Escape from Alcatraz (17 page)

“Take it easy, Joe,” Lageson said.

Cretzer calmly removed the clip, shoved in a new one. He apologized, “Sorry, Mr. Lageson,” then fired. The bullet creased Lageson’s cheek and clipped his ear. He lay in the corner, still, as if dead.

In the city room of the
San Francisco Chronicle
the rewrite men were flipping coins for coffee. It was almost three thirty, and the copy was over for the first edition deadline. It had been a dull news day.

A city desk phone rang, and a reporter on the Oakland beat across the bay said, “The highway patrol on the Bay Bridge say they hear shooting over at Alcatraz. Sounds like a break. What’ve you heard?”

“Escape from Alcatraz!” the city editor yelled to the news editor, then to a rewrite man, “Check Alcatraz!”

An electric thrill tingled through the city room.

Another phone on the desk rang, a Marin County correspondent: “Say, we hear the sound of shots at Alcatraz. What’s up?”

The rewrite man reported, “Line’s busy.”

“Keep on it!”

The managing editor came out. “Escape from Alcatraz?”

“Looks like it,” said the city editor. “Reports of shooting over there. We’re checking.”

“Still busy,” said the rewrite man.

“Call Washington.”

A copy boy ran up with a telegram for the city editor:
SERIOUS TROUBLE. CONVICT HAS MACHINE GUN IN CELLHOUSE. HAVE ISSUED RIOT CALL. PLACED ARMED GUARDS AT STRATEGIC LOCATIONS. MOST OF OUR OFFICERS ARE IMPRISONED IN CELLHOUSE. CANNOT TELL EXTENT OF INJURIES SUFFERED BY OUR OFFICERS OR AMOUNT OF DAMAGED DONE. WILL GIVE YOU INFORMATION LATER IN THE DAY WHEN WE GET CONTROL. J. A. JOHNSTON, WARDEN, ALCATRAZ.

Later in the day thirty Marines landed on The Rock, combat-ready with bayonets, grenades, trench knives. Going over they stared at a huge sign on Angel Island erected to greet troops returning from the Pacific:
WELCOME HOME—WELL DONE.
The Rock was reviving memories of Corregidor.

Coast Guard cutters circled the embattled island, and overhead roared military planes. The San Francisco police boat joined in, on her deck marksmen pulled off target practice at the range. In Washington, Director Bennett ordered guards flown from other prisons, then took a plane west.

Fifty children, homebound from school in San Francisco, and a score of mothers who had been shopping in town, were stranded at the Fort Mason dock. The youngsters stared intently at the besieged island, some in tears; then they played hopscotch and tag until the Red Cross bundled them off to the YMCA Hotel. On the island the clerical staff took refuge in the air-raid shelter, relic of the war; the remaining housewives, some with babies, stayed in their homes, the doors locked for the first time in years.

Word of the battle at Alcatraz spread swiftly. By nightfall spectators crowded San Francisco’s hills, the Embarcadero piers, and the shoreline facing The Rock. Patrol boat searchlights crisscrossed the darkened prison. Tracer bullets drew thin red lines in the night sky and burst brilliantly against the concrete wall. An occasional flash of a grenade exploding inside the cellhouse limned briefly the tall windows. Bonfires in the yard cast a glow and silhouetted Marines standing watch on the parapet over the convicts herded out of the shops. High above, the Alcatraz light winked its warning to ships coming in from the sea.

Shortly after nine o’clock the barking rattle of small arms began and kept up for nearly an hour, the most sustained barrage of the battle. It abruptly gave way to deep rumbles, indicating new tactical maneuvers. At midnight the artillerylike booming ceased, and the conflict settled into silences punctuated by the sporadic crack of a rifle.

Late that first afternoon, Warden Johnston decided to move a task force into the west gun gallery to regain control of the cellhouse. A volley cleared the corridor in D Block, then six officers rushed the gallery. Four pushed on through the draft door. On the floor below stood Cretzer. Guard Stites, who killed Convict Limerick in the 1938 break attempt, fought a pistol duel with Cretzer. He fell. Cretzer dropped the other three. They crawled back out, were taken to a first-aid station set up in the warden’s office. And there later Stites was borne, dead.

Reconnoitering, against sniper’s bullets, the task force discovered the position of the hostages, and at nine o’clock the rescue operation began—the sustained drumfire heard by observers off The Rock. Machine gunners laid down a withering cover fire as guards in pairs sprinted down the C Block corridor and carried out the captive officers, one at a time. Warrant Officer C. L. Buckner, leader of the Marines’ platoon, watched the operation through a bulletproof window in the visitors’ room and praised the guards: “They’d make good Marines.”

The toll: Officers Miller and Stites dead, thirteen wounded.

Baker, in Cell 402, reported he could hear the moans of Simpson, shot in the stomach, through the afternoon. “We didn’t dare help him. The convicts kept coming back and looking in.” When darkness set in, Baker, crippled by bullets, dragged himself to the basin tap and brought Simpson a cup of water.

As the searchlights played across the windows that night, Lageson stealthily scribbled the names of the mutineers on the rear concrete wall of Cell 403; Cretzer, Coy, Hubbard, Carnes, Shockley, Thompson.

Apparently the covering fire had driven the convicts into the utility corridor of C Block. Guards shot gas grenades through ventilators toward the service area, but this failed to rout the convicts. The warden assumed they had crawled into the tunnel that carries pipes and conduits beneath the cut-off, or lateral passage, midway in the block. He called a halt to the grenade bombardment and sent to the military arsenal at Benicia for demolition bombs.

Daybreak disclosed to offshore observers the intensity of the first night’s battle: the prison’s concrete wall deeply pitted, the cellhouse windows shattered.

Warrant Officer Buckner, who won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart for breaking a banzai charge on Guam, decided he had not come to The Rock for guard duty. He spoke to the warden and became once again a fighting Marine. He climbed to the roof, drilled three holes and dropped antitank shells from the Benicia Arsenal on the concrete top of the tunnel to flush out the rebels. Then he came back down and crouched in the pink ice plant to lob in missiles. Hurling hand grenades would be too risky: the window bars were closely spaced. He fitted an adapter to the muzzle of a carbine to blast the bars with rifle grenades. The carbine lacked power; he switched to a Garand M-1 rifle, infantry piece of World War II. He bent the bars out of shape, then rifled grenades through the gaps: a smothered concussion, and shrapnel sprayed out for fifty feet. After a spell of this, Buckner hurried again to the roof and dropped hand grenades, some tied to string to explode at varying levels. Then back to the post in the flowers. A guard now crouched on the catwalk below the grenadier’s target window, and after each blast he shouted to the rebels to surrender. All morning the tireless Marine kept at it, lobbing three cases of rifle grenades past the bars, dropping 150 hand grenades through the holes in the roof.

Crowds clustered again at vantage points in San Francisco. It was a sparkling sunny day, and every foot of space that afforded a view of The Rock held a spectator, every window was a theater box. Employers reported an abrupt rise in absenteeism. A soldier from the Presidio elbowed slowly through the mob on the fishing pier at Aquatic Park with binoculars, peddling intimate glimpses of the battleground. Once a gasp went up along the curving pier as billowing smoke obscured the prison, then the throng waited in hushed horror for the flames and the screams of a holocaust. A sigh swelled up as the prison reappeared, with only the smoke of the exploding grenades issuing from the windows: a grenade, falling short, had set fire to dry grass. At times a projectile burst against the concrete in a bright yellow flash and sent vines of black smoke curling up the wall.

The patrol fleet, augmented by Navy destroyer escorts and press launches, cruised around the island. Army crash boats churched a foamy wake from Sausalito, ferrying relief guards from San Quentin and those flown in from other federal prisons. Fighter planes from a nearby military field power-dived on the prison for psychological effect. Their roar, coupled with the relentless shelling that shook the cellhouse, brought wild shrieks from the noncombatant convicts hiding in their cells under beds or behind barricades of books and pillows. A gloom of smoke and steam, hissing from broken pipes, filled the corridors. Officer Stucker remained trapped in the basement with a group of prisoners, and up in the hospital a dentist and an intern waited it out with the patients.

At noon the gunfire ceased. The besieged rebels had phoned about a deal. The seventy-two-year-old warden curtly replied: “The only possible deal is this: Throw out your weapons.”

A pregnant silence prevailed through the afternoon as the mutineers considered the ultimatum. The warden took advantage of the truce and moved the yard convicts, who had been heckling the Marines, into A and B Blocks. He was heartened by a visit from two distinguished military men, General Joseph W. (Vinegar Joe) Stilwell and General Frank Merrill. General Stilwell offered army aid, but the warden felt the rebels could not hold much longer. They had no access to food, and the water mains had been shut off after the pipes had burst. The Armorer told the police chief of San Francisco on the phone: “I think we’ll wind this thing up in the morning.”

The truce ended late in the afternoon. A bullet zinged past a guard’s head as he crept warily by the utility corridor of C Block on a reconnoitering mission. The single shot was the mutineers’ reply to the warden’s terms: unconditional surrender. It indicated too that the bombing had driven them from the cut-off tunnel.

As a second dusk fell over The Rock, the convict war surged anew. Fusillades resounded almost continuously hour after hour until, at nine o’clock, the warden ordered a cease-fire. He stationed night watches at the utility foxhole and in the gun cages.

At 8
A.M.
Saturday, the third day of the battle, six Marines moved along the catwalk and set up a ladder at a cellhouse window. A prison guard mounted the ladder, peered in cautiously, sighted a rifle upward through the window, and fired a single shot. The maneuver, repeated at window after window, drew no responsive shot. The group retired.

At 9:20 a burst of gunfire sounded in the cellhouse, a dozen rapid reports. Then silence. At 10:40, three shots, like hacking coughs. They were the last. The Battle of The Rock was over.

After the window reconnaissance the warden had ordered an assault on C Block’s utility corridor. At 9:20 guards opened the east door and raked the dark interior with rifle fire. They waited. They fired the final shots. Guard Donald H. Mowery entered, riflemen at his rear. He waded in a foot of mucky salt water, splashing over the twisted, cracked pipes. Deep in the darkness the beam of his flashlight picked up Coy, in Captain Weinhold’s uniform, sitting in the muck, covering this entrance. He still held the rifle in his hands, ready to fire, but the grip was that of rigor mortis. Beyond sat Cretzer, facing the other entrance, wearing Guard Burch’s coat and holster with ammunition belt. On Cretzer’s lap lay the .45 pistol, his forefinger resting on the trigger, also in rigor mortis. Between them Hubbard sprawled against the rough concrete wall, the long blade of the carving knife protruding from the dark water, leaning against a knee. His body was still warm.

An irony came to light. Hubbard had petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, claiming he had been beaten into signing a confession and submitting hospital records to show that, soon after his arrest, he was treated for a broken nose, a possible skull fracture, and multiple bruises. His petition was scheduled for a hearing in federal court on the following Monday, two days after the battle. It was dismissed on motion of Prosecutor Joseph Karesh, who said that Hubbard would have had “a fair chance” of walking off The Rock a free man.

After the last shot had been fired, a Navy demolition crew went over the battleground and gathered up eleven unexploded grenades.

Late that Saturday night Warden Johnston held an unprecedented press conference, the first time since The Rock opened, twelve years earlier, that newsmen had been invited to the island. He took the reporters on a tour of the cellhouse. It reeked of the acrid smell of battle and burst sewer lines. A night chill drifted in the paneless windows. Convicts catcalled from the tiers.

As they walked down Broadway and back past the hostage cells, the warden said: “Coy must have been planning this for a long time—he and Cretzer. They had Burch cased.”

Thompson, Shockley, and Carnes were tried for the murder of the two guards. They appeared in court as if stamped out of the same press: black suits, black shoes, black ties, white shirts, white socks.

Shockley’s counsel built a defense on mental deficiency. A psychiatrist testified he had hallucinations that minerals were served in his food on The Rock, that he was a walking radio station, picking up news around the prison, and that at the outset of the battle his internal radio had transmitted: “Let her go off!” The psychiatrist said the convict, with an I.Q. of 54, was not smart enough to fake insanity. Shockley was adjudged medically, but not legally, insane.

Carnes went back to The Rock with time to serve now topping Whitey Franklin’s record: two life terms and ninety-nine years. Thompson and Shockley drew the supreme penalty. “Hell,” said Thompson, “I’m not afraid to die. If I was, I wouldn’t be in this racket.” He offered his eyes to a blind person. On the morning of December 3, 1948, they sat in the twin oak chairs in San Quentin’s octagonal, green-tinted gas chamber and inhaled the sweetish, almond-scented fumes.

Of the grim Battle of Alcatraz, the
San Francisco Chronicle
editorialized: “As to why this judgment goes wrong (i.e., judging odds against them), perhaps William Bolitho was right; that the adventurer is peculiarly drugged by the stuff of adventure and cannot think of failure. It may be, as Sigmund Freud had it, that there are men in subconscious search of death.… In any case, it was an epic drama of man bound upon a rock, and Aeschylus would have left it to the lane of universal tragedy and grandeur.”