Customer Reviews

Tin Can Man

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are interested in naval history, especially of the World War II era, you will find this book to be a good complement to the usual "this happened there" chronicle. However, if you are merely a casual reader of such things, you will probably want to give it a pass.

The book is unique in that it tells the personal saga of a destroyerman's five years in the Navy, most of it while serving on the USS Saufley, a Fletcher-class destroyer. We don't often see this type of story reaching bookshelves. In this biography, E.J. Jernigan comes through as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving "devil may care" sailor, almost a stereotype of our image of pre-war and wartime sailors. It briefly covers his early years in Florida, then follows his career from battleships to destroyers to home after the war; from Atlantic to Pacific and back again.

His story is sometimes funny, sometimes somber, and sometimes mundane, much the same as the experiences of most of us who have served in the military. Mr. Jernigan also had his "warts", and is more than willing to tell us about them.

My interest in the book comes from the fact that I am engaged in a naval history project with a similar outcome: telling the story of a destroyer crew in World War II. In our story however, the ending is not so happy: our ship, the USS Pringle, was sunk off Okinawa by a Kamikaze in April 1945, with the loss of 70 officers and men.

What's good about Jernigan's book is (1) getting this story out on to the bookshelves; and (2) the "common man" approach to the narrative... it is not elegant, but it *is* compelling.

However, the book suffers from some faults too. First and foremost, it needs an "editor's touch". Some of the prose is quite awkward (but then some is almost lyrical in other places). It is also disjointed in a few spots, as if parts of the story got mixed up somehow. There are a few historical inaccuracies and omissions too, but few enough not to detract from the thrust of the book. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the story reaches something of an anti-climax about three quarters of the way through, then just pretty much peters on out.

If the publisher (Vandamere Press) had assumed its proper editing role, I would have given it a 5-star rating. In any event, it is a "must read" for the naval history enthusiast who wants to see what life was like below decks on a WW2 warship.

Please note that there are more than a few scatological and sexual references in the book. I would not recommend it for the "younger" set.

for wanting to get away from home. Like many who entered the service, he did so to get away from grinding poverty and to support his family. Don't blame him for getting into scrapes, fights and disastrous liberty ashore. He was a kid, at war. Don't blame him for stiffness in prose; all he knows about writing is what he learned in high school, and, besides, he's entitled to his own style. Don't blame him for writing still another first-person account of the life of an enlisted man in the U. S. Navy during WWII; each such book adds something new. He witnessed the cliff-jumper suicides at Okinawa, for example, and he reveals that even enlisted men knew, at the time of Yamamoto's death, the Japanese Naval Code had been broken. Don't blame the man; blame the book. It's written from memory rather than contemporaneous diary, so anecdotes lack breadth and detail like James J. Fahey's "Pacific War Diary" or insights like Shelly Robinson's "10,000 Miles Aboard the Destroyer Cotten." Also, it amplifies memory with research, but lists no bibliography. Its motivation, I guess, is to write things down so memories wouldn't be lost; to honor friends; and to amuse the author--good enough reasons to spend time with a sailor who served in a death trap of an action station, sixty years later.

It was with their introduction in World War II that destroyer class ships were originally referred to by the men who manned them as 'tin cans'. "Tin Can Man" by E. J. Jernigan is the personal story of an enlisted man who served aboard the USS Saufley during the war. It provides readers with insights into what it was like to live, work, fight, and die aboard these ships. A superbly written 206-page memoir, "Tin Can Man" is especially informative and recommended reading for military history buffs in general, and academic library 20th Century Naval History reference collections in particular.

It was a gift for a man who was in the Navy on a destroyer during the Korean War. He liked it.

Blood and sweat were never far from E. J. Jernigan's memory when he wrote this memoir. He had the luxury to absorb the little things that took place both in and out of combat that not all others had, ranging from sailors hitting their shin bones while responding to calls to general quarters to seeing flying fish leaping out of the water, sometimes ending up on ship decks.

Although he refrained from using the dirty language that he admitted to have learned during these years, his first-person narrative did not skirt around the some of the less-than-innocent issues such as visiting whore houses and picking up loose women. For that reason, consideration should be taken for the younger readers.

Tin Can Man provided an insightful and entertaining glimpse into the daily lives of the common sailors in the WW2-era US Navy and the camaraderie between the men. Recommended.

This review of Tin Can Man is a snippet from the website WW2DB.com

This book was published around the time of the "Greatest Generation" phenomonon (generated largely by Brokaw's book and the film "Saving Private Ryan"), and is surprising in that it presents the story of marginally honorable service and was published in an era when the warriors of WWII were (justifiably) being lionized.

This narrative of this US Navy Sailor's service during the war includes a recollection of the author's going AWOL ("get me some liberty") resulting in missing the departure of the aircraft carrier on which he "served" from New York Harbor. He got out of the brig following that scrape by agreeing to serve in destroyers, which is how he became a "Tin Can Man". What a guy!

Once a destroyer sailor, Jernigan got into a fight with (and allegedly beat bloody) his CPO. In yet another passage, Jernigan's skipper (after reviwing the author's file) warned the author that he was well on his way to becoming the ranking mess cook (equivalent of KP) in the Navy. This is not the kind of person I would have wanted to serve with, let alone know. He seems like the type who could get anyone around him in trouble.

What makes the recount of these incidents surprising is that they are probably superfluous to the story. What makes it scary is that the author (after all these years) expresses no regret.

I do suppose that there is some appeal to the adolescent or post-adolescent crowd in this man's story, but if one is interested in WWII history, the only reason to read the book is that it is the recollection of an enlisted man who was not a senior NCO. There are all too few such works available. However, I would suggest borrowing this book from the library or purchasing it second-hand so as not to further allow the author to profit from his "service".