Harm's Way (novel)
First edition
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| Author | James Bassett |
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| Cover artist | Carl Smith |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | War novel |
| Publisher | World Publishing Company |
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Publication date
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1962 |
| Pages | 510 |
Harm's Way is a 1962 war novel by James Bassett.
The explanation for the title, was, according to Bassett: —attributed to John Paul Jones
A regular Naval officer in the Pacific theater is assigned to command an operation to seize a group of strategic islands from the Japanese.
The attack on Pearl Harbor catches the United States Navy unawares. They include Captain Rockwell Torrey, commanding a heavy cruiser known only as Old Swayback (an obvious reference to the USS Salt Lake City (CA-25), which is off the Hawaiian coast near Pearl Harbor, running another set of exercises in a long string of them.
Lieutenant (junior grade) William "Mac" McConnell is assigned as Officer of the Day aboard the destroyer, USS Cassiday, tied up in a shallower channel of Pearl Harbor, not all that far from Battleship Row. When the attack comes, Lieutenant McConnell takes his ship out of the harbor, leaving his captain and executive officer behind, and eventually joins a scratch task group assembled around Torrey's cruiser. Torrey leads his task group on a seek-out-and-destroy mission. When the ships approach the end of their fuel, Torrey orders them to steer a straight course. That makes the group vulnerable to attack. A Japanese sub scores two torpedo hits on Old Swayback before Cassiday can sink the sub with depth charges.
Back at Pearl Harbor, Torrey is relieved of his command and faces a Board of Inquiry that could lead to a Court Martial, but when Admiral Chester Nimitz arrives to take command in the Pacific theater, he makes sure that Torrey will have a position on his planning staff. Torrey's officers scatter to various points in the Pacific theater, with his old exec, Paul Eddington, assigned to an unrewarding post at an old Free French base on the island of Toulebonne. Torrey drifts into a romance with a Navy nurse named Maggie Haynes; this romance is interrupted only briefly by the alert ordered during the Battle of Midway. Eventually, Torrey and his roommate, Captain Egan Powell, USNR, are invited to dinner at Nimitz's house, where Nimitz personally presents Torrey with the pair of Rear Admiral (lower half) stars that Nimitz had worn before taking command as CinCPAC and announces that he is to go into the Pacific theater to take personal command of an operation, called Mesquite, that has ground to a halt because of the inept micro-management by the area commander.
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