Hi James,

Thanks for the tip. I had read this when Torpedo Junction first came out but I guess I glossed over the part where the baby was born in the lifeboat. Here is the account from Torpedo Junction (an excellent book by the way):

“At 0430, another flare brought the Roper to a lifeboat crammed with twenty-two survivors, one of them a new-born baby! The Roper's crew rushed to the side to help. A human chain soon formed, the survivors hauled up to the deck by sailors hanging on netting draped over the side. One of the survivors was a small girl handed directly to Howe. The child was shivering, her little legs icy cold. She clung to Howe as tightly as she could while he carried her forward to a bunk in the officers' quarters. Gently, Howe laid the little girl down on the bunk and covered her with a blanket. He suddenly found himself thinking of his own daughter who was about the same age. Filled with sadness, anger, and frustration, he hurried back to the bridge. On deck, Dr. "Johnny" had taken an hours-old infant and wrapped it in a windbreaker and was watching incredulously as the baby's mother climbed up the cargo net under her own power. She was, as it turned out, Desanka Mohorovicic, the wife of an official in the Yugoslavian government-in-exile. After the Germans had taken over her country, her family had begun an odyssey to get away that had led to Jerusalem to Cairo and then to South Africa. When the Yugoslavian government had ordered her husband, Joseph, to New York, Mrs. Mohorovicic could not get a berth on the same ship. A month later, however, space on the City of New York had come open. Even though her baby was due in about a month, she decided to follow along with her two-year-old daughter Vesna. She had almost made it, being twenty-three days out with two days to go when the first of two torpedoes from the U-160 had struck.

In minutes, Mrs. Mohorovicic had found herself in a crowded lifeboat giving birth. The ship's doctor, Dr. L. H. Conly, was called to help. Dr. Conly had deliberately followed Mrs. Mohorovicic to the lifeboat but had slipped and fallen when a huge wave had knocked him off balance. That had left him with two broken ribs. The other passengers rigged some canvas to cover them while the doctor shrugged off his own pain to aid Mrs. Mohorovicic. There was a massive Hatteras storm on the sea. The lifeboat was being pitched about by 15- and 20- foot waves that intermittently crashed down on the small boat, flooding it with seawater. Dr. Conly caught the baby, a boy, just as one particularly huge wave crashed aboard. Miraculously, all it did was wash the baby off and start his first breath. After Dr. Conly had cut the cord with a pair of small scissors from the first-aid kit, Mrs. Mohorovicic took the baby, swaddled it in a turban offered by a fellow passenger, and put it in her blouse next to her skin and leaned happily back while the other survivors stared at her, amazed at the pluck of this tiny woman.

Soon, Mrs. Mohorovicic, Vesna (as it turned out, she was the tiny girl Howe had carried to safety), and healthy baby son were bedded down in the officers' quarters. Once her origin was determined, Harry Heyman was called on to try to speak to her since he had grown up among people who spoke Serbo-Croatian. Unable to remember the word for husband, Heyman asked her, "Where is your daughter's father?" Grinning, she explained and soon the word had spread throughout the ship-the wife of a Yugoslavian government official, later exaggerated to the ambassador to the U.S.A., had been rescued by the Roper. The Roper was named after a nineteenth century naval hero, Jesse Sims Roper. When it was announced that Mrs. Mohorovicic had decided to name her baby Jesse Roper Mohorovicic, the crew, to a man, almost burst with pride. A sum of $200 would be raised for the baby that night by the bluejackets.

All night long and well into the morning, Howe and his officers and crew continued to ignore their own peril to keep searching. More lifeboats were found but no more survivors. Despite the tragic circumstances, there was a light mood aboard the Roper. Children raced up and down the narrow corridors of the destroyer and young women- nurses from South Africa and Holland- stopped to smile and talk with the bedazzled crewmen. Late that night, the Roper proudly entered Norfolk harbor with sixty-nine survivors from the City of New York. It was to be, perhaps, the proudest moment in the existence of the old warship.

The Roper's crew were given exactly one day to savor their accomplishment, and then the Roper was sent out once more to take up the same patrol. Five days later, she returned, leaking again, her crew exhausted and frustrated and, in many ways, defeated. The Roper had seen more burning freighters and tankers, had passed through massive oil slicks, drifting wreckage and floating bodies, but had managed only a few sound contacts. Howe was intensely aware that since the Roper had first gone on patrol, thirty freighters and tankers had been sunk in his patrol area. The U-boats were as invulnerable as ever.”

Regards,

Ken Dunn