Just finished reading this book, which is a historical novel based on the saga of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13), which suffered massive damages from kamikaze attacks towards the end of World War II, yet survived.
How I got the book is kind of interesting. It just showed up in the mail one day in a package from Richard Don Simms from Fort Worth, who I have never met. A note inside the book said that it was being presented in memory of Mr. Simms' father Omer Dee Sims, who was killed in action on the Franklin, in an effort to share his father's story, and there was a picture of Mr. Simms, age 7, in a sailor suit with his dad taken while his dad was home on leave shortly before the attack. It also had a video enclosed about the author, Dr. Prato, who was a sailor on an escort carrier in 1946 when he heard the story of the Franklin from shipmates. I am assuming that it was sent to me because I had written a book on the class of carriers that the Franklin belonged to in 1997 (Essex Class Carriers in action, by Squadron Signal).
The book itself is a historical novel about the stories of several sailors on the Franklin from her commissioning through her reconstruction after the March 19, 1945 attack, with the overall story drawn largely from the carrier's deck and action logs. As best I can tell, all the characters are real sailors with the exception of the central character, who is fictional, but through whom the story of countless sailors is told. In this sense, the book is similar to movies like Titanic and Pearl Harbor where the historical setting is a backdrop to a fictional story. No objections from me there - great storytelling device. There are a few historical errors, but they are minor, and the larger errors (communications during battle between admirals via phone, carriers within sight of the islands they were attacking) are storytelling devices as well.
If you like 1940's-style war movies, you'll probably like this book. The dialogue is vintage 1940's. Actually, that's pretty kind - the dialogue is nothing anyone anywhere ever said. Characters are saying sentences no one would actually say out loud, and using words no one ever uses outside a political speech, and there are conversations between captains, chiefs, and admirals that are simply not believable. But there's a reason for all of them - exposition. The admirals have conversations to explain the setting of the war, albeit phenomenally clumsily. I just can't believe Marc Mitscher and Raymond Spruance stand around wondering out loud what Admiral Nimitz will say when he arrives for a meeting. The most bone-jarring example of this is when a captain, when told that a fighter squadron is made up of former members of VMF 214, exclaims "VMF 214? Why wasn't that Greg 'Pappy" Boyington's squadron?" You can say that in text - but no one would every say it in dialogue. And the enlisted men and ship's officers have conversations primarily to express feelings and emotions that the author needs conveyed. It isn't that no one would ever think these things - it's that much of it would remain unsaid. It would be expressed without words, and the author would have to explain what the characters were thinking. Here the author just puts it all into expository dialogue.
But that's really kind of the strength of the book as well. Because the conversations are so unbelievable that after a little while you start disregarding what they're saying completely, and regarding the dialogue as simply what the characters are feeling - it's a cartoon version of something that really happened, but after all - it did really happen. And if the sailors didn't speak as openly about their fears as the book has it, what they say does tell you what they were thinking. And that's what I liked about the book - I really got interested in the characters because I could tell what they were thinking. The chief character, Gunner John Oxler falls in love at first sight in the book and ends up marrying the girl before the Franklin leaves for her second cruise. Their feelings for each other are clear, from his gnawing doubts that she'll wait for him to his intense desire for her when she isn't there, to her fears that he won't come back, and often well written, even if the dialogue is, again, woefully inadequate to convey them at times. One example - after the Franklin is damaged, John is able to place a phone call to Sandy to let her know he's alright. She knows, courtesy of a handy plot device, that his ship was horribly damaged, but doesn't know if he's okay. The dialogue that ensues when he wakes her up at 2am is just awful - she doesn't break down into hysterics that he's okay, but instead immediately starts making small talk about how his friends are getting along. But I pretty much skipped it because I could picture what it would really have been like. In other words, I bought into the story and the characters, and just mentally tuned out the dialogue they were forced to say - the dialogue turned into a sort of stock ticker at the bottom feeding me the facts the author wanted me to have. It's a little like watching a soap opera or reading poetry - you have to disconnect what you're actually reading or watching in order to actually relate to it. If that makes any sense. Paradoxically, if the dialogue were somewhat better it would make it harder to do - here it's so bad that I just mentally rewrote what was being said as I read it to preserve the illusion that I was really there when all this was happening. Because I cared about the characters and their story. And felt a little sorry that they had such a difficult script to tell their story through. So I pretty much just watched the characters and read the subtitles after a while, and ignored what they were actually saying.
In the end, I'm glad that I went ahead and finished the book, because this is a story of courage and sacrifice that really deserves to be told. And told, and told again. No one will confuse this with Walter Lord's "Incredible Victory" about Midway or any of the other great war fiction, but I did learn a lot from it about what the sailors were thinking and worrying about and suffering through. While movies and television (I'm thinking primarily "Band of Brothers" here) can tell you a lot about what these men went through, you need the written word to tell some of it, and this book does help with that. I feel like I understand a little better what life on a ship in war is like.
There are lots of great histories out there, but not a lot of good fiction that fleshes out the dry facts of who did what and when. We need to remember that these people didn't act in a vacuum - they suffered from intense fear, if nothing worse, and had to overcome it. One of the best parts of the book (and good dialogue, to boot) is when a sailor can't stay at his post during air attacks - even drills - because he is so afraid. Eventually he accepts what the chaplain tells him - that when it's his time it's his time, but when it isn't, it isn't, and plays a crucial role in saving the ship when it is burning after the attack. One of the officers foreshadows this chapters before, pointing out that they never really know until the time comes what burly sailor will break down and fall apart under pressure, and which mousy sailor will "stand tall". Oxler works to keep the fearful sailor from committing suicide and tries to put him in a less stressful situation, all the while worrying that he'll be a liability when the times comes, and when the moment comes, the sailor realizes that he can only die once, and he might as well do what he can in whatever time he has left. That story is never a part of the written history of battle, and leaves us with the impression that these men just went about their work matter of factly, regardless of the danger, when the truth was that most of them were scared to death, and often fighting harder against the fear in their gut than they were against the Japanese. What they did was remarkable - but that they did it under this invisible attack as well is what we need to recognize. And this book helps do that.