Gerald S. Johnson Tropical Furlough.

Johnson's ironically titled sea adventure is set in 1944 in the Indian Ocean, a theater of war rarely encountered in World War 2-related fiction. His narrative follows the voyages of three vessels (two Allied ships and a Japanese submarine on patrol) which fate - or at least the author's imagination - have brought together in the seemingly deserted waters surrounding the atoll of Diego Garcia in the south central Indian Ocean. Primary focus is on the aged Royal Indian Navy supply vessel BANGALORE which, while sailing with a load of cargo from Ceylon to the RAF station on Diego Garcia, encounters a fierce tropical cyclone and is nearly destroyed. Shifting cargo pushes the ship permanently over onto her side. In the ensuing chaos her engines are destroyed and most of her complement of officers and crew perish. The survivors find themselves aboard a powerless hulk which is at the mercy of the Indian Ocean's little-known Great Oval Current. They drift for months and for a time Johnson's tale takes on the qualities of a seagoing version of Robinson Crusoe.

Meanwhile, a Japanese attack submarine secretly departs Singapore, bound for the South Indian Ocean hunting grounds of the Cape of Good Hope to Australia convoy route. Her captain is an arrogant and cruel Imperial Navy officer right out of central casting. He torpedoes an Allied troop transport early on and then, with great malice, sinks a small, unarmed merchant steamer (the fictitious CORAL QUEEN) en route from the British island colony of Mauritius to Diego Garcia. One narrative strand here then follow the course of four lifeboat-bound CORAL QUEEN survivors while another traces the course of the Japanese submarine - a course which leads the submarine to a fatal rendezvous with the drifting BANGALORE. Johnson's climax is dramatically satisfying, though over-reliant on the role of coincidence. A romantic subplot (the BANGALORE's junior officer and a female CORAL QUEEN survivor fall in love once fate casts them into one another's paths) rounds out the novel.