Researching Robert

Subchaser 265

by Jim Potter

As mentioned previously, shortly after the United States entered the World War in 1917, Robert Parks joined the United States Navy. He trained as an electrician and radio operator at Great Lakes Training Center, Naval Training Center at Harvard University, and at New London.

Beginning in July 1918, Parks was ready to use his skills on a submarine chaser (SC), intending to help destroy German submarines that were creating havoc at sea after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. The aggressive campaign severely crippled merchant shipping as Germany attempted to starve England into submission.

In March of 1917, “the US government authorized the construction of these ‘submarine chasers,’ and as time was of essence, the navy contracted with shipyards all across the country, each shipyard receiving a contract of a size it could handle in a short time frame.”¹ 

Deliveries started in July 1917, continuing into 1919, with 441 boats built, and the remaining seven boats canceled. One hundred were sold to France,² and a further 121 US Navy subchasers were deployed to Europe to operate off Britain and France and in the Mediterranean, where they supported the Otranto Barrage with the remaining US Navy boats operating off the East Coast of the United States.³

“The chaser was fitted with a 3”/23-caliber deck gun, a depth charge launcher, machine guns, small arms – and a crew that would spend long, difficult days on rough seas in remarkably close quarters. The wood-hulled vessel, at 110’ length and 15’ beam, was a long, slender boat powered by three 220-hp gasoline engines. It was designed to provide exceptional seaworthiness and reasonably good speed – and no comfort whatsoever.”⁴

The design of the US subchaser “included quarters and room for provisions to support a crew of two dozen men on missions that could keep them at sea for weeks at a time.”⁵ Subchasers were normally directed by a commanding officer, who was usually a lieutenant junior grade or ensign, and supported by an executive officer who served as second-in-command. They both managed communications. A quartermaster was a senior petty officer responsible for navigation and steering the boat. He assisted officers, like the coxswain, with plotting visual courses using charts, managing signal flags, and handling the helm during maneuvers and submarine hunts. The quartermaster might have help from a signalman who handled visual signaling like flags and lamps. The boatswain’s mate (or bosun’s mate), a senior petty officer, was responsible for the physical seamanship and deck operations of the vessel. He supervised the crew on deck, maintained the rigging, anchors, and deck equipment, and oversaw general maintenance like painting and hull repairs to keep the boat seaworthy. The chief machinist was an officer who oversaw the boat’s entire mechanical operation, ensuring the main engines and auxiliary systems ran smoothly. The chief machinist’s mate did hands-on work, managing the engine room crew, performing repairs, and directly operating the three gasoline engines. From two to four firemen assisted the machinist’s mates. They managed fuel lines, lubricated machinery, monitored gauges, and helped clean and repair the engines. One or two gunners’ mates maintained and operated the deck guns and depth charges. A typical subchaser carried around six to eight seamen (seaman first class and seaman second class). They made up the core deck crew that handled lines, stood watch, and loaded the guns. A cook or mess attendant managed the galley, prepared meals, and handled ship stores. A hospital apprentice, usually a junior pharmacist’s mate, managed first aid, treated basic injuries, dispensed medicine, and handled emergency medical care until the boat reached port. The electrician (radio) operator managed the wireless radio, wireless phone, and was a hydrophone listener. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to learn the names of the ship’s officers or crew members who served with Radio Officer Robert Parks.

Standing five feet-four and three-quarter inches and weighing 121 pounds,⁶ Robert Parks would have been less likely than most sailors to hit his head on a doorway or hatch, and more likely to be able to scramble in close quarters during an emergency.⁷ “The radio operator, located in the radio room, was responsible for transmitting and receiving radio messages and recording the time each message was sent or received. He communicated with the commanding officer through a voice tube running from the radio room to the pilot house.”⁸

Each subchaser would ultimately, “be fitted with a Y-gun (depth charge launcher), a complement of a dozen or more depth charges each containing 300 lbs. of TNT, a deck gun and a set of listening and tracking devices that represented the state of art in detecting submarines.”⁹

“Viewed in profile, the major feature of the chaser was the pilot house, built just forward of the center of the boat. The main mast with a crow’s nest was located just behind the pilot house. Below decks, the officers’ stateroom and the radio room were located directly under the pilot house, and forward of that was ammunition storage and crew’s quarters. Toward the stern from the officer’s stateroom were the engine room, crew’s quarters and the galley. The fuel tanks were under the officer’s stateroom, and storage lockers of various types were scattered throughout.”¹⁰

Volunteers to the Navy may have been influenced by the dreadful conditions of the Army’s trench warfare, but once a sailor was in the service he quickly learned how the size of a vessel made a world of difference in his comfort. Battleships would offer hot showers and hot meals due to their steam heat, space for formal dining and a personal hammock, and minimized pitching and rolling due to their massive displacement. With their tight quarters, sailors on a 110-foot subchaser had to share the same hammock quarter space by sleeping in shifts. There were no showers. A small coal-fired stove or boiler system piped hot water or steam to radiators in the crew spaces but the heat was notoriously spotty and inadequate, leaving the crew freezing in the winter and sweating the rest of the year. For me, I think the worst part would be when the round bottomed boat, with no keel, rolled up to seventy degrees to port and seventy degrees to starboard in quick succession. I’d be violently seasick from the boat’s motion in heavy seas. While I was seasick, I’d also be sick and tired of the constant leaking of the ship due to the gaps in the hull planking (because the ships were rushed into production using unseasoned, green timber, that shrunk as it dried out). Can you imagine your clothes, bunk, and mattress being constantly damp or dripping wet?¹¹

On July 17, 1918, Parks finally settled into his temporary home, Submarine Chaser 265 (SC 265),¹² which had been commissioned on February 9, 1918.¹³ It was one of twenty subchasers (numbers 253-272) built by George Lawley & Son Corporation, Neponset, Massachusetts.¹⁴ Subchaser 265 operated within the First Naval District, headquartered in Boston, protecting the coastlines of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. During Parks’ first subchaser assignment, he was stationed at Rockland, Maine, which primarily protected Penobscot Bay.¹⁵ 

Since enemy subs waited off the Eastern Shore of the United States to sink departing merchant ships headed to England, US subchasers patrolled along the same coast, searching for U-boats. Other American subchaser units accompanied warships, helping protect merchant and military vessels crossing the Atlantic. Finally, additional subchasers were assigned to barrages, helping keep enemy submarines bottled up to help prevent them from getting loose into international waters where they could sink neutral and Allied vessels.

Despite the expense of manufacturing subchasers and training the crew, the World War motorboats weren’t officially credited with sinking any U-boats. However, their contributions in the war effort were credible by detecting, delaying, and deterring enemy submarines from their tour of duty, both physically and mentally.¹⁶

As touched upon previously, submarine chaser officers drilled their crews on the search for enemy subs, the chase, and the attack. There were three chasers to a unit. Locating enemy submarines required listening periods when the crew would turn off their ship’s engines and use listening devices (including hydrophone models of the era, such as the C Tube, K Tube, or MB Tube), to detect suspicious sounds. The subchasers were able to communicate with one another, ship-to-ship, using radio telephones which were newly developed technology.

Once the location of an enemy submarine was detected, the chasers would advance, then stop periodically in multiple short runs for updated calculations. The listeners paid close attention to the sound of propellers so they could determine the submarine’s speed. Ideally, when the chasers were within a few hundred feet, they would drop a pattern of depth charges.

The U-boats and subchasers played a deadly cat and mouse game for survival. Often the U-boats would remain silent, hoping the Allied vessels would assume the submarine had been damaged or destroyed. If the subchasers detected the enemy submarine “playing dead,” or restarting its engines to attempt to escape, they would resume the attack using depth charges once the sub started its getaway.¹⁷

I haven’t found any record of Robert Parks’ Subchaser 265 engaging German U-boats with machine gun fire or depth charges while the boat was assigned to protect New England’s coastal waters. One bold, strategic action taken by the German Imperial Navy occurred on July 18, 1918, when U-Boat-156 laid mines off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The following day the armored cruiser, USS San Diego struck a mine and sank. During the summer U-156 destroyed over twenty commercial fishing vessels from Cape Cod up to Canada, including Nova Scotia, but it appears, the closest American vessel lost to Rockland, Maine, was the Robert & Richard. It was a 140-ton fishing schooner intercepted by U-156 on July 23, when it was about sixty miles off Cape Porpoise, Maine (sixty-five to seventy nautical miles south of Rockland). The submarine fired a warning shot, boarded the vessel, placed time bombs in the hold, and sank her. All twenty-two crew members survived after they were allowed to evacuate the area in dories.¹⁸

It’s likely I’ll never discover if Robert Parks was ever ill of the “Spanish influenza”or “the epidemic” during his time serving in the Navy during 1918 or 1919. During the fall of 1918, while Parks was serving on Subchaser 365, he would have lived with two dozen sailors for extended periods of time in cramped, poorly ventilated quarters, with their hammocks squeezed together. The flu hit the US Navy hard; perhaps as high as forty percent of its personnel had influenza in 1918, due in large part to its massive coastal receiving stations which continuously funneled infected sailors onto warships and overcrowded troop transport ships with severe epidemics on board.¹⁹ Even though, at the time, the epidemic wasn’t commonly referred to as a global pandemic, the second wave’s mutated virus was the deadliest, killing healthy adults aged twenty to forty. Worldwide, tens of millions of people died during that catastrophic autumn surge.

During the war, subchasers helped maintain a presence around vital naval bases, ports, and shipping lanes to secure local waters. After the Armistice, they were still busy during the demobilization of the main fleet. They enforced maritime laws and conducted search and rescue missions and assisted in coastal mine clearing operations that threatened commercial shipping.

The Armistice of 1918 may have ended the shooting on a single day, but the process of shipping home and discharging nearly two million American sailors and soldiers deployed overseas to Europe was a complex challenge. Despite the overwhelming public and political demand from the American citizenry to bring the boys home, the primary bottleneck was shipping. Without a large wartime fleet, American forces were stranded for months waiting for transport.

Parks’ last day as a radio operator assigned to SC 265 was March 28, 1919, but that wasn’t due to his impending demobilization. He wasn’t being released from active military service; he wasn’t returning to civilian life. Although the fighting had stopped, Electrician Parks prepared to trade his subchaser duties on a boat, for radio operator work on a ship. Once the USS Heron (AM-10), a minesweeper, was retrofitted for the rough North Sea—between Scotland’s Orkney Islands and Norway—Parks would finally get his opportunity to cross the Atlantic.²⁰

*

Notes

^{1. Todd A. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks: The Submarine Chasers of WWI. (Bowdoinham, Maine, Signal Light Books, 2006), 12-13.}

2. Robert Gardiner and Randall Gray, eds., Conway’s All The World’s Fighting Ships, 1906-1921 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1985) 132-133.

3. Norman Friedman, US Small Combatants: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1987), 38.

^{4. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 3.}

^{5. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 12.}

^{6. World War Service Record of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives at St. Louis, Missouri.}

 ^{7. Jeff Nilsson, “The Average American Today and on the Eve of World War I,” Saturday Evening Post, Posted April 6, 2017. Note: During the World War, the average American soldier in the armed forces was twenty-five years old, stood five feet, seven and a half inches tall, and weighed one hundred forty-four pounds.} 

^{8. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 58.}

^{9. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 12.}

^{10. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 14.}

11.William Washburn Nutting, The Cinderellas of the Fleet (Jersey City, NJ: Standard Motor Construction Co., 1920), 83-84.

^{12. Service Record of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives. Note: During Parks’ service on SC 265, he was assigned to two coastal areas of the northeast: Rockland, Maine, from July 17, 1919, to October 21, 1918, and the Boston Harbor section from October 21, 1918, to March 28, 1919, interrupted by an assignment to the District Detail Office in November 1918. Also, according to Parks’ service records, he received leave from January 15, 1919, to February 15, 1919. I’m guessing he returned home to visit his parents in McPherson County, Kansas, but I haven’t found any documentation to support my opinion.} 

13. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Naval History Division (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976) vol. 6, app. 1. 

14. Nutting, The Cinderellas of the Fleet, 177.

15. Service Record of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives.

16. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 176.

17. Woofenden, Hunters of the Steel Sharks, 56.                

18. Bangor Daily News (Bangor, MA), July 25, 1918, 3.    

19. Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2003), 122-123.

20. Service Record of Robert Walter Parks, National Archives.    

The Subchaser Archives, created and administered by author Todd A. Woofenden, is a naval history collection devoted to the 110′ submarine chasers of the Great War and the men who served on them, primarily covering 1917 to 1919. Click the link to see the Subchaser Archives. https://www.subchaser.org/