“My father was a pharmacist’s mate on a submarine during WWII.”
Wow. If you watched that scene in Das Boot where they sprinkled some kind of insecticide powder on some of the sailor privates to kill crabs. I bet your dad had to deal with that kind of stuff too.
He didn't say much about his service--I wish I had asked him for more information. But he could very well have encountered such a problem because he was operating in a tropical climate. And being a pharmacist's mate he would have been the one to deal with this.