Johnson, Marill Thirteen Desperate Hours: A Liberty Ship's Crew and Their Navy Armed Guard Fight for Survival While Grounded on a Japanese-Held Island.

Issued only in paperback, Thirteen Desperate Hours was written by the husband-and-wife team Will and Marilyn Rayment under the pen name "Marill Johnson." The short novel is a thinly fictionalized account an incident which occurred in January 1945 when Will was a merchant mariner serving aboard the Liberty Ship ALBERT A. JOHNSON in the Pacific. The work's subtitle pretty much tells it all - how the munitions-packed JOHNSON, lost out of a Philippine Islands invasion convoy, gets grounded (on enemy-controlled Negros Island in the Mindanao Strait) and then fights it out with the Japanese while desperately attempting to free herself. What the authors lack in polished writing skill is made up with gutsy seat-of-the-pants, "you are there" storytelling, all based on Will's real life Second World War sea experiences. As "Marill Johnson" explains in the novel's foreword: "This story is fiction - founded on a lot of fact."