Thomas F. (hardtack) -
Helpful Score: 1
This is a very good book about life on a small destroyer escort during World War II. The author, who served on the USS Abercrombie from her commissioning until the end of the war and final separation in the U.S, more than adequately relates what makes a ship function day by day. He also takes great care to ensure that the reader understands that a ship is more than metal, but flesh and blood. It is the men who make the ship. He takes you through the process of how men from all walks of life, come together to become a crew who identify with each other and the ship itself.
He doesn't pull any punches and exposes all the problems and quirks these men have, that at times threaten the integrity of the crew and its performance. By the middle of the book, the reader has also come to identify with the crew and know the men aboard the ship.
The USS Abercrombie was only commissioned in May 1994, but by war's end had seen it all, from the dull days and nights when men ached for action, to the weeks on picket line around Okinawa when the kamikazes just kept coming without letup and the men prayed for an hour's rest and a hot meal.
If you are well read in the Pacific War of World War II, you know of the losses around Okinawa from the Japanese kamikazes, but never has a book, as this one does, so thoroughly depicted what the men of the U.S. Navy went through in those endless weeks on station. There were times, while reading the long chapter on Okinawa, that my mind would blank out as I read of one attack after another. But all I did was read about it, those men lived it. They didn't change their clothes, they slept at their duty stations, when they could sleep, they watched the planes coming in despite seemingly impenetrable walls of anti-aircraft fire, and they watched ships and men die. For that alone I highly recommend this book.
He doesn't pull any punches and exposes all the problems and quirks these men have, that at times threaten the integrity of the crew and its performance. By the middle of the book, the reader has also come to identify with the crew and know the men aboard the ship.
The USS Abercrombie was only commissioned in May 1994, but by war's end had seen it all, from the dull days and nights when men ached for action, to the weeks on picket line around Okinawa when the kamikazes just kept coming without letup and the men prayed for an hour's rest and a hot meal.
If you are well read in the Pacific War of World War II, you know of the losses around Okinawa from the Japanese kamikazes, but never has a book, as this one does, so thoroughly depicted what the men of the U.S. Navy went through in those endless weeks on station. There were times, while reading the long chapter on Okinawa, that my mind would blank out as I read of one attack after another. But all I did was read about it, those men lived it. They didn't change their clothes, they slept at their duty stations, when they could sleep, they watched the planes coming in despite seemingly impenetrable walls of anti-aircraft fire, and they watched ships and men die. For that alone I highly recommend this book.
