Small World

Received a nice note from a lady who found the post I wrote back in August about the sinking of the HMT Rohna, the British troopship sunk by the Germans in the Mediterranean Sea in World War II (Nov 26, 1943). My dad was on that ship and was one of the few Americans to survive. (Of the 1,138 men lost, 1,015 were Americans.) The sinking of the Rohna remains the single largest lost of American troops at sea in any war.

(I smile thinking that no hardheaded Dutchman like my dad was about to let a lousy Luftwaffe pilot consign him to the briny deep—and the fact that he was an excellent swimmer. Not to mention the fact that he still had conception work to do after the War—me!)

The lady who wrote me said that her father was a crew member on the USS Pioneer, an American minesweeper that was one of the first ships to come to the aid of the Rohna survivors and which rescued most of them. She wondered if our fathers might have met. However, Daddy was rescued by a British cargo ship, SS Clan Campbell, so it's not likely they met.

Thanks to the Internet for making these unlikely connections happen—another small stitch in the tapestry of life.

[When I get a minute I'll post the article daddy wrote and submitted to Reader's Digest magazine years ago (they declined to publish it) about the sinking of the Rohna and later working side-by-side at NASA with the German scientist who developed the airborne torpedo that sunk his ship.]