Brand, Max "Survival!"
A Navy gunner named Avant serving aboard a Victory Ship (“one of these sixty-day wonders”) in the South Pacific becomes trapped in his cabin after the freighter is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. With the door out of his cabin having been jammed by the torpedo explosion, water starts to rapidly fill the small space. Luckily, Brand’s hero is something of a small town “mechanic” and, rather than panicking, he uses old fashioned Yankee ingenuity and brute strength to first force the door open and then, a few moments later, figure a way to crank open a jammed watertight compartment door. His calmness and fortitude under stress saves his life as well as the lives of several other mariners trapped in the sinking freighter’s hull. Weeks later, recuperating from his ordeal back at Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco Bay, Avant
“... dreams of manning a gun on some other day, or night, when a Jap sub comes up to have a look at another Victory Ship, and he hopes to be the one who makes that the last look that sub takes at any kind of ship or weather.”