Why You Shouldn't Pay Attention to the Claims that Israel Attacked the USS Liberty Deliberately

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/39936.html

How An Intentional Attack Could Also Have Been An Accident.

What  the  Israelis ought to  have done, after the Liberty  incident, in order to demonstrate good faith, would have been to invite the U. S. Navy to send representatives to serve on the Israeli court of inquiry, with the right to deliberate, and  to examine witnesses, but not to vote. If there had been a proper inquiry, rather than a whitewash job, I thing  you would find that  the Israeli staff believed that  every Egyptian cargo ship was actually a "secret cruiser" like the German Atlantis, fitted with concealed guns, submarine-style underwater torpedo tubes, and a disguise kit of collapsible canvas funnels, deckhouses, etc., quite apart from false flags.  Normal wartime paranoia, made up of plausible worst-case assumptions. If the Israeli  pilots had formed  the belief that a ship was fitted with  multiple Oerlikon  20-mm cannon mounts, they would very  probably have shot first and asked questions afterwards.

A further complicating factor was that the Liberty really was a Liberty Ship (or rather a Victory ship, a member of the follow-on, improved class, a "Liberty II," if you like). That is, it was the  maritime equivalent of a DC-3; a standard design, mass-produced during the  Second  World War,  lend-leased to all the Allies, sold surplus to all the world after the war, quasi-obsolete by 1967, and readily purchasable with a dummy company and a Swiss bank account. The Israelis could not easily eliminate the possibility that the Liberty had been bought in Singapore by the Saudis, and surreptitiously refitted as a warship.

The probability is that the Israelis knowingly fired on the Stars and Stripes, believing it to be carried by an impostor. That would account for all of the evidence accessible to the United States government. It was  not until the Israelis picked up a life raft with U. S. Navy markings, serial numbers, etc. (*) that they came to doubt themselves, and when they attempted to parley, they got  told precisely what to do with themselves  in good old-fashioned American expletives. Then they knew.

(*) Not the  kind designed to be read at sea, but rather the kind designed to put a San Diego  pawnbroker on notice that he  might be purchasing stolen government property from an AWOL sailor on a toot.

What happened next was that the Israelis set out to lie about their involvement.  To do so  involved smearing the Liberty's crew. This earned  the the Israelis the undying hatred of the "institutional navy," the men, both  commissioned and  enlisted, who serve for twenty or thirty years without  making admiral. The American admirals accepted the necessity of a cover-up for reasons of  state, but the wardroom and the lower deck felt differently. For years, they whispered angrily into their beer, until they  had evolved a full-blown JFK-style conspiracy theory. The publication of James Ennis's book happened when they all reached retirement age, and were no  longer bound by orders from above. Of course, not all of the sailors retired. Some of them eventually became admirals.

To take an analogous  incident, after My Lai,  the United States Army accepted the painful necessity of disinfecting itself in public, and the result was the Peers Commission report. The Israelis refused to do this, and the wound festered.

I have examined  three  of the four   Israeli reports posted on Jay  Cristol's website, those for which English translations are provided, that is, the Ram Ron Report of 1967, the Examining Judge's Report of the same year, and the IDF History Department Report of 1982. As I do not read Hebrew, I was not able to read the Israeli Air Force report of 2002. 

In the first place, a radar set carried aloft in an airplane to an altitude of 20,000 feet or higher can detect a ship at a tremendous distance, at  least a hundred miles. It was therefore  easily feasible for Israel to establish  "radar pickets" reaching a hundred miles out to sea. The British and American navies were doing this sort of thing back in the Second World War, from about 1943 onwards. If Israel had not taken  such reconnaissance as to know continuously where the Liberty was, within five  miles or so, and to know whether there were any other ships out there, then Israel would have been wide open to Arab fighter-bombers coming in off the sea at low altitude, a la Jimmy Doolittle.  That is a serious matter. It is not good to have enemy fighter-bombers suddenly appear out of nowhere. The radar operator is supposed to report the coordinates of "blips," so that they can be plotted on the map in an orderly  way, in such a way as to  reveal not only their present position, but the history of their movements. Then an airplane may have to be sent out to establish visual  identification. It was precisely the failure to plot movements by the numbers in this way which enabled the Japanese attackers at Pearl Harbor to get past a working radar set.  The Israelis claim, in effect, that they had "lost the plot," become disoriented with respect to an area only two or three minutes flying time from the coast.

Thus the story told by the Israeli reports amounts, on its face, to a confession of Dereliction of Duty. If it were true, I would expect to find that a senior officer, at least of the grade of commander, had been censured, reduced in grade, and forced into retirement,  the way the commander of the  U.S. S. Stark was after he allowed his ship to be struck by an Iraqi missile. The statement in the  1982 report (English version, p.30), that an Israeli court found no one to blame, would seem to be a  tacit admission that 'all of this never really happened, and it is just a charade we  are putting on for the  Americans.'  Parenthetically, the Examining Judge seems to have a very strange idea of command responsibility.

Now, of course I do not really believe that the Israeli  Defense Force  is one of those comic-operetta South American armies. But  I don't believe the Israelis were telling the truth, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_(FFG-31)
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/usships/

Look at Sir Arthur Hezlet (Vice Admiral, Royal Navy, KBE, CB, DSO, DSC), _Electronics and  Sea Power_ (1975), for a good technical overview  of developments during the  Second World War.  Len Deighton, _Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of  Britain_ (1977) provides a good discussion of what was involved in assimilating the early and crude radars to make them  yield  useful information. There were whole  chains of plotting rooms, in which bits of information were painstakingly  worked out by large numbers of young  women (WAFs), and reconciled to yield a usable "big picture." Nowadays, that sort of thing is done in an electronic computer attacked to a radar  set, but the underlying methods are basically the same.

The basic idea is to record radar blips, and permanently mark them on a map, noting the time beside each mark, and drawing lines between the  marks to  make a  trail. It is important that the observations should be frequent enough that there is not sufficient time for an object to get from one trail to another. Record various other  information as it becomes available. At regular intervals, update the big map from the plot  map. There is someone whose job is to look at the big map and make sure that it is an accurate summary  of the  various  little maps. The kind of explanation the Israelis  have  offered posits a massive breakdown in training. One would have difficulty in accepting the idea that half of the people in the Israeli command center could neither read nor write, and  were therefore unable to use training manuals, or something of that nature. Israelis are just not like that.

My guess is that the control center commander received an urgent message that El Arish  was being shelled.  This message  was  very likely  coupled with a demand from above, from Moshe Dayan or  Yitzhak Rabin, that he do something about it,  "like yesterday." The commander observed, correctly, that the only ship within artillery range of El  Arish was "that liberty ship with the American flag." There were two possibilities:  either the report of shelling was wrong, or the ship was a "false flag." It was not easily possible to determine which.  The commander chose the wrong possibility.  He may have been influenced by the likelihood that questioning the accuracy of the report of shelling  might get him called a "chairborne commando" over the telephone. The commander certainly did not want  Moshe Dayan, the man with the eyepatch, to get the idea that he was "wishy-washy."

I have now obtained a copy of  Jay Cristol's _The Liberty Incident_ (2002). I was  pleased to find that Cristol is of a higher mental order than his HNN supporters. Interestingly, he talks about the chronic inferiority complex of the  Israeli navy, and its active desire that the Liberty should be an Egyptian warship in order to have the glory of sinking an Egyptian warship (pp. 7-8, 44, 52). Not to put too fine a point on it, the  Israeli navy was "medal  hunting," projecting its rivalry with the Israeli Air Force  onto third parties.

I observe that  Cristol's own table of Commanders and Second in Commands of the Israeli Navy (p. 268) does not  bear out his claim  that promotion from Second in Command to Commander is routine (p. 170). Rather, it is routine in  peacetime, but failure  to  be  promoted from  Second in Command to Commander is routine  in  wartime.  It would appear that the Israeli government is systematically dissatisfied with the performance of  its navy in wartime. Ships are much harder to destroy than airplanes. Airplanes are mostly made of thin layers of a flammable material, aluminum. Ships are made of thick steel plates. If a ship is anchored over a shallow mud bottom, a la Pearl Harbor, it can usually be put back into service even after being sunk.  In naval warfare, it is exceedingly difficult to achieve a decisive victory, on the order of Trafalgar or Midway, unless the enemy is willing to accept the wager of battle  in deep water. If the Israeli government expected the Israeli navy to destroy the Egyptian navy in a decisive battle, that hope was inevitably doomed to disappointment. One can imagine how a pervasive climate of invidious comparisons  might  have developed.

Parenthetically, a reasonable armament for the Liberty, which would have been  inconspicuous and unostentatious, and which would not have interfered with the ship's normal function, would have been four Vulcan guns. A ship thus equipped would very  probably have splashed all the Israeli aircraft  involved in the attack, and then started in on the torpedo boats.

On another  related note, given the "German" character of  the Israeli military, operating in the  tradition of Rommel and Guderian, the  inferiority complex of the Israeli navy seems to have strong  points of similarity to the inferiority complex of the German  Kriegsmarine, as discussed by the former U-boat officer Wolfgang  Ott in Chapter 11 of his autobiographical novel,  _Sharks and Little Fish_ (English translation, 1957). The German navy did stupid things because it was trying to prove that  it was not a coast guard. 

Of course the  Navy's conventional approach to arming auxiliary ships at the time was to fit them with anywhere from four to twelve  three-inch guns,  in twin anti-aircraft mounts, of the type which, in surface combatants, were being superseded by missiles.  These would of course have had anti-aircraft rounds fitted with  proximity fuses. I take it that at least some of the guns actually  were hand-me-downs. The bottom line was that the  Liberty was a ship the size of a cruiser, and it could be fitted with the armament of a destroyer escort (or a frigate as  it is now called), without substantially impairing the ship's primary functionality. The place to locate anti--aircraft guns would be on the extreme bow or stern, leaving the middle section for the radio  masts. The great virtue of Gatling  guns, such as the Vulcan, is that they fit a lot of firepower into a small space. For example, half a dozen Gatling guns could have been put on a common mount, adjusted to  slightly different  elevations via a common linkage, so that traversing the mount would yield a "shotgun effect,"  which need not depend on exact aim.

For a "point target," such as a ship or a bridge, simply firing anti-aircraft guns upward was a surprisingly effective tactic, as the North Vietnamese demonstrated. Before Precision-Guided Munitions, the attacking aircraft generally had  to fly  over the target, in order to aim its ordnance correctly.  Further, the attack had to be along the long axis of the target, in order to get hits,  given the imperfect  accuracy of aiming. During the Second World War, the British developed an  inexpensive equipment for merchant ships on  this basis, consisting of a rocket, a parachute, and a steel cable. The rocket, fired when an attacker was on the final approach, carried the parachute and the cable aloft to form a temporary equivalent of a barrage balloon. (Gerald Pawle,  _Secret Weapons of World War II_, alt title: _The Secret War_, 1957, ch. 8, "Cables in the Sky")

I realize this is stretching a point, but the U. S. Navy expended something like a hundred and fifty aircraft at Midway to destroy four aircraft carriers which were both bigger targets than the Liberty, and vastly more  flammable,  getting from two to  four hits per carrier (see Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, _Midway: The Battle that Doomed  Japan_, 1955).  The United States experienced comparable losses trying to take out the bridges over North Vietnam's Red River, before eventually resorting to Precision-Guided Munitions. The greater speed of a jet airplane  made it harder to hit, but it also made it more difficult for the airplane to place  bombs accurately.  A Mirage simply could not place conventional bombs with the accuracy of a Stuka.

The bottom line is that if the Liberty  had not been almost studiously disarmed, an Israeli attack would probably have led to an escalating confrontation, with re-enforcements coming in from both sides, and in an escalating confrontation, unless stopped, the United States Sixth Fleet  must inevitably have destroyed the entire Israeli Air Force and Navy in detail. The Israeli Navy was very definitely  playing with fire. I note Cristol's  observation that the Israelis were greatly  relieved to discover that they  had attacked an American ship, and  not,  as they briefly feared, a  Russian  ship (p. 63). Russians could not be placated with fair words, but would find a way to retaliate.