Taste of Salt: A WWII Skipper Looks Back

Taste of Salt brings to life the World War II years in a captivating style that rivets the reader and solidifies the author's role as historian of the WWII subchasers.

With fascinating photographs and text, Ted Treadwell describes the parallel lives of himself and his ship during the war years. Though Treadwell was an officer, he says his true rating at the start of the war should have been "Landlubber 1/c." He knew nothing about ships or the sea. In addition, he had a history of childhood motion sickness. But he wanted to be "where the action was." His romantic notion was that a proper naval officer should be on the high seas blazing away at the enemy. Today, he admits, "I was pretty dumb and reckless back then."

Managing to wangle an assignment to U.S.S. SC 648, a 110" wooden subchaser, the smallest commissioned warship in the navy, he served on this vessel in the Southwest Pacific for two years, the last nine months as her commanding officer. "It was enough sea duty to last a lifetime," he says today.

As in Treadwell's book, Splinter Fleet-The Wooden Subchasers of World War II, the people and the stories are all true.

A native of New Jersey, Theodore “Ted” Treadwell lived most of his life in upstate New York and New England. After graduating from Rutgers University and Harvard Business School, he spent four years in the navy, two of them on a subchaser in the Pacific. After the war he and his wife Zan raised five children while he made a career in the packaging industry, from which he retired in 1984. Not long after that he began researching and writing about the little wooden subchasers.

The years of research sent Treadwell and his sons Dan and Ted III to National Archives, the Naval Historical Center, the Naval Institute, and other facilities throughout the U.S., England, and Norway. Treadwell’s Fine Arts model of SC 648 is on display in the Navy Museum in Washington, DC. He continues to write while “fully maturing” at the age of 91, in Bellingham, WA.

The Treadwells maintain a website dedicated to subchasers:

http://www.splinterfleet.org