. government retaliation for any apparent connection with any published material concerning the attack.
7. Smokey dropped from sight a few months after the attack. If he reads this, he is invited to write to the author in care of Random House, as he is remembered fondly by many of his former patients, who would like to hear from him.
8. So severe was Lucas's exhaustion and such was his state of mind that he has no recollection of Admiral Martin's visit. The story of Admiral Martin's visit came from other officers and from letters in which Lucas described escorting the admiral, but days later he could not recall ever having seen Admiral Martin in person.
"Prepare to abandon ship!" spoke the general announcing system, now working only in parts of the ship.
"Oh, goddamn," a sailor near me cried as he looked out through a rocket hole at the torpedo boats. "We can't go out there. They'll kill us out there."
A messenger paused briefly at the end of our passageway to yell, "Prepare to abandon ship! Prepare to abandon ship!"
No one moved. The ship might be sinking, but it was a lot safer aboard a sinking ship than in front of those machine guns.
An engine man brought the news that bullets were whistling over the ship's boilers: "The boats are firing at the waterline. They're trying to explode the boilers!" he yelled. But most of the bullets were passing harmlessly through the ship.
We had no way of knowing that "our" jet fighters waited lifelessly on the flight decks of the Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier force, crippled by diplomacy and inept planning.
"Where are our jets?" we asked each other. We were promised help and we were told that help was on the way, but no friendly forces were anywhere near us while an enemy-we still didn't know who-machine-gunned us. Through tightly clenched teeth men called for help as though they were playing cards or dice: "Come in, jets! Now, Phantoms! Right now! Come in here and get these bastards before they sink us," they begged.
Although carriers America and Saratoga carried more than 150 aircraft between them, this potent force found itself incapable of coming promptly to our aid with conventional weapons. Having recalled the ready aircraft that might have defended the ship, the administration in Washington eventually granted permission to send conventionally armed aircraft. But, incredibly, nearly every aircraft was disabled, was restricted to a nuclear mission, was reserved for some other mission (protection of the force, air-to-ground strikes, antisubmarine warfare, reconnaissance) or was otherwise grounded. In any case, before aircraft could be sent to defend Liberty, it was necessary to replace the nuclear bomb racks with conventional bomb racks, gun pods and air-to-air missile racks, and to bring up conventional weapons from the magazines far below decks. All this takes an interminable amount of time.
While carrier sailors began the tedious job of changing bomb racks, two more messages arrived from Liberty. Saratoga relayed, GUNBOATS ARE APPROACHING NOW, 1 followed moments later by, HIT BY TORPEDO STARBOARD SIDE. LISTING BADLY. NEED ASSISTANCE IMMEDIATELY.2 Then silence. Nothing more was heard from the ship. An hour later CINCUSNAVEUR in London would order Liberty, ESTABLISH IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATIONS ... CONFIRM REPORT OF ATTACK. 3 Three Naval Communication Stations listened on every frequency, but Liberty was no longer on the air.
****************
I heard the steady thu-runk, thu-runk, thu-runk of the feed pump as it drew water from the feed water storage tanks and fed it to the always-thirsty boilers. The sound never stopped while the ship was underway. Thu-runk, thu-runk was an ever-present musical background to wardroom meals, to the evening movies. Now the sound changed. Thur-runk, thuur-runk Slower. Thuur-ruunk Thunk.
The ship was still shuddering from the torpedo blast when the pump stopped. The boilers, lacking water, ceased to produce steam, and the engines, lacking steam, ceased to tum. A great cold wave of nausea swept over me as, one by one, vital equipment ceased to operate. The engines stopped. Lights dimmed and went out; emergency lights switched on. Fire main pressure failed. A firefighter swore loudly as his hose went limp, forcing him to retreat quickly from a barely under control river of flaming napalm. Air blowers and air-conditioning equipment stopped. Silence. We heard only footsteps, voices and the incessant clatter of the torpedo boat's machine guns as they relentlessly punched holes in our sides.
****************
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter emerged from the flooded research compartment to find the passageways filled with choking black smoke. Having been spared the force of the explosion, having escaped from drowning, still dripping with water, and with the voice of the torpedo ringing in his ears, Carpenter groped his way along a dark passageway. Stay low, there's air near the deck, he remembered from firefighting school, and he tried to stay low, but the deck slanted precariously, moved treacherously, was slippery with oil tracked by the men ahead of him, and he couldn't make good time staying below the smoke anyway, so he plunged on toward the ladder he knew to be ahead of him somewhere. Finally, he emerged on the main deck, just forward of the bridge, and stood alone under a blue sky that he had thought he might never see again. Above him, leaning over the forward railing on the starboard wing of the bridge, was McGonagle.
"Hey, we need more firefighters up here," McGonagle yelled. Carpenter, choking from the smoke, spitting the taste of oil and explosives from his mouth, charged up the congested ladders toward the fires that needed to be fought.
He found flames everywhere. The port-side gasoline fire raged out of control, and napalm burned in gun mounts and in the motor whaleboat. Carpenter found "J" "C" Colston and James Smith on the port side, fighting fires with water and with CO2, He quickly carried another CO2 bottle to the inferno, and almost immediately had to retreat under machine-gun fire from the still-circling torpedo boats. This time the machine guns punctured the fire hose in several places, sharply reducing the flow; and a few minutes later the hose went completely limp as Lieutenant Golden in the engine room, unable to communicate with the bridge and forced to choose between supplying water to the boilers and to the fire mains, chose to supply the engines in the hope that he could get them to operate. Water wouldn't extinguish a gasoline fire, but it would cool down the area, helping to prevent flashbacks and protecting the men. Now the fires radiated heat like a blast furnace. There were plenty of CO2 bottles, but the men couldn't get close enough to use them. The best they could do was lay a blanket of foam around the periphery.
Carpenter had an idea. Opening the valve on a new bottle of CO2, he locked the valve in the open position and heaved the entire bottle into the middle of the inferno. It worked. For the first time the men were able to make headway against the flames.
Again the word "Prepare to abandon ship" was circulated. Lieutenant Golden in Main Engine Control had heard that before too. During the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945, Golden was in destroyer USS Hazelwood when three Japanese kamikazes dove out of low cloud cover. Hazelwood maneuvered to avoid two, but a third, coming from astern, hit the number-two stack on the port side and crashed into the bridge. Flaming gasoline spilled over the decks and bulkheads as the mast toppled and the forward guns were put out of action. Ten officers and sixty-seven men were killed, including the commanding officer, and thirty-five were missing. Hazelwood rolled over on her side and had to be abandoned.
Golden remembered being plucked out of the water that day. Hazelwood's engineer officer took command and led a crew that went back aboard to extinguish the remaining flames, pump out the flooded spaces and save the ship. Golden was one of that group. Now Golden was Liberty's engineer officer. He was Liberty's third-ranking officer, and he was a "plank owner," having been aboard since the ship was commissioned.
"Disable the main engines and scuttle the ship," Golden was now told by sound-powered telephone from the bridge. The order seemed to come in the captain's voice, but Golden wanted confirmation. All of the crew should be removed before anything was done to scuttle the ship, and Golden had not heard any orders to go over the side. Men had been told only to prepare to do so. He asked the bridge to confirm the scuttle ship order, but got no answer. He called again. Finally he decided to ignore it.
Men everywhere now reacted with enthusiasm to a "demolish ship" order, which echoed over the announcing system. Equipment that had not been destroyed by the attackers fell to "demolition" teams. In the radar room, a sailor threw a heavy coffee cup through a cathode-ray tube, which burst with a satisfying sound. Aft of the bridge someone attacked a cluster of electrical cables with a fire ax. Elsewhere, men took fire axes to the already disabled gyro compass.
In Damage Control Central, Ensign John Scott received the prepare-to-abandon-ship order over his telephone circuit from the bridge, and relayed it to the repair parties. Repair Three, headed by Lieutenant Painter and located in the crew's mess hall, was now the main battle dressing station and was crowded with wounded and dying men. Scott suggested that Painter start moving some of the wounded up to the next deck, closer to the life rafts. Painter checked the situation topside, saw no attackers, and began the difficult task of moving wounded men up the steep ladder. Many of the wounded could walk with help, and these were no problem. The more seriously wounded, those who had to be moved in their stretchers, required backbreaking effort as two, three or four men hauled each of the awkward stretchers up the narrow and nearly vertical ladder leading to the main deck.
Painter organized a reasonably orderly exodus from this place, under the circumstances, and in a few minutes had assembled most of the wounded in and around the after deck house near the abandon ship stations. As the men caught their breath they, too, realized that they would not be able to abandon ship. They were still being machine-gunned by the torpedo boats. Armor-piercing projectiles were passing easily through the ship. Liberty didn't seem to be sinking. Her heavy list to starboard was getting no worse. No word was coming from the bridge. Nothing had been heard from the bridge since the orders to prepare to abandon ship, to disable engines, and to demolish and scuttle ship, and those orders were still in effect; the order to go over the side had not been given. Painter elected to return the men to the mess deck. There would be time enough to move them when the abandon-ship order came, if it came. In the meantime, there would be more protection from the bullets that continued to whistle so easily through the upper decks.
****************
Thomas Smith, the ship's laundry operator, heard the orders to prepare to abandon ship, and with a group of seamen began making preparations. Smith hoped that he would not have to go over the side; but this order was to prepare to abandon ship--it required men to assemble at their assigned life-raft stations with their equipment and life jackets and to be prepared to go into the water if it became necessary.
Smith waited for the sound of the machine guns to stop. When the torpedo boats finally pulled back, he raced to his abandon-ship station where he was alarmed to see sticky rubber sealant leaking from the life rafts. All of the rafts in' his area had been charred by fire or punctured by bullets or rocket fragments. Finally, at a life-raft rack on the ship's port quarter, Smith found several apparently sound rubber rafts. When he pulled cords on the CO2 cylinders, only three rafts held air. These he secured with heavy line and dropped over the side, where they would be ready if the abandon-ship order came.
Lurking lazily a few hundred yards away, patiently waiting for Liberty to sink, the men on the torpedo boats watched the orange rafts drop into the water. Smith saw someone move on the center boat as her engine growled and her stern settled lower in the water. The boat moved closer to Liberty. When within good machine-gun range she opened fire on the empty life rafts, deflating two and cutting the line on the third, which floated away like a child's balloon on the surface of the water.
Smith cursed helplessly as a torpedo boat stopped to take the raft aboard. Then the boats added speed, taking the raft with them, and turned toward their base at Ashdod, sixty-five miles away.
****************
As the torpedo boats faded in the distance, helicopters could be seen approaching the ship. ''Stand by to repel boarders!" barked the announcing system while messengers ran through the ship crying, "Helicopters are coming! Helicopters are coming! Stand by to repel boarders!"
"Oh, shit!" a sailor near me cried as men raced off to previously assigned repel-boarder stations. "Repel boarders" is a frequently drilled shipboard exercise, reminiscent of wooden sailing ships, in which the crew man the sides with rifles and side arms. The men who responded to the call found themselves facing two large Israeli Hornet assault helicopters, each heavily loaded with armed men in battle dress. A sailor broke away from his station and ran screaming through the ship. "They've come to finish us off," he yelled. But the helicopters did not attempt to land and made no effort to communicate. Clearly marked with a blue or black Star of David on a white circular field, Israeli helicopters H 4 and H 8 circled the ship several times at a comfortable distance, then came in for a closer look, and departed.4
Men used the lull in the shooting to fight fires, repair damage, string emergency telephone lines, care for the wounded and, as time permitted, collect the dead. Nothing more was heard from the bridge about the order to abandon ship, and at one point Captain McGonagle leaned over a bridge railing to order some men to leave the life rafts alone. The various doomsday orders were soon forgotten as full attention was paid to staying alive and remaining afloat.
Lieutenant Golden and Chief Brooks in the engine room fought to keep the ship's engines on the line, but it became a nearly impossible job as machinery surrendered to combat damage and vital gauges rendered false readings. These men supervised an eager and able force. Engines growled, started, ran for a few minutes and then died; lights and auxiliary equipment went on and off. By 1520 the engines were back on the line, but McGonagle could not control the rudder from the bridge. In another oft-drilled and ancient procedure, men were dispatched to the after steering station to manipulate the rudder by hand. More emergency telephone wire was strung to keep these men in communication with the bridge, as the regular telephone circuit was out of order. Ordinarily, the men would have been given a course to steer; but the compass was out of order, so McGonagle was reduced to giving rudder orders. With great effort, the men were able to force the rudder through an arc of about ten degrees. "Right five degrees rudder," the bridge ordered. Slowly the rudder responded. Even more slowly the ship began to tum. "Rudder amidships," the bridge ordered. In this manner USS Liberty commenced a zigzag movement toward deeper water.
At 1530, more than an hour and a half after the first strike, it began to look as though we would survive. For the moment, at least, no one was shooting at us. The crew was advised by messengers and, where it worked, by the general announcing system that ''the attack appears to be over. The attack appears to be over. "
We still didn't know who was shooting at us or why; only a few men had seen the Israeli markings on the helicopters, and no one was certain that the helicopters were associated with the aircraft or torpedo boats. One officer gave me his solemn opinion that the Soviet Union was responsible and that World War Three would surely follow. Others were certain that the attackers were Egyptian. Hardly anyone suspected Israeli forces.
****************
Word of the attack finally reached President Johnson in the White House about two hours after it all began. Pentagon officials had apparently been aware of the situation for nearly forty minutes when National Security Advisor Walt Rostow telephoned the President to tell him that a U.S. Navy ship was in trouble.
Johnson ordered an emergency meeting to be held within the hour in the White House Situation Room. He called Rostow and McNamara personally; his staff summoned Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Chairman Clark Clifford, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach and Special Consultant McGeorge Bundy. Then, because the President feared that the Soviet Union might be responsible for the attack, he summoned our ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Llewellyn Thompson, who happened to be in Washington.
Unruffled, the President went about his ordinary business while he waited for his advisers to assemble. "Get me in twenty minutes how many states I have been in since I became President," he told his secretary on a private line. That report took just fifteen minutes to prepare; he had visited all but four states.
****************
Meanwhile, near Crete, Sixth Fleet sailors completed the rearming of Liberty's much-delayed air support. "General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations. This is not a drill, " cried the general announcing systems as pilots raced to their airplanes. Four F-4B Phantoms armed with Sparrow and Sidewinder missiles and four A-4 Skyhawks with air-to-ground missiles were launched from America. Four piston-driven Douglas A-I Skyraider "Spad" bombers were launched from Saratoga. As before, the pilots were instructed to clear the air and water around the ship, but under no circumstances to approach the nearby land. They were reminded, however, that Liberty, 400 miles from the carrier task force, was beyond the ordinary combat range of the aircraft and that it would be necessary to refuel. One tanker was in the air and would provide fuel for four of the defending airplanes. Another tanker might be launched in time, the pilots were told. But at least four aircraft and possibly eight could not be refueled and would necessarily ditch at sea when their fuel was exhausted.
Aircraft from three squadrons were involved. Because of the danger of the mission and the prospect of losing the aircraft, each squadron commander elected to fly. 5 Thus-"a day late and a dollar short" -help finally streaked toward Liberty.
By this time, the Israeli government had hastily summoned the u.s. naval attache to report that an unidentified "maybe Navy" ship had been erroneously attacked. At 1614, Liberty time, a Flash precedence message from the American embassy reported the Israeli apology to everyone concerned, including COMSIXTHFLT, the White House and the Department of State.
Admiral Martin received the message only moments after his twelve jet aircraft vanished in the distance and well before they were due to arrive over Liberty. No doubt influenced by the "ditch at sea" contingency order given to the pilots, he promptly recalled the all twelve of them. Not one-not even one of the few that could have been refueled-was permitted to approach Liberty to verify her condition and reassure her crew.
President Johnson received the Israeli apology just as his emergency meeting was getting started; he took time to dispatch a message to Premier Kosygin on the Moscow /Washington hot line to advise the Soviets that our aircraft were en route-and, presumably, that they were being recalled. Then, with much of the tension relieved, he made a quick trip to the Oval Office with Press Secretary George Christian before popping into the Situation Room just six minutes behind schedule.
Christian was left to fend off a hungry Washington press corps. Reporters sensed trouble when they learned that Rusk had been called away from a committee hearing-an unprecedented event and they descended immediately upon the press secretary for answers. They found him close-mouthed.
Q. George, is Secretary Rusk in the building?
A. Yes.
Q. Seeing the President?
A. Yes.
Q .... he was called away from the Hill for an "emergency meeting." Is that true?
A. Secretary Rusk is here.
Q. There is some grumbling on the committee . . .
A. The Secretary is here in the White House seeing the President.
Q. Can you say anything more?
A. No, I cannot.
Q. Are you aware of any emergency, George?
A. I am not going to comment on it.
Q.You can't give us any help on this situation?
A. No.
The immediate White House reaction to the attack, I am told by a former staff member, was to accept Israel's apology at face value even though there was considerable skepticism that the attack was entirely accidental. The feeling was strong that Israel had nothing to gain and much to lose in attacking a United States ship; consequently, it was felt that if the attack was deliberate, it resulted not from a premeditated act of the Israeli government, but rather from a tactical decision of some local military official-and no evidence supported even that suspicion. Besides, the President could ill afford a confrontation with Israel. His major concern was to bring about an end to the war before the Soviet Union stepped in; a confrontation with Israel would likely destroy the leverage he needed. After some discussion, Johnson detailed Clark Clifford to head an investigation into the circumstances of the attack, and the White House resolved to bite its collective tongue until the Clifford report came in.
Johnson and his advisers drafted two more hot-line messages to Premier Kosygin-one concerning Liberty and one concerning cease-fire negotiations. Then the President went off to a long diplomatic luncheon and upon his return consulted briefly with Bundy and Rostow before sending still another hot-line message concerning Liberty. In all, the hot line was activated five times during the day: three times to convey messages to Kosygin concerning the Liberty attack and twice for messages concerning cease-fire negotiations.6
When the Clifford report eventually came in, it contained no evidence that the attack was deliberate, and White House tolerance of the affair as a "feasible" error of war thus became permanent.
****************
In Liberty's main battle dressing station Corpsman VanCleave administered first aid to the many wounded. Dr. Kiepfer checked all of the men and left orders for several to be given morphine or for intravenous solutions to be started. He assigned men to stay with some of the most seriously wounded, keeping a close watch for changes in pulse or respiration, and then headed for the bridge to check on the captain's condition.
A messenger ran through the ship shouting that "friendly fighters are in the area," but the report was wrong. The aircraft, reconnoitering from a distance, were soon identified as the same swept-wing jets that had been attacking us.
Lieutenant Painter was helping VanCleave hang an i.v. bottle from an overhead fluorescent light fixture when the general announcing system suddenly cried: ''Aircraft and torpedo boats approaching, starboard side. Stand by for torpedo attack, starboard side. "
Pandemonium broke loose in the room as men raced for the ladder. Every table bore a wounded man, and those who had the strength burst from their tables, lurching, falling, stumbling toward the ladder. Men tore freshly inserted i.v. tubes from their arms in a wild effort to leave the place before it filled with water as they knew the Research spaces were filled. Men too sick to move, men too weak to be driven to their feet even by the fear of instant death, cried out: "Help me!" "Please, oh, please help me!" "Mama, Mama!"
Lieutenant Painter, fearing the panic as much as the torpedo, reached the ladder ahead of most of the men. With a great leap he landed on the third rung, then turned to face the fear-crazed throng behind him.
"Stop it, goddamn it, knock it off!" he screamed as a wall of frightened sailors piled up against him. Someone grabbed at his foot in trying to pull him from his perch, but he sent the man flying with a kick to the neck.
Having slowed the momentum, he ordered the men to move away from the ladder. "No one leaves here until every wounded man is safe! No one leaves!" he bellowed.
He was afraid they would tear him apart, but they moved back. With haste, but this time without panic, men helped other men leave the space that they were all certain would collapse at any moment. The strain was everywhere. Men trembled. Their voices cracked. But they controlled their panic. A senior petty officer with more than fifteen years in the Navy, a man who had long instructed others in the use of life-saving equipment, trembled uncontrollably as he realized that he had forgotten how to inflate his life jacket. He was embarrassed as a younger man reminded him to twist the air tube to open the valve.
A flight of Israeli jets passed over the ship at low level without releasing ordnance. Men who had braced for the arrival of more rockets exhaled slowly. Perhaps it was over, they hoped. Perhaps the torpedo boats that were approaching at such high speed would not attack. Maybe, just maybe, it was over.
As before, the three boats arrived with signal lamps flashing. The signals, unobstructed by smoke this time, were clearly seen; but no one on the bridge could read the flashing light. Word was passed for a signalman or a radioman to report to the bridge. Although several men reported, none could read the signals.
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter was on the bridge now, serving as messenger, steward, hospital corpsman, lookout and jack-of-all trades as needed. Soon he became combat photographer, taking pictures of the torpedo boats with the ship's 35mm Canon that I had selected and placed on the bridge only a few days before. "Take pictures as long as you can," McGonagle directed. "If you have to, destroy the camera and try to hide the film."
A small flag with the Star of David could be seen. "They seem to be Israeli," commented McGonagle.
At 1632, more than two and a half hours after the first rocket was launched against Liberty, radarman Cocnavitch entered in his log the first identification of the attacking force: "1632-Boats flying Israeli ensign. 'Torpedo boats seem to be Israeli' Captain's statement."
Radioman Chief Wayne L. Smith regained power in the radio room and quickly raised Commander Sixth Fleet. "The torpedo boats are flying the Star of David. They seem to be Israeli," he reported.
The boats came closer.
McGonagle strained to read the hull numbers, partially obscured by bow waves. "Two oh four one seven," he read aloud to a quartermaster, who recorded the numbers that would be reported to Admiral Martin and to newspaper reporters around the world. Israel had no boats numbered 204-17. McGonagle misread as Arabic numerals "17" the Hebrew letter "T" of Israeli motor torpedo boat Tahmass, hull number 204T, which now stood close to Liberty.
Chief Thompson came up from the forward repair locker. Harry Thompson had once been trained as a signalman, so he tried to help, but the lights from the boats made no sense. He tried semaphore. Standing in the open with semaphore flags, he tried to talk with the boats. Still there was no response.
The Tahmass commander came closer in order to use a bullhorn. Slowly, enunciated carefully, the message came across the water in English: "Do you need any help?"
Enraged, McGonagle specified to his quartermaster the particular profanity that he thought most appropriate for reply under the circumstances and that short message, uncharacteristic of McGonagle, was obediently relayed to Tahmass. The torpedo boats withdrew in silence and resumed their observation from a safer distance. A few minutes later they turned away for the last time and disappeared over the horizon.
Listing heavily to starboard, canted toward the bow, most of her vital equipment destroyed, two thirds of her crew wounded, thirty two men dead and others dying, a quarter of the ship flooded, and with her captain severely wounded, Liberty traced an oily serpentine path upon the water.7
Chapter 8
RECOVERY,
REPAIR AND RENDEZVOUS
You can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates, but
it will not suffocate without having stung you. You may
say that is a small matter, and, indeed, it is a small matter.
But if the bee had not stung you, bees would have long ago
ceased to exist.
Jean Paulhan, 1884-1968
Recovery of the dead and collection of the wounded continued as the ship fitters, engine men and damage control parties fought to keep control of the heavily damaged ship. Ensign Scott in Damage Control Central received dozens of reports of flooding from bullet and rocket holes near the waterline. Men packed these with rags, then hammered cone-shaped pieces of wood into the openings to force a tight fit. Larger holes were sealed by using giant timbers to force blocks of wood or waterproof boxes against the holes.
Scott received a report of a large leak just aft of Damage Control Central in the crew's gym and weight-lifting room. Two feet of water swirled through the room in a great torrent admitted through a huge underwater hole. The usual methods would not work here. Men raced through the ship to gather mattresses from the crew's sleeping compartment. Three mattresses were stuffed into the hole, where they slowed but failed to stop the flooding, then were swept away and into the sea.
The list of the ship kept the flooding contained within the one room. Water, which was at shoe-top level near the door, became more than two feet deep in other parts of the compartment. Using large plywood panels to hold mattresses against the opening, forcing these into place with jacks and braces, and holding the whole arrangement in place with timbers, Scott and his men plugged the hole. Pumping the room dry, they found only a small and controllable trickle of water coming through the apparatus.
****************
Not far from where I lay in the passageway outside the wardroom was the chief petty officers' lounge. This room, never intended as a battle dressing station, was relatively safe from rockets, bullets and napalm due to its location near the ship's centerline. It became a collection station for the wounded. Painter found the XO in the passageway outside-bleeding, coherent and angry. Painter lit a cigarette for him, then broke the seal on a bottle of Johnny Walker that he had brought down from the XO's stateroom. Armstrong poured a comforting quantity down his throat, then tucked the bottle under his brown Navy blanket where it nestled alongside his left arm. The bottle remained there as, a few minutes later, a group of men lifted the stretcher for the arduous journey to the main battle dressing station in the crew's mess hall. Philip complained bitterly as the stretcher stood nearly on end to make a sharp tum in the narrow passageway, but he didn't let go of the bottle.
Soon it was my tum. My leg was grotesquely swollen now as I was carried, none too gently, through circuitous passageways. It was dusk as I was lifted over a section of the main deck alongside the after deck house. Above me at very low level hovered a small green helicopter with two men visible in the bubble that was its nose. Then the green bird disappeared from my view as someone covered my face with a blanket to protect me from the strong prop wash.
****************
On the bridge, one of our sailors appeared at the captain's side with an Ml .30 caliber rifle. "Captain," he said, "I can pick off the pilot easy."
"No," McGonagle answered quickly, "they'd only return to finish us off."
As the helicopter continued to hover near the bridge, its occupants attempted to signal by gestures and hand signals that they wanted to land. In no mood for visitors, McGonagle waved them away.1
Moving closer to the forecastle, the men continued to signal their wish to land, and McGonagle remained firm in his refusal. Finally, a message packet dropped from the helicopter. Retrieved and brought to the bridge to be opened, it was, McGonagle found, the calling card of the naval air attache of the United States embassy at Tel Aviv-Commander, U.S. Navy, Ernest Carl Castle. Written on the back of the card was the terse query, "Have you casualties?"2
"Yes," replied McGonagle, again using the hand-held Aldis lamp. But Commander Castle seemed not to understand, and in a few minutes he, too, departed toward Tel Aviv. "The entire helo trip," he reported later by message, "was a frustration."
I finally arrived at the main battle dressing station to find a bloody scene that seemed somehow reminiscent of the American Civil War. Eased out of my stretcher and onto the cold Formica of a table top, I could see other wounded men lying on top of other tables. About two dozen mess-hall tables, each welded to the deck as is customary for tables aboard ship, now served as hospital beds. From fluorescent light fixtures hung glass bottles, which dripped vital fluids through plastic tubes into the arms of the men below. Thin mattresses from the crew's sleeping compartments had been placed on deck between and under the tables, and these held still more men.
Everywhere were wounded men. Most lay silently staring at the overhead. Some chatted quietly with friends. Several were in obvious distress as they awaited the arrival of Dr. Kiepfer or a corpsman, and these were being comforted by shipmates. Bandages, slings, compresses of all sizes and shapes cluttered the room.
Men filtered through the room offering water, fruit juice or coffee. Medicinal whiskey had been authorized for issue, we learned, and brandy, wine or bourbon was available. I accepted a quart can of chilled grapefruit juice and drained it without stopping for breath.
"Anything else, sir?" asked a startled sailor.
"Yes, more juice, please," I said, as surprised at my own capacity as the sailor was at my performance.
On a table near me I could see Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, my department head. No wounds were visible, but Dave's face was the color and texture of fresh asphalt paving. "Dave!" I called, but got no answer.
"He's deaf," I was told, "and he's blind. He was in the room with the torpedo. Saw it coming through the side of the ship. The explosion burnt his eyes and burst his eardrums." I thought of the story of Medusa.
Chief Benkert sat with me and brought my first detailed news of casualties. "Your roommate is over there," he said, pointing over my left shoulder with obvious pleasure.
"No, he's dead," I insisted. But O'Connor was alive. He was clearly very ill, lying on a blood-soaked mattress between two mess hall tables. When I caught his eye he smiled and waved.
Across the room I could see the XO atop a table near the serving line. Pale but alert, Philip lay on his side and raised himself on one elbow to survey the room. He, too, had just arrived, and he wanted to know who had survived with him. I waved. Philip waved back.
"Thank God the XO is okay," I said.
The serving line, where men ordinarily carried meal trays, was now stocked with bandages, drugs, i.v. bottles, syringes and a host of other medical supplies. Dr. Kiepfer stopped to see me a few minutes after I arrived.
"How do you feel, Jim?" he asked.
Calm, unhurried, seemingly unflustered by the chaos and carnage around him, Kiepfer projected self-assurance. He reminded me of a hospital physician making routine rounds.
"I feel pretty lucky. I'll be okay, Dick."
"Let me know if you need any help," he said, moving on to look after men who obviously were in trouble.
"How do you feel, XO?" he asked Philip Armstrong.
"I'm okay, Doc," he lied as the doctor started to examine the bleeding near Philip's groin. "Some of the guys are a lot worse off than I am. Cup of coffee and I'll be fine."
"Okay, XO," the doctor promised after examining his wounds and checking pulse and blood pressure. "I'll be back to see how you're doing."
Moving to Seaman Salvador Payan, Kiepfer found him unresponsive and apparently dying. Gray matter dribbled into Payan's left ear as he stared at the ceiling, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, but with a grimace of distress on his face.
Kiepfer knew he couldn't save the man. If Payan lived, it would not be Kiepfer who saved him. Kiepfer could only help to make him more comfortable. With that mixture of science and sixth sense that came to characterize the doctor this day, he guessed that much of Payan's distress came from a simple need to urinate. Inserting a catheter to drain the bladder that Payan's own system could not control, he heard a giggle of pleasure that confirmed the diagnosis. Prescribing morphine, Kiepfer moved on.
Steward's Mate Troy Green sat with Armstrong now. Green was the XO's room steward, but he was also his friend, a drinking companion and a confidant. Green brought the coffee that Armstrong asked for, and stayed to comfort him.
McGonagle, unaware of the extent of his executive officer's injuries, came on the general announcing system to ask, "Will the executive officer please come to the bridge?"
Enjoying the irony of his position, Armstrong laughed. "Tell the captain that I can't come to the bridge right now," he said, swallowing more coffee. Green laughed with him. Others who heard the exchange chuckled. One simply doesn't send word to the captain that one can't come to the bridge. One goes.
Abruptly Armstrong began to cough, then to vomit. Green was alarmed at the deep red color of the vomit; Armstrong was calm. "I'll get the doctor," Green said. "Doctor! Corpsman!"
"No, no, no," Philip cautioned. "I'm okay. A little blood. No big deal. Now, look," he said, removing his wristwatch, "look, I want you to have this.
Looking across the room a few minutes later, I found his table empty and sobbed for the first time that day. Philip Armstrong was an enigma. We all loved him. Probably even McGonagle loved him. Now he was gone.
We learned much later that a tiny shrapnel wound in Armstrong's back had caused severe internal damage and extensive bleeding near his heart; finally, the pressure around the heart became so great that the heart could no longer pump.3
McGonagle worried about running aground in shallow water. His bleeding was under control, thanks to a tourniquet that had been applied by Petty Officer Carpenter, and now the leg was numb. The tourniquet should have been loosened every few minutes to maintain circulation, but too much was happening.
He was headed toward open sea. The gyro compass was out of order and the magnetic compass was not reliable, but he headed the ship toward where he thought deeper water should be. The Fathometer was one of the few items of auxiliary equipment that continued to work, and the reports it gave were not reassuring. Where he expected to find fifty fathoms of water, he found forty. As he slowed the ship from eight knots to four, the depth of water dropped to thirty-five fathoms.
Summoning the deck department officer, Ensign David Lucas, McGonagle directed Lucas to set the anchor detail. He knew that several of the men who had been assigned to this detail were dead or wounded. "Just round up as many of the men as you can," he said, "and hurry!"
In less than five minutes Lucas reported by sound-powered telephone from the forecastle that the anchor detail was set. Golden reported from Main Control that power was available to the anchor windlass. McGonagle waited.
"Thirty fathoms," reported a quartermaster who stood near the Fathometer.
"All engines stop," ordered McGonagle.
"Twenty-eight fathoms."
"All engines back one third!" cried McGonagle.
"Twenty-eight fathoms," repeated the quartermaster as the ship shuddered from the sudden exertion of trying to reverse her direction in the water. Water in the flooded spaces added to the strain by resisting the change. Bulkheads bordering Research heaved and bulged as they threatened to give way under the pressure. In the supply department, behind a small-parts stowage cabinet in number four storeroom, a small crack admitted a stream of water from the adjacent room.
"Twenty-eight fathoms."
On the forecastle, Lucas had prepared the anchor for letting go. The anchor windlass friction brake gripped the heavy chain only lightly, as the main weight was taken by a large pelican hook. A boatswain's mate stood with a sledge, ready to knock the retaining shackle from the pelican hook upon command.
"Let go the starboard anchor," directed McGonagle.
"Let go the starboard anchor," repeated Lucas by sound-powered telephone from the forecastle.
The boatswain's mate hoisted the heavy sledge.
"Belay that," snapped McGonagle over the phones as he countermanded his order. Catching the sledge in mid-swing, too late to stop, the boatswain's mate directed the blow against the steel deck, missing the shackle. The blow, sounding to those in the area like the report of a rocket, caused some to wince, others to duck for cover. The anchor stayed in the hawsepipe.
McGonagle had decided against anchoring and to attempt instead to back out of the ever-shallower water in which he found himself. For twenty minutes the ship backed. Rudder control while backing is poor under the best of conditions; now there was almost no control at all as the rudder reacted slowly within the narrow arc the men could manually move it. Still, the ship did move generally in the direction that McGonagle wanted it to go.
"Thirty fathoms," repeated the quartermaster. "Thirty-eight."
Finally, McGonagle found deeper water.
Resuming forward motion and changing course to the right, he maneuvered around the shallow water. "Forty-eight fathoms."
One emergency seemed only to lead to another: the ship's engines stopped.
"Lost lube-oil pressure," came the report from Golden in the engine rooms. The sudden loss of momentum again caused water to surge wildly through the flooded compartments and to pound heavily against the weakened forward bulkhead. The steel bulkhead plating showed a decided bulge now from the weight of water pushing against the other side. Seamen described the movement as "panting" as the steel rippled like thin paper from the relentless push of the churning water. The small crack enlarged; the trickle of water became a small, but ominous, spray.
Golden quickly brought the engines back on the line, and the ship continued to move toward deeper water. Within minutes she was in more than eighty fathoms of water and McGonagle determined that there was no longer a danger of grounding. The engines were performing well now and responded to his call for ten knots.
****************
At 1725, the COMSIXTHFLT order to move Liberty away from Gaza was broadcast to the ship from the Naval Communications Station in Asmara. The message was now more than six hours old and had long since been overtaken by events. The receivers that would have received the message were out of order; the decoding equipment that would have unscrambled it was underwater; the men who would have processed the message were dead. But the ship seemed to be relatively free of danger for the first time in several hours.
In Main Engine Control, Golden allowed himself to relax. Fireman Aishe brought a large pitcher of cold water, which he slowly poured over Golden's head. Then he handed Golden a towel and a lighted cigarette.
On the bridge, McGonagle moved to the port wing where he lay on deck and propped his injured leg on part of his "captain's chair." Identical chairs-large, comfortable and elevated for good view were permanently affixed to each wing of the bridge. From his supine position, McGonagle could see aft over the fantail, where he could judge the ship's progress from the wake she left and could easily give orders to the men on watch in the pilothouse a few feet away.
A plain-language voice radio message from COMSIXTHFLT told him to steam almost due north for a hundred miles, where he would be met by two destroyers with medical aid. Nearly everyone aboard was wounded to some extent, and about a third of the crew were more or less seriously wounded. McGonagle was proceeding toward a rendezvous with friendly forces, but with only tenuous control of ship's equipment and with a weakened bulkhead whose collapse would almost certainly cause the ship to sink.
When Lieutenant Bennett appeared on the bridge, McGonagle dictated a report of the attack for Liberty's seniors in Washington and London and in the Sixth Fleet. Bennett transcribed the captain's words, then typed the message himself in the ship's office, returned the completed message to the bridge for the captain's signature, and delivered it to Chief Smith in Main Radio for transmission. 4
Next, the captain summoned Ensign Malcolm "Patrick" O'Malley and directed that a report of personnel casualties be sent to the Bureau of Naval Personnel. Finally, he called Dr. Kiepfer, assured himself that everything possible was being done for the wounded and that the dead were being properly cared for, and at last permitted the doctor to examine his wounds. These things completed, McGonagle succumbed to fatigue.
He had lost a large amount of blood. He had wounds in his right arm and leg and over much of his body from flying rocket fragments, mostly aluminum and magnesium particles. The leg was numb. He was exhausted. Soon he was barely conscious.
When Kiepfer asked his name, McGonagle could not answer. He could not tell who he was, where he was, what had happened, where he was going. Kiepfer considered declaring the captain physically unable to retain command and consulted with Lieutenant Golden. The captain had lost so much blood that he could no longer think clearly. Certainly he was in no condition to make important decisions concerning the ship. Kiepfer and Golden decided that since he was in no condition to make any decisions at all, he was unlikely to make any dangerous ones. Most of his problem, the doctor decided, was caused by fatigue and great loss of blood, and this would soon start to correct itself with rest and the passage of time. Kiepfer left the captain unconscious on the deck and sent Signalman David to locate an officer who could come to the bridge and take control of the ship.
Just before dusk, Signalman David found Lieutenant Painter helping look after the wounded in the after battle dressing station.
"You're it for tag, sir," he said.
"Huh?"
"Mr. Golden's busy in Main Control. You're the next senior line officer. Captain's alone on the bridge and needs help."
Painter went directly to the bridge, where he found a lightly manned watch. McGonagle was unconscious. Painter assumed the "conn," advised the pilothouse watch that he was in control of the ship, and thus took over for the stricken captain. When no new emergencies arose immediately, he dispatched a messenger to his stateroom to bring his Instamatic camera, which he used to take several pictures in the remaining rays of light from the setting sun, including a view of the unconscious commanding officer.
****************
During the evening, Commander Sixth Fleet advised that he was sending an airplane to provide navigational support,5 and lookouts were instructed to search carefully for such an airplane, but it failed to arrive. Once, a light was seen at great distance, but it came no closer and did not respond to calls by radio. We never learned what happened to the airplane, but the search for it helped keep the conning officer and lookouts occupied.
Meanwhile, Dr. Kiepfer worried about Seaman Gary Blanchard, a very young sailor who had suffered serious wounds from the full force of an exploding rocket at his midsection. Kiepfer had several patients whom he could do nothing for. Blanchard's injuries were to his kidneys. Although the damage was serious, surgery might save him.
"How is it? Will I die, Doc?"
SN Gary Ray Blanchard, USN, 771 77 22
Born 16 September 1946, Wichita, Kansas
Active duty since 11 February 1964
Parents: Mr. & Mrs. Earl T. Blanchard, Wichita, Kansas
Died on operating table 0315 June 9, 1967
Buried: Lakeview Cemetery and Mausoleum, Wichita, Kansas
Active duty since 11 February 1964
Parents: Mr. & Mrs. Earl T. Blanchard, Wichita, Kansas
Died on operating table 0315 June 9, 1967
Buried: Lakeview Cemetery and Mausoleum, Wichita, Kansas
"It's not good, Gary," Kiepfer said. "If I don't operate, I'm sure you'll die. If I do operate, you may die anyway. Your chances are not good either way, but if I operate we may be able to save you."
Lieutenant Painter, who had been relieved on the bridge and was again helping with care of the wounded, turned away from the poignant scene and tried to hide the emotion he felt. Young Blanchard showed no fear.
"Well, then, I guess we better operate," he said.
An hour later Kiepfer performed major surgery under emergency conditions on the wardroom mess table. Blanchard, both kidneys riddled with rocket fragments, never regained consciousness.
****************
Lieutenant Maury Bennett stopped to see me quite early in the evening. I knew that his battle station was in the flooded space, and I had been told that he had died there. I had been thinking of his wife, Joy; his son, Maurice III; and his unforgettably named daughters, Heidi, Holly, Heather and Hilary. And as I mourned for them, Maury appeared in front of me.
"My God, Maury, I thought you were dead!"
I don't think he ever understood how glad I was to see him, or why my voice cracked, or why I wiped my eyes.
"I just sent the battle report on this thing to the Chief of Naval Operations," he told me. "I hope you get to see it. You won't believe what Shep said."
"What did he say?"
"From reading the report, you'd think almost nothing happened at all. The report says there were just one or two airplanes that made a total of maybe five or six strafing runs over a period of maybe five or six minutes. Then, bam, the torpedo, and it was all over. Clean. Simple. Just like that."
"For Christ's sake! Who wrote the god damned report?"
"Well, I did. Shep dictated it to me."
"Jesus Christ, Maury, what did you let him send a crazy report like that for? He's pretty sick. Doesn't he know what really happened?"
"What do you mean, 'let him'? He's the captain. I couldn't sit up there and argue with him about the details of his battle report. He told me what to say and I said it."
"For Christ's sake, Maury!"
I didn't see Maury again that night. When I mentioned the report to Lloyd Painter and others during the night, they reacted with bewilderment. No one could understand why the report so minimized the incident. But that message was the first detailed report to leave the ship, and it was subsequently released by the Pentagon, essentially verbatim, to the press.
****************
Pat O'Malley compiled the casualty report. He drafted the message in three headings: KILLED IN ACTION; MISSING IN ACTION; WOUNDED IN ACTION. A few hours later he told me the story.
Pat was a small man. Only a few weeks out of Officer Candidate School, he was Liberty's most junior officer and consequently the butt of every ensign joke ever known. "You'll always be an ensign to me, Pat," he was told, as are all ensigns, and he took the kidding well, but now he was angry.
"God damned stupid Bureau," he said. "They got my casualty report okay. And do you know what they said? They sent a message back, and they said, 'Wounded in what action?' 'Killed in what action?' They say it wasn't 'action,' it was 'an accident.' I'd like to tell 'em to come out here and see the difference between 'action' and 'accident.' Stupid bastards!"
Pat stayed with me for a while, brought me yet another chilled can of grapefruit juice, which I drained, and filled me in further on what was happening in the ship and in the Sixth Fleet and how the world was reacting to the attack.
Finally, he wandered off, still angry over having to.respond to what seemed an insane query from the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
****************
When Damage Control Officer John Scott received reports of the weakened and leaking bulkhead in number-four storeroom forward of the flooded research compartment, he made a personal inspection. Alarmed, he mobilized the most experienced members of his damage control teams to "shore up" and support the weakened steel plating, but he was less than comforted with the result.
The flooded compartment was like a giant swimming pool, nearly filled, being hauled over rough ground by drunken teamsters. With each roll, water crashed crazily against the ship's sides, increasing her roll, delaying her return to equilibrium. Tons of water moved freely throughout this large compartment that had been "number three hold" when the ship was a merchantman; and with the water moved heavy desks, radio receivers, filing cabinets, battered doors and bulkheads, and the bodies of friends. All crashed relentlessly against the ship's sides and the already weakened and leaking forward bulkhead.
Scott did all that could be done. Heavy plywood was braced against the straining steel, and everything was held in place with timbers. The fury inside still howled to get out, but the barrier was now, if not secure, at least more equal to the task.
It was necessary to station a man near the shoring to warn by telephone of any shifting of the shores or of any new leaking. Ordinarily, men would have been assigned to such duty in four-hour shifts; because of the hazard and the terror of this task, volunteers were sought to rotate for ten minutes at a time. Typical of the Liberty crew, there were ample volunteers.
****************
Chief Joe Benkert and Senior Chief Stan White spent most of the night with me, keeping me informed of what was going on and looking after my health and comfort. Although compresses had been applied to every important wound, blood continued to ooze through the bandages and to collect in a sticky mess in my clothing. The stuff collected under my body; it pooled on the table top and under the small of my back; and it dripped from the table onto the deck below.
"Be still, damn it," I remember Benkert saying. "I want you to be around for the next trip."
It didn't seriously occur to either of us that Liberty would not be making another trip. I was still high enough on morphine and on the happy accident of being alive that I was not terribly concerned about the continued bleeding, and my confidence was maintained by an occasional visit by Dr. Kiepfer or a corpsman who, after taking pulse and blood pressure, reported that these vital signs were within normal limits.
****************
On the bridge, men continued to scan the sky and to search the horizon for American ships or airplanes. No American forces were sighted. The first sighting was not American, but Russian. Soviet guided missile destroyer 626/4 arrived after midnight-hours ahead of Martin's forces-to send a flashing-light message in English.
DO YOU NEED HELP? asked the Russian.
NO, THANK YOU, the conning officer replied.
I WILL STAND BY IN CASE YOU NEED ME, the Russian answered.
Thus the Soviet skipper celebrated his achievement discreetly by remaining near Liberty to wait with her for the arrival of American ships.
The night went slowly. The few officers who were able took turns on the bridge with the captain, who, regaining some strength, moved into the pilothouse at about 0200. He spent the rest of the night in a special captain's chair fashioned long ago from a discarded helicopter pilot's seat. The seat, comfortable yet small, fitted neatly next to the disabled bridge radar repeater and in front of a porthole. In it, the captain could see through the porthole, and he could lean on the radar repeater for support.
When Kiepfer found him here and gave him a report on the condition of the wounded, McGonagle remained incoherent and seemed not to understand what was being said to him.
Toward morning Benkert informed me that two destroyers from Destroyer Squadron 12, USS Davis and USS Massey, were approaching on schedule and would be alongside with additional medical help soon after sunrise. A few hours behind the destroyers were the Sixth Fleet flagship USS Little Rock; our newest carrier, USS America; carrier USS Saratoga; and other ships. Helicopters would begin transferring wounded to the carriers during midmorning.
****************
Seaman Nathan Coleman had worked all night. He had helped plug rocket holes and had repaired damage wherever he could. He had helped man the rudder from the after steering station. He had raced through the ship, carrying messages. And he had helped look after the wounded. Now, with Navy ships on the way, he remembered his new 35mm Canon camera in his locker in the sleeping compartment. He was a serious amateur photographer in the midst of a great drama, and his new camera had yet to be loaded with its first roll of film.
He had not been in the sleeping compartment at all during the night. The room looked as it had never looked before. Usually spotlessly clean, it now had greasy footprints tracked everywhere. Bunks, suspended three-high from steel stanchions, were usually neatly made up, with clean white towels hanging near each pillow. Today, greasy rags hung in their place. A few men dozed in their bunks, half-dressed, shoes abandoned to the jumble on deck along with unrecognizable denim that had been clothing. Fully half of the bunks in this room were now stripped, the mattresses having been borrowed for the wounded.
Coleman found the camera undamaged in his tiny locker, loaded it with his only roll of Kodachrome II, and headed forward. Pausing in the battle dressing station, he took two quick shots by existing light.
"Hey, Nat, I don't think we're supposed to be taking any pictures."
He moved forward toward the bridge. The pilothouse on a Navy ship at sea is almost a sacred place. One doesn't go there unless one has business there. One doesn't joke or speak loudly. Idle chatter is discouraged. And on Liberty, McGonagle tolerated smoking on watch only by the conning officer.
Coleman entered the room through a rear door. He had preset the camera so that he would be ready to shoot, even though he didn't know what he might find here. He knew he should not be here at all, but there were pictures that had to be taken. The men on watch said nothing, seemed not to see him as he stood next to a chart table to the left of the helm. Steering control had been restored, and a helmsman stood behind the wheel, feet apart, learning that a heavy list and a belly full of water cause a ship to respond differently. Fully occupied with a very difficult task that had once been second nature, he seemed not to notice Coleman.
In silence, Coleman sensed that the captain now occupied his chair on the port wing of the bridge, perhaps ten feet from the pilothouse door. Moving to the door, he raised the camera to eye level and focused carefully. McGonagle sat stubbornly in the chair, a paper cup in his left hand, drinking black coffee. His khaki trouser leg had been tom away above the right knee to reveal the abuse it had suffered.
Clack, reported the single-lens reflex camera as shutter clicked, mirror moved.
Coleman saw the captain stiffen, but so far he had not been seen. He wound and snapped again. Clack.
"Hey, stop that man!" cried McGonagle.
Coleman spun, dashed past the startled helmsman, and nearly fell through the rear door. Holding the camera to his chest with his left hand, he bounded down the ladder to the 02 level. All ladders were slippery now with fuel oil tracked from the ruptured tanks. He lost his footing as he crossed the landing outside the captain's cabin, but his right hand caught a railing. He recovered his balance without damage to himself or his camera. Behind him he could hear a shipmate, dispatched by McGonagle. Coleman was faster and more determined. On the 01 level he made a top-speed dash down a long corridor through "officers' country," and burst through an open door onto a landing leading to the main deck. Two giant steps put him on the main deck, and a few more steps put him inside the after deck house near the barber shop.
He paused to listen for his pursuer and to catch his breath. "What have I done?" he asked himself, wondering what charges would be lodged against him when he was caught. Although he was no longer being chased, the men on watch knew him. It was only a matter of time before someone would report him. No matter. He had his prize and he would not give it up. He had a latent image, two latent images, of a U.S. Navy commanding officer on the bridge of his ship during a historic incident at sea.
He removed the film from his camera and hid it. He might be caught and punished, but he would never give up the film. 6
****************
"Surface contact dead ahead," cried a bridge lookout. "Two contacts, sir, hull down on the horizon."
Forgetting the phantom photographer, McGonagle left his chair to scan the horizon with binoculars. He was on a westerly course now, with the rising sun at his back. In the distance he could see the superstructures of two ships, the hulls hidden by the curvature of the earth. Untrained eyes would have seen nothing at all. McGonagle, sick as he was, recognized the distant gray shapes as United States Navy destroyers.
More than sixteen hours after the onset of the attack, destroyers Davis and Massey came alongside. The ships nestled together, dead in the water, as Commodore Lehy of Destroyer Squadron 12 came aboard from his flagship, Davis, along with Navy doctors Peter Flynn from USS America and Joseph Utz from USS Davis. Also sent over were two medical corpsmen, fifteen damage control technicians and a host of other specialists.
Commodore Lehy was escorted to the bridge, where he found McGonagle conscious and on his feet, but sick and exhausted. Clearly, it was time for McGonagle to go below, to rest, to look after his own wounds. Gently, the commodore offered to assume command of Liberty. Even though McGonagle was so weary that he slurred his words, he refused to relinquish command. Lehy held a quick conference with Dr. Kiepfer and Lieutenant Golden, then resumed his conversation with McGonagle.
The two men leaned on the bridge railing for several minutes while they talked. Finally it was agreed: McGonagle would go below to his cabin to rest and recuperate. Lieutenant Golden, now Liberty's second-ranking officer, would handle the ship's business, keeping the captain informed and executing his orders, and Lieutenant Commander William Pettyjohn from Lehy's staff would come aboard to assist with navigation and ship handling.
Retiring to his cabin, McGonagle found the place a shambles. Fire from napalm had scorched the furniture and melted portions of his nylon carpet. Rockets had tom more than a dozen jagged eight- and ten-inch holes in his bulkheads. Portholes were shattered. A rocket had exploded in his pillow, and an unexploded eight-inch projectile lay quietly in his shower. Taking time only to have the projectile removed, McGonagle retired.
****************
During midmorning, the first helicopter from USS America arrived to begin the slow job of removing the dead and wounded. I was slated to make the trip, along with about fifty others. Once again, the tireless Liberty crew started the muscle-wrenching job of hauling stretchers up the impossibly steep ship's ladders, and once again my stretcher stood nearly on end as men struggled to move me toward the helicopters.
The fresh air on the main deck was refreshing. The sky was blue and the weather mild as I waited in a row of identical stretchers to be hoisted into the air. Finally, my tum came. As the big blue Navy helicopter hovered over the forecastle, a wire and hook descended from a winch, grasped my stretcher, and hauled me into the sky. Although it couldn't have been more than twelve feet, it seemed higher as I was pulled into the heat, noise, oily exhaust, smoke and pressure of the helicopter's prop wash. A few minutes later we were deposited on the flight deck of USS America.
I was met on America by a civilian agent from the Office of Naval Intelligence, who walked alongside my stretcher as it was carried away from the helicopter and past a group of reporters and cameramen. "Don't answer any questions," the man warned as he hunched over the moving stretcher to show me his identification. "Don't talk to the press or anyone else until you are told it's all right."
More than an hour passed before the carrier reached Liberty. The ship was a pathetic sight. Her list could be seen from miles away. Her bow was several feet lower in the water than her stem. She was blackened with smoke, oil and blood, and punctured with hundreds of rocket and bullet holes. She was afloat and moving under her own power. And she flew her American flag.
As the ships came closer, every man not on watch was on deck. From my bunk in America's sick bay I heard the cry of several thousand men. "Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!" they cheered to honor our ship.
Petty Officer Jeffery Carpenter, weakened finally from loss of blood, occupied a stretcher on Liberty's main deck, where he waited for a helicopter. Stan White lifted the stretcher by one end so that Jeff could see the tribute being paid by the carrier.
"Now I know we'll be all right," he said.
The most seriously wounded were aboard the carrier now and in the hands of an expert and well-equipped medical team. The entire medical department sprang to life. The ship's senior medical officer, Commander John J. Gordon, spent more than twelve hours continuously in surgery, where he was assisted by Drs. Donald Griffith and, when he returned from Liberty, Peter Flynn. Drs. Frank Federico and George Lussier made ward rounds. The very seriously ill were attended constantly by corpsmen. Off-duty men from other departments volunteered to help with feeding, bathing, changes of bedding and other details. Carpenter's faith was well placed. Although doctors identified several men as probably beyond help, not a single man died.
An alert corpsman with the unlikely nickname "Smokey the Bear" adjusted a special splint that the America team made for my leg. For the first time I was relatively free of pain, thanks to Smokey. Recognizing that my primary need now was for sleep, he posted a sign over my bunk: DO NOT DISTURB. THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAYBE YOUR OWN. [signed] SMOKEY THE BEAR, MASTER-AT-ARMS IN CHARGE OF WARD. As long as that sign hung, I was never disturbed. 7
In Norfolk and elsewhere throughout much of the United States, friends, family and sweethearts of Liberty crewmen reacted to the news that Liberty had been mauled at sea. Most received the news first on radio or television. All lived through at least twenty-four hours of anxious misery before learning whether their particular man had survived.
My wife, Terry, received the news before noon on Thursday as she worked at home in the kitchen of our rented Norfolk townhouse. A neighbor, a Navy wife whose husband was at sea in a submarine, appeared at the patio door to tell of the news report she had heard on the radio.
Initial reports listed ten dead, a hundred wounded. Soon reports were broadcast of fifteen seriously wounded. Then came a report that twenty-four were missing, trapped in the flooded space. Everyone knew that these men were almost certainly dead. Finally, later in the afternoon, the wives decided that they should go home and keep the telephone lines open so that they could receive any news that might come to them from Washington.
Paula Lucas was in Corriganville, Maryland, visiting her mother with the new baby when she heard Paul Harvey report on his news show that "a communication ship in the Mediterranean" had been torpedoed. Paula knew that Liberty was the only communication ship in the Mediterranean. A call to a friend at the radio station confirmed that Liberty had been hit. In a few minutes Paula's stockbroker cousin called to report that he had seen the story on the Dow-Jones ticker.
He awoke shortly after 0600 to the sound of his doorbell. The front door had a translucent fiberglass curtain, and through the curtain Captain Toth could see two figures. With mounting fear he rose from the chair. He could see that the visitors were naval officers. One was a chaplain.
Captain Toth told me much later that it was not necessary for the officers to speak. He had served as a commanding officer during his military career, and he had made such calls himself. He tried to wish them away, but they wouldn't go. He had a flash of hope that he was still asleep and the men were part of a very bad dream, but the vision remained. Finally, he opened the door, accepted the message in silence, thanked the officers for their courtesy, and closed the door very slowly.
****************
Meanwhile, the officers and men of Liberty were fully occupied with keeping the ship afloat and keeping Washington informed of what was going on. Necessary reports were still being made; vital repairs were being accomplished; urgent messages from Washington and London were being answered.
John Scott and his damage control crew by now had a satisfactory feel for the extent of damage and the size of the torpedo hole. They could see much of the hole through the clear Mediterranean water, and by probing the opening with a long fire nozzle they had determined that it was at least thirty feet wide. Clearly, such an opening could not be repaired at sea. Nevertheless, senior officers in the other ships pestered Golden and Pettyjohn with demands to have divers measure the hole and report what might be done to patch it.
Lieutenant Bob Roberts, commanding officer of the fleet tug Papago, donned scuba gear and led a small group of divers. Stretching nylon rope from one edge of the opening to another, they knotted each end, then cut the rope to the length of the opening and sent it up to the main deck to be measured. Several such lengths were cut, and they all told the same story: the opening in Liberty's side was more than forty feet wide. They didn't have to measure the height. They could see that it extended from above the waterline to the bilge keel twenty-four feet below. Any remaining hopes for patching the hole were quickly abandoned.
Golden was becoming increasingly concerned about an apparently undiscovered major leak in the forward part of the ship. The ship, already noticeably low in the water forward, was getting lower. Although her sharp starboard list was getting no worse, now she seemed to be sinking by the bow, and no flooding or other reason for this condition could be found. Golden pumped ballast around to try to improve the ship's trim; still, every hour she was a few inches lower. He resolved to jettison anchor chain if necessary to lighten the forward part of the ship, and continued to search for undiscovered flooding.
After borrowing a circular saw from Davis (to replace the ship's saw, which an officer had borrowed and failed to return), Ensign Scott rounded up a crew to replace the temporary shores that had been erected to support the panting bulkhead in number-four storeroom. This job took up most of the afternoon, required every available man and several Davis men as well, and used every remaining piece of shoring on the ship, all of the adjustable shoes and all of the plywood. Duilio Demori helped, as did Richard Neese, James Smith, Phillip Tourney and others, and when they were finished the bulkhead looked reasonably secure. Although it still leaked, the leak was small. The shoring was a sturdy complex of professionally fitted timbers that looked as though it would do the job. The men were proud of their work, and several of them posed proudly by the scaffolding like structure to have their pictures taken.
Golden never did find the reason for the ship's poor trim. Luckily, the condition stabilized during the afternoon, and it was not necessary to take any drastic action.
next
COVER-UP
footnotes:
Chapter 7
1. USS Saratoga message 081245Z June 1967.
2. USS Saratoga message 081254Z June 1967.
3. CINCUSNAVEUR message 081340Z June 1967.
4. A witness would later describe these helicopters to the Court of Inquiry as "Russian Sikorsky" models; Sikorsky is, of course, an American aircraft company, but the helicopters were neither Russian nor American. Photographs taken by McGonagle reveal that these were French-built Aerospatiale SA321 Super Frelon (Hornet) helicopters, designed for heavy assault and antisubmarine operations. This model is the largest helicopter made in France and can carry thirty armed troops; it has a boat-type hull and stabilizing fins to permit amphibious operations.
5. A squadron of carrier aircraft is comprised of about twenty aircraft under a commanding officer, usually a Navy commander. The squadron commander does not routinely lead each mission. In this case the squadron commanders were later chastised by the air wing and carrier air group commanders for having exposed themselves to risks that could have been taken by junior and presumably more expendable pilots.
6. The National Security Council has released two of these messages, but declines to release the text of a message intended for relay to President Nasser of Egypt.
7. See Appendix D, pages 237-41, for a discussion of efforts to send aircraft to Liberty's defense.
Chapter 8
1. Commander Castle later described McGonagle's gesture as a thumb-up signal, apparently meant to convey the message that the situation was under control. An officer who was on the bridge reports that the extended digit was not a thumb, but a defiant middle finger. Castle, in civilian clothes aboard an Israeli helicopter, was assumed to be an Israeli.
2. See Appendix F, page 243.
3. A pathologist who examined Philip's body told me later that his throat, bronchial passages, lungs, kidneys and liver were all in poor shape from his abuse of alcohol and tobacco. It was likely, the doctor told me, that Philip would have died within two years, as he had prophesied, even without help from Israel.
4. USS Liberty message 081715Z June 1967 (Appendix G, page 244).
5. COMSIXTHFLT message 0819S3Z June 1967.
6. The pseudonymous Seaman Coleman declines permission to reproduce his photograph of McGonagle. Despite the several years that have passed, he fears Navy or U.S. government retaliation for any apparent connection with any published material concerning the attack.
7. Smokey dropped from sight a few months after the attack. If he reads this, he is invited to write to the author in care of Random House, as he is remembered fondly by many of his former patients, who would like to hear from him.
8. So severe was Lucas's exhaustion and such was his state of mind that he has no recollection of Admiral Martin's visit. The story of Admiral Martin's visit came from other officers and from letters in which Lucas described escorting the admiral, but days later he could not recall ever having seen Admiral Martin in person.
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