Of Undetermined Origin

By courage, discipline and with the luck of calm weather, the U.S. Navy had performed a feat at sea. Last week it told the story: how it had rescued some 1,600 men from one of the sea's worst perils, a burning ship far from port, without losing a life.

It was 6:30 p.m. Sept. 3, sea calm, weather clear, when smoke plumed from the forward deck of what in peacetime was the liner Manhattan, now the busy transport Wakefield. The 24,289-ton ship was steaming westward with about 950 passengers (civilian and Army personnel from England) and 650 crewmen. In one of the passengers' cabins a fire had started and begun to spread. The plume of smoke filled to a straight black pillar in the almost windless air, within view of all ships in the convoy. A minute later the seriousness of the sight was vouched for: the Wakefield broke radio silence with the message: "I am on fire."

Flames spurted from the smoke, swept the superstructure. White steam billowed up within the pall as hoses played on the fire. Beneath the smoke, passengers crowded the windward decks. There was no shouting, no panic, even when they heard an officer call out an order to flood the magazine.

Sailors tossed shells overboard. Two destroyers stood in against the Wakefield's sides and with a cruiser at the stern began taking on passengers who scrambled down landing nets. The bridge of one destroyer crunched against the huge transport's plates. The destroyer's captain yelled: "To hell with the bridge, hold her in."

The Wakefield could no longer be distinguished within her shroud of smoke and steam. But messages beep-beeping from the sparks' cabins aboard the cruiser and the destroyers told the story. "The engines are still okay. Fire hasn't got below B deck. The captain (Coast Guard Commander Harold Gardner Bradbury) thinks it will burn out the superstructure."

Minutes later fire had swept down from B deck toward the magazine, but Bradbury stubbornly refused to abandon ship. The next message conceded the fire out of control. "They are abandoning ship." Flames scorched the blistered rescue ships. But in the glare and with submarine-taunting searchlights stabbing through the smoke the last of the fire fighters were taken aboard rescue craft.

Later, the fire abated, Bradbury led a party back aboard the half-gutted vessel, got the fire under control and took her into port. The rescue was one for Navy history books, but nobody had explained the fire.

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