More than a footnote

By DAVID BALLINGRUD

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 3, 2000

LARGO -- Evelyn Parker's little piece of World War II doesn't rate many lines in most histories of the great conflict. Truth be told, it's not easy to find a mention anywhere.

The SS City of Birmingham was short on fame and glamor when it departed Norfolk, Va., 58 years ago this past weekend. But it was a piece of a much larger picture, and its fate highlights the turning of the tide in one of the great battles in history: the Battle of the Atlantic.

Now 82, Parker lives in Royal Palms Senior Residence in Largo, a place where memories are given the special status they deserve.

She believes the City of Birmingham is a memory worth preserving.

Historians agree. In the summer of 1942, the nation was newly at war. In the Pacific the Japanese fleet had just suffered its first major setback at Midway, but its ships still roamed unchallenged most everywhere else in that part of the world. In the Atlantic, Allied forces had yet to find a way to counter the threat to shipping posed by the infamous German U-boat.

Of the 381 passengers and crew aboard the City of Birmingham the night of June 30, 1942, only four were women. Evelyn Parker was one.

"I heard they needed secretaries in Bermuda, and I always wanted to go to Bermuda," she said Friday. "But I thought they would fly me."

Instead she got the City of Birmingham, a 382-foot passenger vessel carrying cargo and contract workers to Bermuda to help ready the island for war. Escorted by the Navy destroyer USS Stansbury, the City of Birmingham got under way on the 29th. Both vessels were about 250 miles east of Cape Hatteras a day later. Night was falling.

Parker and two of the three other women aboard had just begun dinner with the ship's officers when Capt. Lewis P. Borum was called away to respond to an urgent message from the Stansbury.

Moments later, Parker heard a muffled bang and felt a shock run through the ship. The first of two torpedoes struck the ship about 100 feet from the bow. Moments later the second torpedo struck just beneath the bridge, slightly nearer the stern.

A German submarine -- the U-202, researchers would later learn -- had managed to slip between the City of Birmingham and its escort and launch at least two torpedoes toward the merchant vessel.

"We were heading for the lifeboats when the second one hit," Parker recalled. "It knocked the pocketbook out of my hand, and I remember asking one of the seaman if I should go back for it. He said, "Suit yourself, but I wouldn't.' So I didn't. My clothes were going to the bottom of the sea anyway."

Parker said she climbed down a rope net thrown over the side of the vessel, then jumped into the water from about 20 feet above the surface. She then swam to an overloaded, almost swamped raft, where she waited for rescue with about 40 other people.

The two quick explosions broke the bow section away from the rest of the ship, and the City of Birmingham went down in about five frantic minutes.

The Stansbury took aboard some survivors and lingered at the scene until the remainder were in life rafts. Then it disappeared into the darkness, in pursuit of the U-202. "We sat in water up to our waists for four hours," Parker said. "We sang songs and pretended it was a party. There was no time to be frightened."

The Stansbury returned that night for the remaining survivors, then took all 372 to Bermuda. Two passengers and seven members of the crew were lost.

The attack on the City of Birmingham was part of an important, long-planned strike on Allied shipping in U.S. coastal waters, said David Kohnen, former curator of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Va.

The Germans called it Paukenschlag, "rolling of drums."

Between 1939 and 1941, Kohnen said, the United States had become increasingly involved in supporting its British and French Allies at sea. Merchant shipping was making its way north from as far south as South America, pausing along the way in ports such as Norfolk.

From these midpoints along the U.S. coast, they would journey north to waters near Nova Scotia. There they would form convoys, escorted by U.S. warships to mid ocean meeting points, or MOMPs, where British naval vessels would take over the task.

Paukenschlag was an attempt to break this supply line. It started slowly following Germany's formal declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, Kohnen said. It gained intensity through the spring and summer of 1942 and lasted until August, he said, when Allied resistance stiffened and the German submarine force pulled back.

From January through August 1942, 623 Allied merchant and naval vessels were sunk by U-boats in U.S. Atlantic coastal waters, Kohnen said, sometimes within sight of horrified observers on shore. It was a stunning loss of people -- it's not known how many -- and material.

"They sank ships left, right and center," said Parker.

As the Fourth of July gets its historical due this week, Parker wondered whether anyone would care about such a minor incident in the nation's history as the sinking of the City of Birmingham.

"I don't think anybody remembers these things anymore," she said.

Kohnen remembers, and he thinks others should, too.

"It's an important part of the war not just because of the scale of the losses," he said, "but because it put the Americans and the British on the ropes. It forced the two nations to work together much more closely, and ultimately successfully."

After her rescue, Parker and the others arrived in Bermuda the evening of July 1. "Paradise," she called it, and almost never left. She went to work for the Navy and stayed until her retirement in September 1981.

Florida was her next stop, she said, because the climate was similar. "It'll do," she said, "but it's not the same."

She thinks about that summer night in 1942 from time to time, she said, but it's not a particularly painful memory.

"You could see it almost as an adventure in your life," she said.

Maritime records show that the U-202 was sunk June 2 of the following year, south of Greenland, by a British warship, the HMS Starling. There were 30 survivors, among them the captain.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.