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.