Different Battles: The Search for a World War II Hero

In the deeper water 300 yards east of the buoy, a 200-foot German submarine rose from the bottom as it prepared to surface. The U-boat had arrived the previous night after a 4,000-mile, 36-day trip across the Atlantic -- destination: the Bethel Shoal buoy. Its mission was to fire its 17 torpedoes to sink U.S. and Allied shipping....Cremer searched the surface with his binoculars....The sea lay quiet...."These Americans," he said...,"they don't know that they are at war!"

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.

Rody Johnson grew up in Vero Beach, Florida. He holds electrical engineering and MBA degrees from the University of Virginia and spent most of his career in the electronic systems business. He later became the publisher of a weekly newspaper in Florida. He and his wife, artist Katharine Johnson, live in Vero Beach, where he fly fishes, kayaks, and writes, and in Lewisburg, West Virginia.