The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk
Summary
Willie Keith, a soft Princeton boy piano player, joins the Navy to stay out of the Army and is posted to the USS Caine, a rusted First World War destroyer minesweeper doing the Pacific war's drudge work. The first long stretch is his education in the ship, in work, and in his tangled loyalty to May Wynn, a nightclub singer his mother would never accept.
Then Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg comes aboard as captain, and the novel becomes the study of a small tyrant under pressure: the obsessions over shirttails and rolled steel balls, the ship handled into a towline cut and a dye marker abandoned off a landing beach, the nickname Old Yellowstain, and the midnight inquisition over a missing quart of strawberries, pursued with the full machinery of command while the officers watch their captain come apart.
In December 1944, in the heart of a typhoon that is sinking better ships, Queeg freezes, and the executive officer Steve Maryk relieves him of command under Article 184. The last quarter is the court martial: Barney Greenwald, a Jewish lawyer in civilian life flying for the Navy, wrecks Queeg on the stand to save Maryk, then shows up drunk at the acquittal party and delivers the most argued about speech in American war fiction, indicting the wardroom, and above all the clever Lieutenant Keefer, for destroying a man who had stood the watch for years while they were civilians.
Around five hundred pages, and it reads like a hundred.
Best for readers who want a great popular novel about authority: who deserves it, who cracks under it, and who talks other men into the mutiny they will not sign themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1952. It reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list in August 1951 and stayed there thirty three weeks, one of the great commercial runs in American publishing.
Herman Wouk had served through the Pacific war aboard two destroyer minesweepers, the Zane and the Southard, through typhoons and kamikaze seasons, and the Caine's world of rust, chipping hammers and small tyrannies is drawn from the life; the mutiny itself is invention.
Wouk distilled the trial into a play, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, staged on Broadway in 1954 under Charles Laughton's direction, and the Columbia film the same year gave Humphrey Bogart his Queeg, the hands working the steel balls on the witness stand, and the last Academy Award nomination of his career. Remakes have kept coming, William Friedkin's final film among them in 2023.
Wouk banked the standing it gave him and spent it decades later on The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, his full scale history of the war he had served in.