Harm's Way (novel) - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

A regular Naval officer in the Pacific theater is assigned to command an operation to seize a group of strategic islands from the Japanese.

The attack on Pearl Harbor catches the United States Navy unawares. They include Captain Rockwell Torrey, commanding a heavy cruiser known only as Old Swayback (an obvious reference to the U.S.S. Salt Lake City - CA-25), which is off the Hawaiian coast near Pearl Harbor, running another set of exercises in a long string of them.

Lieutenant (juniot grade) William "Mac" McConnell is assigned as Officer of the Day aboard the destroyer, USS Cassiday, tied up in a shallower channel of the harbor, not all that far from Battleship Row. When the attack comes, Lieutenant McConnell takes his ship out of the harbor, leaving his captain and executive officer behind, and eventually joins a scratch task group assembled around Torrey's cruiser. Torrey leads his task group on a seek-out-and-destroy mission. When the ships approach the end of their fuel, Torrey orders them to steer a straight course. That makes the group vulnerable to attack. A Japanese sub scores two torpedo hits on Old Swayback before Cassiday can sink the sub with depth charges.

Back at Pearl Harbor, Torrey is relieved of his command and faces a Board of Inquiry that could lead to a Court-Martial, but when Admiral Chester Nimitz arrives to take command in the Pacific theater, he makes sure that Torrey will have a position on his planning staff. Torrey's officers scatter to various points in the Pacific theater, with his old exec, Paul Eddington, assigned to an unrewarding post at an old Free French base on the island of Toulebonne. Torrey drifts into a romance with a Navy nurse named Maggie Haynes; this romance is interrupted only briefly by the alert ordered during the Battle of Midway. Eventually, Torrey and his roommate, Captain Egan Powell, USNR, are invited to dinner at Nimitz's house, where Nimitz personally presents Torrey with the pair of Rear Admiral (lower half) stars Nimitz had worn before taking command as CinCPAC and announces that he is to go into the Pacific theater to take personal command of an operation, called Mesquite, that has ground to a halt because of the inept micro-management by the area commander.

Torrey lands on the island of Gavabutu, about three hundred miles west of Toulebonne (where the area commander is headquartered), and immediately makes the area commander his enemy by planning an operation to drive the Japanese off Gavabutu immediately. This operation succeeds, and Torrey turns his attention to his next target: Levu-Vana, a much sought-after island having a central plain large enough to build runways for B-17 bombers. He learns that the Japanese want to stay on Levu-Vana.

Torrey's repeated attempts to get more materiel for his mission end in failure, largely because the Navy is sending most of its heavy tonnage to the Solomon Islands to support General Douglas MacArthur. Torrey presses on anyway; during the battle, enemy fire sinks his ship, and falling wreckage strikes him and knocks him unconscious. He wakes up aboard a hospital ship under the care of his lover, Maggie Haynes, initially believing that he has lost the battle and sacrificed his ships to no good purpose, until the general commanding his landing forces informs him that he is in control of Levu-Vana, that Torrey's battle was a success, and that no less than Admiral Ernest King has praised him highly for his efforts. Torrey submits to the ministrations of Maggie Haynes—who, in the last scene, prepares to shave his face using his prized seven-blade set of German straight razors, which his rescuers preserved and returned to him.