Splinter on the Tide Read online

  Splinter on the Tide

  Splinter on the Tide

  PHILLIP PAROTTI

  Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2021 by

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

  1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

  and

  The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK

  Copyright 2021 © Phillip Parotti

  Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-958-2

  Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-959-9

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

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  For my family

  1

  The last thing Ash Miller had anticipated when he activated his commission in the Naval Reserve was that the very ship to which he’d been assigned would be blown up by his own Navy. Nevertheless, on December 12, 1941, in the sea just south of Key West, he was. He’d been riding the old four-piper destroyer to which he was assigned, the U.S.S. Herman K. Parker. Only 55 minutes before, after taking on fuel, stores, and ammunition, the ship had commenced a rapid transit toward the Panama Canal in order to pass through and join what remained of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. By that time, Ash had already spent a year on active duty as an ensign. The Parker’s captain, he imagined, might still have considered him an amateur and green, but his brother officers, regulars all, seemed to have accepted him, particularly after he had shown himself to be quietly competent in his role as assistant navigator and as the deck officer who oversaw the crews manning the ship’s depth charges. Three times, before the United States declared war, he had participated in lend-lease convoys, herding as many as 40 cargo-laden ships toward rendezvous with Royal Navy corvettes waiting along the chop line in the mid-Atlantic. Each time, after learning the fate of the Reuben James (DD-245), he knew that he risked being torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat. But what he did not foresee was being blown up by an American mine.

  Prior to the moment of impact, no one aboard the Parker knew that a minefield existed anywhere in their vicinity. As a Naval Board of Inquiry subsequently determined, a destroyer minelayer had indeed laid a field two days before so as to protect the northern approaches to Key West. Both the field and its exact location had been communicated to the appropriate shore authorities, but because of a breakdown in secure communications equipment, knowledge of the field had not yet been disseminated to the fleet. Even so, the field should have been anchored miles to the north of the track laid out by the Parker’s navigator. Owing to unknown causes, one of those mines had apparently broken loose from its anchor and drifted south. Hence the impact, the explosion, and the sinking of the Herman K. Parker. But at the time, everyone believed that the ship had been attacked by a U-boat.

  In thinking back, Ash knew that he had been fortunate. Thirty minutes before the Parker collided with the mine, after a cup of coffee and a late afternoon doughnut in the wardroom, Ash had climbed to the bridge and relieved the Junior Officer of the Watch. At the moment of impact, he happened to be standing on the port wing taking a bearing on a rusted fishing trawler that seemed to be scuttling toward Key West so as to reach port before nightfall. When the Parker struck the mine on the starboard beam and the center of the vessel suddenly heaved up like a breaching whale, Ash had been catapulted straight over the side and out into the sea, still holding his binoculars.

  Ash could never quite remember how he entered the water but thought he might have doubled up into a cannon ball so as to avoid the impact of a belly flop. At the time, he felt sure that the ship had been torpedoed, so in the instant that he surfaced, he burst into motion in order to swim away from the sinking ship, arms pummeling the waves and legs kicking hard. In his haste, he did not see the ship break up, but he did hear the boilers explode, and when he turned, finally, and looked back, he saw nothing but a sea of floating heads to mark the men who had escaped and the Parker’s high stern plunging from sight.

  Without a life jacket, Ash did the only thing he could. Swiftly discarding his shoes, he removed his khaki trousers, knotted the legs at their ends, stretched them behind his neck, and slung them forward over his head, filling each leg with air, and then, holding the waist beneath him in the water, he kicked himself up over the crotch so as to use the inflated legs as water wings. Then, amid periodic movements to restore the inflation of the trouser legs, he set himself to wait in hopes that sharks wouldn’t find him before help came.

  And again Ash knew that he had been fortunate. He hadn’t been in the water more than an hour before the trawler he’d been watching in the moment before the explosion closed the distance, spotted him, plucked him from the sea, and went on picking up survivors until she was crammed to the gunwales with 72 of the Parker’s crew and nine of her officers. Four officers, including the captain, and 38 men—including, Ash assumed, the entire engineering section—had gone down with the ship. The others—despite their burns, gashes, scrapes, and saltwater-soaked lungs—some of them having swallowed some of the oil itself, still lived. Blissfully, after conducting a thorough search, the trawler made Key West before midnight, depositing the remains of the ship’s company at the Key West Naval Station where emergency personnel stood waiting to receive them.

  The days that followed swam together in a blur. Ash remembered interrogations, written reports, forms to be filled out, interviews with senior officers, the first night in the hospital under observation, trips to the exchange in order to be fitted for new uniforms, and six funerals, all of them conducted with appropriate military honors. More than anything, he remembered the palpable sense of fury that it had happened at all.

  One month later, after the Board of Inquiry had settled responsibility for the disaster, after a thorough medical examination at Key West, and after the Navy had kitted him out in a fresh set of uniforms, Ash received orders to report to Atlantic Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk. Reluctantly, he said goodbye to the few remaining friends with whom he had served aboard the Parker. As things turned out, and much to Ash’s later surprise, they passed from his life, one and all, as though they had never been.

  2

  When Ash reached Norfolk, he found the streets windy, wet, and cold beneath a dense January fog off the Chesapeake. The train he had taken, an express, had been packed, so from Miami to Jacksonville, Ash sat on his bag or stood beside it near one of the car’s windows. When a number of passengers finally departed in Jacksonville, Ash found an empty seat and slept through much of the night as the train traversed the Carolinas. Waking about an hour out of Norfolk, Ash managed a dry shave in the car’s washroom, and then, because someone slumped into his seat the moment he left it, he once more stood until the train reached the station where a paper cup of lukewarm coffee completed his morning ablutions. Discarding the cup into the trash and turning up the collar of his bridge coat against the damp, Ash walked outside and hailed a taxi.

  From the U.S. Naval Station’s main gate where the taxi deposited him, Ash bent into the wind and made his way toward the building which, according to the gate sentry, housed the
Atlantic fleet’s personnel offices. It didn’t. Instead, the structure functioned as a land-based administrative headquarters where an obliging yeoman nevertheless stamped his orders and redirected him: “Personnel, Sir? That’s across the way. Third deck.”

  Arriving on the third deck of the building indicated, Ash found not an office but a loft, a long, wide loft not unlike the floor of a warehouse where more than two hundred yeomen and a few junior officers seemed to be absorbed intensely while typing at high speed. There, after yet another yeoman examined his orders, he was told, “You are to see Lieutenant Commander Sims, Sir, all the way down the center aisle, second door to your right.” No one so much as glanced at Ash as he walked down the aisle and entered a passageway, and when he found the door marked “LCDR Sims,” he knocked once, hesitated for an obligatory two seconds, and entered.

  “Ensign Miller, reporting from Key West, Sir” Ash announced, coming to attention.

  “Relax and take a seat,” said the man behind the desk without looking up. “You can smoke if you like. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Ash sat down, removed a pipe from the pocket of his bridge coat, tamped some tobacco into the bowl, and lit it with his Zippo. The man in front of him, bent over a set of papers upon which he swiftly wrote, showed a closely cropped head of iron-gray hair. His blouse, hanging from a nearby coat tree, displayed ribbons from the First World War and well-aged gold stripes denoting Sims’ rank. Ash considered and wondered if Sims, too, might be a reservist but dismissed the thought when the man put down his pen and looked up, projecting a weathered expression from a lean face, a pair of penetrating gray eyes underscoring the effect.

  “Just get in?” Sims asked, extending his hand to give Ash’s a firm shake.

  “Yes, Sir,” Ash replied.

  “Pity about the Parker,” Sims said. “I convoyed with her in 1918. She was a new ship then, just off the ways, and fast” He shook his head. “Sad business”

  “Yes,” Ash said. “Very.”

  “And what about you?” Sims asked. “Medical report says you’re fit. Are you?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Ash said. “No complaints. I was lucky.”

  “Good,” Sims said. “Then let’s get down to business” And with that, he lifted a file from the corner of his desk and flipped it open. “Background checks first, right?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Ash said.

  “Born 1915,” Sims began, “on a small farm near Makanda, Illinois, Scottish heritage. High school, Carbondale. Graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1936 with a double major in English and Journalism. Right?”

  “Right,” Ash replied.

  “What language did you study?”

  “German, Sir.”

  “Skip the ‘Sir.’ Just stick to the facts. Fluent?”

  “No,” Ash said, “but I can get by.”

  Sims made a note. “What did you do after graduation? Be concrete.”

  “The depression made things difficult” Ash said. “The only job I could find was with the Herrin Bugle, so I went down to Herrin and to the Bugle as a general dogsbody. I typed, I proofread, I ran errands, I wrote obits, I covered sports at Herrin High School, and I acted as a reporter for minor local news stories. The editor covered the major events. I also wrote and sold short stories to the pulps. After a year and a half, I quit because I wasn’t making enough to cover my rent and my meals. A diet of beans, egg sandwiches, and hamburger gets old, fast.”

  “And?”

  “That’s when I went to New York and signed as a deck hand onto the S.S. Winston James, a freighter. Hard work, but better food and good pay. Finally, I was able to bank some money. We made three trips between New York and Brest carrying general stores, and then we returned to Charleston, took on a cargo of cotton, and delivered to Wilhelmshaven. I left the ship there. Id saved some money by that time. Id read a number of things about Nazi Germany, but I wanted to see what was going on for myself.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your impression.”

  Ash sat back in his chair, took a puff from his pipe to gather his thoughts, and continued. “I found Germany to be a clean country and efficient—more so than France. But the Germans were overbearing, impatient, and arrogant to a fault. I caught one of those goosestep military parades in Berlin and thought it typified the whole German attitude. I saw a Pole beaten badly by some Brownshirts in Bremen for nothing more than refusing to give way to them on the sidewalk, and another time, from my hotel window above the street, I saw a Jew beaten half to death in Regensburg for what I thought was no reason at all. That did it for me. I didn’t like the Germany I was seeing; I didn’t think it had much in common with the country of Bach and Goethe, so I got out, made my way up to Rotterdam, signed onto another freighter, and came home. I spent only about a month traveling in Germany, but I wouldn’t care to go back. France turned out to be a far more congenial place.”

  “Improve your German while you were there?”

  “Some,” Ash said.

  “And what did you do when you came back?”

  “I went to Chicago,” Ash continued, “got on as a proofreader for the Chicago Daily Dispatch, found a recruiting office, enlisted, applied for a commission, and began doing weekend training at Great Lakes.”

  “And in October of 1940, you asked for orders to active duty?” Sims said, once more making a mark on a page.

  “Right. I can’t claim to be prescient, Commander, but with regard to Nazi Germany, things have turned out more or less the way I anticipated.”

  “Yes,” Sims said, “so you applied for orders early with the result that you reported to the Parker on December 6, 1940 and remained aboard until the ship’s sinking.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Ash said.

  “Run down your duties for me” Sims said, adding pointedly, “and I want an accurate self-appraisal.”

  “When I reported aboard,” Ash began, “the captain appointed me assistant to the navigator. Lieutenant Stephen Thomas was both executive officer and navigator aboard the Parker, and he gave excellent instruction. From the beginning, he set me to amending charts and to piloting whenever we went to sea, and then he handed me a sextant and started me shooting the stars with him, morning and evening, and we shot sun lines at noon. Within a month, I could find the right stars to shoot, and within two months, Id mastered the computations for celestial navigation, so by late spring of ’41, I was doing most of the navigating unsupervised, and the captain and our various officers of the deck seemed to trust my work.”

  “What about battle stations?”

  “I did a week’s familiarization with depth charges at a school in Charleston last February” Ash said. “After that, I supervised the torpedo ratings manning Parker’s depth-charge racks. I know how to store the charges, change and set the detonators, and time an attack.”

  “Good” Sims said, making yet another note in the file. “What about watch standing?”

  “I qualified as Officer of the Deck for Independent Steaming in September” Ash said. “Between September and the end of November, in company with five other escorts, we screened three convoys to the mid-Atlantic chop line, so I gained plenty of experience working maneuvering boards and handling the ship. After we returned from the last trip, the captain signed a letter qualifying me as an Officer of the Deck for Fleet Steaming, but I’m doubtful that the letter survived our sinking.”

  “The original didn’t,” Sims said, “but I have an endorsed copy here. What about collateral duties?”

  “Alcohol and narcotics custodian,” Ash said, “public relations, in the sense that I wrote news releases about the ship and the crew for hometown newspapers, and the publication of a mimeographed newspaper for the ship’s company when we were at sea.”

  “So,” Sims said, leaning back against his chair and once more fixing Ash with a penetrating gaze, “tell me, Mr. Miller, how would you rate your first year on active duty in the Navy?”


  The question may have been unexpected, but Ash didn’t hesitate.

  “Excellent,” Ash said. “I wouldn’t have thought that I could learn so much, so fast. I had the good fortune to serve aboard a fine ship with a well-qualified crew and a congenial wardroom. I’m doubtful that any of my seniors found me to be brilliant, but I’m hopeful that I didn’t prove to be a disappointment. Personally, I found sea duty more than agreeable and would like to continue with it. Now that we’re in this war, Id like to see it through.”

  For a moment more, Sims said nothing, his gray eyes continuing to plumb the depths of Ash’s face, but then, once more, he sat upright in his chair.

  “It’s good that you’ve found sea duty agreeable" he said, “because you are about to see a great deal more of it. Ever hear of subchasers, Mr. Miller?”

  “I’ve heard of them,” Ash said, “but I’ve never seen one. My impression is that they were small but used extensively during the First World War and pretty much disappeared after the war ended. I gather that they rolled a lot and weren’t as fast as destroyers.”

  “You’re right on all counts,” Sims said. “I had command of one myself in 1918—part of the Otranto Barrage running out of Corfu to try to bottle up the Austrians in the Adriatic. After the war, mine was sold to France. Last I heard it was still in service, as a patrol vessel running out of Toulon.”

  Ash had never heard of the Otranto Barrage but figured it had to be a blockade of some type.

  “Now listen up,” said Sims, “and I’ll give you the statistics, because the United States Navy is about to order between five hundred and a thousand new subchasers for whatever may be required of them—and all of them, Mr. Miller, are going to be staffed by reserve officers and crews that are largely made up from reserve sailors. At the moment, the Navy has neither the officers nor the sailors to man the ships that are already on the drawing boards, so within the next year, you are going to see the start of the most massive build-up of ships, equipment, and personnel that this country has ever experienced. Even as we speak, Lieutenant Commander E. F. McDaniel, a highly competent Naval Academy graduate, is headed for Miami. There he expects to begin training thousands of reserve officers and sailors for duty aboard subchasers and other small craft. But the school is not yet up and running, so for the time being, the Navy is going to have to use what it has. Nazi U-boats are already sinking ships not far off the coast, some of them close enough so that people on the beach can see them go down. I’ve seen one myself, a tanker on fire off Virginia Beach, and it wasn’t pretty. Thirty-two men killed on that one, and not an escort vessel anywhere in sight. So, once more we’ve been caught with our pants down, and we’re in a pinch. For convoy duty alone, we need those subchasers now, all of them, but we aren’t going to get them for six months to a year. In the meantime, a lot of merchant sailors are going to die. Take my meaning?”