During the early days of World War II, German U-boats crept along the U.S. East Coast off of Vero Beach. As a child, Rody Johnson had heard the whispers about ships blowing up off the Florida coast, and of Nazi submarines. Rody's father, Kit, in 1942 had volunteered with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, patrolling the Vero Beach coastline in his small fishing craft, the Kitsis -- part of a U.S. military effort to make the Germans think U.S. Navy sub chasers covered the ocean.
The volunteers and their small cruisers had no machine guns, no depth charges -- and had no idea what they would do if they saw a sub.
In the dark early morning hours of 5-6 May 1942, Kit Johnson saw a bright flash of light burst into the sky --what turned out to be a flare from a tanker ship torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. Johnson placed himself and his crew at risk, expecting no medals, nothing in return, to rescue the survivors of the flaming tanker -- 22 bleeding, burned crewmen.
Many years after the war, Rody Johnson thought about his father's volunteer adventures and, in his search for the details, was caught up in the excitement of finding and meeting the German Commander of the U-boat that had torpedoed the tanker -- the renowned Peter Cremer. As Rody got to know the Commander, he also began to realize that while Cremer was a hero in the German war effort, Kit Johnson, his father -- by then held prisoner of Alzheimer's Disease -- was a hero as well.
Rody Johnson has written a touching remembrance to his father, the hero.
