[SAMWolf]

On Liscome Bay, preparations were being made to launch the day's first aircraft. For the carrier's crew and the men of VC-39, the past three days had been hectic, and they expected the 24th to be the same.

Today was also the eve of Thanksgiving. Down in the galleys, the cooks broke out the frozen turkeys that had been packed aboard at Pearl Harbor. There was a lot of work ahead if the traditional meal was to be done up right.

At 0450 flight quarters were sounded. The deck crew began manhandling 13 planes into position on the flight deck in preparation for a dawn launch, while seven planes rested on the hangar deck, armed but not fueled, ready for later launch. Stowed in the carrier's magazine were more than 200,000 pounds of bombs, including nine 2,000-pound, semi-armor-piercing bombs, 78 1,000-pound bombs, 96 500-pound bombs and a large number of torpedo warheads.


Type KD6 IJN Submarine

At 0505 Liscome Bay's crew was called to general quarters. Dawn was only 30 minutes away as pilots and aircrewmen climbed into their planes.

Five minutes later, Rear Adm. Griffin ordered the task group to turn northeast. Liscome Bay, as guide of the formation, started her turn, followed by the other ships. The formation was a bit ragged because of the absence of the two destroyers, so Admiral Griffin ordered the remaining destroyers to close up the gap left by the Franks' departure.

Not far away, hidden by the blackness of night, lay the Japanese submarine I-175, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. Sumano Tabata. Having approached Task Group 52.13 on the surface to avoid detection, Tabata found that his submarine was perfectly positioned to attack through the hole left in the outer circle by the double departure of Hull and Franks. With the American ships now turning toward him, no zigzagging, at 15 knots, Tabata had a setup that submariners dream of.

He made the most of it. Taking a firing bearing on the ships with I-175's sound gear, he gave the fateful order-a spread of torpedoes streaked from I-175's four bow tubes toward the unsuspecting task group. That done, he took the submarine deep to escape the depth-charging sure to follow.


Japanese Submarine I-175

None of the destroyers in TG 52.13 detected I-175 on sonar, nor did anyone see a torpedo wake on the surface until it was too late.

At 0513, an officer stationed at one of Liscome Bay's 40mm guns on the starboard side screamed, "Here comes a torpedo!" into his telephone.

A moment later, it struck the carrier with a shattering roar, throwing up a column of bright orange flame, flecked with white-hot pieces of metal. Seconds later a larger explosion followed, as the torpedo warheads and bombs stowed below the ship's waterline detonated.

The consecutive explosions hurled large fragments of the ship and the airplanes that had been parked on its flight deck 200 feet into the air. A huge mass of wreckage, thrown into the sea, drifted away from the carrier, burning fiercely. The intensity of the blast stunned lookouts on the surrounding vessels. Debris from the stricken carrier rained down on them. New Mexico, 1,500 yards away, was showered with oil particles, burning deck fragments 3 feet long, molten metal droplets, bits of clothing and human flesh.



The destroyer Maury, 5,000 yards astern, was also splattered. The flames from Liscome Bay were so intense they lighted up the sea around the task group and were seen from the battleship Pennsylvania near Makin, 16 miles away.

Liscome Bay had been hit in the worst possible spot-the bomb stowage area, which had no protection from a torpedo hit or fragment damage. The bombs stowed there had detonated en masse. The resulting explosion disintegrated half of the ship. No one aft of the forward bulkhead of the after engine room survived. In an instant, the interior of the aft portion of the carrier blazed with blast-furnace intensity.

Few survived on the flight deck. The blast caught most, flying shrapnel cut down the others.

Flaming material was flung the length of the hangar deck and into the forward elevator well. The hangar deck became a roaring wall of flame.



The blast sent the ship's bullhorn and radar antenna crashing down on the bridge, killing two men. Lieutenant Gardner Smith, a radio announcer before the war, went to the open bridge looking for Captain Wiltse and found it a shambles. Two sailors were pinned alive beneath the bullhorn; Smith had to try several times before he could free them.

Tremendous waves of heat engulfed the carrier's island, making the bridge rails too hot to touch. From the nearby Corregidor, Liscome Bay's bridge seemed to "glow a cherry red." The heat abated for a moment, and the men threw knotted lines over the bridge railing on the island's inboard side and scrambled down to the flight deck.

Marshall U. Beebe, commander of VC-39, had been in the head when the torpedo hit. "There was a terrific rumbling throughout the ship, and an explosion that lifted me off the deck. The next thing I knew I was trying to get out the door in the darkness, but I could find no passage...."

Additional Sources:

www.beadee.com
www.navsource.org
www.ussmullinnix.org
www.rb-29.net
www.astrosurf.org
www.dixiewing.org
www.amazon.com
www.anft.net
www.angelfire.com/fm/odyssey

[SAMWolf]

Beebe somehow made it to the flight deck and found it ablaze, with oil burning on the water near the bow, and nearby ammunition beginning to explode.

Captain Wiltse ordered all hands to go as far aft as possible, then go over the side. On his way aft he met Beebe, and they proceeded aft along the remains of a catwalk. "The fire was spreading rapidly," Beebe recalled, "making it apparent that we weren't going to get very far. I called to the captain to go over at this point, but he did not answer...." Wiltse instead disappeared into the mass of flame and smoke, never to be seen again.

Beebe lowered himself into the water by a line running from the catwalk, holding an uninflated life raft he had found. Unable to maintain his grip on the line due to an injury to his left arm, Beebe fell heavily into the water and surfaced next to the raft, where two of his pilots joined him. They pushed the raft 200 yards from the carrier before inflating it.

All over the ship, crewmen realized that it was hopeless to try fighting the raging fires without water pressure in the fire mains, and they began to abandon ship. One sailor, trapped below decks, groped his way to a ladder so overcrowded he could not go up. He then climbed a superheated steam pipe, burning both his hands.

Another climbed 40 feet up electrical wires to a gun plot before jumping overboard. A pilot, Frank Sistrunk, of VC-39, recovering from an appendectomy done only six days earlier, and no swimmer, jumped overboard and managed to make it to a life raft several hundred yards away with the help of his friends and a small piece of floating debris.

Other VC-39 pilots, scheduled for a later flight, had been asleep when the torpedo hit. The explosion trapped some in their bunks temporarily and threw some out of theirs. Like most survivors, they had to crawl through the jumble of wreckage scattered throughout the ship before going over the side. Fifteen VC-39 pilots were later picked up by destroyers. Fourteen others had died in their planes when the aft flight deck disappeared in the fireball caused by the torpedo.

The fate of Admiral Henry Mullinnix is unknown. He was in air plot when the torpedo struck and was apparently injured by the blast. Several men remembered seeing him seated at a desk, head cradled on his folded arms; others recalled seeing him swimming away from the ship after it went down. In any event, he did not survive.

John Crommelin, Admiral Mullinnix's chief of staff, was stepping out of the shower when Liscome Bay exploded. "The violent shaking knocked me off my bare feet," he recalled, "and I hit the deck. The lights went out but flames lighted the ship's interior instantly...."

Naked, Crommelin fought his way through burning compartments of the flight deck. "I felt like a fool-caught stark naked when even a boot [recruit] knows one should be protected against fire. My fingers looked like boiled wieners popped open." He received burns on the right side of his face, legs and arms. Despite this, he took charge of the men in his area and directed the evacuation at that point before jumping overboard himself.

"I jumped off the flight deck with less than I was born with," he later said, "on account of the fact I left part of my hide behind." Crommelin swam for nearly an hour, supported only by a cork float, before being rescued, still stark naked. In Liscome Bay's final moments, the ship's senior medical officer, Lt. Cmdr. John B. Rowe, displayed what survivors called "splendid" conduct in his concern for the safety of his patients and in administering to the wounded aboard a rescue ship, despite a leg injury of his own.

Rowe rushed into the operating room to prepare his patients for evacuation. The flight deck was ablaze, and Dr. Rowe made a number of trips back and forth through the sick bay, forming his group for evacuation and picking up first aid gear. Rowe's group grew to 15 men, including the ships' damage control officer, Lt. Cmdr. Welles W. "Buzz" Carroll, who refused Rowe's offer to dress his wounds, and Liscome Bay's chaplain, Lt. j.g. Robert H. Carley.

Chaplain Carley, like Beebe, had been in the head when the blast came. Carley picked himself up from the jumble of smashed sinks, toilets and urinals, and staggered out into the passageway. There he joined up with Dr. Rowe and his group.

Carroll and his men attempted to fight the fires they saw flickering through holes in the overhead, but were unable to get any water pressure in the fire main. Giving that up, Carroll and his men groped their way through smoke-filled passages and joined Rowe and Carley's party.

The group clambered over piles of debris and squeezed through passageways crushed inward like tin cans until they reached the forward elevator well, where a sailor named Hunt was trying to extinguish the blaze with portable CO2 bottles. Seeing that Hunt's efforts were useless, Carroll told him to get out before he was trapped, but Hunt refused to leave and returned to his firefighting.

The group climbed to the flight deck. To them the scene was Dante's Inferno brought to life. The fire was roaring so loudly that men had to shout to be heard. Constant explosions of ammunition added to the tumult.

Three men huddled around a 20mm gun made no reply when Carley told them to abandon ship-they were dead. Three other sailors standing numbly nearby "woke up" when they heard Carley's order and slid down a rope into the water, followed by Carley.

Carroll, although weakening due to blood loss from his injuries, paced up and down the flight deck giving orders and helping men to abandon ship.

Carroll refused to leave the ship until Seaman Hunt (who had come up from below after giving up his firefighting efforts) told him that he would not leave without him. Medical officer Rowe, Carroll and Hunt all went over the side together. Once they were in the water, Hunt swam off to find a raft for the injured Carroll, while Rowe held his head out of the water. Hunt returned with a raft a short time later and asked how the commander was. Rowe looked down at the man he was holding. "He's dead," he said and let Carroll's body slip beneath the water.

Twenty-three minutes after the torpedo hit, Liscome Bay sank stern first, still burning furiously. "Looking like a gigantic Fourth of July display," said one survivor.

"I watched her go," said aerographer Lyle D. Blakely, "and heard her death gurgle. There was no suction, only a loud hissing."

"Liscome Bay went down gracefully," said Commander Beebe. "Settling by the stern, going down fast, and sliding backwards. Her final farewell was an audible hiss as the white hot metal cooled. The ships' bow was enveloped by a cloud of steam obliterating our view."

Liscome Bay was gone, taking with her Admiral Mullinnix, Captain Wiltse, 51 other officers and 591 enlisted men. Only 55 officers and 217 enlisted men, many badly injured with shattered limbs, frightful burns, and severe concussions from the enormous blast, had survived.

They were rescued from the oil-thick water-many clinging to life rafts, bits of wreckage, or floating in kapok life jackets -- primarily by the destroyers Morris and Hughes. The destroyers picked up the last few by 0730. Morris and Hughes then transferred them to the transports Neville and Leonard Wood, anchored in Makin lagoon.

Neville and Leonard Wood set out for Pearl Harbor with the Liscome Bay's survivors on November 25, arriving December 2, 1943, after an eight-day voyage.

The same day, the Navy Department issued an epitaph of sorts for CE-56: "The USS LISSCOME BAY (an escort carrier) was sunk as a result of being torpedoed by a submarine on November 24, 1943, in the Gilbert Islands area. This is the only ship lost in the Gilbert Islands operation.

"The next of kin of casualties aboard the Liscome Bay will be notified as soon as possible."