Customer Reviews

Action In the North Atlantic

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I have to admit right off that I haven't seen the large-print reissue of "Action in the North Atlantic," and so can't comment on this specific new edition. I did, however, just finish reading the story itself for the first time. And I was surprised at how thin the story is, considering that the Raymond Massey-Humphrey Bogart film that was made from it seems to be considered by many one of the great combat-at-sea movies to come out of World War II.

The fact is, there's just not a lot that happens in this book. Character development is minimal. And while there are a few exciting passages, usually involving torpedo attacks, these are brief payoffs for all the setting up you have to plow through to get there. The book is peopled with stock characters -- familiar now to anyone who knows their World War II films, and not quite so welcome to our modern sensibilities: the New York Jewish guy; the corn-fed Midwesterner; the Scandihoovian; the jut-jawed Navy Man; the dumb-but-loveable African American messman from the Deep South (who talks, natcherly, in awthennic di-uh-lekt that is painful to read today). I felt at times like these were the same group of people who showed up in the John Wayne film "Sands of Iwo Jima."

I hope Gilpatric's Glencannon books are better, because I'd still like to read those. In the meantime, the interested reader should be able to dust off this short book in little more time than it takes to watch the movie. On the whole, however, I'll take the film instead.