Sinking of USS Liscome Bay (CVE‑56)

The morning that should have been routine

The sun rose over the Pacific in a flat, indifferent blue. Around Makin Atoll, Task Group 52.3 took its stations to provide air cover and anti‑submarine patrols for the Marines ashore. For many aboard USS Liscome Bay, the day felt like the comfortable rhythm of a ship doing its job: pilots launched and recovered aircraft, sailors checked gear, and officers plotted flights and screens. Rear Admiral Henry M. Mullinnix, commander of Carrier Division 24, was embarked; his staff moved among the ship's corridors, coordinating strikes and patrols that were meant to keep the landings secure.

Escort carriers like Liscome Bay—Casablanca‑class ships built for speed of production and purpose rather than armor—were a crucial, if vulnerable, part of the fleet. They carried planes and fuel and ordnance in cramped hangars. They flew missions to find and fend off submarines, to sweep for enemy fighters, and to give close support to troops grinding inland. On this November morning the carrier's flight deck looked busy and ordinary. The water around the formation was deceptively calm.

The torpedo in open water: 11:10 a.m. and an instant that changed everything

About 11:10 a.m., according to contemporary action reports and survivor testimony, something unseen in the water found Liscome Bay. Japanese submarine I‑175 fired a spread of torpedoes at the carrier group. One struck the carrier on the starboard side near the forward hangar and the areas where aviation gasoline and bombs were stowed.

The first strike was not merely a hole in a hull. Within seconds it touched off a chain reaction—a massive detonation that investigators would later attribute to burning avgas and exploding ordnance. Sailors on the hangar deck and nearby spaces had no time to react. The blast collapsed steel, sheared structures, and sent a sheet of flame up through the flight deck. Men were killed where they stood. Equipment that had been routine moments before became shrapnel and fuel for the fire.

The shock of the explosion was followed by an atmosphere of corrosion and confusion: smoke so thick the sky near the carrier became sullied, oil on the water catching fire, and the sharp, metallic scream of damaged fittings as Liscome Bay began to list.

Ninety minutes compressed into twenty‑three: the ship goes down fast

When a carrier loses its bow and key internal spaces to an explosion, the clock becomes cruelly short. Liscome Bay did not sink slowly. In roughly 23 minutes from the initial hit—a timeframe repeated in official reports—the ship lost buoyancy and stability. Men who had minutes, perhaps even seconds to move, found themselves in a rush toward the stern, into life jackets, into rafts, into the Pacific.

Nearby destroyers and destroyer escorts turned from their screening patterns into rescue vessels at once. Small motor launches and whaleboats pushed out through slicks of burning oil and floating wreckage. The scene in the water was a mix of the ordinary and the unimaginable: life belts and pieces of aircraft, men pulled from the sea burned and shocked, some unrecognizable to those trying to help. The heat from the fire and the risk of further detonations made every rescue a hazardous exercise.

Survivors later described a chaos made worse by the clarity of the morning—the cruel contrast between blue sky and black smoke—and by the reality that this thing had happened in minutes. Within the day, both the dead and the living would be counted, but neither count would be gentle.

Hands in the oil: rescue amid smoke and debris

Screening ships pushed through the debris field with searchlights and loudhailers, with cutters and boats lowered. Men reached over rails and pulled fellow sailors from the water. The rescuers worked beside burning pools of fuel, with the possibility of additional explosions hanging in the air. Many survivors were badly burned; others were trapped on floating wreckage, clinging to bent metal. Medical teams from the escorts improvised triage on their decks, treating shock, severed limbs, and terrible burns with the limited supplies at hand.

Rescue operations continued until darkness fell. Some bodies were recovered; many were not. The water took things that could not be borne back to the deep. The survivors—numbering around 272—were ferried to other ships, where medics and chaplains moved among them. The loss of life was severe and immediate: of all aboard Liscome Bay that morning, 644 officers and enlisted men never made it off the carrier.

Among the dead was Rear Admiral Henry M. Mullinnix. Command staff, aircrew, and ship's company lay counted among the casualties. For families and for a Navy at war, the news carried a weight that did not bend to euphemism.

What was lost: people, craft, and a carrier gone in an hour

The material cost was absolute: Liscome Bay—the hull, its engines, guns, communications gear, and dozens of aircraft—was a total loss. The aircraft and ordnance that had been meant for sorties over the atoll became the means of the ship's destruction. For the task group, the carrier's loss meant an immediate and painful reduction in local air support capability. But even in that operational wound, the larger campaign pressed on: the landings and the wider goals of Operation Galvanic were not undone by the sinking.

The human cost, however, was the primary toll. Six hundred and forty‑four men would not return. The number became part of the Navy's ledger of sacrifice in the Central Pacific—one of the costliest single‑ship losses in terms of life up to that point in the war.

The navy's reckoning: questions, lessons, and slow reforms

Liscome Bay's sinking did not exist in a vacuum. By late 1943 the Navy had accumulated painful lessons about the vulnerabilities of carriers—especially escort carriers—in the face of submarine attack and the hazard posed by onboard fuel and ordnance. After the incident, inquiries and after‑action reports examined everything from the torpedo's trajectory to the layout of fuel and bomb stowage.

Two broad themes emerged. First, anti‑submarine warfare (ASW) had to become more aggressive and more coordinated. Screen formations, sonar sweeps, and the timing of patrol aircraft were adjusted incrementally across the fleet; naval commanders tightened escort patterns and honed procedures so that submarines could not approach as freely. Second, the danger posed by aviation gasoline and munitions stored close to vulnerable spaces led to changes—improvements in stowage practices, more rigorous damage control training, and better protective measures where possible.

None of these changes can be traced to a single directive that sprang from Liscome Bay alone. They were iterative: lessons learned from multiple losses shaped doctrine. The ship’s sinking became one of the stark cases naval planners used to argue for better training, stowage discipline, and ASW tactics across carrier task groups.

A grave on the deep black sea and the memory that remains

Today the wreck of USS Liscome Bay rests in deep water near Makin Atoll. The exact location is treated with respect and is not publicized; the ship is a war grave in the judgment of the Navy and in practice. The men who went down with her are memorialized in lists and at ceremonies; their names join the ledger of American losses in the Pacific.

Historically, accounts of the event converge on the same hard facts: a torpedo from submarine I‑175 struck Liscome Bay on November 24, 1943; the subsequent explosion of avgas and ordnance devastated the ship; it sank rapidly; and 644 men were killed, including Rear Admiral Mullinnix. Some operational details—exact second‑by‑second sequences of interior detonations, the minute‑by‑minute timeline as told by different survivors—will vary by source. Those variations do not undercut the essential narrative of sudden loss and the bravery of those who tried to save their shipmates.

The quiet cost of a single morning

It is tempting to frame Liscome Bay's loss as a footnote in a broad campaign that produced strategic wins in the Central Pacific. The Gilberts were taken; the island‑hopping campaign continued. But the cost was counted in names and faces, in letters sent home, in chaplains reading lists, in husbands and wives adjusting to a new reality. For the sailors and aviators who survived, for the crews that lowered boats into the oil and smoke, the memory of that morning did not fit neatly into strategy chapters. It lived in scars and in the stillness of a watch when someone would say a name and remember.

The ocean keeps its own counsel. Where Liscome Bay lies now, the blue is undisturbed by the years. On it rests a ship made of steel and the men who sailed with her—still part of a war whose maps were redrawn at great human cost. The story of Liscome Bay is not merely a tale of hull and explosion; it is the story of how fragile preparedness can be in the face of sudden violence, and of the ways those who survive respond, instantly and without hesitation, to bring their shipmates home.