Hemingway, Ernest Islands in the Stream.

Published posthumously after being edited by Mary Hemingway (the author’s widow) and Charles Scribner, Jr., this three-part novel has as its protagonist a painter named Thomas Hudson who, as the story opens (in the late 1930s) is living a solitary life on the island of Bimimi, in the Bahamas. Parts 1 and 2 of the novel contain interesting passages concerning steamships of the era (the ILE DE FRANCE in Part 1 and an unnamed luxury liner – the EMPRESS OF BRITAIN? – on a world cruise, sailing from Mombasa through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean in Part 2).
Part 3 (titled: “At Sea”), however, is of the most interest to this bibliography, set as it is in the early stages (1942-1943) of active American participation in the War. At this point in the story Hudson is living in Cuba and, on his own initiative (though with permission from U.S. Naval Intelligence), he organizes a paramilitary group of like-minded Allied nationals to go to sea to hunt for the German U-boats which were then decimating shipping in the Caribbean. Hemingway’s tale has Jordan, captaining his own diesel cruiser, in pursuit of a group of survivors off a wrecked U-boat who are attempting to make their way to the relative safety of Havana (from whence pro-Axis Spanish or Argentinian shipping interests will transport the German sailors to safety). The U-boat survivors are depicted as a stereotypically cruel lot, for, as they make their way across the Caribbean they attack, plunder and murder civilians – with the poor Black inhabitants of isolated cays and islets being their victims. Hudson and his crew eventually locate the Germans and, in a ferocious battle, kill them to a man (despite the U.S. Navy’s request that at least one survivor be brought back for interrogation). What is of particular interest here is that it is a fictionalized version of Hemingway’s own Cuban activities in 1942 and 1943. Then living on the island for tax reasons, Hemingway actually organized a paramilitary Caribbean sea patrol, using his beloved 38-foot diesel cruiser PILAR as a “Q-boat” to track down German submarines off Cuba. That’s where real life and fiction diverge – for though Hemingway and crew did once spot a U-boat (which ignored the PILAR), they never engaged in any action with the enemy whatsoever.