The Attack on the Liberty Read online

  The skipper’s warning hung over the crew as the men returned to duty. Dale Larkins paused for a cigarette break at the filter maintenance shop before he resumed work on a high line used to transfer people between ships. The twenty-one-year-old Nebraskan, whose half-brother had been killed in the Korean War, remained ticked off as he snubbed out his cigarette. The deck department had to pull extra duty that night as punishment for someone scribbling on the partitions between bathroom stalls. Bryce Lockwood stood at his bunk in a rear berthing compartment, clutching several white T-shirts he had just picked up at the Liberty’s store. In his haste to pack his sea bag a week earlier, Lockwood had neglected to grab enough undershirts. Armed with an inkpad and Marine-issued rubber stamp, he pressed his name in the collars. Petty Officer 2nd Class Dennis Eikleberry, a twenty-year-old communications technician from Ohio, climbed the ladder to the Liberty’s fantail. After an all-night shift monitoring the war, he stared at the golden beaches nearby.

  Ensign Scott, still tired from his morning watch, drifted into the wardroom in search of a cup of black coffee. The six-foot-four officer from North Carolina lugged his Polaroid Model 210 color camera, hoping to snap a few pictures that afternoon of the Egyptian coast. Several officers relaxed on the red couch and in metal chairs in the wood-paneled lounge, waiting for the skipper to drop in for his usual critique of the afternoon drill. The men wished Scott a happy birthday. Ensign Dave Lucas reclined nearby, a cup of coffee in one hand. The twenty-five-year-old West Virginian, who had missed the birth of his daughter five weeks earlier, had vowed to stop smoking on this cruise; otherwise he likely would have enjoyed a Marlboro from the half-full carton he kept in a drawer beneath his bunk. Dr. Richard Kiepfer, the ship’s thirty-year-old physician, chatted nearby with George Golden, the Liberty’s chief engineer and one of the ship’s few World War II veterans. Word passed over the public address system to stand clear as crews planned a routine test of the motor whaleboat engine.

  McGonagle remained on the bridge. Rather than meet in the wardroom for his usual critique, the skipper planned to talk to his officers individually later in the afternoon, though he had failed to alert his men gathered below of the change. Lieutenant j.g. Lloyd Painter, a twenty-six-year-old intelligence officer from California, studied the radar at 1:55 P.M. Painter, who normally reviewed intelligence reports and helped determine spy targets, noted that the Liberty sailed seventeen and a half miles from shore, as much as five miles beyond the spy ship’s closest assigned operating area. Painter asked the skipper if he should correct the ship’s course. McGonagle checked the Liberty’s position. He sighted the minaret at El Arish, approximately twenty-five miles away. Lookouts stationed above the bridge interrupted the discussion. Two fighters zoomed toward the Liberty. McGonagle grabbed his binoculars and headed onto the starboard wing to investigate. Five to six miles out, the skipper spotted a fighter. The jet dropped to seven thousand feet as it raced on a parallel course toward the spy ship.

  Others on the bridge, including Lieutenant Commander Armstrong, crowded around the portholes or joined the skipper on the wing. Lieutenant Jim O’Connor and Lieutenant Jim Ennes, Jr., both intelligence officers who had just finished watch, climbed the ladder to the flying bridge above for a better view. Another sailor grabbed a Nikon camera. Ensign Patrick O’Malley studied the radar. O’Malley, the ship’s assistant operations officer, had just arrived on bridge to begin his shift as the junior officer of the deck. He spotted more activity on the radar screen. Three blips now appeared, closing in fast on the Liberty. O’Malley summoned Painter, who peered down at the green radar screen. The older officer recognized the attack formation. He yelled to McGonagle. “We’ve got three unidentified vessels, steady bearing, decreasing range, coming right at us.” McGonagle remained focused on the approaching fighter, binoculars pressed to his eyes. Planes had reconned the Liberty all day. He had personally witnessed several of the flights. But this felt wrong. All wrong. The skipper turned to Painter. “You’d better call the forward gun mounts,” he ordered. “I think they’re going to attack.”

  Painter grabbed the sound-powered phone to alert the gunners to the jets. Through one of the forward portholes, he spied the men stationed at the mounted .50-caliber machine guns on either side of the forecastle. Painter knew the guns would prove powerless against a supersonic jetfighter. The planes traveled too fast for the gunners to manually sight them in the guns’ limited one-mile range. Painter pressed the phone to his ear. Twice he tried to raise the gunners, but failed. His frustration mounted. The jets bore down on the ship. On the third try, Painter reached them. “Gun mounts 51 and 52.” Painter watched as the fighters dropped out of the sky before he could complete his sentence. He had no time to warn the men—kids really, he would later say. The guntubs vanished in a cloud of smoke and metal, the sailors blown apart with such force that friends could identify one only by his St. Christopher necklace. The explosion happened so fast that Painter would later tell the investigating board that he couldn’t determine whether the fighters hit the starboard or port gun first. He now stared at the charred machine guns, the phone still clutched in his hand.

  The fighters zeroed in on the bridge, strafing the command hub with rockets and 30-mm cannons. The forward portholes exploded, sending glass and metal flying through the bridge. The quartermaster, who stood next to Painter, collapsed to the deck, bloodied with shrapnel wounds. O’Connor, on the flying bridge above, dove to the deck for safety as shrapnel ripped into his back. He tumbled down the ladder to the bridge below. Ennes, who had climbed up to the flying bridge with O’Connor, was blown against a rail. Shrapnel had broken his left femur about five inches above the knee. Blood soon soaked the left side of his uniform from dozens of shrapnel wounds as he hopped down the ladder. The skipper, who had raced in from the wing at the start of the attack, landed shoulder to shoulder with Ensign O’Malley against a rear bulkhead. Acrid smoke flooded the bridge. In the confusion, O’Malley heard someone shout general quarters. He repeated the call. The young officer turned to the skipper next to him and in a combination of shock and naïveté asked if McGonagle wanted him to sound general quarters. The skipper confirmed. O’Malley reached up and hit the alarm. But no one on the Liberty needed the alarm to alert him to the attack.

  The officers and crew raced to battle stations as the jets—later identified as French-made Mirage fighters—banked and prepared for another attack. The fighters destroyed the Liberty’s machine guns, knocked out the antennae, and targeted the bridge to kill the officers and spark chaos among the crew. Shells smashed portholes, ripped gashes in sealed metal doors, and left basketball-sized craters on the bridge, deck, and smokestack. Dead and injured sailors, many of whom had been chipping paint seconds earlier, littered the decks. One sailor, with two and a half feet of his colon blown out by shrapnel, used his own blood to cool his burning skin. Even far belowdecks, explosive rounds and shrapnel zinged through bulkheads and ruptured vent pipes, lodged in bunks, and busted lights. The ship’s internal communications, including the public address system and many of the sound-powered phone circuits, soon malfunctioned and fried. Runners darted through smoke-filled passages to relay orders to repair parties, firefighters, and the engine room as the jets crisscrossed the spy ship nearly every forty-five seconds.

  McGonagle grabbed the engine order telegraph, a pedestal that stood in the center of the bridge that allowed him to order speed changes with a lever. Bells five decks below in the engine room would alert crews there to increase speed. The skipper threw the lever to flank speed, ordering maximum power. The Liberty had trolled all morning at five knots, or just under six miles per hour. Compared to a supersonic fighter, the spy ship essentially stood still, an easy target. One of the ship’s two boilers was still offline. With only one boiler, McGonagle knew the Liberty’s maximum speed was only about eleven knots. To protect his crew and the ship, McGonagle needed maximum speed of eighteen knots. Even that was slow, but fighters would have a harder time targeting
the Liberty at full speed; that speed also would allow him flexibility to execute evasive procedures, such as zigzagging. McGonagle shouted at his officers to broadcast an emergency message that the Liberty was under attack by unidentified fighters and needed immediate help.

  Below the bridge on the port side, two fifty-five-gallon gasoline drums ignited. Fire raged on the deck and engulfed deflated life rafts stored nearby in a metal rack. Clouds of black smoke flooded the bridge. The only breathable air hovered eighteen inches above the deck. The skipper could deal with the smoke, but he feared the gasoline drums might explode. The only solution: jettison the barrels into the sea. However, flames blocked access to the quick-release lever on the portside. McGonagle recognized that someone would have to climb down to the deck and knock the drums overboard. He turned to his executive officer. Armstrong didn’t hesitate. He darted out of the starboard side of the bridge and grabbed the ladder, but there was no protection from the fighters. The rocket and cannon fire, as McGonagle would later write to Armstrong’s wife, had proven “overwhelmingly accurate and effective.” A jet slipped out of the sky before Armstrong could reach the gasoline drums. The explosion threw him to the deck. The force broke three bones in his right leg and two in his left. He couldn’t move, but he was alive.

  O’Connor lay at the bottom of the ladder, where he had fallen from the flying bridge above. Shrapnel riddled his back. He had no feeling from the waist down. He couldn’t stand up, much less fight. O’Connor realized that he had to get out of the way of his uninjured colleagues. He dragged himself across the metal deck, now covered in shards of glass and twisted metal, to the Combat Information Center, located through a door in the rear of the bridge. There he found other injured sailors. Shrapnel tore through the bulkheads. A spent round landed on the deck between him and another sailor. He stared at it. O’Connor had a wife and child back home in Virginia Beach. His son would celebrate his first birthday on Sunday, three days from now. His wife, Sandy, was three months pregnant with their second son. O’Connor watched blood pool around him on the deck. He felt he was going to die. Ensign O’Malley suddenly appeared before him. The young officer and ship’s secretary noted the blood, but saw no injuries on O’Connor’s chest. He gently felt along O’Connor’s back and discovered two large holes. O’Connor instructed him to peel off his T-shirt and stuff it inside his wounds to slow the bleeding.

  Lieutenant Stephen Toth stood in the door to the Combat Information Center, clutching a camera in one hand. The twenty-seven-year-old navigator told O’Malley he planned to climb to the flying bridge to photograph the fighters. The Liberty still did not know the nationality of the attackers and needed evidence. He wanted O’Malley to join him. The younger officer refused. O’Malley told Toth not to go, either, but the navigator was determined. Though normally quiet and reserved, Toth could be stubborn, often at inopportune times. His refusal to compromise had led him to divorce his beautiful Brazilian wife, whom he had married soon after graduating from the Naval Academy. She had wanted the couple to return to South America, where her family planned to set Toth up in business. Toth had refused. The son of a retired Navy captain with whom he struggled to communicate, Toth had likely felt his own family pressures. He had instead urged his new bride to stay with him in the United States. Neither would compromise. Hours after the divorce was finalized, the couple had checked into a Virginia Beach motel for one last night together.

  O’Malley urged Toth one last time not to go up to the flying bridge. It was suicide; he would be totally exposed to the rocket and cannon fire. Toth again refused. O’Malley would see the navigator only one more time. Later that afternoon, several stories below the flying bridge, O’Malley would zip Toth’s remains inside a black body bag. O’Malley watched Toth turn and disappear toward the ladder, camera in hand. When he reached the top, Toth towered above the battered ship. If he looked toward the bow, the young officer would have seen the destroyed guntubs along with the bodies of his shipmates and the blood trails that stained the deck. He would have watched firefighters spraying the raging infernos. He would have witnessed stretcher bearers, already out of litters, using mattresses and blankets to haul the wounded below. Had Toth looked up, he would have seen the brilliant afternoon sun and the clear blue skies interrupted only by the smoke from the chaos below. He would have felt the warm Mediterranean sun on his face and a gentle breeze that on any other day would have been divine.

  CHAPTER 4

  Primary cause of death on some men was penetrating wounds of chest and lungs which made it impossible for them to breathe.

  —DR. RICHARD KIEPFER, TESTIMONY BEFORE THE LIBERTY COURT OF INQUIRY

  Ensign John Scott strode out of the wardroom with a cup of black coffee in one hand and his new Polaroid in the other when the first explosion rocked the ship. An announcement over the loudspeaker moments earlier had warned sailors to stand clear of the twenty-six-foot motor whaleboat suspended on a davit about ten feet above the starboard deck. Crews had planned a routine test of the whaleboat’s engine. When the explosion occurred, Scott thought the maintenance crew had dropped the whaleboat to the deck below. After he heard the secondary explosions, Scott realized that the Liberty was under attack. He threw his coffee to the deck and sprinted to his battle station in Damage Control Central. He paused only long enough to toss his Polaroid camera onto the floor of his stateroom before he jumped down the ladder to the deck below, his arms sliding on the rails. Scott arrived inside his office before the general quarters alarm sounded.

  Scott assumed that the Egyptians had shelled the Liberty with artillery from shore. The spy ship had sailed much of the morning within sight of land. But the staccato attacks followed by a brief lull and then resumption of fire meant it had to be fighter planes. One of the first messages from the bridge to damage control over the phones confirmed his suspicion. Rocket and cannon shells pounded the Liberty as the planes tag-teamed the defenseless ship. Even in the damage control office below deck, Scott heard the deafening crash of metal on metal as shells ripped holes in the ship’s steel skin and echoed through the passageways. Fragments ricocheted off bulkheads inside compartments and littered the decks below.

  Scott’s job was to coordinate firefighters, organize stretcher bearers, and assess and respond to damage. He operated this vital function out of an austere office four decks below the bridge. Two phone talkers joined him, using sound-powered phones to relay messages to the bridge and to repair parties strategically stationed around the ship. To help navigate the complex maze of compartments, Scott kept the ship’s blueprints spread out under glass on a table in the rear of the room. An inclinometer that measured the Liberty’s tilt in the water hung from the ceiling. If the ship were to flood, the inclinometer would gauge the ship’s list and whether it might capsize. Crews of up to fifteen sailors manned three other repair lockers near the bow, stern, and engine room. Each locker held axes, firefighting hoses, and stretchers along with pumps used to dewater compartments.

  Reports arrived of multiple fires on deck. The gasoline drums used to store fuel for the ship’s truck and pumps had ignited on the port side, and the fire threatened to spread. Fighters also had hit the motor whaleboat that dangled above the starboard side. The blast set the fiberglass boat ablaze in its davits. Phone talkers also reported that the attackers had hit the bridge. Scott ordered crews from the forward repair locker topside to fight the fires. Men unrolled canvas-covered hoses and turned a valve, releasing a spray of seawater. The effort proved futile. With each pass of the jets, shrapnel punctured the hoses and sapped the pressure. The hoses were worthless, so the firefighters grabbed axes and shovels from the repair locker and tossed flaming debris and rubber over the side.

  The situation worsened. Each time sailors charged onto the deck to rescue the wounded, more were hit by shrapnel. Scott ordered his men to travel through the ship’s superstructure, using the safety of the internal passageways. Only go on deck, he instructed, between lulls in the attacks. He also ordere
d his men to leave the dead and grab only the wounded. A round tore through the bulkhead and hit the valve on a vent pipe directly over Scott’s head. He looked up to find that the force had turned the valve upside down. The close hit triggered one of the phone talkers to panic. Scott watched as the man suddenly recited the Lord’s Prayer. Scott raced over and grabbed the man by his shirt. He slapped him. “Get it together,” Scott ordered. “There’s time to pray later, but not now.”

  Down in the engine room, Chief Petty Officer Richard Brooks heard the bell ring out over the roar of the machinery. The thirty-one-year-old Yonkers, New York, native shot a glance at the engine order telegraph and saw that the skipper had thrown the lever to all ahead flank, signaling the need for full power. With each pass of the fighters, shrapnel ricocheted inside the cavernous engine room and dropped to the grated deck below. “Get me all the steam pressure,” the machinist’s mate barked into the voice tube to the boilermen. “I don’t want to wait fifteen minutes. I want it all now.”

  The fighters first strafed the Liberty from bow to stern, targeting the bridge, machine guns, and antennae. With those destroyed or on fire, the attackers crisscrossed the spy ship to target the engine room, the Liberty’s heart. Boilers there converted water to steam that raced through metal veins and arteries, driving the two turbines and the screw. Beyond the propulsion system, generators transformed steam pressure to electricity to power everything from the lights and refrigerators to the ship’s radios and spy equipment. If the pilots crippled the engine room, Brooks knew the Liberty would be dead in the water, an easy target for fighters or torpedo boats. The Liberty was particularly vulnerable because it was designed as a cargo ship. Warships such as destroyers had two engine rooms and two boiler rooms to increase survivability in an attack.