Below is just a portion of the free, online chapter six.

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The True Story of Israel's attack
on an American Intelligence Ship

By James M. Ennes, Jr.

Chapter Six

AIR ATTACK

Copyright by James Ennes 1980, 1986, 1995, 2002, 2004, 2005

Imagine all the earthquakes in the world, and all the thunder and
lightnings together in a space of two miles, all going off at once.
--Description by unknown U.S. Army officer of night engagement
when Farragut ran Fort Jackson and St. Philip, April 24, 1862

Searing heat and terrible noise came suddenly from everywhere.
Instinctively I turned sideways, presenting the smallest target to the
heat. Heat came first, and it was heat--not cannon fire--that caused me
to turn away. It was too soon to be aware of rockets or cannon fire.

"We're shooting!" I thought. "Why are we shooting?" The air filled with
hot metal as a geometric pattern of orange flashes opened holes in the
heavy deck plating. An explosion tossed our gunners high into the
air-spinning, broken, like rag dolls.

My first impression--my primitive, protective search for something safe
and familiar that put me emotionally behind the gun--was wrong. We were
not firing at all. We were being pounded with a deadly barrage of
aircraft cannon and rocket fire.

A solid blanket of force threw me against a railing. My arm held me up
while the attacker passed overhead, followed by a loud swoosh, then silence.

O'Connor spotted bright flashes under the wings of the French built jet
in time to dive down a ladder. He was struck in midair, severely wounded
by rocket fragments before he crashed into the deck below.

I seemed to be the only one left standing as the jet disappeared astern
of us. Around me, scattered about carelessly, men squirmed helplessly,
like wounded animals--wide-eyed, terrified, not understanding what had
happened.

The second airplane made a smoky trail in the sky ahead. Unable to move,
we watched them make a sweeping 180-degree turn toward Liberty, ready to
resume the attack. My khaki uniform was bright red now from two dozen
rocket fragments buried in my flesh. My left leg, broken above the knee,
hung from my hip like a great beanbag.

The taste of blood was strong in my mouth as I tested my good leg. Was I
badly hurt? Could I help the men floundering here? Could I help myself.
Was it cowardice to leave here?

On one leg, I hopped down the steep ladder, lurched across the open area
and fell heavily on the pilothouse deck just as hell's own jackhammers
pounded our steel plating for the second time. With incredible noise the
aircraft rockets poked eight-inch holes in the ship; like fire-breathing
creatures, they groped blindly for the men inside.

Already the pilothouse was littered with helpless and frightened men.
Blood flowed, puddled and coagulated everywhere. Men stepped in blood,
slipped and fell in it, tracked it about in great crimson footprints.
The chemical attack alarm sounded instead of the general alarm. Little
matter. Men knew we were under attack and went to their proper places.

Captain McGonagle suddenly appeared in the starboard door of the
pilothouse and ordered: "Right full rudder. All engines ahead flank.
Send a message to CNO: 'Under attack by unidentified jet aircraft,
require immediate assistance.' "

Grateful for an order to execute, confident that only this man could
save them, the crew responded with speed and precision born of terror.
Never have orders been acknowledged and executed more quickly. These
were brave men. These were trained men. But these were also confused and
frightened men inexperienced in combat. An order told them that
something was being done, made them a part of the effort, gave them
something to take the place of the awful fear.

Reacting to habit as much as to duty, and grateful that duty required
his quick exit from this terrible place, Lloyd Painter looked for his
relief so that he could report to his assigned damage control station
below. Finding Lieutenant O'Connor half dead in a limp and bloody heap
at the bottom of a ladder, he demanded: "Are you ready to relieve me?"

"No, I'm not ready to relieve you," O'Connor mimicked weakly --aware,
even now, of the irony. McGonagle interrupted to free Lloyd of his
bridge duty.

I lay next to the chart table, unable to control the blood flow from my
body and wondering how much I could lose before I would become
unconscious. Blood from my chest wound was collecting in a lump in my
side so large that I couldn't lower my arm. My trouser leg revealed a
steady flow of fresh blood from the fracture site. Numerous smaller
wounds oozed slowly. Next to me lay Seaman George Wilson of Chicago, who
had stood part of his lookout watch this morning without binoculars. In
spite of a nearly severed thumb, Wilson used his good arm and my web
belt to fashion a tourniquet for my leg, effectively slowing the worst
bleeding. Someone opened my shirt, ripping off my undershirt for use
somewhere as an emergency bandage. Meanwhile, I wrapped a handkerchief
tightly around Wilson's wrist to control the bleeding from his hand. In
this strange embrace we received the next airplane.

BLAM! Another barrage of rockets hit the ship. Although the first
airplane caused a permanent ringing in my ears and forever robbed me of
high-frequency hearing, the attacks seemed no less noisy. Men dropped
with each new assault. Lieutenant Toth, still carrying my unsent
sighting reports, received a rocket that turned his mortal remains into
smoking rubble. Seaman Salvador Payan remained alive with two jagged
chunks of metal buried deep within his skull. Ensign David Lucas
accepted a rocket fragment in his cerebellum. And still the attacks
continued.

In the pilothouse, Quartermaster Floyd Pollard stretched to swing a
heavy steel battle plate over the vulnerable glass porthole. A rocket,
and with it the porthole, exploded in front of him to transform his face
and upper torso into a bloody mess. Painter helped lead him to relative
safety near the quartermaster's log table before leaving the bridge to
report to his battle station.

On the port side, just below the bridge, fire erupted from two ruptured
fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline. A great flaming river inundated the
area and poured down ladders to the main deck below. Lieutenant
Commander Armstrong-ever impulsive, ever gutsy, ever committed to the
job at hand-bounded toward the fire. "Hit, em! Slug the sons of
bitches!" he must have been saying as he fought to reach the
quick-release handle that would drop the flaming and still half-full
containers into the sea. A lone rocket suddenly dissolved the bones of
both of his legs.

Meanwhile, heretofore mysterious Contact X came to life with the first
exploding rocket. Quickly poking a periscope above the surface of the
water, American submariners watched wave after wave of jet airplanes
attacking Liberty. Strict orders prevented any action that might reveal
their presence. They could not help us, and they could not break radio
silence to send for help. Frustrated and angry, the commanding officer
activated a periscope camera that recorded Liberty's trauma on movie
film. He could do no more. 1

Dr. Kiepfer, en route to his battle station in the ship's sick bay,
stopped to treat a sailor he found bleeding badly from shrapnel wounds
in a passageway. A nearby door had not yet been closed, and through the
door Kiepfer could see two more wounded men on an exposed weather deck.
Cannon and rocket fire exploded everywhere as the men tried weakly to
crawl to relative safety.

"Go get those men," Kiepfer yelled to a small group of sailors as he
worked to control his patient's bleeding.

"No, sir," "Not me," "I'm not crazy," the frightened men whimpered as
they moved away from the doctor.

No matter. Kiepfer would do the job himself. As soon as he could leave
his patient, Kiepfer moved across the open deck. Ignoring bullets and
rocket fragments, the huge doctor kneeled beside the wounded men,
wrapped one long arm around each man's waist, and carried both men to
safety in one incredible and perilous trip.

Lieutenant George Golden, Liberty's engineer officer, was in the
wardroom with Ensign Lucas when the attack began. A meeting had been
planned for Golden, Scott, Lucas and McGonagle to discuss the drill. The
captain was still on the bridge, so the meeting would be delayed. Scott
was slow to arrive, as today was his twenty-fourth birthday and he was
at the ship's store picking out a Polaroid camera to help celebrate the
occasion.

Golden was pouring coffee when they heard the first explosion. "Jesus,
they dropped the motor whaleboat!" he cried as he abandoned his cup and
started toward the boat. Then he heard other explosions and knew even
before the alarm sounded that Liberty was under attack.

Reversing his path, he started toward his battle station in the engine
room just in time to see Ensign Scott open the door to his stateroom and
slide his new camera across the floor before racing to his battle
station in Damage Control Central.

A rocket penetrated the engine room to tear Golden from the engine-room
ladder. He plunged through darkness, finally crashing onto a steel deck,
miraculously unhurt. He could see rockets exploding everywhere, passing
just over the heads of his men and threatening vital equipment. "Get
down!" he yelled. "Everybody stay low; on your knees!"

Golden knew that the bridge would want maximum power. Already Main
Engine Control had an all-engines-ahead-flank bell from the bridge that
they could not answer. Flank speed was seventeen knots, but Golden had
taken one boiler off the line just ten minutes earlier so that it could
cool for repairs. Without that boiler the best speed he could provide
was about twelve knots. He immediately put the cooling boiler back on
the line and started to bring it up to pressure.

Even with both boilers on the line, the engines were limited by a
governor to eighteen knots. For years Golden had carried the governor
key in his pocket so that he could find it quickly in just such an
emergency as this. He switched the governor off, permitting the ship to
reach twenty-one knots.

As machine-gun fire and aircraft rockets battered the ship, the main
engine room began to take on the appearance of a fireworks display. Most
lighting was knocked out in the first few minutes, leaving flashlights
and battle lanterns as the only illumination in the room except for a
skylight six decks above. In this relative darkness, men worked on hands
and knees, operating valves, checking gauges, starting and stopping
equipment, bypassing broken pipes; and all the while above them danced
white, yellow, red and green firefly like particles. Some were small.
Some were huge and burst into pieces to shower down upon them. All
entered the room with a tremendous roar as they burst through the ship's
outer skin.

Golden glanced at the scene above him. It reminded him of meteor
showers, except for the noise, or of electric arc welding. Most of his
men were here now, having safely descended the ladders through the
fireworks to reach their battle stations. Boiler Tender Gene Owens was
here and in charge of auxiliary equipment on the deck below Golden.
Machinist Mate Chief Richard J. Brooks was here. Brooks was petty
officer in charge of the engine room, and he was everywhere.

Golden realized suddenly that far above them, directly in the range of
rocket and machine-gun fire, was a hot-water storage tank. Five thousand
gallons of near- boiling water lay in that tank, ready to pour down upon
them if it was ruptured, and it would surely be ruptured. The drain
valve was at the base of the tank, so it would be necessary to send a
man up more than three decks to open the valve.

Golden quickly explained to a young sailor what had to be done and sent
him on his way, but the frightened man collapsed on the deck grating and
refused to move.

Chief Brooks overheard the exchange. "C'mon, you heard the lieutenant.
Move!" he cried, jerking the panic-stricken teenager to his feet.

Terror was written on the young man's face. Tears started to flow as his
face contorted in a grimace of fear.

With a snarl of contempt, Brooks gave him a shove that sent him
sprawling. Then Brooks mounted the ladder leading to the vital drain
valve. Two decks above, perhaps fifteen feet up the ladder, a tremendous
explosion occurred next to Brooks. In a shower of sparks and fire, he
was torn from his place on the ladder and thrown into space to land
heavily upon the steel grating below. Brooks was back on his feet before
anyone could reach him. Back up the same ladder he headed until he found
the valve, opened it and drained the water only moments before the
inevitable rocket hit the storage tank to find it newly empty.

In a few minutes, most of the battle lanterns had been struck by rocket
fragments or disabled by the impact of nearby explosions. The room was
nearly dark. By working on hands and knees, men could remain below the
waterline and thus below most of the rocket and gunfire, although they
were still vulnerable to an occasional wildly aimed rocket and to the
constant shower of hot metal particles from above.

When fresh-air fans sucked choking smoke from the main deck into the
engine rooms, Golden ordered the men to cover their faces with rags and
to try to find air near the deck. When the smoke became intolerable, he
sent a message to the bridge that he would have to evacuate; but just
before Golden was to give the evacuation order, McGonagle ordered a
course change that carried the smoke away from the fans. Fresh air
returned at last to the engine room.

The first airplane had emptied the gun mounts and removed exposed
personnel. The second airplane, through extraordinary luck or fantastic
marksmanship, disabled nearly every radio antenna on the ship,
temporarily preventing our call for help.

Soon the high-performance Mirage fighter bombers that initiated the
attack were joined by smaller swept-wing Dassault Mystyre jets, carrying
dreaded napalm--jellied gasoline. The Mystyres, slower and more
maneuverable than the Mirages, directed rockets and napalm against the
bridge and the few remaining topside targets. In a technique probably
designed for desert warfare but fiendish against a ship at sea, the
Mystyre pilots launched rockets from a distance, then dropped huge
silvery metallic napalm canisters as they passed overhead. The jellied
slop burst into furious flame on impact, coating everything, then surged
through the fresh rocket holes to burn frantically among the men inside.'

I watched Captain McGonagle standing alone on the starboard wing of the
bridge as the whole world suddenly caught fire. The deck below him,
stanchions around him, even the overhead above him burned. The entire
superstructure of the ship burst into a wall of flame from the main deck
to the open bridge four levels above. All burned with the peculiar fury
of warfare while Old Shep, seemingly impervious to man-made flame and
looking strangely like Satan himself, stepped calmly through the fire to
order: "Fire, fire, starboard side, oh-three level. Sound the fire alarm."

Fire fighters came on stage as though waiting in the wings for a
prearranged signal. Streaming through a rear pilothouse door, they
carried axes, crowbars, CO, bottles and hundreds of feet of fire hose.
The sound of CO, bottles and fire-hose sprinklers added to the din as
the smell of steam overtook the smell of nitrates, smoke and blood. Men
screamed, cried, yelled orders and scrambled to duty as the ship
struggled to stay alive.

On the forecastle, Gunner's Mate Alexander N. Thompson fought his way
relentlessly toward the forward gun mount. Only moments before, Thompson
had remarked to me on the bridge: "No sweat, sir. If anything happens I
just want to be in a gun mount." Now he was repeatedly driven away by
exploding rockets. Weakened, with duty waiting in that small gun tub, he
tried again.

His radar disabled, Radarman Charles J. Cocnavitch left his post to man
a nearby gun mount. "Stay back!" Captain McGonagle ordered, knowing that
the gun would be ineffective and that Cocnavitch would die in a futile
attempt to fire. Meanwhile, Lieutenant O'Connor, still lying near the
ladder where he had fallen, was robbed of any latent prejudices by huge
black Signalman Russell David, who braved fire, blast and bullets to
move the limp and barely conscious officer from the bridge to safety in
the now-empty combat information center.

The pilothouse became a hopeless sea of wounded men, swollen fire hoses
and discarded equipment. Men tripped over equipment, stepped on wounded.
In front of the helmsman a football-size glob of napalm burned angrily,
adding to the smoke and confusion. Smaller napalm globs burned in other
parts of the room, refusing to be extinguished.

Again I thought of duty. My duty was on this bridge, amid the flame and
the shrapnel, driving this ship and fighting to protect her. Already I
was weak from loss of blood and from the shock of my wounds. A sailor
tripped over me, stepped on Seaman Wilson, and fell on other wounded as
he dragged a CO, bottle across the room. I decided that duty did not
require that we all lie here and bleed. It may even require that we get
out of the way, if we can, so that others may fight. Relinquishing
Wilson's tourniquet to Wilson, he released mine. Acutely conscious of my
retreat from the heart of battle, I raised an arm toward some sailors
huddled nearby. Seaman Kenneth Ecker pulled me to my feet and I resumed
my one-legged hopping.

I need a place to plug my wounds, I told myself, a place to find the
holes and stop the flow of blood.

I hopped out of the room. Ecker stayed with me, adding to the guilt I
felt for leaving the bridge. Bad enough that I should leave, but to take
the bridge watch with me! "Go back!" I insisted. Ecker stayed. The
ladder leading from the pilothouse was thick with fire hoses. Somewhere
beneath the hoses were solid ladder rungs, but my foot could find only
slippery fire hoses. With one hand on each railing and with my beanbag
catching awkwardly on every obstruction, I hopped clumsily down the
ladder. Once I stood aside to let a man pass in the other direction with
a C02 bottle. He stopped to stare at me with a startled look, his mouth
open. "Hurry!" I said. I reached the level below to find Ecker still
with me. "Go back!" I protested again.

Lightheaded from loss of blood, I searched for a place to examine my
injuries and to treat my wounds. The search became urgent as I became
increasingly dizzy. More airplanes pounded our ship as I discovered that
the captain's cabin offered no refuge. Through his door I could see a
smoke-filled room with gaping holes opening to the flame outside, and
frantic napalm globs eating his carpet.

Around a corner I found the doctor's stateroom. The room was dark, the
air free of smoke. His folding bunk was open from a noontime nap, his
porthole closed with a steel battle plate. Strangely concerned that I
was soiling his sheets with blood, I pulled myself onto his clean bed.
My useless left leg hung over the side in a sitting position. Ecker,
still nearby, wanting to help but afraid to touch the leg, finally laid
it gingerly alongside the other. I thought of the tissue being abused
and wondered how close the sharp bone ends were to the artery.

What happens if I cut the artery ? I wondered. Maybe I have already. A
thousand questions begged for answers: Did we get our message off? Will
they never stop shooting? When will our jets arrive? And who is shooting
at us, anyway?

We still had no idea who was attacking. Although the Arab countries
largely blamed the United States for their problems and falsely charged
that American carrier-based aircraft had assisted Israel, we knew that
the Arab air forces were crippled and probably unable to launch an
attack like this one. And to increase the confusion, a ship's officer
thought he saw a MIG- 1 5 over Liberty and quickly spread a false report
among the crew that we were being attacked by the Soviet Union. Probably
no one suspected Israeli forces.