The Attack on the Liberty

by James Scott

  Ensign Scott had worked nonstop since the attack to make sure the crippled ship did not sink. Sailors had sealed off the torpedoed spaces minutes after the strike, but damage control teams still had to plug hundreds of other shell holes. Scott ordered crews to begin a compartment-by-compartment search for leaks, which revealed as much as a foot and a half of seawater in some of the lower compartments. Many of the shell holes had been above the waterline prior to the torpedo strike, but with the Liberty now listing nine degrees, those holes had dropped beneath the waterline, causing the compartments to flood. The Liberty carried various sized wooden cones that sailors now hammered into the holes. The fire on the port-side deck had burned up the fuel for gas-powered pumps. The ship’s remaining electrical pumps, weaker than the gas-driven ones, now struggled to bail water.

  Scott had examined the top of the torpedo hole earlier in the afternoon from a perch on the main deck. Only a few feet poked above the waterline. Some debris floated out. Engineers could shift the remaining fuel in the lower tanks to stabilize the ship and reduce the list. But Scott realized that such a move risked the possibility that classified documents and bodies might wash out into the sea that night. With no other ships around to retrieve them, those men and records would be lost. He decided to wait until help arrived. His initial assessment of the ship hours after the attack revealed a significant amount of damage. He also appreciated how close the Liberty had come to sinking. He later captured those early impressions in a letter to his parents. “One more torpedo hit and we would have gone down,” he wrote. “The entire ship looks like hell—burned and full of rocket and shell holes.”

  Scott felt the awesome burden of being the Liberty’s damage control officer. Though Lieutenant George Golden technically held that title, Golden’s battle station was in the engine room. Golden had remained there throughout the attack and now worked with crews to restore power to the ship’s systems. Damage control duties fell to Scott.

  The young officer had attended a ten-week damage control school in Philadelphia before his assignment to the Liberty. There he had climbed inside a mock compartment armed only with a bag of wooden plugs and a mallet. Water began to flood the space. Scott hammered wooden plugs into holes as the cold water rose from his ankles to his knees. He grabbed more cones and pounded. The lights went out as he hammered, feeling for holes with his hands. When the water reached his neck, supervisors ended the simulation. Scott crawled out and toweled off. The simulation chambers were the closest many sailors would ever come to actual combat conditions. Scott learned. When the torpedo tore open the side of the Liberty and the power died and the ship began its roll, he was thankful that he had.

  The Liberty was his first sea assignment fresh out of Officer Candidate School in the spring of 1966. Scott spent his first cruise along the west coast of Africa in the fall of that year, learning the ship’s intricate systems. He studied the ship’s blueprints and explored the passageways, compartments, and engine room. There was not a compartment on the Liberty he had not visited. Though he lacked top-secret clearances required for the research spaces, Scott even had ventured beyond the cipher-locked doors, though the spooks had covered the equipment with black tarps. Scott applied the lessons he learned in damage control school to his crews. He often used smoke grenades during damage control drills to better simulate battle. His men would later thank him for that.

  McGonagle summoned Scott to the bridge in the middle of the night. He arrived to find the skipper in his chair, his leg bloodied. The rigid McGonagle, never one to buck regulations, still wore his officer’s hat. The skipper demanded a report on the damage control efforts. Scott told him the flooded spaces were sealed and the bulkheads that supported the water appeared stable at the moment. Crews used plywood and beams to shore up some of the bulkheads for added protection. Other sailors plugged shell holes and pumped seawater out of some of the compartments. McGonagle listened in silence as Scott ticked off the efforts of his crews. When the young officer finished, McGonagle didn’t ask any questions, but offered only a comment: “The drill we had earlier today was not very realistic, was it?”

  “No, sir,” Scott answered.

  The stress of the attack and the exhaustion increased as the hours slipped past and help failed to materialize. The officers opened up the ship’s storage and rounded up several bottles of liquor from the guarded supply locker. They hauled the liquor below and distributed the bottles to the senior petty officers. Crews had worked nonstop. Nerves were frazzled and tensions soared. The men needed a break, something that might calm them. “We don’t want any drunks,” Scott told his men. “But if anybody wants to have a little shot of whiskey after what we’ve been through, they’re welcome to it.”

  Scott climbed to the main deck later that evening for some fresh air. The faint light of stars shone down from above. A warm breeze blew across the deck as the ship now steamed in the dark. Scott tried to keep his crews and others busy, believing it best for the men to focus on a job rather than dwell on the horror of the afternoon. It also kept sailors out of the mess deck, where the ship’s doctor and corpsmen remained busy. Extra men were added to watch. Scott ordered teams to walk the ship to reinspect each compartment for leaks and report back to him every hour. He also demanded that crews open the sealed hatch to the flooded research spaces each hour in the off chance others below might have survived. One of the ship’s cooks approached Scott on deck and wanted to know the Liberty’s prognosis: “Are we going to sink?” the cook asked.

  “I don’t know,” Scott replied. “Ask me in the morning.”

  Shortly before 6 A.M. on June 9, the gray light of dawn appeared on the horizon, offering many the first view of the Liberty’s damage since the attack had ended. The spy ship still listed nine degrees and the bow rode low in the water from the weight of the flooded forward compartments where two dozen of the dead remained sealed inside. Investigators would later count 821 rocket and cannon holes—some as much as a foot in diameter—in the ship’s bridge, decks, and smokestack. Nearly all of the forty-five antennae had been wiped out, including four softball-sized shell holes blasted in the towering forward dish. The attack had shattered portholes, ripped open metal doors, and destroyed the forward machine gun tubs, where sailors had died desperately trying to defend the ship. Charred and blistered paint covered much of the port side from the combination of napalm and the 110 gallons of gasoline that had furiously burned on deck. A scorching fire on the ship’s starboard side had vaporized the Liberty’s motor whaleboat and reduced many of the ship’s life rafts to ashes.

  Few of the ship’s officers and crew had slept much that night. Those who did mostly dozed on the Liberty’s outside decks, afraid of venturing to the berthing compartments below in case the injured ship sank. Even at daybreak—roughly sixteen hours after the attack—crewmembers wandered around in life jackets, some still clutching battle helmets. Many of the sailors used the morning light to explore the damage, take photographs, and scavenge bits of twisted shrapnel and spent bullets that littered the decks. More than a few paused to look at the dried blood on the machine gun tubs and the walls of the forecastle. Others peered over the rail to see the top of the torpedo hole that poked above the waterline and fingered the nubs of machine gun rounds lodged in the ship’s exterior walls. Many of the crewmembers brought bullets and shrapnel of varying sizes to the bridge so that investigators could later identify the ordnance. One officer even scooped up a vial of unburned napalm jelly.

  Daybreak brought a sense of relief for many after an exhausting night alone at sea. The skipper, still on the bridge, remained in the pilothouse chair, where he had spent much of the night, silently sipping coffee from a paper cup, the tourniquet still cinched around his right leg. The ship’s doctor and his two corpsmen continued to make rounds, administering morphine, checking vital signs, and comforting the wounded. Down in the engine room, teams worked to restore electrical systems and monitor the ship’s boilers and generators. Damage control crews
combed the Liberty’s compartments for leaks, checked for water intrusion in the fuel tanks, and hammered wooden plugs into the remaining shell holes. Topside deck crews began the grisly task of cleaning up the carnage. The bodies had been removed soon after the attack the day before—stored in the ship’s freezer and air-conditioned transmitter room—but sailors now trained high-powered hoses on the dried blood, washing bits of flesh, bone fragments, and even a shoe with a foot still inside over the edge.

  Soon after sunrise, the first silhouette of a ship emerged on the empty horizon, dark smoke streaming behind. Many of the Liberty’s uninjured sailors and walking wounded lined the rails and watched as the distant specks grew larger, evolving into the destroyers U.S.S. Davis and the U.S.S. Massey. The sleek ships had plowed through the Mediterranean at thirty knots to rendezvous with the Liberty at 6:27 A.M. The aircraft carrier America trailed farther behind. For nearly seventeen hours, many on the Liberty had desperately waited for help to arrive. Signalmen had spent the night on the ship’s bow, aiming lights skyward to alert rescue planes that never materialized. The men in the Liberty’s radio room had transmitted updates and the names of the dead over a weak signal. The deck log records that the first ship the Liberty spotted on the desolate seas at 4:40 A.M. was the Russian merchant ship Proletrsk. For many of the sailors, the arrival of the destroyers served as the first tangible sign of hope. Danger now seemed to pass.

  The Massey’s motor whaleboat departed the destroyer at 6:52 A.M., carrying Dr. Peter Flynn and a small medical team to the Liberty. The Davis’s whaleboat sailed about the same time, ferrying medical and damage control teams. A thirty-five-year-old lieutenant commander, Flynn served as a general surgeon on board the aircraft carrier America. When news of the attack on the Liberty arrived, the Navy flew Flynn, a hospital corpsman, and operating room technician to the Massey on a helicopter, lowering the trio in harnesses to the deck below at 7:30 P.M. as the destroyer cut through the waves. The Navy flew other America personnel to the Davis. Flynn had met with the Massey’s commanding officer upon arrival and received the latest casualty figures and the estimated dawn rendezvous. Thirty minutes after he arrived on the destroyer, he had met with the medical corpsmen to formulate a plan. Flynn knew little about the nature of the injuries, but speculated that with a strafing and torpedo attack, he would encounter shrapnel, gunshot, and burn wounds. The team decided to take only limited supplies to the spy ship. Anything necessary could be ferried over later.

  The whaleboat motored alongside the Liberty in the calm sea. The American flag—the same one hoisted during the attack the afternoon before—fluttered from the mast. The medical team climbed a Jacob’s ladder to the deck above. There Flynn scanned the topside, noting the bloody guntub and the hundreds of shell holes. In one spot, the doctor could see through the entire superstructure where a shell had passed through every bulkhead, revealing daylight on the far side. Many of the Liberty’s sailors crowded around to watch as the whaleboats from the Massey and the Davis ferried personnel and equipment. Lieutenant Hubert Strachwitz, who boarded the Liberty from the Davis, captured the first moments in a letter to his wife. “The reality of the situation struck home as we climbed aboard and looked into the faces of the men. No Hollywood makeup man nor actor could ever produce those faces,” the officer wrote. “There were sunken eyes, bristly, dirty faces, dark bloodstains, ripped clothes covered with oil and charcoal. There were no hysterics, no crying, no cursing—just tired bodies trying to do necessary jobs.”

  Flynn’s medical team headed below. When he arrived in the mess deck, the doctor paused. Silence permeated the cavernous room as the injured all stared at Flynn and the corpsmen. Kiepfer, exhausted after being up for twenty-four hours, welcomed the men. The team evaluated the most seriously injured for evacuation to the America. Fifteen of the sailors appeared critically injured. Four would require immediate exploratory surgery upon arrival on the carrier. Two sailors who had been in the compartment where the torpedo exploded suffered burned faces. Many others had compound fractures, shrapnel wounds, and lacerations. Shrapnel had lodged in one man’s brain and the doctors found another already had developed gangrene. Two of the Liberty’s injured suffered amputations. “A rapid survey revealed that almost all had suffered missile and shrapnel wounds with or without underlying injuries depending on the area, angle, and force of penetration,” Flynn later wrote in a seventeen-page report he coauthored on the rescue effort. “Considering all they had experienced, the long anxious night many had spent, and that all were nearly exhausted, their calmness and excellent morale was remarkable.”

  The medical team discovered that the long night had exhausted the Liberty’s supply of sterile bandages, dressings, and medicine. The ship’s doctor and two corpsmen likewise needed rest. All the seriously injured would have to be evacuated. The team expected the first helicopters from the America to arrive midmorning. In the meantime, corpsmen began cleaning and dressing wounds. Others inserted intravenous drips to hydrate the wounded sailors and Foley catheters to allow teams to monitor urine output for complications like blood or reduced urine that might indicate kidney problems. The corpsmen swapped Ringer’s lactate solution—nicknamed “white blood”—for the 5 percent dextrose and water mixture that Kiepfer had used to fight shock. Every injured man received a tetanus booster. Corpsmen soon prepared an evacuation route to the Liberty’s forward deck to make it easier for volunteers to carry the injured in Stokes litters, a special basket-style stretcher with raised sides that can be easily hoisted into a hovering helicopter. The corpsmen conducted a second survey of the critically injured to determine which sailors had to be airlifted first.

  Flynn visited the bridge to check on McGonagle at 8:45 A.M. The skipper, who had regained some of his strength, greeted the men, though he remained largely quiet. The few comments he directed at the doctor centered on the condition of his crew below. McGonagle’s right pant leg had been cut off the day before and the doctor found the tourniquet tied around his upper thigh. The skipper’s leg finally had stopped bleeding, but it remained stained with dried blood. The combination of the tourniquet and the skipper’s refusal to lie down had left McGonagle’s leg grossly swollen and forced him to limp. It appeared to the doctor that shrapnel had lacerated the skipper’s greater saphenous vein, a large vein located just beneath the skin that runs the length of the leg and thigh. “His leg was extremely edematous since he had been on his feet continuously with a tight pressure dressing over the wound for eighteen hours. This was the only treatment that he had permitted,” Flynn later wrote in the report. “This is typical of his outstanding performance during the entire incident.”

  McGonagle may have performed heroically, but the doctor recognized that the injured skipper needed rest. He had remained on the bridge throughout the attack and the long night afterward, piloting the Liberty despite his injuries. Black coffee no longer could combat his exhaustion. Flynn’s report shows that the doctor wanted to evacuate McGonagle to the carrier America along with the other injured. Flynn met with Kiepfer, Golden, and Captain Harold Leahy, the destroyer division commodore. McGonagle had begged Kiepfer the night before not to let the Navy evacuate him. The Liberty’s doctor spoke up on behalf of his commanding officer. The men decided that McGonagle could remain aboard the Liberty and in command despite the potential danger his injuries posed. With its staggering number of injured and killed, the Liberty needed every available man. McGonagle eagerly accepted the increased personal risk, bolstered by the Navy’s decision to provide an additional senior officer to help manage the ship and crew. The skipper soon climbed down to his wrecked cabin below. The deck log shows that at 10:04 A.M., Lieutenant Commander William Pettyjohn, a member of Leahy’s staff, boarded the Liberty and assumed the duties of the spy ship’s executive officer, replacing Philip Armstrong, Jr., who had been killed in the attack.

  Volunteers carried the injured to the Liberty’s forward deck at 10:10 A.M. Twenty-seven minutes later, the first helicopter from the Amer
ica thundered over the horizon. The Liberty’s elaborate antenna configuration prevented the helicopters from landing. Hovering barely twenty feet above the ship, crews lowered cables. The wind from the rotors blew across the deck as volunteers attached the litters and watched as crews hauled up the injured. The America’s deck log recorded the arrival of the first injured sailor on the flight deck at 11:15 A.M., where a swarm of reporters and photographers greeted the crew. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, helicopters transported fifty Liberty sailors, followed by the bodies of nine dead, completing the transfer at 1:43 P.M. Soon after the flights began, the America rendezvoused with the Liberty. Captain Donald Engen, skipper of the carrier, sailed his ship down the side of the Liberty, passing as close as 150 yards away. Crewmen from the carrier lined the deck, marveling at the hundreds of blast holes, burned decks, and the spy ship’s nine-degree list. The American flag fluttered from the mast. Engen called the air boss—the officer in charge of flight operations—with a unique request. “Let’s give them three cheers!”

  With nearly two thousand officers and sailors crowding the America’s deck, the air boss came over the public address system. “Let’s hear it for Liberty!”

  The roaring cheer that followed thundered over the open sea and echoed back to the men on the carrier’s deck, making the hair on the skipper’s neck rise in a moment he would never forget. “Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!”

  CHAPTER 9

  I grieve with you over the lives that were lost, and share in the sorrow of the parents, wives and children of the men who died in this cruel twist of fate.