José Ferrer paid tribute to the long-serving regulars—“…you can’t be good in the Army or Navy unless you’re goddamn good,”—and then tossed a drink in Fred MacMurray’s face in the film version of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Forty-one years later at another dinner, the Naval Institute’s 121st Annual Meeting and Seminar at Annapolis, Herman Wouk packed the house—and brought it down repeatedly. The World War II naval officer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, who went on to write The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance, held his audience spellbound. That night’s spontaneous applause and laughter may be missing from what follows, but the insights of a great writer who also is an eloquent speaker shine forth in these extemporaneous remarks.
I was signing books today at the Naval Institute’s book store, something I haven’t done in 30 or 40 years, but the Navy is different. I must have signed about 100 copies of the Naval Institute’s special edition of The Caine Mutiny, and I was thinking to myself, well, after all, here is sure immortality for a work of fiction. But then I remembered the other side of the picture.
Not very long ago a gentleman named Alan Dershowitz, the wild-haired legal light who is a member of the squadron of lawyers escorting O. J. Simpson through his ordeal, told me a story. Alan teaches at Harvard Law School, and when I met him recently—he’s an old friend of mine—he said to me, “Herman, I don’t know what’s becoming of the students who go to law school these days. For years I’ve taught first-year law, and, of course, I’ve used the court writings in Dostoevski’s great novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and I’ve also used The Caine Mutiny. And do you know, in this year’s class, nobody had heard of The Caine Mutiny?” He must have seen how my face fell because he said, “Don’t worry, they haven’t heard of Dostoevski either.”
The overwhelming tribute to this early work of mine is most gratifying, but I have to tell you that The Caine Mutiny did not, at its outset, have this kind of reception in the United States Navy.
Grave reservations were vocally expressed at this model of imperfection (Captain Queeg), who was presented realistically as a Regular naval officer. Now, the turn came when Admiral Fechteler, who was then Chief of Naval Operations, was speaking at a banquet like this one.[1] During the question-and-answer period one courageous soul raised his hand and asked: “Admiral, have you read this new novel, The Caine Mutiny, about the Navy?”
The Admiral said, “Yes, I have.” The brave officer persisted, “What did you think of it, Admiral?” And the Admiral growled, “Well, in a long naval service, I’ve met every one of those sons of bitches but never all on one ship.” Well, the boss man had spoken and The Caine Mutiny was in.
But there was still another barrier that the old Caine had to cross, and that was Hollywood. My wife Sarah and I were then a very young couple with a baby, and I was anxious for a movie sale. The major studios wouldn’t touch it because there seemed to be no chance of getting naval cooperation for a film about Captain Queeg. But an enterprising young producer, Stanley Kramer, offered us a very modest deal with a still more modest option. In other words, we were paid a small amount for a six-month option; then, if he decided he wanted the book, I would get a sum—which at that time meant a lot to us—for the rights.
However, there was a catch. I had to get naval cooperation for the filming of The Caine Mutiny! Well, my baby was hungry, and so were we. I went to the Navy, to the public relations department, and spoke with the admiral there. He was not all that anxious to lay his head on the chopping block for saying, “Okay, let’s film The Caine Mutiny." So we had an unsuccessful discussion, some talk of making Queeg a Reserve, notions like that.
I went home and, discouraged, told Sarah, no deal. And I wrote Kramer a letter saying, “I’m very sorry, I believe Navy cooperation is quite impossible; I think our deal is off, and I’m perfectly willing to return your advance.” The next day, Kramer exercised the option and grabbed the rights, obviously assuming I’d gotten a better deal from someone else. That was the origin of the film.
And, of course, ever since then—thanks, I think, in part to the magnificent performance of Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg—I can say that, even though he’s my own creation, he’s passed into legend. I’ve heard from all over the world, from people who say, “I personally served under that guy.”
I’ve heard it here in the United States from the Air Force, from the Army, from the Coast Guard. I heard from an airman in England who wrote, “How the hell did you find out about Wing Commander So-and-So?”
I want to talk tonight about another commanding officer whom I created. Again, people often say to me, “I know that guy, I served with him,” or “Victor Henry, Pug Henry—he’s a friend of mine.” But nobody knows who he was except me, and now you’re going to hear the story and how I thought of him.
When The Caine Mutiny first came out and Admiral Fechteler had yet to give it his imprimatur, I got a letter from a gent who is gone now, may he rest in peace—Rear Admiral Dan Gallery. Some of you may have known him—an original, very brilliant officer, the one who captured the (German) U-boat, U-505, and brought it back to our shores; the submarine that is now at Chicago’s Science and Industry Museum. Dan wrote me, “I don’t care what they’re saying, this is a great book and I’d like to meet you,” and we became very good friends. When I told him years later that I was working on a major panoramic book about World War II in which Leyte Gulf would be a prominent part, he said, “Well, if you’re going to write about Leyte Gulf, you should talk to Mick Carney because he was Halsey’s chief of staff.”[2]
So I went and visited Mick Carney in his home in Georgetown. About the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Mick spoke the straight Halsey line: “Given the information at the time, he couldn’t have made any other decisions.” If we have a question-and-answer period, we can discuss that. But then he said, “So you’re writing about World War II and about the Navy’s part in it. I want to tell you a story. When I arrived at Pearl Harbor for a new tour of duty shortly before the war, I went to see Admiral James Richardson who had just been recalled as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet after recommending that the Pacific Fleet be pulled back to the West Coast because of the way it was exposed in Pearl Harbor.”
Of course, at the time Mr. Churchill wanted the fleet advanced to Singapore so as to overawe the Japanese. Neither Admiral Richardson’s advice nor Churchill’s was acceptable to FDR, Singapore being impossible and the West Coast being politically impossible as well, and so Admiral Richardson was recalled. He said to Carney, “I want you to know something: there’s a war coming, it’s absolutely inevitable, and you guys are going to fight it. We’re too old; we’ll be out to grass. You had better understand what the situation is here in the fleet. We don’t have the torpedo depots far forward. We don’t have the logistical infrastructure. I have grave doubts about the torpedoes that we have.” And he proceeded to tell Carney, then a commander, everything that was wrong with the situation in the Pacific and the danger to which the Navy and, therefore, the United States, was exposed.
Carney said to me, “This was a turning point in all my days, this conversation with Admiral Richardson. I suddenly realized where I was and where I was heading with my life. I was a go-go career officer, I was regarded as a comer, and that had been my life until then. With this conversation, I all at once realized that I was also responsible for the safety of the United States of America. That changed my whole way of thinking about myself, my career, and my aspirations.”[3]
And that was when I got the flash of the character who became Victor Henry. Victor Henry is not a great leader. He is no Mick Carney, destined for CNO. He goes through the entire war, he has various posts, he has many disappointments, he misses one blue-water assignment after another because he’s diverted into diplomatic jobs which he does well. The characteristic of Victor Henry, this comer who never quite makes it, is that he does things so well that he’s given things that do not necessarily lead straight to flag rank. He reaches flag rank, but he is not a naval officer whom anybody would ever have heard of, had I not created him and made him a hero of The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.
He’s not a brilliant strategist like Raymond Spruance. He’s not a celebrated, flamboyant leader like William Halsey. What he is, is a backbone naval officer, and it is the Victor Henrys who create the victories for the Spruances and the Halseys.
I don’t have to tell anybody in this room of the troubles that the Navy has been through in recent years, and these are endemic troubles of armed services. But because of the Victor Henrys, the Navy sails on and will—and with another word or two concerning the larger situation which the Victor Henrys may think about when they’re off-duty, I will close these remarks.
On the United Nations at the entrance are carved the words, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
You and I look at the television day by day and read the headlines about the events in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in the Middle East, in the Far East, and we hear of terrible events that don’t even surface in the headlines, and this carving seems like a cruel mockery of reality.
There are really two views of war which come down to us in our Western cultural heritage. There is the view of Thucydides, the first and I think still the greatest of true historians. It stems from the Greek rational view of human nature, of mankind, and of society. He traces the Peloponnesian War to completely realistic facts, the confrontation of Athens and Sparta, the unstable balance between them, which led to the kicking off of a war with all the things that happen in war: reversal of alliances, bullying of the weak by the strong, shifts and counter shifts of events, great invasions, invasions that succeed, invasions that fail. The book of the Peloponnesian Wars is not finished, but what comes out of this unfinished masterpiece, is a sense of deep pessimism about the possibility of war ever ceasing. It seems to be built into human nature and human society.
But we inherit another view of war. It is those words carved at the entrance to the United Nations: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more,” or in the Hebrew:
This same view of war is expressed in Psalms, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” It is spoken again in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
We look around us and we wonder, where lies the tilt in the balance between these two diametrically opposed views, which seem equally powerful insights into human nature and human aspiration? A son of mine lives in Israel and has fought in the Israeli Navy. My grandson, Barak—4-1/2 years old—flew here last week with his parents to celebrate the Passover with us. When he grows up, by a supreme paradox he will probably serve in an armed service that speaks Hebrew, the language of Isaiah, who said, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
And if you ask me where do I come down on this clash of views, I say to you, that as a historian and a realist Thucydides is my great teacher, but as a simple man of faith, my prophet is Isaiah.
After graduating from Columbia University in 1934, Herman Wouk worked in radio and wrote for the Fred Allen Show from 1936 to 1941. He joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor and reported on board the destroyer-minesweeper USS Zane (DMS-14) in February 1943 at New Caledonia. In an earlier life, she had been a “flush decks and four pipes” destroyer with a different hull number (DD-337). Later, he transferred to a sister ship, the USS Southard (DMS-10), formerly DD-207, and was her executive officer at war's end. He took part in eight Pacific invasions—including Rendova. Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Guam, Tinian, and Okinawa—earning several battle stars while serving on the two vessels. He began writing The Caine Mutiny, for which he was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in June 1949 while on a reserve training cruise on board the USS Saipan (CVL-48). He is one of America’s most widely read writers, and his most recent historical novels—The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994)—delineate Israel’s early embattled years.
[1] Admiral William M. Fechteler, Chief of Naval Operations 1951-1953.
[2] Admiral Robert B. Carney, Chief of Naval Operations 1953-1955.
[3] Admiral Carney’s recollections of his meeting with Admiral Richardson can be found in Air Raid: Pearl Harbor!, edited by Paul Stillwell and published by the Naval Institute Press in 1981, page 49.