The Kursa leader orbited the Liberty looking for the “Blue Max,”28 which was the identifying mark the Israelis placed on their hardware to help identify them as friendly. He did not see a flag on the ship.29 Kursa Flight leader had carefully sorted out the non-Israeli warship from the Israeli torpedo boats. Now he contacted air control for specific permission to attack. It was granted at 1355, subject to verification that “it is a warship.”
At 1357 the Kursa Flight leader, as well as his wingman, rolled into shallow dives from west to east with the sun at their backs.30 His right index finger found the trigger of his 30 mm guns, and the air attack began. Traveling at six hundred knots (perhaps a little slower, see chapter 1, note 2), the attacking plane closed on a slow-moving surface target at the rate of ten miles per minute, or a mile each six seconds. Less than three seconds were available for firing (he may have had four seconds rather than three), followed by a pull-up and turn back for another firing run. It is extremely dangerous to remain in the attack run too long, because of the rapid closure rate with the target. The phenomenon is called target fixation. It is a fascination with the run that compels the pilot to continue the run rather than pull up a safe distance from the target. Because very little time remains after firing ceases until the aircraft will fly into or strike a surface target, fighter and attack pilots are told repeatedly to fire and pull up. Most pilots, including this author, will confess that they have in fact delayed pull-up to observe their hits. The Kursa Flight leader and his wingman did so that day.
As the stream of 30 mm rounds struck the Liberty, they tore into the unarmored superstructure and deck, slaying men and destroying equipment with equal ferocity. They also struck the Liberty’s motor whaleboat stored amidships on the starboard side just aft of the bridge, puncturing and setting on fire two fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline stored on the port side on the 01 level (one level above the main deck).31
Chaos and horror reigned on the bridge. Shattered glass, mutilated bodies, and blood were everywhere. Amid it all, Commander McGonagle remained calm and continued to command his ship. He even got the ship’s camera out of the safe and took pictures of the second wave of attacking aircraft.32 The initial attack so disrupted the Liberty’s radio transmission capability that she was unable to transmit on her standard encrypted transmitters. The ship’s radio shack began transmitting on the CINCUSNAVEUR high-command (HiCOM) unsecure high-frequency voice circuit, initially without success. Someone had accidentally moved the frequency dial one kilocycle. This was quickly discovered and corrected by Radioman Chief Wayne L. Smith, and the transmitters worked at once. This transmission problem, along with other problems, such as destroyed connections, is the source of the myth that the Liberty’s radio transmitters were “jammed.” Compare the testimony of Radioman Chief Smith, in the U.S. Navy court of inquiry transcript (p. 94):
Word was passed on the 1MC to pass over hicom that we were being attacked, to any station. I immediately picked up the hicom transmitter which was on UIC 32, auxiliary radio. We started to transmit with it. No station heard us, and five minutes or so later the transmitter was reported to have blown out. I immediately switched to a work two transmitter in the transmitter room, and we couldn’t get out on that either, so, in between attacks by this time I went down to the transmitter room and I found or discovered that somebody had accidentally knocked the frequency dial one KC [kilocycle] off. I corrected this and ran back to the radio shack and we got hold of stations schematic on which we passed the attack message.33
The initial report of the attack to reach the Sixth Fleet was received and understood by the aircraft carrier Saratoga (CVA 60), call sign “Schematic,” at 1210Z (1410 Sinai).34 Immediately after the air attack began, the Liberty began transmitting: “Any station from Rock Star, over, any station from Rock Star we are under attack we are under attack over.”35
The logs reflect a response two minutes later from the aircraft carrier Saratoga: “Rock Star from Schematic u are garbled, say again, over.” The log entry notes four minutes later: “Switching xmitrs but no luck.” The log entry reporting the transmission of the message about the torpedo strike was entered as 1218Z/1418 Sinai, which makes clear that time entries in the radio logs are a number of minutes earlier than the actual events occurred. The log entry reads: “Schematic from Rock Star be advised we have been hit by torpedo listing about 9 deg request immed assist over.”
Pinchas Pinchasy provided much of the data for this chapter during an interview by this author on January 12, 1990, in his office at Technion University in Haifa, where Pinchasy was on the development staff. Pinchasy was most gracious with his time and allowed the interview to be taped. After several hours the interview ended. The tape recorder was turned off, and this author was putting his pad and pencils in his briefcase when Pinchasy leaned forward and said words that made this author’s hair on the back of his neck stand up and sent a chill down his spine. Pinchasy said: “Now I am going to tell you something as one naval officer to another which I have never told to anyone else before. I am going to tell you what really happened out there that day, and you may do with it what you wish.” At that stage of the research this author was still looking for a possible smoking gun—that is, for evidence that the attacks were not caused by mistakes but rather that they were intentional attacks on a U.S. warship. And here it was. A confession about to be made by a senior Israeli naval officer who was at the Kirya at the time of the attacks. The tension was enormous.
Pinchasy continued: “What caused this terrible tragedy was the intense competition between the navy and the air force.” The tension disappeared. This author thanked Pinchasy for the information but explained to him that this was not a new theory and told him that, in addition to other sources, the theory could be found in the Rabinovich book The Boats of Cherbourg.
Chapter 5
THE AIR AND SEA ATTACKS
The first rounds fired by Kursa Flight leader struck the Liberty at about 1358. There is some debate on whether rockets or missiles were fired by the aircraft. It was the recollection of the Kursa Flight leader on June 10, 1992, twenty-five years and two days after the event, that his Mirage carried a couple of air-to-air missiles.1 The Kursa Flight leader and Kursa wingman each made three strafing runs and exhausted their ammunition by about 1404. Kursa Flight then left the target area for home.
As Kursa Flight leader steered slightly east of north to return to Hatzor Air Base, he was haunted by the attack he had just made. It was the first time he had attacked a ship. It stirred memories of his boyhood. His father had been a poet and a sailor. In 1941, during World War II, he had left on a boat with twenty-two other members of the PALYAM, a British-led Jewish naval commando group, on a mission to Vichy-controlled Tripoli, Lebanon. None of the commandos was heard from again. It had been a difficult experience for the small boy to grow up on a kibbutz with his widowed mother. But grow he did. He became a poet, like his father, and a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force.2
Col. Shmuel Kislev, the chief air controller, sitting in the pit at the Israel Air Force command center in Tel Aviv, two chairs to the right of General Mordechai Hod, had located another flight, on its way to interdict Egyptian troops and armor in the Sinai. This flight, call sign “Royal,” consisted of two Super-Mystère B2 jets, armed with the same 30 mm guns fitted in the Mirages. Each of these planes also carried two canisters of napalm, in addition to two 216-gallon (U.S.) drop tanks. Kislev vectored Royal Flight toward El Arish and, following a momentary delay, authorized Royal Flight to attack. The Royal aircraft made their initial runs from stem to bow, dropping their napalm as they passed over the hapless ship. At least three canisters missed.3 Capt. R. L. Arthur, fleet material officer, Service Force, COMSIXTHFLT, later sent a message from COMSIXTHFLT to COMSERVFORSIXTHFLT stating in part: “1E. Flash fire stbd wing of bridge. No major damage.”4
The two Royal Flight Super-Mystères pulled up in left turns to the west and then made 270° turns to come back across the ship broa
dside, from west to east, with the sun at their backs.5 The Liberty had turned from west to north, putting the sun to her port side and the ship’s own shadow on the starboard side. As Royal Flight leader crossed the ship, firing at her in an effort to hit the boilers, he observed on her bow what appeared to be a letter and some numbers on the up-sun (port) side of the hull.6
Back at air force headquarters in the Kirya, Chief Air Controller Kislev, ever the professional, kept asking Royal Flight leader, “Is there any Nun Mem?” Nun Mem is a Hebrew acronym comprising the letters nun, which translates as N, and mem, or M. It stands for neged matossim, which translates as “anti or against aircraft” and is used by the Israel Defense Forces the same way the U.S. forces use “AA” to denote “antiaircraft” or “triple A” for “antiaircraft artillery.”
Although the official U.S. Department of Defense press release stated that the Liberty fired her machine guns against the aircraft,7 there is no such report in the Liberty’s log. There is some testimony in the U.S. Navy court of inquiry record that the ship’s guns were fired at the aircraft. Whether or not this took place, neither Kursa Flight nor Royal Flight reported any antiaircraft fire. Thus eight or nine minutes into the air attack both Kislev and Royal Flight leader became concerned. As Royal Flight leader passed over the ship observing the bow marks, he radioed to air control, “This ship is marked P 30, I am going down for another look.” At 1411 Royal Flight leader reported, “Pay attention, this ship’s marking is Charlie Tango Romeo 5 [CTR 5].” While the flight leader repeated this “CTR 5” identification twice, he was in error, because actually the first letter on the Liberty’s bow was G, not C. At almost six hundred miles per hour, this is an understandable mistake. It was also grave news. First, both Royal Flight leader and Kislev knew that Arab ships were marked in Arabic script, not with Roman letters, and that therefore the ship was not Arab.
Twenty years later on Thames TV, Kislev said that when he heard the identification, he threw down his headset and swore; it was then that he believed the ship was American. Shmuel Kislev does not explain why at that point he thought the ship was American. In the Thames TV production, Kislev first justifies the attack:
One has to try to put yourself in—in the shoes of the pilot. What is he told now? He’s told now—he’s not told to look for an American ship—he’s not told to look for a French ship. He’s told that there is an enemy warship that is running to the west, that the navy is chasing it, that it has shelled our positions, and now all he is told to do, please find it. And on top of that, he is told just to make sure that it’s that ship were talking about. It’s not something else. That’s all you have to do. More than that, I would say, we are telling him that there are no other military ships in the vicinity—so if you will be sure that it is a military ship, you can hit it.
He added, “At that time, I was sure it was an American ship and I was sure that we did—that we had that mistake.”8 Persons who were present have told me that Kislev’s words were, “Damn it! The navy has f——ed us again.” A minute after Royal Flight leader’s transmission, at 1412, Kislev gave Royal Flight the terse order “Leave her!” and Royal Flight turned toward home to the Hatzor Air Base.
Different IDF personnel in Israel had learned or concluded at different times that the vessel that been targeted was a U.S. ship. Lt. Cdr. Uri Meretz, the naval intelligence officer at Tel Aviv, decided the Liberty was a U.S. ship shortly after sunrise on the morning of June 8. But Meretz went off duty at 0800. He had passed the information to navy intelligence, and the information was in a room down the hall from the navy command-and-control room at Stella Maris on Haifa’s Mount Carmel. Rear Adm. Shlomo Erell knew from a report from Lieutenant Commander Pinchasy, the naval liaison officer at the air force control center, that a U.S. Navy supply-type ship was north of Port Said near dawn, but Erell had left the command center and gone down Mount Carmel to the port of Haifa. The navy command duty officer, Cdr. Avraham “Ramy” Lunz, was aware that a U.S. ship had been near Port Said about dawn, but he did not associate that ship with the warship reported shelling Israeli troops near El Arish. Since the Israelis considered the United States a friendly country and it was not reasonable for Lunz to have concluded that the ship reported to be shelling the troops was American, obviously it could only be Egyptian.
As indicated previously, Kislev remembers that at 1412 he concluded that the target of Kursa and Royal Flights was American. It is clear, however, from the recordings that during the remainder of that afternoon, as the tragedy was unfolding and he was listening to the radio traffic on his headset, he changed his mind several times, still thinking that the ship might be Egyptian.
Air Attack Kursa: Two Mirage IIIC aircraft attack from bow to stern
At about 1358 hours, the Liberty was steering 283° degrees, or west. The sun’s position was at an elevation of 58° 50'; azimuth of 82° 20'. Two Mirage IIIC aircraft made three passes each.
Air Attack Royal: Two Dessault Super Mystère aircraft attack from bow to stern
At about 1406 the Royal Flight approached from the stern to the bow and then made a left turn then attacked broadside west to east. Aircraft came from out of the sun on the second and third passes.
Others in the Kirya who heard the report “marked CTR 5” and who were aware that there were half a dozen Soviet intelligence gathering ships in the area, all of whose identification marks began with the letter C, were shocked and horrified that the target might be a Soviet ship! Some Soviet intelligence-collection ships were designated sudno svyazyy, or “communications vessel.” On their bow they had pennant numbers preceded by the letters SSV. In the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian, they resemble the Roman letters CCV. Hence the confusion over the C, the mistaken G in the Liberty’s “GTR 5” bow markings.
The Liberty’s commanding officer testified at the U.S. Navy court of inquiry that her flag was shot away in the first strafing run. The Liberty had a motor whaleboat stored amidships on the starboard side, just aft of the bridge. On the port side two fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline were stored on the 01 level. The initial strafing ignited the gasoline drums, causing a large fire, as well as igniting the fuel contained in the motor whaleboat, and it is most likely that the resulting flames burned through the halyard holding the five-by-eight-foot national ensign. The main halyard was a line attached to a pulley on the main mast below the yardarm and below the radar dish, in the vicinity of the Liberty’s bridge. It is the customary location for hoisting a ship’s colors. In any event, there is no disagreement that the flag was gone early in the air attack. However there is substantial disagreement on whether or not the five-by-eight-foot American flag was extended, and therefore visible to the attacking airplanes, at the very start of the attack.
The Israelis involved were mistaken regarding the perception that she flew no flag. Before the air attack began, the ensign was there. Whether it was sufficiently extended to be observable or whether the Israeli pilots were close enough to see a flag of this size is the question. (See chapter 7 for a detailed discussion of this issue.)
At 1412 the air attack was over. At Tel Nof Air Base, a flight of two Mystère IV aircraft, Nixon Flight,9 armed with conventional bombs, was on takeoff roll. The flight’s target was that ship off El Arish. Time to the target at subsonic speed would have been twelve to fourteen minutes.10 Thus Nixon Flight probably would have beaten the navy MTBs to the scene. However, shortly after ordering Royal Flight to “Leave her!” Colonel Kislev diverted Nixon Flight to a target in the north. Consequently this second flight, which could well have quickly and efficiently sunk the Liberty with its iron bombs, did not attack the ship.
Motor Torpedo Boat Division 914 continued to approach the Liberty from the northeast, on a southwesterly heading. Its personnel observed the air attack and watched the aircraft depart. Before them was a ship spewing a huge cloud of black smoke and steaming west; this, they thought, meant that it was running toward Port Said. The MTBs were somewhat down-sun, approaching the
starboard side of the ship. According to the testimony of Commander McGonagle, Liberty’s bow was pointed 283°. In June the sun is at about twenty-four degrees north, so it would have been slightly off the port bow of Liberty, and her starboard side would have been in shadow, facing the approaching MTBs. Following the loss of the steaming flag, a larger flag had been hoisted on the port halyard, which was on the other side of the ship from the approaching Israeli MTBs.11 The MTBs stopped at a distance of about a mile from the Liberty. They began signaling with a flashing Aldis lamp. While there has been no dispute that the MTBs stopped and began signaling, there were clearly misperceptions on both sides about what was signaled. The MTBs were sending “A-A,” which in international maritime code means “Identify yourself,” or “What ship?”
USS Liberty under way. View from starboard bow. At six hundred miles per hour and almost a half-mile farther away, clearly “GTR” could be mistaken for “CTR.” Photography Laboratory U.S. Naval Air Station, Norfolk, VA, 11-1-66
Perhaps because of the huge pall of smoke, the crew on the Liberty was not able to understand the message from the MTBs. At the U.S. Navy court of inquiry held in June, there was no testimony about anyone signaling back from the Liberty. On June 13, 1967, CINCUSNAVEUR requested the commander of Destroyer Squadron 12 (COMDESRON TWELVE), “Please ask Liberty . . . did Liberty at any time use any signals such as blinker light, flag hoist, etc. to identify herself to Israeli attackers?”12 The Liberty responded, “Did not attempt to signal planes with flashing light or any other method at any time.”13 While the question asks the Liberty if she signaled the Israeli “attackers,” the answer limits itself only to the attacking planes and fails to refer explicitly to the MTBs. In a secret message dated June 19, 1967, SECNAV asked CINCUSNAVEUR specifically, “Did Liberty attempt to answer signals from patrol boats prior to attack?” The Liberty responded, “Yes, [Israeli] Patrol boat signals were partially obliterated by flames and smoke from burning whaleboat abaft starboard wing of bridge. Patrol boat signals could not be understood by Liberty who attempted establish communications by Aldis lamp. Other signal lights had been shot away.”14
The Liberty Incident Revealed Page 7