Mister Roberts

Thomas Heggen

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786257314
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The novel, Mister Roberts, was an instant hit after being published in 1946 and was quickly adapted for the stage and screen. The title character, a Lieutenant Junior Grade naval officer, defends his crew against the petty tyranny of the ship's commanding officer during World War II. Nearly all action takes place on a backwater cargo ship, the USS Reluctant, that sails, as written in the play, "from apathy to tedium with occasional side trips to monotony and ennui." This irreverent, often hilarious story about the crew of the Reluctant has enjoyed wide and enduring popularity. Heggen based his novel on his experiences aboard the USS Virgo in the South Pacific during World War II, and began as a collection of short stories. It was subsequently adapted as a play, a feature film, a television series, and a television movie. The film version with Henry Fonda, James Cagney and Jack Lemmon is one of the most well-known movies of WWII.-Print ed."This book is vivid, unimpeachable narrative, with no holds barred. But elders with a distaste for the frankness of the sea and profanity should keep out."—ATLANTIC MONTHLY"The remarkable thing is that such an honest, behind-the-scenes portrayal of the Navy as it usually is—in dungarees rather than dress blues—has never been attempted."—BOOK WEEK
"Mr. Heggen has written a little classic. It invites reading aloud; it stirs vivid memories."—THE NEW YORK TIMES

CHAPTER 1

THERE WERE FOURTEEN OFFICERS on the Reluctant and all of them were Reserves. Captain Morton was a lieutenant-commander, and on the outside had been in the merchant marine, where he claimed to hold a master’s license. Mr. LeSueur, the executive officer, also a lieutenant-commander and also ex-merchant marine, swore that the Captain held only a first mate’s license. Mr. LeSueur was a capable man who kept to himself and raged against the Captain with a fine singleness of purpose. The other officers represented the miscellany of pre-war America. Ensign Keith and Ensign Moulton had been college boys. Lieutenant (jg) Ed Pauley had been an insurance salesman. Lieutenant Carney had been a shoe clerk. Lieutenant (jg) Langston had been a school-teacher. The new mantle of leadership fell uneasily upon these officers. Most of them, feeling ridiculous in it, renounced the rôle altogether and behaved as if they had no authority and no responsibility. Excepting Mr. LeSueur, excepting categorically the Captain, and excepting the Doctor as a special case, there was only one of these Reserves who successfully impersonated an officer, and he least of all was trying to. That was Lieutenant Roberts. He was a born leader; there is no other kind.

Lieutenant Roberts was the First Lieutenant of the Reluctant. The First Lieutenant of a ship is charged with its maintenance; he bosses the endless round of cleaning, scraping, painting, and repairing necessary to its upkeep. In itself the job is a considerable one and in this case the only real one on the ship, but Roberts had yet another job: cargo officer. That was one hell of a job. Roberts was out on deck all the time that the ship was working cargo, and whenever there was a special hurry about loading or discharging, he could figure on three days without sleep. And all the time he was standing deck watches, one in four, day in and out. He got very little sleep. He was a slender, blond boy of twenty-six and he had a shy, tilted smile. He was rather quiet, and his voice was soft and flat, but there was something in it that made people strain to listen. When he was angry he was very formidable, for without raising his voice he could achieve a savage, lashing sarcasm. He had been a medical student on the outside; he loathed the Captain; and all the circumstances of his present station were an agony to him. The crew worshiped him.

They really did. Devotion of a sort can be bought or commanded or bullied or begged, but it was accorded Roberts unanimously and voluntarily. He was the sort of leader who is followed blindly because he does not look back to see if he is being followed. For him the crew would turn out ten times the work that any other officer on the ship could command. He could not pass the galley without being offered a steak sandwich, or the bakery without a pie. At one time or another perhaps ninety per cent of the crew had asked him for advice. If it had been said of him once in the compartment it had been said a hundred times: “The best son-of-a-bitching officer in the goddamn Navy.”

The officers, who lived with Roberts as equals and could therefore judge him less emotionally, felt much the same way. Being less interdependent than the crew, the officers were correspondingly less unified, and were split into at least four definite and mutually exclusive groups. Roberts, although he allied himself with none of these cliques, was ex officio a member of all, and was sought by all. It was unthinkable that Ed Pauley enter the stateroom of Carney and Lieutenant (jg) Billings, and vice versa. The Doctor’s room was forever closed to Ensign Moulton, and vice versa. Langston could sooner pass through a needle’s eye than the doorway to the room of Lieutenant (jg) Gonaud, the supply officer. All of these doors were enthusiastically open to Roberts, and to no other officer. His special friends were Ed Pauley, who had to offer an easy sociability; the Doc, who offered that plus intellectual comradeship; and Ensign Pulver, whose contribution was hard to define. Ensign Pulver thought that Roberts was approximately God, and admired equally and uncritically everything that he did. He was almost shameless in the way, literally and figuratively, that he dogged Roberts’s footsteps. Without ever inviting one or desiring one, Roberts had acquired a disciple.

The only enemy Roberts had was the Captain, who hated his guts. Ed Pauley kept in his room a small chart that listed all of the officers and after their names varying numbers of blue and red crosses. A bluecross represented a direct threat or insult from the Captain, and counted two red crosses. A red cross stood for an insult or slander from the Captain delivered second-hand to someone else. And on this chart Roberts’s name led all the rest, even though his record consisted almost entirely of the red crosses representing hand-me-down calumny. The Captain had a noticeable reticence about upbraiding Roberts to his face.

That would be one obvious reason for the Captain’s hostility toward Roberts; he was afraid of him. He had no hold over Roberts and he knew it. If Roberts had asked once for a transfer, he had asked twenty times, and every time the Captain had turned him down. The Captain had done that out of spite, of course, but also from a sensible awareness of Roberts’s value to the ship. Roberts was irrefutably competent and the Captain hated him for that, too; for Captain Morton was irrefutably and unbelievably incompetent. On two different occasions Lieutenant Roberts had saved the ship in convoy from fairly imminent collisions invited by the Captain’s inept conning. The Captain felt no demonstrable gratitude. He repaid Roberts in the only coin he knew: by haranguing him over trifling details, by calling him names in absentia, and by keeping him aboard the ship. The petty and sneaking abuse merely amused Roberts, but the prison of the ship was an endless torture to him and a mounting despair beyond which, finally, he couldn’t see.

He had been aboard the Reluctant two and one-half years, longer than any other officer. He alone on the ship sincerely wanted to fight the war, and he worked cargo and kept the ship painted and stood watches. He alone sincerely hated the ship, and it lay unbidden in the palm of his hand. He had to get into the war, but in a chaos that blandly reduced imperative to impossible he ran up and down the dreary islands of the back areas. He tried very hard not to let himself get disorganized, and for the most part he succeeded simply by reading a great deal, by talking with his friends, and by working until sleep was unavoidable. Sometimes, though, the pressure inside him became too strong, and then he prowled the ship with an uncontrollable restlessness.

On one such evening Lieutenant Roberts left the movie early. The movies were the great opiate of the ship. They were held every night in port, and everyone attended except the men on watch, and many of them attended too. The screen was rigged on the mast-table forward of number three hatch and the crew sat on the hatch cover and on boxes and a few chairs on the deck. The officers sat regally in chairs on the quarterdeck, the Captain in the center. There was only one projector so that at the end of every reel there was a pause while the new reel was wound on. This was always a noisy period, with much shouting back and forth, much speculation on the heroine’s chastity, and many offers to share her bed. The movies were the one great social function of the ship. No matter how bad they were—and they were consistently bad and always ancient—everyone but Roberts stayed grimly to the end. Roberts could seldom stomach them beyond the fourth reel.

Tonight, because he was restless and because the movie was a surpassingly stupid Western, he quit after the first reel. For a while he walked up and down in the area just abaft the house. Then he went up to the flying bridge and stood for a while looking out over the bay. Then he went down to the wardroom. Out of old habit he looked into the refrigerator in the pantry, found a few olives and ate them. He poured a cup of coffee and drank it. Then he drifted along the passageway looking into each stateroom for someone to talk with. There was no one. Finally he went into Ensign Pulver’s room.

Pulver lived alone in a double room. He slept in the bottom bunk and used the top one as a general file for everything that couldn’t decently be strewn on the deck. It now contained a soiled scivvy shirt, a pair of soiled khaki trousers, an orange, half a dozen books, a thick pile of old magazines, and the harmonica with which Pulver achieved an eerie caterwauling effect on the only two tunes that he knew. Roberts looked now at the books. One of them was Nana which Pulver was currently reading in an English translation. Then he examined the magazine file. Pulver had a well-known faculty for attracting all the loose magazines on the ship. Roberts found a year-old Cosmopolitan that he hadn’t seen, and he stretched out in Pulver’s bunk and started looking through it.

He hadn’t been there long when there were shuffling footsteps and Ensign Pulver came in. Roberts looked up, surprised. He didn’t know anything short of leg chains that could keep Pulver from a movie.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You sick?”

Pulver flopped dejectedly in the chair and locked his hands behind his head. “Hell,” he said, “what a stinking movie!”

“Since when did you object to stinking movies?” Roberts asked.

Pulver looked faintly hurt. “Hell,” he said, “I like a good picture all right, but not one like this. Besides,” he added, “that miserable bastard had a chance to get a really good movie tonight and he took this one instead.”

“Who’s that?”

“The old man. This ship astern of us wanted to trade us Since You Went Away—that’s almost brand-new—and he took this damn shoot-em-up!”

Roberts folded the magazine across his stomach. “Well,” he said “that’s not surprising.”

Pulver said disgustedly: “And he’s sitting up there now chortling and having a big time!”

“That’s to be expected,” Roberts said. “He’s found his own level of entertainment.”

Ensign Pulver shook his head gloomily. “Did you hear what he did today?” he asked suddenly.

“Probably,” Roberts said. “What did he do?”

“He was prowling around the rooms this afternoon and he caught five officers in their sacks. Now—”

Roberts interrupted: “Needless to say you were one of them.”

“Yeah,” said Pulver, “I was one. Now he’s putting out a new order that says all officers will stay out of their sacks during working hours. He told the exec that if they don’t he’s going to have all the mattresses removed during the day and he’s going to take down all the doors so he can walk around and see who’s in bed. Jesus,” said Pulver, “did you ever hear of such a simple bastard?”

Roberts smiled. “He’s certainly simple if he thinks he’s going to keep you out of your sack.”

He had touched upon a sore spot. Although he conscientiously spent better than two-thirds of each day in his bunk, Ensign Pulver always got aggrieved when charged with this. His argument was that he actually slept very little, and that most of his time in bed he was thinking. He answered now a little stiffly, “I’m not in there as much as you think. I’m not in there half as much as Billings!”

Roberts was not disposed to be charitable. “Maybe not”—he conceded nothing. “It’s true that you do get up for meals once in a while!”

“Hell,” said Pulver defensively. He sniffed, rubbed his nose, and minutely examined his fingernails. Then he thought to change the subject.

“What the hell’s the matter with that stupid bastard anyhow?” he asked.

“Which one is that?”

“The Old Man. What’s really the matter with him anyhow?”

Roberts doubled his legs and pushed restlessly against the top bunk. “What’s the matter with Stupid?” he mused. “Oh, mostly that—that h...