The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

First published: 1951

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Bildungsroman

Time of plot: 1942-1945

Locale: New York City, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean

Principal characters

• Willie Keith, a young Naval Reserve officer
• Tom Keefer, an intellectual and Keith’s communications officer
• Captain De Vreiss, Keith’s first commanding officer on the Caine
• Steve Maryk, Keith’s fellow officer
• Captain Philip Francis Queeg, the Caine’s second captain and a focus of controversy
• Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, the mutineers’ defense attorney
• May Wynn (Marie Minotti), Keith’s girlfriend

The Story:

Wealthy and sheltered, Willie Keith graduates from Princeton. To avoid Army service, he enters the Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Program shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. A spoiled adolescent, his distinctions are limited to amusing friends by playing piano and inventing clever ditties. Straying from his social reservation, he also begins an infatuation with May Wynn (born Marie Minotti), a hardworking nightclub singer and the daughter of immigrants. In the first of The Caine Mutiny’s six parts, Keith passes into the bizarre world of the Navy, war, and authority. During the next three years, the once callow Ensign Keith acquires the skills of his trade, learns self-reliance, acquiesces to cabals against his superior, becomes a party to a mutiny, and ultimately captains the final voyage of the U.S.S. Caine.

At the outset, however, Keith has difficulty comprehending that there is “a right way, a wrong way, and the Navy way.” Loaded with demerits for his blunders, unclear about the meaning of service or sacrifice, and close to expulsion, he survives his midshipman’s training at Columbia University only by mustering a surprising amount of inner determination. Expecting a soft billet thereafter, he is dismayed by his assignment to the Caine, a lowly, World War I-era destroyer that was converted to a minesweeper.

Keith’s first tour aboard the battle-scarred Caine is a study in mixed signals. Boarding ship as it is being refitted in San Francisco Bay, he meets the aspiring novelist-intellectual Tom Keefer, a communications officer and Keith’s superior officer. Keefer immediately defines himself as a sneering, acerbic critic of the Navy. Keith also meets Steve Maryk, soon to be the ship’s executive officer, who admires Captain De Vreiss. Having just adopted respect for Navy regulations, Keith, however, is appalled by De Vreiss’s lax discipline and slovenly shipkeeping, despite Maryk’s stress on De Vreiss’s superb seamanship and the respect he enjoys among the weary crew. Keith’s estimate of De Vreiss drops lower when Keith’s failure to deliver an important message to De Vreiss leads him to reprimand Keith. Upon transfer of command from De Vreiss to Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, Keith therefore feels relieved and hopeful.

In his mid-thirties, Queeg, though physically unimpressive, is a Naval Academy graduate and a believer in strict adherence to regulations. Behind Queeg is fourteen years at sea and extended combat duty, so to the officers things look promising under their new captain.

Part 3 chronicles the growing estrangement between Queeg and his officers. As the Caine alternates in the Pacific between training exercises, routine convoy duty, and then Keith’s first combat during the Marianas invasion, her officers, led by Keefer, awaken to mounting evidence of Queeg’s indecision, ineptitude in shiphandling, personal quirkiness, and preoccupation with minor disciplinary matters.

A series of episodes casts doubt on Queeg’s fitness for command. Initially maneuvering his ship in harbor, he grazes another vessel and runs the Caine aground. Called to account by his superior, Queeg blames the accident on crewmen. Later, while the Caine conducts a target towing exercise, Queeg, busy reprimanding a seaman for a flapping shirttail, allows the Caine to turn full circle, sever a towline, and sink a valuable target. Again, Queeg puts blame elsewhere. Returning his ship to San Francisco for repairs, Queeg sequesters his officers’ liquor rations and illegally tries smuggling them ashore for himself. The liquor is lost overboard by a boat party in Keith’s charge, and Keith is blamed.

Worse is to come. Responsible for guiding landing craft to an invasion beachhead, Queeg, frightened, drops a yellow marker before the Caine reaches its designated turning point, abandoning troop-filled small craft under fire. Shortly afterward, he fails to aid another ship busy suppressing enemy artillery. Keith and others, in addition, observe Queeg’s habit of seeking the safest place on the bridge during combat. For a minor infraction, Queeg deprives the crew of water for days. Theft of a gallon of Queeg’s strawberries results in turning the Caine inside out in a fruitless search that continues even after the culprits are identified. Meanwhile, at Keefer’s urging, Maryk begins a record of Queeg’s behavior.

At last, convinced that Queeg is psychologically unbalanced, Maryk, citing Navy law and joined by Keith and others, relieves Queeg of command as the Caine threatens to founder in a typhoon. Subsequently charged with mutiny, Maryk (who accepts full responsibility), Keith, Keefer, and other officers are defended reluctantly by Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, an experienced lawyer. Greenwald, with ruthless brilliance, discredits the Navy’s psychological experts who testify to Queeg’s sanity and then leads Queeg to discredit himself thoroughly on the stand. Morally, however, it is a hollow victory. At the acquitted officers’ celebratory party, Greenwald denounces them, damning Keefer in particular as the real cause of the mutiny and the person responsible for making Greenwald ruin Queeg.

Justice is done in the novel’s final section. Queeg is reassigned to ignominious service as executive officer of a Navy depot in Kansas. Placed in command of the Caine, Keefer demonstrates cowardice when he leaps overboard, his manuscript in hand, after a Japanese kamikaze plane crashes into his ship. Keith, by then seasoned and commanding, becomes the last captain of the Caine, sailing her home to decommissioning and destruction, and, despite his mother’s doubts, to renewed romance with May.

Bibliography

Ardolino, Frank. “Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny.” Explicator 67, no. 1 (Fall, 2008): 39-43. Argues that many of the characters are guilty of the mutiny and the novel “demonstrates the difficulty of affixing individual guilt in a complex moral situation.”

Beichman, Arnold W. The Novelist as a Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984. Concentrates on Wouk’s conservatism. There are useful observations on The Caine Mutiny and the questions it raises about authority versus individualism.

Darby, William. Necessary American Fiction: Popular Literature of the 1950’s. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. An insightful analysis of how popular novels such as The Caine Mutiny reflect American values of the decade.

Gerard, Philip. “The Great American War Novels.” World and I 10 (June, 1995): 54-63. Notes that World War II was “the last public event that defined a generation of novelists,” and examines many of these books, including The Caine Mutiny.

Jones, Peter G. War and the Novelist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Uses The Caine Mutiny as an example of how war novels deal with the problems of wartime military command.

Mazzeno, Laurence W. Herman Wouk. New York: Twayne, 1994. One of the best studies of Wouk and his writings. Chapter 3 is devoted entirely to The Caine Mutiny.

Shapiro, Edward S. “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity.” In We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2005. This collection of Shapiro’s previously published essays includes a retrospective review of Wouk’s career. Shapiro argues persuasively that Wouk is concerned principally with defining American Jewish identity.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, eds. Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Includes an entry on Wouk’s life, major works, and themes, with an overview of his critical reception and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Waldemeir, Joseph T. American Novels of the Second World War. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton, 1971. Emphasizes how The Caine Mutiny, among a minority of war novels, commends the subordination of civilian individualism to military authority.