For the handful of seamen who survived, the sinking of USS Liscome Bay was an experience that would :» haunt them for years to come.
“Here comes a torpedo!” Spotting a white wake streaking toward his ship, a lookout aboard the U.S. Navy escort aircraft carrier Liscome Bay called out the alarm in the early morning darkness.
No one knows how many officers and sailors heard his warning on November 24, 1943. What is known, however, is that within 30 minutes 644of his shipmates would be dead or dying in the Pacific. It was a terrible price to pay for the young carrier’s sole campaign battle star.
Liscome Bay had been the second escort carrier to come out of the Kaiser Shipyards, slipping into waters off Vancouver, Wash., on April 19, 1943. Typical of the class, it displaced 7,800 tons, with a length of 512 feet and a width of 108 feet. The ship carried one 5-inch gun and 16 40mm anti-aircraft “ pom-pom” guns for self-protection. The main weapons, however, were its complement of between 28 and 45 General Motors TBM-1 Avenger torpedo bombers and Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat fighters. Those aircraft formed Composite Squadron VC-39.
The U.S. Navy designated Liscome Bay CVE-56. The “ CVE” stood for “ carrier, vessel, escort.” Fatalistic sailors, however, taking note of the ship’s thin hulls and massive quantities of aviation fuel, bombs and aerial torpedoes, maintained that it stood for something else altogether: “ combustible, vulnerable, expendable.”
Sailing aboard Liscome Bay were 860 men in ranks from lofty captain to the lowliest cook. The actual individuals occupying both ends of that range of rank were remarkable people of heroic distinction. The escort carrier’s captain, Irving D. Wiltsie, had previously served aboard the carrier Yorktown as its navigation officer and had already earned a reputation as one of the Battle of Midway’s heroes for his actions during the Japanese air attacks on that ship and his subsequent efforts to salvage it.
In the decks below Wiltsie’s quarters labored another American hero. Doris “ Dorie” Miller served the carrier as a cook third class. He had previously been assigned as a mess attendant aboard the battleship West Virginia, where his bravery during the attack on Pearl Harbor had earned him the distinction of being the first African American to receive the Navy Cross.
After Liscome Bay’s shakedown period and a series of operational exercises, it steamed for Pearl Harbor. Following a brief layover there, the carrier was at sea again, this time conducting operational exercises in Hawaii’s waters to prepare for the first offensive thrust by the United States into the Central Pacific.
The target was the Gilbert Islands— specifically Tarawa and Makin atolls— lying 2,000 miles west of Hawaii. With the sheltering anchorages and airfields of the Gilberts in hand, the Americans could use them as a springboard for the subsequent push into the Marshall Islands and pierce Japan’s outer defensive perimeter. Navy brass code-named the operation “ Galvanic.”
On November 10, 1943, Liscome Bay departed Pearl Harbor in support of Operation Galvanic. On board was Rear Adm. Henry Mullinnix, commander of Carrier Division 24, which consisted of Liscome Bay and sister escort carriers Coral Sea and Corregidor. Division 24 joined up with four battleships, four cruisers and six transport ships carrying the green troops of the U. S. Army’s 27th Infantry Division to the Gilberts. This flotilla, under the command of Rear Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner aboard the battleship Pennsylvania, was designated Task Force 52, Northern Attack Force. Its target was Makin Atoll, while two other task forces assaulted Tarawa and provided general covering support to the invasion fleet.
In total, the three task forces converging on the Gilberts represented the largest and most powerful U.S. naval force assembled in the Pacific up to that point in the war. Nevertheless, tensions ran high as the American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen of the invasion fleet headed west.
Liscome Bay’s aviation operations prior to and during the invasion typified those concerns. The carrier’s Wildcat fighters flew combat air patrol, screening the ships of Task Force 52 from Japanese aircraft based on the nearby islands, while its Avengers patrolled the seas searching for enemy submarines.
On November 13 the Americans began pounding the Gilbert Islands’ Japanese defenders. Land-based U.S. Army Air Forces planes struck at the coral atolls for five days. On the 19th, the carriers entered the fray, launching their aircraft for strikes on the entrenched Japanese. During the early morning hours of November 20, the battleships and cruisers began pummeling Tarawa and Makin with their big guns. Landing craft departed the troop transports, carrying Marines toward Tarawa and Army troops to Makin.
ALTHOUGH THE ARMY SECURED RELATIVELY lightly defended Makin in three days, the Marines on Tarawa spent those three days locked in brutal combat with its better-prepared Japanese defenders. Despite the capture of Makin, Admiral Turner’s task force continued to cruise the waters off the island. Apparently, the Navy was hesitant to cut the task force loose while the issue on Tarawa was still in doubt. “ We cruise 15 miles north, and then turn around and cruise 15 miles south,” recounted Francis Daily, an ensign and the ship’s pay officer, years later. “ It was the talk of the wardroom. Even Admiral Mullinnix talked about it. ‘We’re setting ourselves up to get torpedoed,’ he said.”
Finally, word came for much of Turner’s flotilla to withdraw from its exposed position among the Gilberts. On November 23, Liscome Bay joined a temporary task force headed by the battleship New Mexico and headed for safer waters.
The carrier would never reach them. The following day, November 24, Liscome Bay sailed through the pre-dawn darkness some 20 miles southeast of Makin. Off to starboard, it was missing two of the destroyers that should have been there to shield the vulnerable carrier from attack. One was chasing a suspected enemy contact on the distant horizon. The other was recovering one of VC-39’s downed Avengers on freshly captured Makin.
Shortly after 5 a.m., Wiltsie’s carrier and Turner’s convoy steamed into range of the Japanese submarine 7-275, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. Sunao Tabata. The big Kaidai 6A-class submarine had arrived in Makin’s waters the same day the escort vessel and its companions began their tardy withdrawal. Now, as the flight crews aboard Liscome Bay readied their Wildcats and Avengers for dawn launches, Tabata crept into position, opened the tube doors and launched a spread of three torpedoes at the distant convoy.
The first warning of impending disaster came with the lookout’s shout at 5:10 a.m. The heavy cruiser Baltimore, having shifted out of line in front of Liscome Bay, limited the carrier’s ability to evade the incoming torpedoes. Minutes later, at least one of them smashed into Liscome Bay’s starboard side, abaft of the after engine room. It detonated with an ear-shattering roar, followed seconds later by another massive blast as the carrier’s aviation fuel and bombs exploded. The explosion hurled debris thousands of feet into the air, showering other ships in the task force with smoking metal and mangled aircraft remnants.
On board Liscome Bay, the blasts engulfed the ship’s hangar decks in flames while plunging the rest of the ship into darkness. Aviation Machinist’s Mate Second Class Tim Woodham was fortunate enough to be serving as a plane captain at that time for an Avenger that had crashed on takeoff three days earlier. Consequently he had no plane to maintain and no reason to be on the hangar deck at that hour. If he had, he would have likely been one of the casualties of that roaring conflagration.
Instead Woodham was just returning to his bunk from an early morning shower when the torpedo struck. The ensuing explosions hurled him into his locker. Struggling to his feet and wearing only his “ birthday suit,” as he recalled years later, Woodham began the search for a way topside through the darkened, mangled passageways.
First he tried to exit through the chiefs’ quarters, located near the hangar deck. A furnace of roaring flames blocked his way, and he started working his way forward through the ship.
Joining other shaken survivors, Woodham wiggled past warped bulkheads, helping other sailors drag a wounded man along with them as they went. The sounds of stressing metal and farther explosions told them they had very little time to find a way out of the sinking ship.
Eventually, the group found a familiar site— the room that housed the carrier’s catapult machinery. A ladder led upward from that spot, and Woodham and his companions clambered up it onto the ship’s port catwalk.
Chief Shipfitter L.A. Ashley had just finished the morning muster of the ship’s repair party when the first heavy explosion rocked Liscome Bay, blowing a nearby elevator completely out of its shaft. Standing near the shop door, he remembered the blast being “ so severe it blew my clothes, including my shoes and rubber life belt, right off.” He found himself standing naked, in the dark, without any means of communications between his shop and the rest of the ship.
“ What do we do now, chief?” one of the repair party asked. The surrounding area was a roaring mass of flames by now.
“ Let’s make a run for it through the flames and try to get water on the fire!” Ashley shouted in reply.
Working their way past the burning elevator pit, Ashley and his crew found their way topside blocked by more fires on the hangar deck. Abandoning that route, they struggled up twisted ladders through more wreckage. They eventually made it to the catwalk on the flight deck level, where they broke out fire hoses.
Meanwhile, Lt. Cmdr. J.B. Rowe, the ship’s senior medical officer, had picked himself up off the deck following the initial blasts and rushed to the operating room. Despite a leg wound, Rowe dashed back and forth between the operating room and the sick bay, guiding the walking wounded and makeshift litter parties into the sick bay.
The sick bay, however, was no haven of safety. Thick gray smoke inundated the compartment, and Rowe once again led his patients to safety with only the feel of fresh air on his face to guide him. Detouring around several ladders blocked by burning debris, they eventually worked their way topside.
Leonard Bohm, a seaman second class who worked in the shipfitters’ shop aboard ship, had just returned to his bunk following the stand-down from General Quarters when the torpedo hit. Although the blast plunged his compartment into darkness, he was lucky to be forward of the hangar deck, away from the main initial devastation. Scrambling out into the passageway, Bohm clambered up a ladder onto the catwalk surrounding the flight deck.
Captain John Crommelin, a naval aviator serving as Admiral Mullinnix’s chief of staff, had, like Woodham, opted to take a shower that morning. He had just returned to his bunk when the torpedo’s blast rocked Liscome Bay.
“There was a tremendous upheaval, one violent explosion setting off others on the hangar deck,” he said later in an interview for his hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser. Stepping out of his cabin clad only in the suds of his morning shower, he was hit in the head by debris from a secondary explosion.
Trying to ignore the smell of burning flesh, Crommelin picked his way down the passageway, stepping around two dead bodies. Reaching a hatch at the end of the passageway, he made the mistake of opening it. Flames burst through the opening, scorching the right side of his face, shoulders, legs and arms. “ I thought I was done,” he recalled.
Abandoning that route, Crommelin eventually made his way, like Woodham, to the ship’s catapult room. He climbed up a ladder and onto the flight deck.
A scene of devastation greeted him. Torn and blackened Wildcats and Avengers burned furiously, while ammunition, bombs and fuel continued to explode. Dead bodies littered the flight deck. Amazingly, the ship remained upright and level, even though it seemed to be missing its entire rear half.
Stumbling across the flight deck, Crommelin encountered Lt. Cmdr. Marshall Beebe, one of the ship’s aircraft squadron commanders. Beebe carried a badly wounded seaman “ like a cat carrying a kitten,” according to Crommelin. The sailor was too injured to be lowered into the water, and Beebe and Crommelin instead placed him gently on the deck away from the flaming patches of oil and aviation gasoline.
Rowe was also on deck by then, tending to the numerous wounded. One of them was a sailor with a broken leg, in too much pain to move back and forth across the flaming flight deck. Giving him a shot of morphine, the doctor and another sailor gently lowered the wounded man into the water below.
One of the ship’s boatswains later recalled seeing the wounded sailor picked up by a rescue vessel later that morning. “ I am convinced,” he said, “ the doctor’s action saved his life.”
Reaching the flight deck, aerographer L.D. Blakely vividly described the scene confronting him: “ The ship was heaving and sounded as if she was breaking up. The lights had gone, but burning oil, deck and planes made it almost as light as day within.” Outside was no better, with “ railings torn off, life rafts gone, oil everywhere, fire raging and ammunition exploding.”
Like Ashley’s group, Blakely and several others tried to man a fire hose, slipping through patches of oil and stumbling over masses of tangled wire. With no water and no pressure, however, it was a futile effort.
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Wells W. “ Buzz” Carroll, the ship’s damage control officer, wasn’t about to give up. Although severely wounded, he was reportedly “ all over the ship,” trying to organize repair parties and put fire hoses into operation.
Captain Wiltsie, however, recognized his ship was doomed, He gave word for all hands to go as far aft as they could and then go over the side. With a mass of burning oil off the ship’s bow, the stern seemed to be the safest place to enter the water, and the survivors began to do so as best they could.
Carroll continued his heroic work on the flight deck, switching from organizing repair parties to directing groups of men over the side. As that work approached an end, a sailor offered the wounded officer his life jacket. Carroll refused. When the sailor insisted, Carroll avoided accepting it by plunging off the ship and into the ocean.
By now the Liscome Bay was listing to the starboard side and Machinist’s Mate Tim Woodham was worried that the carrier might roll over on top of him. He moved to the higher, port side and made the 40-foot leap into the water below. Close to 60 years later, he still remembered the painful smack of the water on his naked body from that long fall. Crommelin, also still naked after his shower, made a similar jump.
Other men, including Bohm and Blakley, slid down knotted lines into the water and began paddling as best they could away from the sinking ship. There they joined survivors Ashley and Daily and others struggling through the oily water. Hundreds, including Navy Cross recipient Miller and Admiral Mullinnix, had apparently been obliterated in the initial explosion. Beebe joined Wiltsie in moving forward through the smoke and flames, picking their way along the mangled catwalk. Beebe remembered where an aircraft life raft was stowed and managed to pull it out. By then, the fire was spreading even faster, and Beebe knew they were running out of time to get off the ship. He threw the uninflated raft into the water and called for Wiltsie to join him. No one answered. Turning around, Beebe saw the captain had disappeared. No one saw Wiltsie again.
Almost surrounded by flames, and trying to ignore the sounds of ammunition and bombs cooking off in the intense heat, Beebe slipped down a line into the water and swam for the raft. Joined by several other men, Beebe and his small group pushed the raft about 100 yards away from the carrier, then inflated it and began collecting survivors.
Bohm, utilizing the only swimming stroke he knew, back- stroked away from his devastated ship. From that perspective, he saw an amazing sight— the full extent of the explosions’ damage. “ It looked just like a big saw had cut off the back half of the ship,” he recalled years later.
Crommelin also stroked for safety. By now, only about 10 minutes had passed since the torpedo strike. He looked back and saw another magazine explode, followed by eight or 10 other explosions. Then, according to Crommelin, the ship settled by the stern and began rolling slightly just before it went down,
Beebe recalled a similar sight. “There were more explosions,” he remembered, “ and the ship made her final dive, bow out of the water until the last.” Approximately 23 minutes had passed between the moment the torpedo struck and the time Liscome Bay sank beneath the waves.
For many of the men, their escape into the water seemed to be only a slightly better option than the hellish conditions they had fled on the burning carrier. Many sailors were without life belts or jackets, and burning patches of oil threatened them from all sides. Struggling through the dark water, they found it difficult to swim without swallowing painful mouthfuls of aviation fuel.
Rowe was also in the water at this point. He found Carroll’s unconscious body afloat and desperately tried to administer artificial respiration. It was a futile effort.
Swimming through the dark water, Daily knew it would be some time before any rescue vessels arrived. It was standard doctrine for a torpedoed ship’s fellow vessels to flee the scene lest they be silhouetted by the flaming wreckage and become the submarine’s next victim. Adherence to doctrine, however, was little consolation to Daily and the ship’s survivors as they struggled to stay afloat.
Fortunately, Daily saw a thin beam of light stabbing through the darkness ahead of him. It came from a floater net, which was essentially a cargo net laced between large chunks of floatable cork. It was — — would by no means keep a dry a shipwrecked perch, but it sailor afloat. One sailor had 2 found the net and, waving the small flashlight he had thought to bring with him, was signaling for other survivors to join him. Daily splashed over to do exactly that.
“ There is no telling how many lives that flashlight saved that night,” Daily commented years later.
One of those lives belonged to the badly burned Crommelin. He made it to the floater net and was pulled up into it. Putting the best face on the disaster, Crommelin modestly recounted to a United Press reporter three weeks later that the net contained 30 “ cheerful” men who were soon picked up by a destroyer.
DAILY RECALLED A MORE DESPERATE situation. More and more men arrived until there were about 70 seamen on and around a net designed for approximately 14. In all, there were only three floater nets and two lifeboats for the ship’s 272 survivors.
On Daily’s net, the officers and chiefs worked to ensure that the most severely wounded were hauled aboard, while more able survivors clung to its sides in the water. As soon as a wounded man was sighted, survivors would swim out and pull him back to the safety of the crowded floater net.
Crommelin, an officer whose devotion to duty and his men had had been established in his previous assignment as the air officer and executive officer aboard the carrier Enterprise, repeatedly ordered Daily and the other men aboard their floater net to put him back into the water. “ I’m not going to make it,” he argued. “ Make room for someone who will.”
Years later, Daily recalled one sailor’s rejoinder to Crommelin’s order: “ Shut up, captain. You’re going to make it.” He was right— Crommelin did.
Before long, the sun crept into the tropical sky. A ship appeared on the horizon, steaming for the small group of survivors. Was it one of their ships returning for them, or a Japanese destroyer dispatched from the enemy naval base at Truk to finish off the carrier’s survivors? If it was the latter, the men in the water knew what to expect— a hail of machine gun bullets.
Moments later, however, a Wildcat flew overhead, wagged its wings and circled the survivors. The approaching ship, as it turned out, was the American destroyer Hughes.Soon the sky was filled with other aircraft, and more ships joined Hughes in the rescue effort. Hughes picked up 152 of Liscome Bay’s 272 survivors. Woodham found himself being hauled aboard Hughes. The destroyer’s crew did the best job they could in sharing clothing and cladding the naked and nearly naked survivors of the torpedo attack, but there was only so much they could do. Shoes in particular were in short supply, which led to Woodham’s single lighthearted memory of the rescue.
Left without shoes, Woodham had to wrap his bare feet in rags in order to avoid burning them on the ship’s hot metal decks. The next day, walking in his ill-fitting borrowed clothes and rags, he encountered a khaki-clad member of Hughes’ crew.
Looking down at Woodham’s feet, the crewman asked the ragtag machinist’s mate, “ What size shoe do you wear?”
“ Nine,” Woodham responded.
“ Come with me,” the crewman said. “ We’ll take care of that.”
Woodham followed him and, before he knew it, he was climbing into what he recognized to be “ officers’ country” aboard the destroyer. Ignoring Woodham’s protests, the Hughes crewman led him on. It was only when they reached the captain’s cabin that Woodham realized his escort was none other than the ship’s commander. The captain handed Woodham a pair of his leather shoes and a pair of socks, and sent the amazed sailor on his way.
Later Hughes transferred Woodham and the other survivors it had picked up to the transport ship Neville.It was a delicate operation that essentially involved walking across a wooden plank placed between the two ships. Woodham was about to make the crossing when he realized he still wore the captain’s shoes. He stopped and began to take them off.
“ What are you doing, Woodham?” a voice cried down from the bridge. It was the captain.
“ Returning your shoes, sir,” Woodham responded
“ I gave them to you,” the captain called back. “ Now get out of here!”
Three years later, in 1946, Woodham was married in that same pair of shoes.
Back in the States, however, there was decidedly less levity. Newspapers were delivering grim news, reporting the sinking of Liscome Bay with only 200 survivors. For many families, it would be days or weeks before they learned if their loved ones fell within the lucky 25 percent of the ship’s crew that had survived the torpedo attack.
For the survivors, there were 30 days of survivor’s leave. Then, for most of them, it was a return to the war.
Regardless of their later experiences, the survivors’ short time of service aboard Liscome Bay forged a bond that still lasts today. In 1990 they formed the USS Liscome Bay and Composite Squadron VC-39 Association. The mission of the association: “ Dedicated to those who sacrificed their lives to keep our nation free. ‘You are not forgotten.’”
James L. Noles Jr.is the author of Twenty-Three Minutes to Eternity: The Final Voyage of the Escort Carrier USS Liscome Bay and Dorie Miller: Naval Warrior.
Originally published in the September 2004 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
