The Caine Mutiny

Any recent book of military history is likely to contain the remark that by the beginning of 1944 World War II was really won. Quite rightly, too. The great turning points, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Midway, and Stalingrad, were in the past. Italy had surrendered. The murdering Germans were at last recoiling. The Japanese, their meager power spread thin over a swollen empire, had begun to crack. The industrial power of the Allies was coming to flood; that of their enemies was waning. It was a bright picture.

But Ensign Keith had a worm’s-eye view of the war remarkably different from that of the post-war historians. Standing in the black cold wheelhouse of the Caine at midnight on New Year’s Eve, as the ship plowed its old snout through the murky sea toward the west, he took a very gloomy view of the world situation.

In the first place, he decided, he had been an idiot to go into the Navy instead of the Army. Russia was doing the real dirty work in Europe. The smart man’s place in this war—unlike the last—was in the infantry, wallowing in idleness in England while the asses who had taken refuge in the Navy tossed on sickening seas, on the way to assault the terrible barrier of the Japanese mid-Pacific islands. His destiny now was coral and blasted palms and spitting shore batteries and roaring Zeros—and mines, hundreds of them, no doubt—and the bottom of the sea, perhaps, in the end. Meantime his opposite numbers in the Army would be visiting Canterbury Cathedral or the birthplace of Shakespeare arm in arm with pretty English girls, whose good will toward Americans was already a global legend.

It seemed to Willie that the war against Japan would be the largest and deadliest in human history, and that it would probably end only in 1955 or 1960, upon the intervention of Russia, a decade after the collapse of Germany. How could the Japanese ever be dislodged from their famed “unsinkable carriers,” the chain of islands, swarming with planes which could massacre any approaching fleet? There would be, perhaps, one costly Tarawa a year. He was sure he was headed for the forthcoming one. And the war would drag on at that rate until he was bald and middle-aged.

Willie didn’t have a historian’s respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn’t know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.

He was on his way to fight in battles as great as any in the histories. But these would appear to him mere welters of nasty, complicated, tiresome activity. Only in after years, reading books describing the scenes in which he had been engaged, would he begin to think of his battles as Battles. Only then, when the heat of youth was gone, would he come to warm himself with the fanned-up glow of the memory that he, too, Willie Keith, had fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.

For two days the Caine wallowed through gray cold rainy weather. There was the usual eating of damp sandwiches while clinging to stanchions, and sleeping in fits between pitches and rolls. Contrasted to the golden days of shore leave, this spell of misery seemed worse to the officers and crew than any they had ever undergone. There was a general feeling that they were all damned forever to a floating wet hell.

On the third day they broke into the sunny blue of the South Seas. Dank pea jackets, sweaters, and windbreakers vanished. Officers in creased khakis and crew in dungarees began to look familiar to each other. Furniture was unroped. Hot meals were resumed at breakfast time. The pervading gloom and taciturnity gave way to a freshet of laughing reminiscence and boasts about the leave period. In a way, the shorthandedness of the crew helped the recovery process. Those who had preferred court-martial to further adventures with Captain Queeg were the crafty, the discontented, the easily discouraged. The sailors who had returned to man the Caine were jolly boys, ready to take the bad with the good, and fond of the old ship, however heartily and horribly they cursed it.

On this day Willie took a mighty leap upward in life. He stood the noon-to-four watch as officer of the deck. Keefer was present to correct any disastrous mistake, and Captain Queeg himself perched in his chair throughout the watch, alternately dozing or blinking placidly in the sunshine. Willie conducted a faultless watch. It was a simple matter of staying on station in the screen while the convoy zigzagged. Whatever his inner shakiness, he kept a bold front, and maneuvered the ship firmly. When the watch was over he penciled in the log:

He had signed many logs for port watches, but this was different. He put an extra flourish to his signature, and thrilled as though he were entering his name in a historic document.

In a state of quiet exaltation, he went down the ladders to the wardroom, and ripped merrily into a stack of decoded messages. He kept at it until the new steward’s mate, Rasselas, a sweet-faced, pudgy colored boy with huge brown eyes, touched his arm and begged permission to lay the table for dinner. Willie folded away his codes, poured a cup of coffee from the Silex, and lay on the wardroom couch with his legs up, sipping. The radio was purring a Haydn quartet; the boys in the radio shack had not yet noticed and strangled it. Rasselas spread a fresh white cloth, and clinked the silver into place. From the pantry, where Whittaker in his new khaki uniform of a chief steward lorded it over the mess boys, there floated an aroma of roast beef. Willie sighed with contentment, and snuggled in the corner of the gently rocking couch. He looked around at the wardroom, freshly sprayed with a light green paint, its brown leather fittings renewed, the brass polished, the chairs gleaming. After all, he said to himself, there were worse places in the world than the wardroom of the Caine.

The other officers came straggling in, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, good-humored, and hungry. All the old jokes were brought out. They seemed funny and gay to Willie: Harding’s procreative fertility, Keefer’s novel, the foulness of the ship’s fresh water (“Paynter’s Poison”), Maryk’s New Zealand girl of the seven warts, and, latest of all, Willie Keith’s stature as a Don Juan. The officers and sailors of the ship had caught glimpses of May Wynn during the overhaul, and her voluptuousness had become a matter of fable. Linked with the remembrance of the pretty nurses who had visited Willie in Pearl Harbor, the appearance of May had established for the ensign a reputation for mystic power over women.

It was a fine new topic for wardroom banter. Sex was the subject, therefore anybody could be a comedian. A properly timed grunt was a great witticism. Willie for his part was delighted. He protested, and denied, and pretended to be vexed, and kept on prolonging the joke long after the others were ready to drop it; and sat down to dinner in very high spirits indeed. He felt a warm bond with the other officers, made stronger by the presence of the two bashful newcomers, Jorgensen and Ducely. He realized now how green, how intrusive, he and Harding must have seemed five months ago to the vanished Gorton, Adams, and Carmody. He put a spoonful of pea soup to his lips, and at that instant the ship passed over a high swell and pitched violently. He noticed the practiced motion of his arm with which he neutralized the pitching and kept the spoon from spilling even a drop; and he uttered a low happy laugh, and drank it off.

After dinner he said to Ducely, as the fragile-looking ensign was about to leave the wardroom, “Let’s have a walk on the forecastle, shall we? Have to start talking about communications sometime.”

They stepped through the door of the forecastle into a cool purple twilight. The only brightness was a patch of fading gold in the west. “Well, Ducely.” Willie rested one leg on the starboard bitts, and leaned on the life lines with both hands, enjoying the flow of the salt wind. “Getting used to the Caine?”

Willie turned an annoyed glance at the ensign. “I suppose so. Every ship has good points and bad—”

“Oh, of course. I guess there isn’t much to do on one of these old rattletraps, which is something. And then I suppose we’ll spend most of our time in Navy yards getting patched up, which suits me, too. If it only weren’t so cramped and filthy! The wardroom is like a chicken coop.”

“Well, you get more or less used to it, Ducely. I guess you don’t like the clip shack too much, eh?”

“It’s revolting. I almost died in there the first night. Why, that stack gas!”

“In the ship’s office, on the half deck. Nobody uses it at night. I have a folding cot. It’s swell in there. Real airy.”

This information irritated Willie extremely. “I don’t think the captain will approve of that. He’s very particular about—”

“I asked him, sir. He said I could sleep anywhere that I could find six vacant feet.”

Willie said to himself that he would be damned. He had suffered five months without thinking of this simple escape. “Hm. Well, now, you’re supposed to assist me in communications, and—”

“I’ll be glad to try, sir, but I don’t know beans about communications—”

“Practically nothing, sir. You see, my—that is, I got a direct commission into the Navy. My mother owns most of a shipyard in Boston, and so—the whole thing is just a mess. Just one letter of the alphabet fouled me up—one letter. When they were making out my commission they asked me whether I wanted to be an S or a G. I didn’t know. They said S meant Specialist and G meant General. So I asked which was better and they said that a G was regarded as much superior. So naturally, I asked for G. That was my mistake. My God, it was all arranged. I was supposed to go into Public Relations. I did, too. But I got ordered to some hole down in Virginia. And suddenly one day this directive came through saying that all ensigns designated G were to be sent out to sea. It all happened so fast there just wasn’t a thing my mother could do about it. So, here I am.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. Public Relations is worse than the Caine, I think. The paper work! If there’s one thing I’m no good for, it’s paper work.”

“Too bad. Communications is all paper work, Ducely. You’ll just have to get good at it—”

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, sir,” said Ducely with a resigned sigh. “Naturally, I’ll do my best. But I’m just not going to be worth a damn to you—”

“No. And what’s worse, I’m absent-minded. I can’t remember where I’ve put a paper two seconds after I’ve laid it down.”

“Beginning tomorrow you’ll get yourself a typing course from Jellybelly and learn to type—”

“And I think you’d better get started on decoding right away. Do you have a watch tomorrow morning?”

“Fine. Meet me in the wardroom after breakfast and I’ll show you the codes—”

“I’m afraid that’ll have to wait, sir. Tomorrow morning I have to finish my officers’ qualification assignment for Mr. Keefer.”

It had grown dark now, and the sky was crowded with stars. Willie peered at the dim face of his assistant and wondered whether he himself had ever seemed such a mixture of effrontery and stupidity. “Well, stay up a little late tonight and finish your assignment.”

“The hell with it. Get a good night’s sleep by all means,” said Willie. He started to walk away. “We’ll start decoding in the afternoon. Unless, of course, you have something more important to do.”

“No, sir,” said Ducely, with bland sincerity, tagging after him, “I don’t believe I have.”

“Great,” said Willie. He twisted the dogs on the forecastle door viciously, motioned his assistant through, and slammed the door with a clang that was heard in the after crew’s quarters.

This force will assault and capture Kwajalein Atoll and other objectives in the Marshall Islands, with the purpose of establishing bases for further attacks to the westward—

Willie stared at the blotchy mimeographed words. He tossed aside the thick operation order and snatched a war atlas from the bookshelf. Turning to a map of the Central Pacific, he saw that Kwajalein was the largest of the atolls, in the very heart of the Marshalls, surrounded by Jap strongholds. He whistled.

Official mail was heaped two feet high on his bunk. He had dumped the tumbled mass of envelopes stamped with crimson secrecy warnings out of three gray mail sacks which lay crumpled on the deck. The stuff had accumulated in Pearl Harbor for a month. It was all his now, to log, file, and be responsible for; his first batch of secret mail since inheriting Keefer’s job.

Willie threw a blanket over the rest of the mail and brought the operation order up to the captain. Queeg was in the cabin on the main deck which had formerly housed two officers. It had been altered at the Navy Yard under his careful direction so that it contained one bed, a wide desk, an armchair, a lounge seat, a large safe, and numerous speaking tubes and squawk boxes. The captain paused in his shaving to riffle through the sheets, dripping soap on them. “Kwajalein, hey?” he said casually. “Kay. Leave this stuff here. You’ll discuss this with nobody, of course, not even Maryk.”

When Willie began to log and file the mail he made unpleasant discoveries. Keefer had turned over to him a set of dog-eared ledgers and the keys to the filing cabinet, and had offhandedly added several handfuls of secret mail which lay on the deck of his closet under shoes and dirty laundry. He assured Willie that the correspondence was “meaningless garbage.”

“I’ve been figuring on logging it in when the next batch came. You may as well do it,” he said, yawning. He climbed back on his bunk and resumed reading Finnegans Wake.

Willie found the file cabinet in a hopeless jumble. Letters in it would have been easier to locate had they been stuffed in a gunnysack. The ledgers contained an idiotically complicated system for entering the arrival of mail, using four different notations for each letter. Willie calculated that it would take him five or six solid working days to log the mail. He went to the ship’s office and watched Jellybelly logging tremendous sackfuls of non-secret correspondence. The yeoman typed entries on green form sheets, and in less than an hour disposed of as much mail as Willie had in his room. “Where’d you get that system?” he asked the sailor.

Jellybelly turned a bored, bleary glance at him. “Didn’t get it nowhere, sir. Navy system.”

“How about these?” Willie thrust the ledgers at Jellybelly. “Ever see them?”

The yeoman shrank away from the books, as though they were leprous. “Sir, that’s your job, not mine—”

“Mr. Keefer, he tried half a dozen times to get me to log in that secret stuff. It’s against regulations for an enlisted man to—”

The sailor wrinkled his nose. “Official? Christ, that system would give any yeoman third class a hemorrhage. Mr. Funk, he invented it back in ’40. He give it to Mr. Anderson, he gave it to Mr. Ferguson, he gave it to Mr. Keefer.”

“Sir,” said the yeoman dryly, “don’t ask me why officers do anything. You wouldn’t like my answer.”

In the next weeks Willie overhauled his entire department. He installed standard Navy systems of filing and logging. He burned some sixty obsolete registered publications, and he sorted the rest into order, so that he could find any book in an instant. In this process he caught himself wondering often about Keefer. It became obvious that the novelist had wasted a fearful amount of time in communications. Willie remembered searches for letters or publications that had consumed whole afternoons, searches punctuated with a fire of Keefer’s sour wit about the Navy’s foul-ups. He remembered the communicator bending over the ledgers for hours, cursing. Willie knew that above all things the novelist prized time in which to write and read. He knew, too, that Keefer had the cleverest mind on the Caine. How, then, could this man have failed to see that he was defeating himself and blaming the Navy for his own mistakes? Willie began to look at Keefer with different eyes. The novelist’s wisdom seemed to tarnish a bit.

During the remaining time before the Kwajalein sortie Captain Queeg fell into a curious lassitude. He could be found at almost any hour of the day in his bunk, or at his desk in his underwear, playing with a jigsaw puzzle. He emerged only at night, when they were in port, to watch the movie on the forecastle. At sea, during rehearsal maneuvers, whole days passed when he was not seen on the bridge. He gave orders to the OOD’s through the speaking tube. The rasp of the captain’s buzzer became as common a sound on the bridge as the ping of the sound-search gear. He stopped coming to the wardroom for meals, and ate almost nothing but enormous quantities of ice cream with maple syrup, brought to his cabin on a tray.

The other officers imagined that Queeg was busy memorizing the documents of the operation, but Willie knew better. When he brought decodes to the captain’s cabin he never found Queeg studying any battle plans or books of tactics. His occupation was either sleeping, or eating ice cream, or reading a magazine, or simply lying on his back, staring with round eyes at the overhead. He acted, thought Willie, like a man trying to forget a terrible sorrow. The ensign guessed that perhaps Queeg had had a quarrel with his wife during the overhaul, or else had received bad news of some other kind in the flood of mail. It never crossed the ensign’s mind that the bad news might have been the operation order.

Willie’s attitude toward the coming battle was a mixture of excitement, faint alarm, and a very immediate pleasure at knowing the secret. There was something reassuring in the great bulk of the operation order, in the lengthy catalogue of ships that were to take part, in the very excess of dry detail which made the blurry gray sheets so hard to read. He felt, deep down, that he was pretty safe, venturing out against the Japs under the Navy’s wing.

On a bright warm January day, a horizon-spanning horde of ships swarmed out of the harbors of Hawaii, formed itself into a vast circular pattern, and set a course for Kwajalein.

The armada moved peacefully over the wastes of the sea, through quiet days and nights. There was no sign of the enemy; nothing but rolling waters, blue by day and black by night, an empty sky, and ships of war in every direction as far as the eye could see, steaming in a great majestic diagram under the stars and the sun. Radar, the ghostly measuring rod, spanning empty space accurately to within a few yards, made the preservation of the diagram a simple matter. This vast formation, so precise and rigid, yet so quick and fluid to change course or rearrange itself, a seagoing miracle surely beyond the dreams of Nelson himself, was maintained with careless ease by hundreds of officers of the deck, not one in ten of whom was a professional seaman: college boys, salesmen, schoolteachers, lawyers, clerks, writers, druggists, engineers, farmers, piano players—these were the young men who outperformed the veteran officers of the fleets of Nelson.

Willie Keith was a full-fledged officer of the deck now, and he took for granted all the mechanical aids that eased his task. He did not consider the work easy. He was enormously and continually impressed with his quick-won mastery of the sea, and with his military authority. He prowled the wheelhouse, lips compressed, chin high, forehead puckered in a squinting scowl, shoulders hunched forward, hands clenching the binoculars through which he frequently frowned at the horizon. Histrionics apart, he was a competent OOD. He quickly developed the impalpable nervous feelers, reaching from stem to stern of the ship, which are the main equipment of a conning officer. In five months on the bridge he had picked up the tricks of station keeping, the jargon of communications and reports, and the ceremonial pattern of the ship’s life. He knew when to order the boatswain’s mate to pipe sweepers, when to darken ship, when to call away cooks and bakers in the early morning, when to rouse the captain and when to allow him to sleep. He could gain or lose a few hundred yards by slight changes of rudder or engines, and could calculate course and speed to a new screening station in ten seconds by drawing a single pencil line on a maneuvering diagram. The dense blackness of a rain squall at midnight did not scare him; not while the radar scope picked out the task force for him in a neat pattern of green dots.

The Caine was placed on the right flank of the formation, in the inner anti-submarine screen. Two belts of destroyers surrounded the troop transports, carriers, cruisers, battleships, and landing craft. Each destroyer constantly searched a narrow cone of water for echoes, and the cones overlapped. No submarine could approach the formation without causing telltale pings aboard one of the destroyers. A single screen would have been enough; the double screen was an instance of the American taste for generous safety factors. The Caine was in a position abaft the beam of the guide, where an approach of a submarine was almost impossible, because the attacker would have been committed to a stern chase under water. The minesweeper was therefore a safety factor added to a safety factor. For an American man of war her combat role lacked something of the dash of the Bonhomme Richard attacking the Serapis. Nevertheless she was sailing into the waters of the foe, pinging. Had John Paul Jones been OOD instead of Willie Keith, he could have done no more.

As the attack force steamed slowly through the wheeling days and nights, life aboard the old minesweeper fell into a cycle that repeated with the circlings of the clock. It became more and more clear that a new pattern of living was hardening on the Caine, after the churning flux caused by the change of command.

One morning in Pearl Harbor, just before the sortie, Captain Queeg had seen some cigarette butts mashed on the deck. After excoriating the OOD he had gone to the ship’s office and dictated this document:

Ship’s Standing Order #6–44.

The main deck of this vessel will always be spotlessly clean.
Failure to comply will result in heavy disciplinary action for the entire crew.

P. F. QUEEG

The order was prominently posted. Next morning he found a cigarette butt in a scupper of the forecastle, and canceled all liberty for the crew. During the next couple of days the deck force kept the main deck constantly swept. As soon as the Caine sailed for Kwajalein the order was shelved, and the deck was as dirty as before, except at sweeping times; but one of the deck hands was detailed to keep cleaning the small patch of the deck between the captain’s cabin, the bridge ladder, and the hatchway leading to the wardroom.

This was typical of the new order. The crew with its vast cunning had already charted most of the habits and pathways of the captain. He was moving now in a curious little circle of compliance that followed him like a spotlight, extending to the range of his eyes and ears; beyond that, the Caine remained the old Caine. Now and then the captain would make an unexpected sally out of the circle. A discordant hubbub would ensue, and Queeg’s disapproval would be crystallized on the spot into a new ship’s law. This fresh edict, whatever it might be, was carefully observed—within the circle of compliance; in the rest of the ship it was ignored. It was not a conscious conspiracy. Individual sailors of the Caine would have been surprised at such a description of life aboard their ship. Probably they would have denied its accuracy. The attitude of the crew toward Queeg varied from mild dislike, as a general thing, to poisonous hate in a few men who had run foul of him. He was not without partisans. Outside the circle of compliance life was easier, filthier, and more lawless than ever; anarchy, indeed, tempered only by the rough community rules of the sailors themselves and a certain respect for two or three officers, especially Maryk. There were sailors, those who enjoyed dirt or gambling or late sleeping, who pronounced Queeg the best skipper they had ever known, “just so’s you keep out of his sight.”

It was well known among the crew that Stilwell was the particular object of Queeg’s dislike. The gunner’s mate was suspended in an agony of worry about the letter that Maryk had sent to the Red Cross regarding his mother’s illness. No answer had come yet. The sailor was growing gaunt as the weeks slipped by and he waited for the ax to fall. Every watch he stood at the helm within range of Queeg was torture for him. The sailors who were against Queeg went out of their way to be friendly with the gunner’s mate, and tried to cheer him up; and so the opposition came to center around him. The rest of the crew avoided Stilwell. They feared that the captain’s hatred might spread out to include his cronies.

In the wardroom there were three distinct parties. One was Queeg himself, daily more frosty and secluded. One was Maryk, retreated into a stolid, humorless silence, maintaining whatever contact existed between the captain and his ship. The executive officer saw what the crew was doing. He was aware that it was his responsibility to enforce the captain’s rules; he was also aware that most of the rules were either impossible of enforcement on the overworked, overcrowded, rough-minded crew, or enforceable only at an unacceptable cost to the ship’s narrow margin of seaworthiness. He winked at the circle of compliance, and set himself the task of keeping the ship functioning adequately outside that circle.

The third party included all the other officers, with Keefer as ringleader. A strong open detestation of Queeg began to serve as a bond of affection among them, and they passed hours in sarcastic joking about him. The new officers, Jorgensen and Ducely, quickly absorbed the air of the wardroom and were soon in full cry after Queeg with the rest. Willie Keith was regarded as the captain’s pet, and was the target of much joking for it; and, in point of fact, Queeg was warmer and pleasanter in manner to Willie than to any of the others. But he joined vigorously in satirizing the captain. Maryk alone took no part in the ribaldry. He either kept silence or tried to defend Queeg, and if the jokes became too prolonged he would leave the wardroom.

This was the condition of the U.S.S. Caine when it crossed the mythical line on the broad sea, five days out of Pearl Harbor, and steamed into Japanese waters.

19

The Circle of Compliance

Ship’s Standing Order #6–44.