Haynes survived sinking of USS Liscome Bay

The USS Liscome Bay drifted serenely in the night off the coast of Makin Island on Nov. 24, 1943. Stars in the heavens were so big and bright they seemed close enough to grab and pocket as souvenirs from paradise for the folks back home. The only sound was the constant rolling of the restless sea hushing itself under a light gypsy breeze that had wandered in the Pacific's vast expanse.

It was half an hour before dawn's murky riddles developed into clear objects and the return of the squalling begging of the seagulls that hung in the sky like noisy box kites off the stern. Then someone on the starboard side of the ship yelled, "Christ, here comes a torpedo!" and the idyllic night exploded into a volcanic nightmare.

Robert E. Haynes, a 77-year-old survivor of the ill-fated USS Liscome Bay, said he didn't hear the frantic warning. Bob Haynes, as he prefers to be called, said he was in the ship fitter's workshop, next to the forward elevator, when the torpedo struck.

"I was working with a first class electrician's mate named Harry Greenbaum. I was a fireman third class, which I think is as low as you can go," Haynes grinned. "Anyway, Harry had just stepped out of the shop when the ship exploded. I had been thrown against a workbench and had broken my leg in two places.

"When Harry came staggering back in, he had his left arm blown off. He was in shock and was quickly bleeding to death. I asked him what had happened, and he said, 'We have been torpedoed.'"

Haynes looked away and quietly added: "That was the last time I saw Harry. He didn't make it off the ship."

The USS Liscome Bay was one of the Casablanca-class escort carriers being mass-produced by Henry J. Kaiser, who's busy shipyards were launching an unprecedented one ship a week out of Vancouver, Wash. This class of ship, the CVE 56, became known as the "jeep" of the Navy for the endless list of tasks it could perform -- from flattop aircraft carrier, hosting 35 fighter or reconnaissance planes, to trooper carriers and cargo ships. These "jeeps" quickly became an essential part of the Navy's huge fleets.

All the Casablanca or CVE 56 class ships were named after locations, just as battleships are named after states. Commissioned Aug. 7, 1943, the USS Liscome Bay was named for a section of Alaska's rugged coast. She was assigned to Task Group 52, with the battleships New Mexico and Mississippi and the cruiser Baltimore. Seven destroyers were also part of this giant fleet along with the Coral Sea and the Corregidor, two sister ships of the Liscome Bay.

On Nov. 20, the massive armada steamed into the Gilbert Islands to support the 27th Infantry Division in the invasion of Tarawa and Makin. The ships would pound the little atoll of Tarawa with 1,500 tons of shells and 1,000 tons of bombs. Although it destroyed the airfield on that coral reef, the bombardment failed to dislodge the Japanese from their lethal concrete bunkers defending the beach.

"A lot of things went wrong on Tarawa," Haynes said, shaking his head. "They tried to go in at high tide, which was a mistake, and a lot of guys were cut down before they ever got to the beach."

Tarawa's beachhead was two and one-half miles long, 60 yards deep and found itself stacked with hundreds of bodies between the 20th and 23rd of November. America would lose 991 men taking this strip of sand. Per square inch, Tarawa was the bloodiest invasion in the military's island hopping campaign to retake the Pacific.

"A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years," Japan's Adm. Keiji Shibasaki, the commander of Tarawa's defending forces, boasted prior to the invasion. Adm. Shibasaki must have been talking about somebody else. It took America's tenacious fighting men three days to take that sand trap.

However, in naval warfare, three days in one area courts catastrophe. The extended blood bath on Tarawa dealt the Liscome Bay her fatal hand. The fleet should have left the precarious waters off Tarawa and Makin, but men slugging it out on the beaches needed their support. Sailors who should have been enjoying the rambunctious and rowdy bars, hosting those famous amateur boxing bouts called "smokers" in Honolulu, lingered in what would prove to be a lethal limbo.

Slithering under the night's blackened seas, Japanese Cmdr. Sunao Tabata's submarine, the I-175, discovered the fleet. It watched and waited. At 0400 hours the battleship Hull was dispatched to Makin. Shortly after the Hull left, the battlewagon Franks reported a dull light on the surface in the distance and was dispatched to investigate. Before the remainder of the fleet could regroup in a defensive position, the patient predator took advantage of the weakened defense. Cmdr. Tabata fired a spread of deadly torpedoes then gave the orders to dive to escape the inevitable depth charges he knew would follow his attack.

"We were hit just back of midship," Haynes said, showing an overhead view of his ship bisected with a macabre line of red ink. Brushing off almost half of the ship, Haynes said, "From here on back, everything was instantly gone."

The torpedo struck in the worse possible place: the bomb stowage area. The thin skinned USS Liscome Bay was carrying 200,000 pounds of bombs, which all exploded en masse. The enormous blast ripped the ship in half, rocketing molten shrapnel a thousand feet in the air. The battleship New Mexico, 1,500 yards away, was showered with fragments of burning deck and fiery shards of metal. Five thousand yards away, the Maury was splattered with clothing and pieces of human flesh.

"A couple of the men in the shop who weren't hurt too bad managed to open our side hatch and I crawled over to the opening and dropped into the sea," Haynes said about his escape from the raging fire racing forward to devour what remained of the ship. "In the water I found some wood from the flight deck among the wreckage and I used it to keep me afloat. I tried to get as far away from the ship as I could. I knew she was going down, and I didn't want to be sucked down with her. She sank in about 28 minutes."

Finally, in a defiant scalding hiss, the USS Liscome Bay slipped beneath the sea and into Navy legend. Her valiant struggle was over. She had lost. In the early light, the Navy pulled 272 men from the oil slick waters where the Liscome Bay sank. They were the only survivors of a crew of 914 brave men.

The haunting words satirizing the CVE 56's nomenclature echoed in every sailor's mind as the frantic search for more survivors continued. The Navy's "jeep," the CVE, was indeed "combustible, vulnerable" and, in war's lethal lottery, "expendable."

"I was real fortunate," Haynes said. "I was only in the water for about two hours before I was picked up by the USS Franks."

Bob Haynes, the kid from Cedaredge, Colo., who at the age of 18 believed it was his duty to fight for his country, had miraculously crawled out of that wreckage. While Haynes was lying in a hospital bed in Los Angeles, Adm. Chester A. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet, awarded Haynes with the Purple Heart. Haynes also has a picture of a surprise visit from Princess Julia of Holland, who had made a visit to the hospital to thank the servicemen for their courage.

When the war finally closed its brutal door, Haynes returned to Colorado only to find it too tame after living through the Pacific slugfest. He enlisted and had a career in the U.S. Marines. His medals and ribbons are a diary of his life. Beginning with his Purple Heart, Haynes proudly wears the American Campaign, Asiatic Pacific, China Service, Naval Occupation of Japan, USMC Good Conduct, Navy Good Conduct, National Defense and the World War II Victory medals.

Haynes eventually retired from a second career with the U.S. Post Office in Montrose. Although he cites his adventures on post-war China's dangerous Wang Po River as his most memorable time with the Marines, he quiets when recalling the sinking of the Liscome Bay. He has a special reverence that belongs only to him for that quiet, starlit night that more than 57 years ago erupted into a sailor's nightmare.

Haynes showed a list of the 642 men who had suddenly paid the ultimate price for our freedom and were lost with the Liscome Bay. Many of the names were underlined. I didn't ask him why.

Next week in the Courage of a People, C.U. "Peg" O'Neill revisits his reckless flight over France on the eve of D-day.