The mess deck was a bloody mess that night. People were dying. It was a ghastly sight.
—LLOYD PAINTER, TESTIMONY BEFORE LIBERTY COURT OF INQUIRY
After the attack, with the sickbay destroyed by a rocket, the Liberty’s medical corpsmen converted the spy ship’s mess hall into an emergency room for the wounded. Cavernous and centrally located, the mess hall was designed to feed nearly three hundred hungry sailors three hot meals a day. Like much of the Liberty, the mess deck was austere, even prisonlike, offering little more than steel walls, exposed steam pipes, and fluorescent lights. Sailors ate off metal trays with bent utensils. Roughly two dozen tables, each with attached stools, sat end to end in rows, all bolted down to weather rough seas.
A mural ran the length of the forward wall, providing the mess hall with its only dramatic flair. Painted by homesick sailors on an earlier cruise, the mural depicted a towering canopy of trees with several wood-frame homes nestled beneath them. A waterfront stretched across the mural’s foreground. This idyllic American landscape, which could have been copied from the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, offered a touch of color and a change of scenery for sailors who spent weeks staring at an empty horizon.
Dr. Richard Kiepfer, fueled by adrenaline, fear, and the responsibility of being the ship’s lone doctor, had not stopped working since the attack began. Rocket and cannon explosions had turned even the most benign objects into weapons. When the torpedo tore apart the Liberty’s forward compartments, it converted coffee mugs, chairs, and wastebaskets into projectiles. An hour of such physical violence translated into scores of shrapnel and gunshot injuries along with compound fractures and penetrating chest wounds. The torpedo blast had even fused one sailor’s eyelids shut.
In the hours since the attack, Kiepfer and his medical corpsmen had performed a tracheotomy, cut open a sailor’s chest to relieve pressure on a collapsed lung, and stopped the bleeding from dozens of gunshot and shrapnel wounds. All this time Kiepfer’s own lacerated stomach was protected by a cinched life jacket that held his bandages in place. Nearly one hundred injured sailors crowded the mess hall, though the doctor suspected the total wounded was much higher since many of the able bodied continued to work. Two dozen sailors remained missing, most likely sealed inside the flooded compartments. Much of what Kiepfer saw as he made his rounds was unsettling, even with his Columbia University medical training. When he pulled back a piece of torn scalp on one sailor’s head, he stared down at the man’s brain. To combat shock, Kiepfer recruited volunteers to distribute water, salt pills, and bicarbonate of soda to hydrate the wounded. As the afternoon faded to evening—and anxiety levels rose—the crew switched to brandy.
The Liberty was not prepared to handle mass casualties. Ships its size lacked comprehensive medical facilities because the vessels normally traveled as part of a larger fleet. In any other situation, injured sailors would have been transferred to an accompanying aircraft carrier complete with an operating room, intensive-care ward, and a generous sick bay staffed by as many as sixty people. The larger ships carried stocked pharmacies, laboratories, and x-ray machines. Dental officers even performed the occasional oral surgery. Before the attack, Kiepfer’s most complicated procedure had been to cauterize a leaky blood vessel in McGonagle’s nose. Most days he froze off warts, iced fingers jammed from tossing a football on deck, or removed errant fishing hooks.
It was only by chance that Kiepfer had landed on the Liberty instead of in Vietnam. The Navy had assigned Kiepfer to the spy ship because his mother had been diagnosed with end-stage cancer. Because of the Liberty’s four-month assignment, Kiepfer would return home in time to see his mother before she passed away. To keep from dwelling on that painful fact, the thirty-year-old New Yorker had busied himself during cruises. He started a program to remove faded tattoos from sailors who now regretted the drunken body art. Even though he was a medical officer and excluded from many of the mundane chores, Kiepfer volunteered to stand deck watch, often taking the dreaded midnight-to-4 A.M. shift.
Now, in the absence of medical staff, surgical gear, and even drugs, the doctor had to be creative. Intravenous fluid bags dangled from overhead lights and transfusions were given arm to arm. Uninjured sailors were given surgical soap and taught to wash wounds while others learned to sew stitches in the wounded. To stretch the ship’s limited supply of penicillin, Kiepfer diluted it with sterile water. Record keeping wasn’t an option, so to prevent an accidental overdose of morphine, the medical corpsmen threaded used needles, like a lapel pin, through each wounded man’s shirt, pants, and even boxer shorts to signify the men had received the drug. When he ran out of surgical tubing, Kiepfer inserted his finger into one man’s chest wall and rolled him on his side to drain the blood.
Standing over Seaman Gary Blanchard at 1:30 A.M. on June 9, Kiepfer realized he needed more than creativity to save the Kansas sailor. Blanchard typified many of the Liberty’s enlisted men. Barely out of his teens, the burly sailor sported a sandy crew cut and thick arms. The son of a mechanic—his father was “Mechanic of the Year” several years running at Bob Moore Oldsmobile in Wichita—Blanchard grew up building and racing model cars. Shortly after turning seventeen, he told his parents he wanted to enlist. Because of his age, the Navy required his parents to sign a waiver. His father, an Army veteran, agreed. Blanchard’s mother refused to sign. She was particularly close with her son and wanted him to wait a year. Blanchard and his father persuaded her that it was the right decision. He was doing something he felt he needed to do. In the end, she relented. He left his junior year of high school, anxious for chance to see the world.
Over the past several years, Blanchard had pinballed around the world, scrubbing decks and chipping paint. On visits home he loved to describe for his family the unexplainable phenomena—the mysterious lights, brilliant stars, and even fire—he saw in the empty oceans. It made him stop and think of God Almighty. He reveled in the countries he had visited and despaired over the poverty he saw. “You wouldn’t believe how fortunate we are to live where we live,” he often told his family. But after several years, the novelty had faded. During card games in the Liberty’s sleeping quarters or over glasses of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black Label in foreign ports, he told his shipmates that he planned to finish his tour in the coming months and return home to Wichita. He had another motive: his girlfriend was pregnant.
Blanchard had been on deck when the fighter jets first strafed the Liberty. He had darted for cover when an explosion steps away knocked him facedown. Shrapnel riddled his lower back. He writhed in pain before sailors dragged him to the mess deck below. There men hoisted him onto a table covered by a mattress. The corpsmen gave him morphine to ease his pain. Kiepfer determined during an exam that Blanchard might need surgery, but he and his senior corpsman agreed to hold off until help arrived. The afternoon turned to evening. Blanchard’s abdomen swelled like a balloon from internal bleeding. Blood soaked through his mattress.
“I’m on my way out,” he groaned when Kiepfer checked on him again at approximately 1:30 A.M.
Kiepfer knew he was right. The doctor’s efforts to stabilize Blanchard had failed. His injuries were too severe. Despite repeated radio requests for help, no helicopters, planes, or ships had materialized in the nearly twelve hours since the attack. Blanchard’s blood pressure plummeted. His skin, normally tanned from scrubbing decks under the hot sun, drained of color. The sailor stared at the lights above and appeared disoriented and confused. Kiepfer recognized the signs of shock. Stabilization was no longer an option.
To open Blanchard up and stop the bleeding, Kiepfer needed at least two more doctors, several nurses, and a crash team. He had no operating room, no anesthesiologist, and no skilled help. Kiepfer was terrified.
“If I don’t do the surgery, you will die,” the doctor said, leveling with him. “If I do the surgery, you may still die.”
“Take your best shot,” Blanchard whispered.
Kiepfer recruited several volunteers to help move Blanchard from the crowded mess deck to the wardroom above, which the Navy doubled as a makeshift operating room in emergencies. With the doctor’s guidance, the sailors rolled Blanchard onto his side and slipped a stretcher beneath him. Kiepfer cinched canvas straps around Blanchard’s calves, waist, and torso, careful not to exacerbate his injuries. Wounded sailors on the floor cleared a path for the men to pass. At the far end of the mess deck, the men maneuvered through the door frame and hoisted the injured sailor up the narrow ladder, struggling to keep his stretcher level. Despite a heavy dose of morphine, Blanchard groaned.
A rectangular table stood in the center of the wardroom where the ship’s officers dined using china, silverware, and cloth napkins. In one corner sat a red vinyl couch and a glass-top table with a couple of aluminum ashtrays, normally filled with Lucky Strikes. Portholes with blue curtains dotted the wood-paneled walls. A carved African mask stared down from one wall and a painting of a man cane-poling in a river at sunset hung on another, both mementos from previous ports of call. On any other night, McGonagle might have entertained a local dignitary, if the Liberty was in port, or retired alone to enjoy one of his favorite Doris Day movies on the ship’s projector.
Kiepfer drew two pints of blood from volunteers in the mess deck. He then gathered as many sterile gauzes and bandages as he could carry. A battle lantern served as his surgical lamp. Because the Liberty was not outfitted for surgery, it carried no ether, meaning Kiepfer could offer only a spinal anesthetic to numb Blanchard’s pain. Unless the injured sailor passed out, he would be awake during surgery. The doctor ordered his impromptu surgical team to roll Blanchard onto his side so he could insert a needle into his back between his vertebrae. Kiepfer felt a slight pop as the needle penetrated the protective sack covering Blanchard’s spinal column. A touch of fluid emerged, his cue that he had hit the mark. He slowly injected the anesthetic. He removed the needle and the men rolled Blanchard onto his back.
Lieutenant Painter and Ensign Scott held Blanchard down as Kiepfer made his first incision into the patient’s abdomen. The doctor discovered what appeared to be several liters of blood in the abdominal cavity. Without equipment to suction the wound, Kiepfer could only use large surgical sponges to soak up the blood. The process was slow and arduous. The doctor wiped the wound and within moments the sponge saturated. Tom Van Cleave, the senior corpsman, handed him another sponge. Then another and another. Blanchard stared at the ceiling and occasionally rolled his head to the side. “Mama,” he repeated. “Mama.”
It took nearly an hour to soak up most of the blood. When Kiepfer finally was able to see inside Blanchard’s abdomen, he noted with despair that shrapnel had punctured his liver and right kidney. The injuries appeared massive. Even more concerning, the doctor discovered fresh bleeding. Some of the blood appeared bright red, meaning it was oxygen-rich and likely coming from Blanchard’s aorta. He also observed oxygen-depleted dark blood, returning to the heart from Blanchard’s vena cava. Both the aorta and the vena cava, two of the body’s most important blood vessels, had been either injured or torn. With each heartbeat, more blood flowed into the cavity.
Kiepfer sank in defeat. There was nothing he could do to save Blanchard from bleeding to death. The doctor pressed packs over the open ends of Blanchard’s major blood vessels to slow the bleeding, then he and his assistant stitched up the incision. The men gave him a final dose of anesthetic to ease his suffering. Blanchard’s blood pressure dropped. The men gathered around to watch as the twenty-year-old sailor stared at the lights above. His breathing grew labored. At approximately 3 A.M., he died.
Kiepfer pulled off his surgical gloves and ordered the corpsman to retrieve a body bag and haul Blanchard’s remains to the ship’s refrigerator. The doctor collapsed on the red vinyl couch in the corner of the wardroom. Thirteen hours had passed since the attack. He wondered where the helicopters and the extra doctors were. Why had no one arrived to help? How had he, an inexperienced doctor who had never completed a surgical residency, been left alone to tackle such an operation?
The doctor felt the throb of his own injury return, a pain he had forgotten during the surgery. He unfastened his life jacket to find his bandage and shirt soaked with blood. Kiepfer peeled off the soiled bandage and replaced it with a fresh one. He pulled on a new shirt and cinched up his life jacket. He paused long enough to devour a ham sandwich for energy as he returned to the mess deck.
It was time to go back to work.
An uneasy calm settled over the Liberty’s bridge that night as the injured ship steamed northwest at ten knots to rendezvous with the Sixth Fleet. The bridge had been one of the most dangerous spots during the attack as jet fighters and torpedo boats repeatedly targeted the command hub to kill senior officers and spark chaos among the crew. The barrage of rockets, cannons, and machine gun rounds had shattered portholes and left bowling-ball-sized gashes in the metal walls. The fire from napalm and burning fuel barrels charred the exterior walls and ladders and the acrid smell of burnt paint still hung in the air. Machine gun rounds, .50 caliber, fired from the Israeli torpedo boats littered the deck, mixed with shards of broken glass that crunched as the officers paced. The decks, once slippery with blood, were now sticky.
The ship’s engineers had restored limited power. Lights flickered and the two boilers generated enough steam to power the turbines, but teams of sailors had to crank the rudder manually to steer the ship, leaving a sinuous wake that trailed for miles. Complicating the challenge, the attack had destroyed most of the Liberty’s navigational systems. Both the radar and gyrocompass were fried and the officers distrusted the magnetic compass. The fathometer was the only operable piece of equipment—despite having stopped working briefly right after the attack—but the depth finder could do little to guide the injured Liberty. The sophisticated spy ship, designed to sniff out radio communications of foreign countries, now operated at the same navigational capacity as an eighteenth-century ship.
Ensign Lucas had remained on the bridge since moments after the attack began. He had become a crutch for the injured captain, even loaning him his belt to use as a tourniquet. “He was so weak and had lost so much blood that several times he almost passed out. He gave me orders as to what course to steer in case he did pass out. He never blacked out, but for a while he was lying on the deck being given medical aid and yet was still giving orders and was in full command,” Lucas would later write to his wife. “How he managed to keep going is beyond me. He kept his head and his cool the entire time and if it hadn’t been for his outstanding leadership we all might not have been able to live. He is the greatest in my book.”
Despite the severity of his injuries, McGonagle refused to relinquish his command. Kiepfer gave the skipper a saline solution to help hydrate him during an exam soon after the attack and fixed his poorly cinched tourniquet to slow blood loss. The ship’s doctor would later tell the Navy’s investigating board that he would have insulted McGonagle had he suggested he go below for medical care. The skipper’s presence on the bridge proved therapeutic for the crew. “The Commanding Officer at that time was like a rock upon which the rest of the men supported themselves,” the doctor would later testify. “To know that he was on the bridge grievously wounded, yet having the conn and the helm and through the night calling every change of course, was the thing that told the men, ‘we’re going to live.’”
Lucas watched the skipper’s strength return as the hours slipped past. McGonagle chased salt tablets with endless cups of black coffee. His injuries made it difficult to get comfortable. The skipper alternated between stretching out on the deck and reclining in a mounted chair on the port-side wing. When the temperature dropped that evening, he traded his life jacket for a Windbreaker. He left the bridge only to go below to the restroom. Even then, he often chose instead to urinate in a coffee can on the bridge that someone retrieved for him. The two officers spent much of the night in silence. McGonagle appeared deep in concentration. His few comments to Lucas focused on the Liberty’s course. That afternoon, the skipper had guided the ship by studying the wake and ordering turns of the rudder. Now in the dark, he periodically stretched out and gazed at the heavens, navigating by the North Star.
Another officer relieved Lucas in the middle of the night, allowing him to retreat below to his stateroom for a few minutes of rest. He found the quarters he shared there with Ensign Scott uninhabitable. A shell had ripped through the ceiling. Blast holes riddled the metal walls. Six inches of salty firefighting water now sloshed on the deck. Lucas spied his roommate’s new Polaroid camera, now submerged. The young officer had quit smoking a few weeks earlier, but he opened the drawer beneath his bunk and salvaged a half carton of Marlboros. Miraculously the cigarettes were dry. Lucas collapsed in an empty stateroom on the deck above and lit a cigarette. He closed his eyes but found sleep impossible. The attack played out in his mind as he stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.
Lucas had seen some of the worst carnage that afternoon. He had felt the warm air of a round zip past his head as he fished his battle helmet out of a locker and crawled into the bridge. The wounded were sprawled all over the deck. Smoke had made breathing difficult. Deafening blasts of rockets and cannons had reverberated. During the torpedo boat attack, Lucas had seen the ship’s quartermaster killed just steps away from him. One moment, the sailor stood at the helm. The next, a round zinged through the bridge and hit him from behind. Lucas heard the man gasp and watched him drop to the floor dead. Lucas wasn’t spared. Shrapnel scraped his forearm and hand and another piece dug into the back of his head. A sliver of metal lodged beneath his right eye, so hot it sliced the skin as it entered so that he didn’t feel it. Only after McGonagle pointed out blood on his cheek did Lucas realize he had been hit. Every time he moved his jaw, he could feel it.
The trauma had not stopped when the attack ended. Lucas helped put out fires and haul the injured to the mess decks. There he had seen the two dozen tables covered with bloodied men and scores of others stretched out on mattresses below. The makeshift hospital smelled of fuel oil, smoke, and blood. Injured sailors occasionally moaned. Lucas had comforted his friend Lieutenant Jim O’Connor, who bled through his mattress on the floor and would later lose a kidney. Lieutenant Commander Dave Lewis, who had been about ten feet from where the torpedo exploded, lay silently, his face charred. On another table, Lucas spotted a man from the deck force stripped completely naked, his body covered with bloody shrapnel wounds.
Alone in the stateroom, Lucas worried that the battered ship might sink. Many uninjured sailors napped in lifejackets topside, just in case. How would he get off the ship? he wondered. His thoughts turned to his daughter, born the day after the Liberty sailed for Africa. Her birth announcement had consisted of a telegram from his mother-in-law that rattled off the ship’s teletype at 6 P.M. on May 3. He knew his five-week-old daughter only through photographs his wife mailed, which he had proudly shown the other officers and crew as he handed out fifty cigars. More recently, Lucas had missed her baptism, held in a Maryland church four days before the attack. He lit another cigarette. The edginess of the adrenaline and nicotine pumped through him. Like many on the ship, he felt alone and scared, but also fortunate. He had lived. “The night was one of the longest I ever spent,” he would write to his wife two days later. “I consider all of us who made it through this to be extremely lucky.”
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 America 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!”