Tag Archives: USS Southard

By my calculations, gentlemen, there should still be a pint of strawberries left…

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Herman Wouk’s Pultizer-prize-winning novel and subsequent two-act play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, is one of the best of either ever set on a U.S. Navy destroyer. If it had a remarkably true ring to it, keep in mind that Wouk was a young officer on two old four-piper destroyer minesweepers– USS Zane and USS Southard— during WWII.

The 1954 film adaptation by noir director Edward Dmytryk– with Bogie as the haunted LCDR Queeg, Van Johnson as the upstart LT Maryk, and a young Jose Ferrer as Maryk’s defense counsel, LT Greenwald– is just classic.

Those damned Baoding balls…

Now, it seems like Showtime is trying to capture some of that old magic by tapping William Friedkin to direct a new version of the story, with Kiefer Sutherland filling Bogie’s shoes.

I have to admit, it looks decent. Hopefully, it won’t be too “modernized” to the detriment of the story.

Vale, Herman Wouk

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As a kid, I was a naval film junkie and the War and Remembrance, and The Winds of War miniseries along with Humphrey Bogart’s The Caine Mutiny were standard fare. Who can ever forget the ultimate toxic skipper that was LCDR Philip “Old Yellowstain” Queeg?

With that, the bell should be rung at the passing of author, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and WWII destroyerman Herman Wouk who shipped out for that great Libo call in the sky at age 103 last Friday.

Born in 1915, Wouk, a 27-year-old radio dramatist, signed up for the U.S Navy Reserves shortly after Pearl Harbor and was soon bobbing around on the aging WWI-era destroyer-minesweeper (“any ship can be a minesweeper, once”) USS Zane (DMS-14).

USS Zane (DMS-14) Off San Francisco, California, 21 September 1943. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. Catalog #: 19-N-57504

USS Caine, err, I mean USS Zane (DMS-14), Off San Francisco, California, 21 September 1943. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. Catalog #: 19-N-57504

Wouk had a very active war, participating in eight invasions from New Georgia to Okinawa and later becoming XO of Zane‘s Clemson-class sistership, USS Southard (DD-207/DMS-10). While aboard the latter, he survived numerous kamikaze attacks and Typhoon Ida. Importantly, his fictional USS Caine was a destroyer-minesweeper in WWII whose pivotal “mutiny” scene revolves around a Pacific typhoon.

He said of his time in the Navy during the war, “I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.”

Wouk reportedly passed in his sleep.

Be sure to have a nice bowl of strawberries sometime this week in his honor.