Splinter On The Tide - Chapter One

Splinter on the Tide

PHILLIP PAROTTI

Philadelphia & Oxford

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 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

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For my family

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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

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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.

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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.

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