Sea duty

Jacland Marmur, sometime pulp writer, wrote extensively about the sea. When WW II came, he moved to the US Navy's fighting in the Pacific. His short stories, some longish,show a familiarity with naval issues, warfare, ships, and sailors. However, the stories were written while the war was going on and, as few now recall, few then thought winning was guaranteed. Thus, his stories are usually pretty upbeat, even when a US ship is sunk. A couple of quibbles: His officers, young and old, are almost always Academy grads. There were not that many. And Marmur loved his torpedoes. Torps were important in surface action, not just for subs. And when a US ship fired a spread, Marmur would have it that the target usually caught one or two. Marmur could not say that US torps were frequently faulty, to a criminal extent, and even when they worked were inferior to the dreaded "long lance" the Japanese used. That said, the shorts each have a separate theme. The most affecting is about a Phillipino mess steward. As Marmur says, even a small dream of a small man is the world to that man and when it is ruined, his world is destroyed. This is a good book well written with a view of a time long gone. Read it.