We had no TV, so this was the first film I ever saw, and I have vivid memories of that trip to the Capitol Theater in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts. I was 7 years old when my lifelong love affair with Wouk’s World War II story started. During a 1949 training cruise, Wouk, still a reservist, began blending memory and imagination into the novel that would make him famous. He never forgot that storm, or the rest of his war: the anxious superior who rolled toothpicks in his hand, the rancor between regular navy men and reservists, and the personalities that meshed and clashed in ships’ wardrooms. In September 1945, Wouk, by then the Southard’s executive officer, was in line to replace that ship’s captain when a typhoon wrecked the vessel off Okinawa. Wouk fought in the Pacific from early 1943 until the war ended, serving in eight invasions aboard the World War I–era destroyer-minesweepers Zane and Southard. He enlisted immediately after that attack, attending midshipman school at Columbia University and communications school at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Wouk was an established writer by the time of Pearl Harbor. Wouk’s fictional revolt rings true because he was writing from intimate firsthand experience during World War II with the conditions, ships, and character types he portrays. Since then, Wouk’s story has been retold countless times on stage, in film, and on television. The Caine Mutiny earned seven Academy Award nominations. The 1954 film based on the book starred Humphrey Bogart in his least typical and arguably greatest role as Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, the paranoid bully who captains a beleaguered destroyer-minesweeper. Wouk adapted the novel, his third, into a hit play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial became a much-produced classic. This 1951 study of men at war with a foreign foe and with each other spent 122 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny may be the greatest American novel of World War II. Why a classic World War II story always matters.
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