by David Ward
Stucker called the control center officer to report “trouble in the cell house.” (He claimed later that he mentioned Cretzer’s possession of a gun, but this was disputed by other custodial personnel.)
Finally, at about 2:30 P.M. Officer Fish called the warden, who came running over and ordered the alarm to be sounded. Pandemonium ensued. The siren alerted everyone on the island that trouble had broken out, and the response was swift but chaotic. Coy began firing at the guard towers with the rifle, first striking guard Elmus E. Besk. From the hospital ward, Harrell saw the guard go down:
I’d been in the ward less than an hour when we heard rifle shots; they seemed to be coming from the cell block. Those of us in the ward immediately ran to the windows overlooking the yard and the tower. The first thing that caught my eyes was a guard that was assigned to the tower, he was lying on the catwalk face down on the outside of the tower itself. From all indications this man was dead.
Besk was not dead but lay unmoving for many hours. Officer James Comerford, in the dock tower, heard a bullet whiz by. He yelled down to Deputy Warden Miller that there was trouble, heard the glass window behind him smash, and dove to the floor. A guard in the employee apartment building yelled across to him to stay down and he did. “I had a dust pan for protection,” he recalled. He remained in the tower until the next morning.
From the hospital window Harrell watched the response to the shots and the siren:
In just a few minutes after this rifle shot, the sirens started screaming and in just no time at all it seemed that there were boats of every description, some with heavy arms, circling the island and most became stationed with their guns trained on the island. In the yard itself, there was guards scurrying about in every direction, seemingly in a state of confusion. But I can assure you this confusion didn’t last long. In just a short time, the guards were surrounding the cell blocks—I would estimate in about eight- to ten-foot intervals—most of them armed with rifles that fired rifle grenades. Shortly thereafter the guards started firing these rifle grenades into the cell block itself.
It was clear at this point that the escape plan had failed, and almost all of the inmates returned to their cells, with inmates in D block barricading themselves behind mattresses and law books for protection during the gun battle they expected would ensue. But Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard were not about to give up. Hamilton remembered an exchange with Coy and Cretzer:
I went to Coy . . . and I said, “What are you people doing fooling around here so much?” He said, “Well, we can’t get the key so we’re going to try to go some other way.” I told him, “If it’s alright with you people, I’m just dropping out at this point and going back to my cell; you people are fooling around too long.” I told him, “If you’d done something right quick, they wouldn’t be bringing the Army and the police over here. You haven’t got a chance. The best thing you can do is just give your guns back to these officers and call it quits and a bad deal. The only thing you do is lose your good time. . . . But Cretzer and Coy said, “No we’re gonna go all the way, go on back to your cell.”
Deputy Warden Ed Miller was the next staffer to enter the cell house. He came with a gas billy club in his hand but he stopped short when he saw Coy pointing the rifle at him. Miller tried to activate and throw the billy, but as he raised his arm, the billy hit the walkway above his head and exploded in his face. With Coy firing at him, he ran back up Broadway and escaped through the steel door into the administration building.
By this time, the escapees had acquired the all-important key 107, which opened the door to the yard, by beating Officer Miller until he surrendered it. But, in their haste to use the key, they jammed the lock. Now with the siren wailing, and the exit to the yard blocked, Shockley began screaming they should kill all the hostages.
Urged on by Shockley and Thompson, Cretzer walked to the front of cell 403 and fired point-blank at the officers backed up against the walls. Captain Weinhold was hit in the chest and arm. Senior officer X had rushed back to the island from his day off in San Francisco after he heard from a newsboy, “They got a riot over at Alcatraz.” He recalled the shooting:
Weinhold was the first man that was shot in the cells; he was a strict disciplinarian, a good prison man. The convicts, a majority of them, respected him because he was pretty fair. He tried to talk to Cretzer before he was shot. He said, “Joe, you give me the gun, unlock the door, go back to your cell, they can’t do anything more with you because you are doing life, plus twenty-five years anyway.” Cretzer told him, “There’s going to be a lot of SOBs killed today and you’re going to be the first.” Boom. He got him through one of the arms. It just slivered the bone and of course he fell down and then Joe started to shoot these others.
Corwin and Miller were shot. Cretzer moved to the next cell, 402, where Baker was hiding under the bed with Sundstrom behind him. Cretzer shot Baker in the leg, as well as Joseph Simpson. He began moving away from the cells but on second thought returned to cell 403, reloaded his .45, and aimed at Ernest Lageson. “Lageson was pretty well liked by several of the prisoners; in fact, by most of them he was considered a fair officer,” recalled Officer X. After Shockley tried to persuade Cretzer to shoot Lageson, Cretzer replied “I’m not going to shoot Lagy, he’s my friend.” According to X, Shockley persisted:
“But the SOB will get on the stand and swear your life away, so shoot him, or give me the knife, I’ll cut his throat.” That’s one thing they wanted to do—open the door and go in with this French knife that they had and cut the throats of the officers but Joe Cretzer said, “No, I’m not going to.” This fellow kept egging him on until he said to Lageson, “Lagy, I’m sorry.” Boom. The bullet just grazed his face and of course Lagy just dropped right over.
With escape now impossible, Carnes and Thompson returned to their cells and pulled the doors shut. Shockley returned to D block where he joined inmates Butler, Pepper, Sharpe, and Quillen, who had barricaded themselves in a cell behind mattresses and books. Coy, Cretzer, and Hubbard, however, were determined to go down fighting. They made their way to the top of cell block C with their weapons, knowing that with so many officers and the captain shot (and some probably dead), they would likely end up in the gas chamber. The would-be escapees settled into an area where they could try to increase the number of guards who would die with them.
The guards in cells 402 and 403 had no choice but to lie on the cold concrete, bleeding, as the cell house was bombarded by gun fire, tear gas, and grenades from the outside hour after hour. Robert Baker remembered that at one point one of the prisoners suggested, “‘Well, let’s take ’em out and cut ’em up and use ’em as hostages like they did in the Ohio Prison’ but they decided no.”
THE BATTLE
The response from the prison staff was poorly organized. Deputy Warden Miller and Warden Johnston gave contradictory orders. Fearing negative publicity, Johnston wanted to avoid both unnecessary bloodshed and recourse to outside help. Because there was no organized plan and the warden was indecisive, the fight dragged on and many officers had to act on their own initiative. The Coast Guard sent boats to circle the island. A contingent of marines came with a demolition expert and grenades, although at first Johnston did not want to let them on the island. Guards from San Quentin arrived with tommy guns, ready to do battle.
Shots began to pour in the windows of D block from outside and ricochet around the cells. For the convicts in the first tier there was no escape. According to Officer Don Martin, “The most amazing part was that no one was hurt except for Jimmy Grove. He got a ricocheted bullet.” From the outside it was assumed the armed inmates were in the D block, and if they were kept occupied with fire from outside, it would be possible to rescue the officers in the main cell block. The inmates in D block were infuriated by the gunfire, since they weren’t participating in the fight. They yelled out the windows, “You damn bastards! There’s no gun in here!”
Harrell, who watched from safety in the hospital, rec
ounted the battle:
It would be impossible to say how many rounds of ammunition was fired into that cell block on that particular day. . . . The cell block was being rocked as if a state of war had been declared. The shrapnel would sing as it would careen from wall to wall and in the midst of all these sounds of firing we could hear prisoners screaming, some shouting obscenities at the guards, demanding “You bastards blow us off the face of the earth,” while others were begging, imploring the guards to stop the firing and not to be killed. This firing continued with no letup. I don’t recall the length of time that it went on. But I know it was late evening before a different type of sound was heard. We could hear what appeared to be air hammers on the roof, which later turned out to be true. They were boring holes through the concrete roof of the cell house itself and hand grenades were being dropped into the cell blocks. After, I would guess, twenty minutes of this constant bombardment, we could no longer hear the voices of the prisoners in the cell block. I felt, and I’m sure other prisoners around me did too, that those prisoners confined to the cell block were all dead. I remember thinking how lucky I had been in asking to be admitted to the hospital. . . . I was consumed with a pure, unadulterated hatred for everything connected with Alcatraz. I was convinced then, and I’m just as firmly convinced today, that it was a deliberate attempt by the guards at Alcatraz to kill every prisoner in that institution.
The firefight continued through the night with no one really clear where the shots were coming from. Lieutenant Philip Bergen and Officer Harry Cochrane wanted to take over the cell block by entering the west gun gallery, but Deputy Warden Miller would not give the go-ahead. They waited armed outside for all of the afternoon and into the night. Finally Miller gave the order for them to get a ladder and look through the windows to see if they could gather more information about the situation inside. It was a risky proposition but, lacking an alternative, they agreed. From outside, the cell house appeared vacant with no one moving about.
Lieutenant Bergen gave permission to a group of officers to enter the west gun gallery through a door that could be opened from outside the cell block. Accompanied by Officers Stites and Cochrane, Bergen entered the gallery.
My God, here you are in a steel cocoon, it’s like being under a washtub and somebody beating on it with a hammer, and in addition to that you have all that cordite smoke and they’d already thrown a lot of tear gas in there and you had that too. It was complete pandemonium down there on the ground floor. I said to Cochrane, “Let’s get the hell out of here and up those stairs.” And so we turned from where we were and started up the stairs, Stites saw us and came after us and at that point in time the guns are still blazing and the ricochets are flying and Cochrane catches one in the arm; we gotta pull back from the stairs and push Cochrane out so he can get some medical care.
They climbed the stairs to the first tier of the gallery, moving quickly since they were in an exposed position. Officers Herschel Oldham and Stites headed off to the right, while Bergen, joined by Officer Fred Mahan, moved to the left. Nothing was moving in D block, so they decided to check the main cell house. Stites came around and started to pass in front of one of the exterior windows, when suddenly he dropped to the floor, calling out that he had been shot. While the others kept up a volley of shots into the cell block to provide covering fire, officers brought out a ladder to get Stites to safety. A minute later Oldham cried out that he had been hit too, and then on the lower tier Officer Fred Richberger caught a bullet in the leg from a ricocheted shot. The gunfire was coming in the windows from outside, but the officers inside still believed it was enemy fire coming from the inmates. Mahan recalled: “You didn’t know where the guns were and nobody knew where the shots were coming from. They’re firing all over around in there. It was confusing, you couldn’t tell who was shooting at what.”
It was not until Bergen noticed a line of bullets on the wall opposite one of the windows that it began to dawn on him that the shots might be coming from outside. Richberger suggested “an old Indian trick” to test the theory. He put Bergen’s cap on the end of a rifle and moved it in front of the window. Immediately a shot was fired, knocking the cap from the rifle. Bergen called out to Deputy Warden Miller: “Ed, there’s some crazy SOB that’s shooting at us from the roof of the hospital and there’s already four or five shots been fired through that window and if you don’t get him stopped, he’s gonna accidentally kill one of us.” Miller did not believe him until Bergen and Richberger repeated the rifle trick, and he heard the resulting shot. Miller ordered the man on the roof to stop firing. According to Bergen, Miller shouted, “You crazy SOB up there, you fire one more shot and I’ll blast you off that roof with a Thompson!”
Bergen later commented,
They fired half a dozen shots out of the prison and about ten thousand from outside the prison into the prison. For what? What was accomplished? If they had any regard for human life at all, if it was just inmates in there, it would have been bad enough. But in addition to inmates, there was a half a dozen or so officers in there and yet they’re firing all this crap into that prison. I said to Ed Miller, “What in the hell is going on here?” “Well,” he said, “we told them if they were fired on, to fire back and I guess they were fired on.” No such orders should have ever been issued. You never fire unless you got a target. And even then you gotta exercise a little discretion about whether you fire or not. What was called for in that particular case was encircling the prison and covering all the access areas. Having accomplished that, the next step is to man the gun gallery. They had done that. They manned the east gallery and got scared off at the west. The third step is to go in and do your job. That’s go into the cell house and take it over. Well here’s a couple of guys that were expert gunmen, Cochrane and myself, we found out what the situation was and it was deplorable, but nevertheless, we said, “Okay if you’re not going to man the west gallery, let’s take step three and go in and get ’em.”
Mahan wanted to continue inside and take over the cell house, but the warden, having learned that Stites had died and other officers were wounded, still presuming the shots had come from the inmates inside, gave orders to wait. The officers were furious. But in the meantime they were able to rescue Officer Burch. They waited all through the afternoon until midnight, while the cell house was bombarded with rifle grenades.
Several officers went down into the basement under the cell house and tried to track the movement of the armed prisoners through the sounds in the floor. Guards from San Quentin, several of whom had worked on the Rock, aimed Thompson submachine guns into the C block corridor and let off rounds of fire. No one knew where the hostages were because they were all keeping very quiet, not wanting to attract any more attention from the armed prisoners.
Inmates who had been locked in the industries building when the fighting began were brought up into the yard where they spent a cold night without blankets watched over by marines patrolling the walls. According to senior officer George Boatman, “The inmates were cheering on Coy and Cretzer and cussing the Marines and cussing the guards, but by the time they spent a night out there in the cold, they weren’t nearly so noisy.” The prisoners took down a scoreboard and built a fire to keep warm.
As the siege raged on, thousands of Bay Area residents watched through binoculars as shells, puffs of smoke from explosions, tear gas, and grenades lighted the island. News reporters and photographers crowded onto police patrol boats and a navy landing craft, which brought them to within fifty yards of the island. Newspapers and radio news programs across the country carried reports of the dramatic events taking place in the bay. As the headlines blared “Marines Battle Convicts on Alcatraz,” “Terror Revolt on the Rock,” and “Alcatraz Gun Battle Raging in Major Riot,” the nation’s dailies and wire services offered photos of wounded officers on stretchers and hospital gurneys, officers’ worried wives and sobbing children, shells bursting against D block, and armed marines on the walls standing guard over i
nmates in the yard. The accompanying stories emphasized the bravery of the guards and the desperation of the convicts.
The media had always sensationalized attempted escapes from Alcatraz, but in this case reporters moved beyond exaggeration into fabrication. An Associated Press release stated that Officer Harold Stites had been “kicked to death” by convicts who had “a long standing grudge” against him.7 Another AP report quoted a warrant officer who was supporting the prison staff:
I watched from the visiting room while [guards] rescued other guards. They put down a covering fire so that none of the rebels could raise their heads to fire. Then two at a time, guards would dash into the cell block and carry out one of their buddies until all were safe.8
Early news stories identified inmate Louis Fleisch as one of the seven “mad dogs of Alcatraz” and reported that after Joseph Cretzer shot Officer Miller, he “crushed Miller’s chest with his boots.”9 The same paper quoted a marine officer who estimated “from the strength of their fire that the convicts might have had 3,000 rounds of ammunition.” The New York Times reported that the rioting inmates had a machine gun and were picking up tear gas bombs thrown through windows and throwing them back through the windows before they could explode. The Times also declared that according to reports from the warden, “most” of the prison’s guards had been taken hostage.10 Other news organizations reported that the marines went ashore at Alcatraz “ready to fight their way in with bayonets and trench knives.”11 Newspapers supplemented their photos and accounts of the battle by listing the identities and gangland affiliations of the prison’s notorious offenders—none of whom participated in the “mutiny.”12 In a particularly dramatic account a San Francisco Chronicle reporter claimed, erroneously, that the prisoners were firing from inside the cell house at guards on the hillside.