It’s been a while since I finished this good one, and I’m not sure why I didn’t write a review at the time. The mental pictures of little destroyer escorts plunging through big seas to take on Japanese cruisers in order to protect American escort carriers linger yet. It was in the last days of the “gun ship” era.
The scenes must have been working on me subconsciously when I recently ordered a similar book. But I really got interested as a child in the 1950s. As the son of an Air Force veteran of the war whose chums were mostly sons of Army veterans, naturally I developed an interest in the Navy.
I made numerous plastic models of the warships, particularly the destroyer escorts. Kids today have much less access to such things, partly because not enough of them are interested to keep the industry afloat (so to speak), in addition to copyright pressures from such as the aerospace manufacturers. Pity. But I remember my dad who came up in the wooden model era thought the plastic ones were too easy.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 