SERVICE IN TIME OF WAR

SERVICE IN TIME OF WAR

My Dad didn’t officially serve in the Armed Forces during WWII (except for the brief sojourn in the Navy Auxiliary, but that’s another story) but his fishing boat did serve.

Daddy was exempt from the draft on two counts; he had a child (me) and he was a food producer. Farmers and fishermen (and Daddy was a commercial fisherman) were exempt. The irony was that the Port of Fort Pierce and its inlet and offshore ocean waters were closed to civilian uses because the Navy had taken it over for a training and coastline security facility. Plus, the Germans were present in their submarines all along the Florida coast, torpedoing ships almost at will. So fishing was pretty iffy anyway.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on our front porch at night looking out over the Atlantic Ocean and seeing, in the black sky just above the horizon, three orange lights. “Ships on fire,” Daddy said. “The Germans got ‘em.”

In addition to patrolling the beaches looking for German saboteurs to come ashore, the Navy had the first training facility for “frogmen” (later called SEALS) on our North Beach. And somehow, Daddy’s 30 ft. fishing boat was pressed into service as a patrol boat. Two Coast Guardsmen, both new recruits from Iowa (I-OWE-WAY was how Daddy pronounced it) who had never seen the ocean until they arrived in Fort Pierce were put in charge. Of course, they didn’t know anything about running a boat and they knew nothing about the coastal waters they were to patrol from Vero Beach to Stuart. So, my Dad went along every time they went out to patrol (I don’t know whether the government knew about this or not)

One moonlit night, a little offshore from “The Pines”, a local landmark of a grove of trees that stood very near the training base for the frogmen, Daddy and the two Coast Guardsmen were surprised to see, just a few hundred yards away, a German submarine break to the surface of the water and put up a periscope. The Guardsmen, armed only with rifles and with no ship-to-shore radio, were terrified. They were sure that the Germans would torpedo their fishing boat. Daddy laughed telling this part of the story, saying the Germans would never waste a torpedo on a 30-foot fishing boat!

Daddy and the Coast Guardsmen turned their little boat around and headed back for port, all the while looking back over their shoulders at the hulking submarine, just breaking the water line and dead in the water, with that periscope still up.

At the Coast Guard station on Fort Pierce Inlet, they radioed the closest Navy airfield in Tampa, on the other side of the state. Tampa sent out a spotter plane, but in the several hours that elapsed dawn had broken. The German submarine had slipped back down beneath the surface and headed for deeper water, not to be seen again that day.