Robert P. Slaff faced three choices as a 17-year-old Navy recruit in 1940. One: become a parachute rigger. He balked, however, at testing his skill by jumping with a personally rigged chute. He also froze at choice number two, studying weather in the Arctic. So that's why he became a crewman on one of the Navy's 167 "nonrigid airships," known commonly as blimps.

Slaff spent most of the war patroling the Gulf of Mexico and the North and South Atlantic looking for German submarines which had sunk dozens of merchant ships carrying critical wartime supplies. His job was to drop bombs on any submarine spotted. But the subs never took the bait.

"I didn't drop any bombs on anybody and I didn't kill anybody," he says, "but we were very effective. We didn't get a lot of press or anything, but we did our job."

He's right. In an unheralded success of the war, once those 300-foot blimps took to the skies merchant ship losses to submarines in the Atlantic dropped to zero.