Hill, Robert A. The First Mate of the HENRY GLASS

World War 2 tale set in the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic. Newly licensed Chief Mate Robert Hall’s first assignment (unwillingly accepted by him) is aboard the just-commissioned Liberty Ship HENRY GLASS, sailing out of San Pedro early on during the War (Hill’s narrative appears to take place during late 1942). The GLASS is described as an armed merchant ship, complete with an S.O.B. of a skipper, unhappy crewmen and contingents of Navy gunners and U.S. Marines clearly unhappy to have to associate with merchant mariners. The novel is inelegant, sexually gritty, sometimes cruel and more often than not poorly written (wasn’t Vantage a vanity press?), yet Hill’s account of the GLASS’ wartime voyages nonetheless reads with an immediacy and authenticity often missing in more polished works. Yes, the captain is often mean-spirited; yes, the GLASS’ crew are generally crude, sex-driven, drunken louts; yes, the sailors and marines serving alongside the crew are themselves often thoroughly unlikeable. Yet by tale’s end the reader comes to care about each and every one of them, and comes to know much about what life aboard a Liberty Ship during the Second World War was all about. Hill’s clincher of a finale occurs in mid-Atlantic, where the poorly constructed GLASS breaks apart and sinks during a wild storm en route back to the United States, with 1st Mate Hall seemingly the ship’s sole survivor.