The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  Petty Officer 2nd Class James Halman hustled to seal the four porthole covers along the port-side bulkhead of the Liberty’s radio room after the first rockets and cannons exploded. Another blast shook the ship, followed seconds later by the general quarters alarm. Smoke billowed from the bow and bridge and Halman heard sailors race through the narrow passageways armed only with battle helmets and life jackets. Halman and the other radiomen closed the last of the portholes as the skipper came on the loudspeaker and ordered operators to broadcast a distress call over the high-command network. The Navy’s high-frequency radio network, monitored by every ship in the Sixth Fleet, served as the fastest way to call for help. Halman didn’t hesitate. The twenty-two-year-old leapt to his station and grabbed the microphone. He squeezed the transmit button. “Any station this net,” Halman called out at 1:58 P.M. “This is Rockstar.”

  Like scores of other sailors, Halman felt stunned by the surprise attack. Only moments earlier, he had wandered out on the deck to see the dark smoke on the horizon. Rather than spark concern, the proximity to the war zone had excited Halman and added a touch of adventure in the Liberty’s otherwise mundane routine. Unlike the spooks down below who listened to the tank commanders on the battlefield, Halman and the other radiomen managed the ship’s radio network out of an office just above the main deck. The sailors hunted usable frequencies, established ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications, and monitored distress networks. Though not part of the job description, the radiomen also reviewed the Associated Press and United Press International wires and printed copies of the latest headlines that when mimeographed served as the Liberty’s daily newspaper.

  Halman repeated his distress call as the fighters circled back and hit the Liberty again. The radiomen struggled to concentrate as shells pounded the ship and knocked out the antennae. Smoke flooded the radio room from a gasoline fire that burned outside on the deck. Napalm dropped from bombers on later attack runs blistered the paint on the interior bulkheads. The radiomen soon dropped to the deck and crawled beneath the desks to seek protection from the shrapnel and find air less saturated with smoke. Halman pulled the microphone under the desk with him so he could continue to broadcast the Liberty’s distress signal. He pressed the transmit button again and yelled into the microphone. “Any station this net, this is Rockstar,” Halman called out. “We are under attack. Be advised we are under attack.”

  The U.S.S. Saratoga was steaming approximately five hundred miles west of the Liberty at the time fighters strafed the spy ship. The 76,000-ton aircraft carrier could carry as many as ninety aircraft and a crew of approximately five thousand sailors. It performed maneuvers south of Crete with the majority of the Sixth Fleet. The aircraft carrier U.S.S. America sailed nearby along with the cruiser U.S.S. Little Rock, which carried Vice Admiral William Martin, the commander of the Sixth Fleet. Halman’s distress call crackled over the airwaves. The Saratoga’s radio operators, likely stunned by the emergency message over the high-command network, struggled to decipher Halman’s distress call. Two minutes after Halman made his first call, the carrier responded. “Rockstar, this is Schematic,” answered the carrier’s operator. “You are garbled. Say again.”

  As shells rocked the Liberty and smoke poured into the radio room, Halman fingered the transmit button and repeated his distress call. “I say again. We are under attack,” Halman shouted. “We are under attack.”

  The Saratoga’s message came back the same. “You are still garbled,” the operator replied. “Say again.”

  “Schematic, this is Rockstar. We are under attack. We are under attack,” Halman yelled. “Any station this net, this is Rockstar. We are under attack. Do you read me?”

  Six minutes into the assault, the Liberty’s radiomen switched transmitters but still could not get a clear message out. Chief Petty Officer Wayne Smith darted down to the transmitter room on the main deck near the rear of the ship. There Smith discovered that the frequency dial was one kilocycle off. He adjusted it and the radio operators tried again. Problems persisted. Each time the planes strafed the ship, the radiomen found the frequency interrupted by a sound like feedback. The noise over the receivers was so loud that one of the men would later tell the Navy’s investigating board that the sailors concluded the transmitters had malfunctioned. The men switched frequencies only to find the same feedback noise on all of them. Halman and the other radiomen concluded the attackers had jammed the Liberty’s communications. Only between attacks could the operators receive signals.

  The radio log shows that at 2:08 P.M.—ten minutes into the assault—Halman called for help again. The fighters by now had strafed the Liberty multiple times. Fires raged on deck and wounded sailors flooded the sick bay, wardroom, and mess deck. The chaotic and frightful reality aboard the ship reflected in Halman’s desperate call for help. “Schematic, this is Rockstar,” the radio operator called out. “We are under attack. We are under attack. We are under attack.”

  “Roger,” the carrier’s operator finally replied.

  “Schematic, this is Rockstar,” Halman radioed one minute later. “We are under attack and need immediate assistance.”

  “Roger,” the carrier’s operator answered. The Saratoga’s radioman asked the Liberty for an authentication code, a secret variable letter combination that ships use to verify the identity of others. Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Ward crouched next to Halman and fed him the authentication code from a book. The carrier’s radioman responded five minutes later. “Authentication is correct,” the operator replied. “I am standing by for further traffic.”

  Ensign Dave Lucas leaned over to grab his battle helmet and life jacket out of the starboard gear locker just outside the bridge when he felt a round zing past his head. He dropped to the deck as another explosion rocked the spy ship. Lucas crawled the last few feet into the bridge, his battle helmet still clutched in one hand. He pulled himself up and surveyed the wrecked command hub. He choked on the smoke and broken glass from the shattered portholes crunched beneath his feet. Blood made portions of the deck slippery. Lieutenant Jim O’Connor had dragged himself into the Combat Information Center just behind the bridge. Lucas spied Lieutenant Jim Ennes, Jr., stretched out in the back of the bridge, his left leg broken. Petty Officer 3rd Class Francis Brown, one of the ship’s quartermasters, had taken control of the helm. In the center of the room, McGonagle barked orders at the phone talkers.

  Lucas buckled his battle helmet just as another fighter strafed the bridge. He dropped to the deck for a second time. Shrapnel dug into his arms, back, and fingers. He grabbed his handkerchief and cinched it around the pinkie finger on his right hand. The gunnery officer’s battle station was on the flying bridge above, but Lucas knew he wouldn’t survive up there with the fighter attacks. Instead he hopped down the ladder to help with the injured in the wardroom. Below he witnessed several men carry the executive officer on a stretcher down the passageway. The normally gregarious Armstrong lay silent and the color had drained from his face. Lucas recognized the signs of shock. Ennes now lay on the deck outside the wardroom, his shattered leg now swollen. Inside the wardroom, Lucas found one of the ship’s corpsmen busy with another half dozen casualties.

  Several men gathered in a passageway to fight a fire on the port side near the gasoline drums. Lucas joined them. The fire had spread from the drums and consumed four life rafts on deck. The men unrolled a fire hose and cranked the valve, unleashing a stream of salt water. Others kicked burned debris and fuel overboard. Each time the fighters passed, the men ducked back inside the passageway. The explosions echoed inside the metal superstructure and rounds whistled through the corridor where the sailors crouched. Injured men littered the decks. Many of them had been chipping paint on deck or were in the forward spaces when the attackers first shelled the ship. The repair party soon ran out of stretchers so Lucas and the men grabbed several blankets from nearby staterooms and hauled the injured below. Lucas returned to the bridge, climbing the ladder inside the sup
erstructure.

  In the brief time he had left the bridge—he estimated it to be no more than fifteen minutes—the fighters had continued to pound the command hub. Unbeknownst to the men on the Liberty, a pair of French-made Super Mystère fighter-bombers armed with napalm had replaced the Mirage fighters that had run out of ammunition. A napalm canister had struck the ship and the jellied gasoline fire had flooded the bridge with smoke. McGonagle, nearly alone on the bridge when the canister hit, would later recall one of his most vivid memories of the attack was “firefly-like pieces of napalm flying around inside the pilot house.” Lucas found the radar and gyrocompass inoperable. The magnetic compass spun wildly and much of the radio equipment was fried. No one had written in the quartermaster’s notebook—a chronology of events used to create the deck log—since 1:55 P.M., minutes before the attack. The final entry in the blood-splattered log noted only that O’Malley had assumed the ship’s conn. Lucas took control of the log.

  The young officer and father of a five-week-old daughter (whom he had never met) stood in a bridge that was now nearly empty. The relentless attacks had killed or injured the navigator, executive officer, and the helmsman along with the off-going officer and junior officer of the deck. Francis Brown, one of the ship’s quartermasters, had assumed the helm to guide the battered ship. Lucas spotted a lone phone talker stretched out on the deck in the chart room in the rear of the bridge, relaying the skipper’s orders to damage control. McGonagle paced the center bridge, clutching in one hand a camera that he used to photograph the fighters. Blood soaked the skipper’s right pant leg from a shrapnel wound in his upper thigh and he had burns on his right forearm. Lucas sensed McGonagle’s relief that another officer had joined him on the bridge.

  The fighters disappeared in the sky and an eerie calm settled over the battered Liberty. Was the attack over, Lucas wondered, or would the fighters rearm and return. Who were the attackers? The young officer, like many others, assumed the Egyptians had strafed the Liberty. Lucas stepped onto the starboard wing of the bridge. Firefighters pushed charred debris overboard on the deck below. The men had extinguished some of the fires and had others under control. Stretcher bearers and volunteers rescued the wounded and hauled them down to the wardroom and mess deck on mattresses and wrapped in blankets. On the deck lay several dead bodies that no one had time yet to recover. The young officer looked at his feet and realized that he stood on the American flag that minutes earlier had flown from the mast above. The fighters had shot it down.

  The Liberty’s problems magnified. Just before the fighter attack Ensign Patrick O’Malley had spotted three unidentified blips on the green radar screen, zooming toward the spy ship. O’Malley had summoned Lloyd Painter, who had identified the blips as surface vessels and alerted the skipper. In the chaos of the attack that followed, no one had had time to investigate the earlier radar report. Men had fought fires, rescued the injured, and stoked the boilers as the unidentified vessels closed the distance. McGonagle now scanned the horizon with his binoculars. Fifteen miles off the starboard side, he spotted three torpedo boats in attack formation aimed right at the Liberty.

  CHAPTER 5

  You are authorized to use whatever force required to defend USS Liberty from further attacks.

  —JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF ORDER

  At 2:24 P.M. McGonagle studied the three torpedo boats in the distance. The skipper could see that the boats traveled nearly thirty knots and in a wedge formation separated from one another by as little as one hundred and fifty yards. The center boat led the group in what McGonagle would later tell Navy investigators appeared to be a “torpedo launch attitude.” The skipper recognized that the Liberty, even at top speed of eighteen knots, was defenseless against the high-speed boats, which closed to within five miles. If he turned the ship to starboard, McGonagle would provide the boats a larger target. If he turned toward port, the skipper risked grounding the Liberty on shoals or violating Egypt’s territorial waters. The skipper had no option but to sail on the same northwesterly course farther out into the Mediterranean. He ordered the machine guns manned and a new American flag raised. One of the Liberty’s signalmen grabbed a holiday ensign—the ship’s largest—and hoisted the seven-by-thirteen-foot flag up the mast at 2:26 P.M.

  Dale Larkins climbed the ladder to the bridge, where he nearly collided with the skipper. Larkins had manned the machine guns aft of the bridge at the start of the attack before the fires from the deck below chased him and the other gunners away. He had climbed down to help fight the fires before he hustled back up to the bridge. McGonagle now ordered him to man the forward guns. When he reached the forecastle, Larkins stumbled over the bloodied remains of the gunners and phone talkers. One of the bodies, located next to the phone box, had been cut in half. The sailor’s intestines draped over the forecastle and blood ran down the bulkhead to the deck below. Larkins reached the starboard guntub steps later and found one of the gunners slumped over with a basketball-sized hole in his back. The other gunner lay next to him in the tub, barely alive with a massive head wound and chest injuries. Larkins could hear the man’s labored breathing.

  Up on the bridge, McGonagle watched the sixty-two-ton torpedo boats slice through the waves toward the Liberty. When the boats closed to within two thousand yards, the skipper spotted a blue and white flag with a Star of David in the center. The attackers had not been Egyptian, but Israeli. The boats appeared to signal the spy ship, but the intermittent smoke from the Liberty’s fires blocked McGonagle’s view. He could not read the signals nor could he respond to them. The fighters had destroyed the Liberty’s twenty-four-inch signal light, leaving only a handheld Aldis lamp approximately six inches in diameter, far too weak to penetrate the smoke. McGonagle and his signalmen—as later testimony would show—did not even try to use the smaller light. A signalman on the bridge instead raised handheld flags to communicate by semaphore. Fearing the attack might have been in error, McGonagle yelled for the gunners to hold fire.

  On the forecastle, Larkins found that shrapnel had hit the machine gun and broken the chain of bullets. There were no spent shells in the guntub. The dead gunners, he realized, had never even had a chance to fire. Larkins stepped inside the guntub and removed the broken chain. He fished the single bullet from the chamber and fed a fresh chain of ammunition into the machine gun. Larkins spotted the torpedo boats zooming toward the spy ship in the distance. The boats turned and pulled back in what appeared to Larkins to be a torpedo run. He swiveled his machine gun and sighted the boats approximately a half to three-quarters of a mile off the starboard side. Larkins squeezed the trigger. A single round fired before the machine gun’s top plate blew open. He inspected it and discovered shrapnel had damaged the latch in the air attack. Larkins couldn’t close the plate. He realized the machine gun was worthless at the same time he heard McGonagle’s order to cease fire.

  The starboard machine gun just aft of the bridge started to fire. The flames and smoke from the motor whaleboat fire on the deck below blocked McGonagle’s view of the machine gun. The skipper assumed one of the gunners had failed to hear the cease-fire order so he instructed Lucas to stop the gunner. The young officer darted out of the hatch and found the bridge’s port machine gun vacant. The flames from the gasoline fire below on deck had forced the gunners to abandon the post. He ran down the walkway where he had a clear view of the starboard machine gun that McGonagle believed fired on the torpedo boats. Lucas was surprised to find the guntub empty. The gun barrel rested on the edge of the tub and flames from the motor whaleboat fire danced over the lip of the mount. Lucas realized that no one had fired on the torpedo boats. The flames had sparked the ammunition.

  The torpedo boats zoomed toward the Liberty in attack formation. Any hope McGonagle had to stop the assault vanished. The torpedo boats—armed with 20-mm and 40-mm cannons along with .50-caliber machine guns—opened fire on the defenseless spy ship. The skipper shouted to take cover as rounds crashed into the bridge and passed through the op
en starboard hatch. The men dropped to the deck as the clash of metal on metal returned. McGonagle knew that the cannon and machine gun fire was the least of the Liberty’s concerns. Israel’s French-made boats each carried up to two torpedoes that gunners had to manually aim. The cannon fire was designed to provide cover and create distractions so the boats could slip in close and unleash the torpedoes. The skipper ordered an alert passed to his crew. At 2:31 P.M. the ship’s loudspeaker crackled. “Standby for a torpedo attack.”

  Nearly three hundred sailors now prepared for the unthinkable. Not since the waning days of World War II—and before many of the Liberty’s crewmembers were even born—had another nation torpedoed an American ship. For many of the Liberty’s men, the surreal circumstances of the surprise attack only magnified the shock of the skipper’s warning. The Liberty had sailed peacefully that morning along the Egyptian coast. Men had sunbathed on the forward decks, shopped for T-shirts in the ship’s store, and written letters home. That had all changed in just half an hour. Scores of sailors had either been killed or wounded. Fires burned on deck and a torpedo now zipped through the water. Throughout the 455-foot long ship, sailors readied themselves for the blast. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Men could only wait and pray.

  Down in the engine room, George Golden ordered all nonessential men to grab life jackets, climb the ladders, and vacate the spaces. The chief engineer knew the ship would not survive a direct hit to the engine room. Golden and a small cadre of boilermen, machinist mates, and firemen would remain behind to operate the engineering plant. Over in the research spaces, Dennis Eikleberry tucked the bottom of his pants into his socks and buttoned up his shirt to protect as much skin as possible from flash burns. Eikleberry lay down on the deck with more than a dozen other sailors in his compartment as the room fell silent. Jeff Carpenter, in a compartment across the hall, chose not to see what was about to happen. He slipped off his glasses, inserted them in his shirt pocket, and pulled his battle helmet low over his head.