Crossing the Line: A Blue Jacket's World War II Odyssey

by Alvin Kernan

In this memoir of life aboard aircraft carriers during World War II, Alvin Kernan combines vivid recollections of his experience as a young enlisted sailor with a rich historical account of the Pacific war. Kernan served in many battles and was aboard the Hornet when it was sunk by torpedoes in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.“One of the most arresting naval autobiographies yet published.”―Sir John Keegan“An honest story of collective courage, evocative, well-written, and fixed before the colors fade.”― Kirkus Reviews“[Kernan] recounts a wonderful and exciting American story about a poor farm boy from Wyoming who enlisted in the Navy. . . .[He] has written eight other books. I will go back and read them all.”―John Lehman, Air & Space“Details . . . make the moment vivid; that is what it was like, on the Hornet in its last hours.”―Samuel Hynes, New York Times Book Review

Genres: History, Memoir, World War II, Military History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, Naval History

Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Alvin Kernan is Avalon University Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Princeton University. He served in the US Navy, 1941-45. Among his previous books are The Fruited Plain: Fables for a Postmodern Democracy and In Plato's Cave, both published by Yale University Press.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a subgenre of memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, stars of the crew cuts-and-close reading postwar English departments, who in late career attracted general readers with personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer) and Samuel Hynes (Auden biographer, Marine aviator). Seventeen year-old Kernan joined the Navy before the war, to escape the bleakness of Depression Wyoming: Ma and Pa down on the ranch, hard winters and harder times. Kernan’s mother had a particularly difficult life. She killed herself while he was at sea. Home on leave, he inspects her grave “already collapsing and pocked with gopher holes”:

The World War I generation to which she, born in 1900, belonged was the first to leave the land, and with a little education, she married a soldier, moved to town, went to Florida, lost the money from the sale of her father’s farm in the land boom, had a child, divorced, and began wandering—Chicago, Memphis, a ranch in Wyoming. She remarried, became a Catholic, and put a determined face on it all, but she was part of the first generation of really rootless modern Americans, moving restlessly by car about the country, emancipated socially and intellectually to a modest degree, but lost, really, without the supporting ethos and family that had protected people in the years when the continent was being settled. Alienation was the familiar state of my generation of Depression and another world war, but the old people had few defenses against it when it appeared.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos are the favorite writers of young Seaman Kernan. He could be one of their characters. As with Hemingway’s Nick Adams, death-shaded excursions in the American wilds precede and forebode initiation overseas. And Kernan must have recognized his family in Dos Passos’ panorama of the wandering and the unmoored, the war-mobilized, the desperately migratory. The down but not out, bumming the freights, going to sea, following work; displaced but for all that able to dream of landing somewhere better:

Returning from out baseball game, we came alongside the ship and began to send sailors up the gangway. At that moment another landing craft came up carrying officers, including the executive officer of the Suwanee—a small, dark, mean man—who stood up in the bow, dead drunk, shouting in a loud voice to the officer-of-the-deck, “Get those fucking enlisted men out of there and get us aboard.” Protocol was that officers always take precedence in landing, and our boat shoved off immediately, circling while the officers staggered up the gangway after their afternoon drinking in the officers’ club. The gap between enlisted men and officers in the American navy during WWII was medieval. Enlisted men accepted the division as a necessary part of military life, but it never occurred to us that it in any way diminished our status as freeborn citizens who, because of a run of bad luck and some unfortunate circumstances like the Depression, just happened to be down for a brief time. “When we get rich” were still words deep in everybody’s psyche. But the exec’s words, “those fucking enlisted men,” spoke of deep and permanent divisions. He obviously really disliked us, and his words made shockingly clear that he, and maybe the other officers he represented, had no sense that we had shared great danger and won great victories together.

Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, in a paragraph.


Beyond the charm of the Lost Generation atmosphere, the virtues of Crossing the Line are its swift pace and concision of evocation. No episode lasts longer than is necessary to make the essential impressions—usually Kernan’s fear and awe (at times laced with boyish glee) before the military juggernauts whose savage collisions he is witnessing. Kernan did not set out to reconstruct the birth of his literary consciousness, or find the boy in the vitae. Quite the opposite. Seaman Kernan is a small animal in a world of threats. He thinks with his gut, senses through the soles of his feet. If you’ve ever wanted to know how it feels to flee a sinking aircraft carrier, this may be your book:

We stood there debating whether to stay on the flight deck or take our chances below. Two great heavy thuds raised and then dropped the entire ship, all twenty thousand pounds of it: torpedoes hitting home one after another on the starboard side—the death wounds of the ship, though we didn’t know it at the time. The Hornet, turning at a sharp angle, shook like a dog shaking off water but immediately began to lose speed and list to starboard, which was terrifying, for you were alive only so long as the speed was up and the ship was moving. You sense it in the soles of your feet, and it began to feel noticeably different at once, sluggish and dull, the rhythm off, and then another delay-fused bomb went through the flight deck just aft, through the hangar deck, to explode with a sharp sound somewhere deep below, followed by an acrid smell and smoke curling from up out of a surprisingly small hole. The rudder was now jammed, and the ship began to turn in circles. The lights went out, and the hoses stopped putting water on the fires that now were everywhere…

About 1500 the destroyer USS Hughes stretched cargo nets between the two decks. The Hornet sat heavy and still, but the Hughes rolled and pitched wildly. When she came into the Hornet she crushed the net and everything in it between the sides of the two ships. Trial and error taught us the right way to do it. The trick was to jump just as the Hughes began to roll out, being careful that your foot landed on one of the tightening ropes, and not in the holes between, for there wasn’t time to recover and make your way slowly up the loosening net. If you did it right you landed on the rope and its stretch would pop you like a trampoline onto the deck of the Hughes and into the arms of several of her crew. Carrying my pillowcase filled with my contraband pistol and my liberty whites, I leaped for my life and made it with a great bound of exhilaration. Tricky, but better than going into the oily water where anything could go wrong…

The Battle of Santa Cruz was over, and sitting on the deck of the Hughes, cold and exhausted, looking at the smoking carrier sitting there at an odd, lumpy angle, I considered for the first time the possibility that we might lose the war. The Hornet had been such a big and powerful ship, and yet only a few hits in a brief space of time had been enough to finish it.

The sinking of the USS Hornet in October, 1942, was the beginning of the end of Kernan’s first naval career as one of the dungareed Airedales trundling ordnance and pushing planes around the deck under a crew chief's stopwatch. For the war’s last two years he was in the air, the back-seat gunner on a carrier-based Avenger bomber roaring down canyons on Okinawa to sling 500-lb. bombs into the mouths of Japanese caves, or jousting half-blindly above a blacked-out fleet with nocturnal enemy intruders spookily visible only by the tiny blue flames of their engine exhaust and the bright streams of tracer rounds whiplashing through the blackness at you.





A Navy dive bomber over Wake Island, 1943. I first saw this image some years ago, on an Edward Steichen exhibition poster, and ever since it has stood for the poetry and lonesomeness of the flier’s vantage. “A lonely impulse of delight/Drove this tumult in the clouds,” Yeats and all that. Kernan reminds one that the fliers were often witlessly terrified and usually formation-bound; but passages of his account do seem to authorize my projection of reverie. Returning from a mission: “We made our way back to the ship in a golden-green haze, with rainstorms and bright shafts of sunlight in a dozen different places around the horizon. The scene had a magical quality, intensified by the big lift that came from having survived another run.” And: “One day we flew to Manila, a hundred miles or so to the north, to pick up mail. The flight led across the jungles of Samar where, flying a few hundred feet off the ground, we saw back in the forests high waterfalls and huge flowers, ten or fifteen feet across, and small villages at the end of long dirt trails.”


Putting “odyssey” in the subtitle of your memoir seems overblown but here it isn’t. Kernan was everywhere. He made his way home circuitously by islands, if you really want to be pedantic. His first ship, the carrier Enterprise, missed destruction at Pearl Harbor by just hours. He describes sailing into the burning base. Four years later he toured the irradiated rubble of Nagasaki. Between are iconic battles: the Doolittle Raid, Midway, Guadalcanal, Okinawa. I was particularly grateful for a glimpse of the old navy that fought the first year. Until the Cold War, the peacetime services were strange institutions, small, insular, vaguely penal. The crews of 1941 consisted of old hands and salty lifers; jobless kids like Kernan; and a compliment of “incorrigible fuck-ups” whom judges had offered the classic choice: the pen or the service (“healthy but in many respects like a chain-gang” is Kernan’s verdict on navy life during peace).


Joan Didion has said that Honolulu’s red light district belongs to James Jones. That may be true, but Kernan got to me first, and with a story about a hooker who had a tattoo of a mouse disappearing into her public hair. Kernan is no less absorbing on the other naval pastimes, cards and drinking. Poker windfalls could fund quite a spree in port. Kernan’s first crew chief on the Hornet stayed buzzed on “moosemilk”—coffee spiked with the rubbing alcohol used to clean bombsights. One night on Fiji Kernan pulled Shore Patrol (canvas leggings, skullstick, holstered .45 on a web belt) and was ordered to herd a liberty party up a mountain to a run-down old resort hotel whose rumored stock of raw cane whiskey was to be the men’s “first real drink in months of imbibing shaving lotion and paint strained through loaves of bread.” Three shots per man of the raw cane stuff were enough to start mayhem. “The sailors had to be forced away from the bar, and straggling, slipping and falling they made their way cussing down the mountain, stopping from time to time to piss and fight a bit more.”

This is such a lean, punchy little book, the very definition of a successful memoir. Kernan makes his memories memorable, paints them durably.

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember “Zelig,” the old Woody Allen film about a guy that shows up everywhere? In all the right places at the right times to make history? Alvin Kerman did that, when he joined the Navy before War Two (to get away from his parents’ farm in nowheresville, Wyoming). Then as an EM, then Airedale, then gunner, managed to be at many of the most famous battles in the Pacific Theater.

What’s most amazing, however, is the writing. After the (relatively boring) first chapter, you’ll be wondering “how does this kid from Snot-locker Wyoming write this well?” I’m not telling. If you read the book you’ll know. And it’s well worth the read.

[Michael Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author had a PhD in English from Yale, and waited until he had retired to write his WW II Memoir. The quality of the writing, and the insight of a 65 year old man looking back on his 4 years as a sailor in the U.S. Pacific fleet from 1941-45, made this a remarkable book. He arrived at Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, aboard the fleet carrier U.S.S Enterprise (yes, that ship) and sailed past the wreckage of Battleship Row. The following year he was evacuated from the wrecked and sinking fleet carrier U.S.S. Hornet. He ended the war with a visit to Nagasaki and Tokyo Bay. In between he spent a lot of time wondering if he would live to his next birthday. What a wonderful story, full of rich details about the thoughts and circumstances of an America at war. I was sad that the book ended, but overjoyed that he survived to lead such a rich life.

[Marshall Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a great and thoughtful review and then the app crashed. Great book!!

[Steven Hull · Rating 5 out of 5]

The term “Bluejacket” in the title of this book is U.S. Navy talk for an enlisted sailor. Kernan served nearly five years in the Navy during World War II as an Aviation Ordnanceman. His served in Navy torpedo squadrons assigned to aircraft carriers, mostly flying the Gruman TBF Avenger, a single engine, three person crewed aircraft. When assigned to maintenance, Kernan maintained the plane’s machineguns, loaded bombs and torpedos, and maintained equipment associated with these capabilities. When flying, he manned the Avenger’s single .50 caliber gun turret. Kernan presents his story chronologically in a little over 160 pages. It is well written. The term ‘Odyssey’ in the title aptly encompasses his war experiences, which were as varied, many, and significant as any bluejacket’s.
Kernan hailed from a poor ranching family who lived twenty miles from Saratoga, Wyoming. Lacking sufficient funds to use a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, in March 1941 Kernan, age seventeen, joined the Navy. In late November he arrived in Pearl, Harbor Hawaii and reported aboard his first ship, the carrier USS Enterprise just before she departed to deliver planes to Wake Island, a few days before the Japanese sneak attack. Over the nest few months the Enterprise was involved is a series of raids on Japanese held islands. In early April Kernan awoke one morning to find that the USS Hornet had joined the Enterprise. Both were heading northwest. On the Hornet’s deck were Army B-25 Mitchell bombers. Commanded by Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the planes would raid Tokyo in a few days.
In May the Enterprise was on her way to the southwest Pacific, but was suddenly called back to Pearl. There she joined the Enterprise and the Yorktown and on June 3-5 she helped earn victory at Midway, a victory that changed the trajectory and course of the Pacific War. Kernan soon transferred to the Hornet and was on her when she was sunk at the Battle of Santa Cruz in September. Subsequently Kernan was reassigned to a new squadron. There he met Dick Boone, who would become one of his closest friends. Kernan became part of one of the first aircrews to use the new technology of airborne radar designed to locate enemy aircraft at night. On his first combat mission his plane was working with two other aircraft. His aircraft shot down two Japanese bombers, while one of the American aircraft was lost—the one piloted by Lieutenant Commander Butch O’Hare, the Guadalcanal Medal of Honor awardee and the namesake of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. For his actions in this air battle Kernan eventually was awarded the Navy Cross.
Kernan applied for and was accepted for pilot training. He successfully completed ground school and initial flight training. When the training pipeline slowed down, rather than be bored doing nothing while waiting for a school slot, Kernan volunteered to return to the fleet as a bluejacket. He ended up an Avenger gunner again aboard the escort carrier USS Suwanee (CVE-27). His squadron served as support for troops ashore during the bloody battle for Okinawa. There, Kernan experienced many close calls and saw many of his friends killed. He and his crew were almost killed when their plane broke free on deck just before launch and careened into the sea. A picture is included in the book showing Kernan and the other two crew members struggling to get out of the plane as it slides down the side of the Suwanee before sinking.
At the end of the war Kernan remained on the Suwanee until she returned home carrying a load of service members as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Just prior to this, Kernan received his final promotion to Chief Petty Officer at age twenty-one.
Kernan now faced the same challenge millions of his fellow veterans faced, what to do now. He heard about the GI Bill, and he wanted to go to college, but he had no savings to make it all work financially—until he won over $3,000 in a poker game on his final days aboard the Suwanee.
For Kernan there was no glory in war. It was sometimes exciting in a deadly way, often boring, and always dangerous. It was an adventure and it was lonely. Kernan was not a religious person, and was constantly bothered by how fast and unfairly Fate caused death. He admitted he was scared, just like every other sane person. The fear never went away. Once his TBF Avenger touched down on Kernan’s last flight in 1945, he did not fly again until 1968.
When he got home to Saratoga, Kernan said goodbye to his stepdad (his mother had committed suicide in 1942), bought a 1936 Chrysler and drove to California to pick up his good friend Dick Boone. They headed east to New York City, where Boone began his career as the actor known later as Richard Boone (Have Gun Will Travel et al.).
As for Chief Aviation Ordnanceman Kernan, he went to Columbia University for a year before transferring to Williams College earning a B.A. there and one at the University of Oxford while on a fellowship. He went on to complete a Ph.D. at Yale and subsequently taught there for nineteen years becoming a noted Shakespearian scholar. From there he went to Princeton as the Dean of the Graduate School. He first wrote about his odyssey to leave a record of his service for his children. I am grateful he took the advice of others and shared this record with all of us.
Alvin Kernan passed away in 2018 at the age of 94.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before Plato's Cave

In 1941, 17-year old Alvin Kernan borrowed five dollars from a friend and rode from a desolate Depression-plagued Wyoming ranch to enlist in the Navy. Kernan (1923 -- 2018) served for five years and attained the rank of chief petty officer while receiving many decorations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. Kernan wrote this memoir of his naval experiences "Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II" in 1994 and revised it into final form in 2007. The memoir is rightly regarded as a classic of WW II literature. I was first interested in the book because I had work and travel experiences in some of the islands and atolls that formed the Pacific Theater of the War. I read "Crossing the Line" in the outstanding recent collection "World War II Memoirs: The Pacific Theater" (2021) published by the Library of America and edited by Elisabeth Samet.

Kernan's beautifully written memoir describes his own experiences and responses to the War rather than presenting a broad history. Still, there is much to be learned about the Pacific Theater from his account. Kernan discusses his navy life from boot camp to discharge. He had three lengthy tours of duty at sea in which he served as an aviation ordinanceman, gunner, and pilot. He was involved in some large-scale and hazardous battles, particularly on the carrier USS Hornet which sank at the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands on October 26, 1942. Among other things, Kernan participated in the Battle of Midway and in the invasion of Okinawa late in the war. He describes his activities, his fears, his brushes with death and his relationship with his comrades.

There is more to the story than combat as Kernan describes his youthful introduction to sex through prostitutes and to love through an unsuccessful relationship. He describes life on board ships, with long periods of boredom and gambling and alcohol. Kernan's service on ship was punctuated by periods of shore time, either in training or on leave. He returned home to rural Wyoming and briefly was feted as a hero. I enjoyed the depictions of his experiences in Hawaii and California and his friendship with Richard Boone, who would become famous in film and as Paladin in the television western "Have Gun Will Travel".

In passages throughout the book, Kernan shows a reflective turn and a strong interest in books and in the life of the mind. In a philosophical passage near the end of the book, Kernan observes:

"[W]ars cruelty and randomness, its indifference to human life, and the speed and ease with which it erases existence are not aberrations but speeded-up versions of how it always is. The evidence is there, I went on to reason, to anyone who will look and see the plain facts his senses including common sense offer him-- and what else is there to trust, fallible though they may be?-- that men and women, like everything else in the world, are, in the poet's words, begotten, born, and die. A young man's desire to live made me avoid worrying about the bleakness of total extinction, but we all knew it; it was in our faces, it was the basis of our shared attitude toward one another and life."

Kernan's memorandum ends with his discharge from the navy, following a successful night at the poker table, and his determinination to pursue an education under the GI Bill and, as he decided, to study literature. Kernan became a distinguished teacher, scholar, and administrator at elite universities, including Yale and Princeton, as I want to discuss in the concluding part of this review.

Kernan was unaware of Plato's Cave during the Navy service of his youth, but learned of being "in"" the cave with his education. Late in life, in 2000, (before the final version of "Crossing the Line"), Kernan wrote another memoir, an intellectual autobiography of his education and career titled "In Plato's Cave". The book throughout shows the influence of Kernan's navy service on his subsequent life. It begins where "Crossing the Line" ends. I was fascinated and read "In Plato's Cave". Kernan writes of his decision to pursue education and the life of the mind rather than to remain in Wyoming:

"I was one of those who feel that the most satisfactory end of life is knowledge, not money or power or prestige but an understanding of people and the world they inhabit. I assented to Socrates's view that the unexamined life is not worth living. I had in my innocence developed a view of life that will seem laughable in our skeptical days. Read the right books and listen to the right people, think in the most intense and logical fashion, I believed, totally and without question, and all the darkness of Plato's cave of illusions would burn away in the bright sun of understanding. I did not think that truth remained to be discovered; I believed that in the main it had already been found and that I had just not yet been informed of the results. The true nature of evil and of good, the structure of the cosmos and what existed beyond it, the workings of cause and effect, the laws of history, the nature of the mind, the rules that governed social life, what distinguished good art from bad, these were all, I believed, lying about like golden nuggets on the American campus, just waiting to be picked up."

Kernan's intellectual autobiography tells of his lifelong search to escape Plato's cave. It is the story of his remarkable career. Even more importantly, the book consists of his reflections of the change in education and in the university during his life. Broadly, the change began with the GI Bill and the democratization of education, making it available to all. But his story tells of the growth of skepticism and relativism and deconstruction, of challenges to the notions of objectivity and of truth and, of what Kernan sees as the tendency to politicize education. Kernan is visibly uncomfortable with many of these trends. But rather than reject them out of hand, he seeks to understand, incorporate, and move forward.

I was glad to find and read "Crossing the Line" and to learn of Kernan and his navy life. It was a stunning way for a young man to come to adulthood. I also was moved to spend more time with Kernan in Plato's cave and to explore with him the nature of reason, study, and the life of the mind.

Robin Friedman

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book is beautiful in its own way. Kernan describes the life of a sailor in World War II, serving on aircraft carriers and nearly dying several times. Looking back fifty years later, he gives an unemotional account of his life from training camp to discharge nearly five years later. He doesn’t burden the reader with wordy descriptions but describes the most terrifying experiences with calm clarity. I had two uncles who served in the Pacific theater, but both are gone, and my brother who served in Vietnam in the Navy never discussed his experiences. Sometimes a reader gains great insight from the most surprising books. I found this book from a weekly article which appears in the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Review section, an excellent source for under appreciated books.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good, straight forward narrative of the author's nearly five years in the US Navy from November 1941 to December 1945. He participated in some of the more significant actions of the war in the Pacific and provides a good narrative of what these events looked like from the lower decks. This book was particularly meaningful to me because my father was a radio operator/tail gunner in TBF Avengers in 1943-45. This was the same type of plane that Kernan armed and later flew in as a turret gunner.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this immediately following E.B. Sledge's memoir of grunt life fighting the Japanese is WW II. Kernan was in the same theatre but as a sailor, not a marine. Kernan was a naval aviation gunner. Not as detailed a memoir as Sledge's because Kernan covers more than four years.

War in the Pacific was no picnic even on the ships. Hot, bad living conditions, bad food. Overall, a vivid and interesting picture of how primitive and rough-and-ready was the life of an enlisted man.

[Iain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give this a six stars if I could.

A skilled writer's reminisces full of insights and heart. Kernan paints vividly with few words.

A must read for anyone interested in first person accounts of World War II's Pacific Theater.

[Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very enjoyable read/listen. The book is the memories of a young man aged between 27-22 in the US Navy, at war. It is as much a social history of the time as a military/naval recollection.

[jonathan schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

War Story

A honest and painful account of five years in the navy. The author was obviously a gifted and talented individual. Also very lucky to have survived.

[Dennis Stradford · Rating 5 out of 5]

a very personal read

I enjoyed this book immensely because of the real experience of warring is and the lasting effects it has on a person.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an eighteen year old the author joins the Navy and spends four years in the Pacific theater as part of a torpedo bomber squadron. He served as a radioman and gunner in a Grumman TBF Avenger.

[Enrique Ramirez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Proceed without Hornet ...." Like many other war memoirs, Kernan's account of his experiences onboard American aircraft carriers during the Second World War makes for some gripping reading. This book is not short on the details of war: Kernan's accounts of boot camp, military operations, and even shore leave in ports of call become a window through which to experience the war. Kernan's World War II, however, was not an ennobling, monumental experience. Instead, we learn about the long hours spent below decks, the constant boredom, the presence of death in all its guises. Though not an action-packed memoir, there are some especially poignant moments, such as Kernan's account of how he learned of his mother's death, his friendship with actor Dick Boone, as well as the controversial death of Butch O'Hare during night operations. Readers wanting to read personal accounts of some of the war's most famous moments (Kernan was not only at the Battle of Midway, but also survived the sinking of U.S.S. Hornet, and steamed into Nagasaki days after the dropping of the second atomic bomb) will be disappointed. His glancing treatment of some of these moments is lacking only because we are reading the memoir of a young man who wanted, above all, to survive.

[John Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is near the top of the list of war memoirs I have read. Mr. Kernan's war started just before Pearl Harbor and ended in December 1945. He got his start servicing guns/bomb delivery systems on carrier-based torpedo planes, where his junior status meant that he spent looong days pushing carrier planes to the rear of the ship for launches and to the front for recoveries. He ended going through abortive pilot training (until the Navy realized they weren't losing as many pilots as they had projected) and settled into flying in torpedo planes as a gunner. He saw it all and won a Navy Cross in the process!

He describes his experiences in a modest, thoughtful way. He became a professor at Yale and Princeton, so the writing is top-notch! He never holds himself out as the hero or downplays his mistakes and embarrassing events. I very much enjoyed his description of coming home from the war and he makes the point that there were no parades and celebrations waiting for him in December 1945. He theorizes that the end of all wars are pretty much the same: no one really wants to talk about the war and everyone would just as soon forget about it and move on with life.

I can't say enough good things about this small book!

5 stars.

[Curtis J. Correll · Rating 3 out of 5]

This account of submarine life during WWII has an amazing scope in that the author was there for many momentous events. If you enjoy submarines and WWII, this is a good listen. However, by all means listen to Silent Running first. It is written more as an adventure WWII submarine story and is wonderful. I preferred the book Silent Running on a similar topic.

[DR J I HILTON JR · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding memoir

This was one of the very best WW II memoirs I have ever read. Personal details are there as well as the larger strategic picture of the war in the Pacific. He is an excellent writer and a highly intelligent person. I am so glad to have read this book, based on a recommendation from the WSJ. Jim Hilton

[Jack Laschenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating true tale of a Navy enlisted man's experiences in WWII.

Mr. Kernan is a good writer - and now a distinguished scholar.

But in 1941 he was a gangly 17 year old from rural Wyoming who enlisted and fought and a Navy air ordinance man in many major sea battles of the Pacific in WWII.

Well done!!

[Fritz Worley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book start to finish without putting it down. its engrossing. a great read about the navy during WW2. Told from and enlisted perspective. Anybody interested in the Navy of WW2 should definitely read this book.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far the best book I've read about the life of an enlisted sailor in World War II focused on the Pacific theatre.

[K T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think reading this book has given me a deeper understanding of my Dad's war experience (WWII). I would highly recommend it.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK memoir of a Navy man in the Second World War.