Statement by survivor John Hrankowski:

We had been surveilled all morning and part of the afternoon by Israeli
forces.  They knew who we were.  We heard them reporting over radio who
we were and how we were sailing and where we were sailing.  They saw the
flag and everything else.  We were in international waters.

At 2:00 the action started when we had just completed a general quarters
drill. I had just come out or the engine room to get some fresh air when
the firing started.  That's when I took my shrapnel hit, nothing
fantastic but pieces of shrapnel.  I went back to the boiler room and
prepared to start lighting off number one boiler to get steam to get out
of there.

This persisted for probably 25 or 35 minutes with the aircraft rocketing
us and hitting us with everything they had--napalm and cannon fire--and
after that there was a comparatively small lull.  We heard that they
were getting hit all over the place and we could see the torpedo boats
moving in and firing torpedoes at us, and then one hit and put a 40 foot
hole in the side of the ship and knocked all power off.

By that time the ship's interior was blackened, you couldn't see
anything except with battle lanterns.  We were still in the process of
lighting off the boiler and trying to head the ship out to see.  The
ship was listing and we got the word to prepare to abandon ship.  We
were ordered by Lieutenant Golden who was in charge in the engine room
to exit, and the last one out of there was myself, and I had to cut off
the boilers' fuel supply.  I was the last one.

We got outside at the main battle dressing station where a lot of
injuries were.  We were just about to go topside when we heard a lot of
shots and canon fire and machine gun fire. Evidently they were trying to
pick off people who were fighting fires and trying to put life rafts in
the water.  They were picking these people off with machine guns.  We
were told, I didn't see them, but we were told that they were shooting
up the life rafts that were in the water, so needless to say they
weren't going to take survivors at all.

And so we headed back to our spaces and did not abandon ship.  We stayed
with it.  And it continued probably for another 40 minutes with them
shooting and finally after seeing that the ship was not going to sink
they grabbed one of the life rafts and they exited the scene.  And
through that, the helicopters had come over loaded with Israeli troops.
This lasted almost two hours and finally we got the ship turned around
and boilers lit off and headed out to sea.

We also heard that nine minutes into the attack we had reached a message
to the Sixth Fleet and they were on their way with aircraft to help us.
Little did we know until afterwards that three sets of aircraft were
turned back.