Rescue in the Fog

At 5:05 o'clock in the afternoon, the Naval Radio Station at San Francisco received a short, fearful message from the 11,000-ton U.S. Naval hospital ship Benevolence: EMERGENCY ... AM FOUR

MILES OFF THE GOLDEN [GATE] BRIDGE . . . NEED EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE . .

That was all, but in exactly 60 seconds, a Coast Guard patrol boat was moving seaward; soon a Dunkirk-like fleet of 30 Army tugs, naval auxiliary craft, Coast Guard vessels and fishing boats were heading through the Golden Gate.

At first the hospital ship's fate was completely cloaked by fog and silence. Then, as the first rescue vessel crept through the murk off Seal Rocks, lookouts spotted what looked like scores of tennis balls floating on the offshore swell.

Disjointed Tale. The tennis balls were human heads. It was quickly evident that there were hundreds of them in patches hidden by fog. There were rafts and makeshift rafts on which humans, crying in thin voices, clustered like sodden bees. The rescue vessels began pulling them aboard, and moving blindly on with whistles braying in eerie chorus.

Most of the people came out of the water a purplish-blue from cold. Their teeth chattered uncontrollably and they clutched the nearest object with unreasoning desperation after being hauled to safety. Occasionally their rescuers pulled aboard a corpse. The living gradually told a disjointed tale of disaster. The gleaming white hospital ship, on a shakedown cruise after being taken out of mothballs, had been rammed by the 15,000-ton freighter

Mary Luckenbach, had listed so quickly and sharply to port that it had been impossible to get her boats away. She had sunk in less than half an hour.

There had been no abandon-ship order; crewmen, Navy nurses, doctors, dentists and scores of workmen from the Navy Yard simply launched rafts, or planks, or belted on life jackets and jumped for their lives. Toward the end, men waded into the freezing water which lapped up the decks, like bathers walking off a beach. But within 3-c- hours, in a remarkable rescue, 492 of the living had been lifted from the sea.

The Cost. What had happened? Both the hospital ship's Captain Barton E. Bacon (who had been the last man off his sinking vessel) and the Luckenbach Line agreed that though both ships were equipped with radar, neither had been relying on it.

Captain Bacon said that his ship had been making possibly 15 knots, which seemed a high speed for a pea-soup fog, but there was also some evidence that the freighter, though outward bound, had been moving along the inward-bound channel. These were questions for the board of inquiry and the courts to decide; even before the inquiry was over the U.S. filed a damage action asking $14 million from the Luckenbach Line, accusing it of negligence. Among the government's accusations: Excessive speed, failure to sound proper whistle, failure to use radar or other navigational warning aids and failure to have proper lookouts on watch.

At week's end the Navy announced the cost in human life: 18 known dead, 13 missing. "Thank God," said one officer, "that she didn't have any patients aboard."

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