Heggen, Thomas Mister Roberts
Think of the Mr. Roberts saga as a not-too-distant antecedent to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22; both look at the wearying, soul-destroying non-combat related part of modern warfare. Heggen’s work, episodic and cynically comic, is set aboard a Navy cargo ship (the U.S.S. RELUCTANT, known to her crew as “this bucket”) during the waning days of World War 2. The ship, Heggen writes,
“ ... operates in the back areas of the Pacific. In its holds it carries food and trucks and dungarees and toothpaste and toliet paper. For the most part it stays on its regular run, from Tedium to Apathy and back; about five days each way. It makes an occasional trip to Monotony, and once it made a run all the way to Ennui, a distance of two thousand miles from Tedium. It performs its dreary and unthanked job, and performs it, if not inspiredly, than at least adequately.”
The Mr. Roberts short stories and subsequently issued novel were enthusiastically received by the American reading public in the days just following World War 2. The works focus on Lt. Douglas Roberts, the RELUCTANT’s Cargo Officer, a humane man lionized by the ship’s crew for his intelligence, sense of fair play, sympathy and — perhaps most importantly — his unfaltering opposition to the ship’s idiotic captain (a former merchant mariner whose promotion to shipmaster by the wartime Navy defies all logic). Mister Roberts was subsequently turned into a highly popular 1948 Broadway play starring Henry Fonda and later into a sanitized 1950s movie featuring James Cagney, Henry Fonda (in a reprise of his stage role) and Jack Lemmon.