A Tale of Two Ships: USS Maddox and USS Liberty

One President, Two Ships and Lots of Questions

Both of these incidents occurred while Lyndon Johnson was president. The response in each instance is shameful and sad, even incomprehensible.

USS Maddox

The notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident, involving the USS Maddox, served as the catalyst that legitimized our going to war on North Vietnam. The president told congress and the media that our ship had twice been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats. He did not tell anyone that the reason for the attack (there was only one, and not two) was that for six months previous "South Vietnam began conducting a covert series of U.S.-backed commando attacks and intelligence-gathering missions along the North Vietnamese coast." (U.S. Naval Institute, "The Truth About Tonkin")

These raids were not working out, so General Westmoreland began bombarding the North using South Vietnamese patrol boats. (We were supposedly neutral, yet we were running the show and providing all the ammo.)

The Maddox was specially equipped with communications intercept technology and specialists. It had come down from Taiwan to monitor the situation from international waters. On August 2 while in the Gulf in broad daylight, three North Vietnamese patrol boats approached them. The Maddox fired shots across their bow. In turn they fired a torpedo. We proceeded to bring in four fighter planes in an attempt to blow them out of the water as they fled. One was sunk and the other two were damaged.

On August 4, at night and during stormy weather, overeager sonar interpreters mis-read signals coming from wave tops as incoming craft, first from the south, then the north, creating a fearful sense of being under attack. A 90-minute flyover by a fighter plan indicated that there was never anything out there.

LBJ persuaded congress that this was proof that we were dealing with an aggressive enemy and should not put up with it. "Let's go to war!"  (OK, he didn't say it like that, but Congress was near unanimous in endorsing this call to escalate the Viet Nam conflict, send troops and bomb the smithereens out of the North.)

Read my blog post The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Revisited and the U.S. Naval Institute's article The Truth About Tonkin, utilizing de-classified NSA documents 

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By way of contrast, Consider the USS Liberty
I first read about the USS Liberty incident in Alfred Lilienthal's 1978 book The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace. Wikipedia supplies this succinct account in its opening paragraph:

Damaged USS Liberty, post attack. 34 dead, 171 wounded.

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War. The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian), wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nmi (29.3 mi; 47.2 km) northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.

The incident was brought to mind again while reading Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option, an account of how Israel came to have a nuclear weapons program. This history of the development of a nuclear facility parallels Israel's emergence as a power in the Middle East. Chapter 12 is about the U.S. ambassador  to Israel, Walwourth Barbour. According to Hersh, Ambassador Barbour was actually present in the Israeli war room during the Six Day War.

A portion of the damage. Public domain photo.

Even though the naval intelligence ship was flying the stars and stripes, the Israeli Air Force fired rockets and strafed the Liberty mercilessly, despite its being in international waters. Israel didn't want to even acknowledge what it had done. Barbour wasn't even angry, Hersh writes, but a lot of people inside Washington were none too happy at how the president downplayed it.

The whole purpose of the ship's existence in these waters was to monitor communications taking place during the Six-Day War. It would have been easy to know that the Israeli pilots bombing and strafing the Liberty were fully aware that this was a U.S. ship.

The many survivors of this horrendous assault are still dealing with their agitation and frustration today. The "official story" is that the attack was a case of mistaken identity. According to Hersh, Israel didn't even want to acknowledge that it was they who attacked and disabled the ship.

Eventually they did apologize, calling it a case of mistaken identity. According to this Chicago Tribune story, "for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis' apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief." And every single one of the survivors interviewed for the Trib story rejected Israel's explanation that it had been "a case of mistaken identity."

Likewise, documents released in 2007 show that very few inside the NSA and U.S. leadership believed "the official story."

Transcripts show that even some of the Israeli pilots were reluctant to attack because it was clearly an American vessel. Read the full Trib story. 

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So how is it that a muffed torpedo shot by a North Vietnamese gunboat that hurt no one can be used to justify the murder of thousands of civilians through bombing raids and deployment of tens of thousands of American youth to do even more damage in that corner of the world, while this particular atrocity is totally buried, ignored and unaddressed?

As it is written in Ecclesiastes 1: 18
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

Related Links
USS Liberty Veterans banned forever from Am Legion Nat’l Convention