First Person Singular

THREE years ago our foreign correspondents were reporting the ominous signs in Europe; today it is their job to bring home the sound and feel of our fighting forces. O. D. Gallagher is a South African, and in his Action in the East (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50) we see him as an inveterate note-taker with a journalist’s swift grasp of the situation and a temperament quick to admire or condemn.

He was on the Repulse, and his account of the sinking of that ship and the Prince of Wales (his notes of which survived the oily sea) speaks volumes for Captain Tennant. He is sardonic in describing the “Singapore mentality.” His chapter on the centennial celebration of the Brookes’ rule over Sarawak stands out in bizarre contrast to the ruin and retreat in Burma, so soon to follow. In his jeep with Leland Stowe, Mr. Gallagher did 10,000 miles in Burma. He lived beside the AVG’s, watched the Gurkhas, the Highlanders, and the Tommies, ill-equipped and underprepared, fight their rear-guard action against the Japanese. In his political judgment, as in his strategical hindsight, I suspect that emotion overbalances knowledge; but Mr. Gallagher writes as he feels, and his book is valuable for its honest and scathing pages of action.

To W. L. White goes the Atlantic citation for his matchless account of what young Americans thought and felt as they lived through the capture of the Philippines. He calls his book, ironically enough, They Were Expendable (Harcourt, Brace, $2.00). Here in dialogue terse and masculine is what Lieutenant (now Lieutenant Commander) Bulkeley and his three surviving junior officers have to tell us about their beloved MTB’s at Manila. There were six boats originally, — 70 feet of plywood, manned by picked crews, with Packard motors that could outrun a destroyer. In the Battle of the Philippines they did everything but fight Japanese tanks. They sank one hundred times their combined tonnage; they sank landing parties, a carrier, cruisers, a tanker, Japanese planes, and transports. They took on huge odds with magnificent grit. They did it all without spare parts and with saboteurs’ wax in their gasoline, which would halt their engines at most critical moments. In the end they ferried MacArthur and his staff and a handful of their own survivors to safety. All of this Mr. White has caught with unobtrusive skill in the natural, characteristic tones of voice of Bulkeley, Kelly, Akers, and Cox.

There is heroism in this book, but you feel it in what is unsaid. Bulkeley’s resourcefulness, his knack of always being on the spot, his magnificent timing at Subic Bay; Kelly’s courtship of Peggy, the nurse on Bataan; the stories which the young aviators told of the bombing of Clark and Nichols Fields; the navigation Kelly worked out for the Admiral with his two fingers angled at 45 degrees; the spirit and devotion of the crews as they made their desperate repairs and stood by their wounded — these are evidences of character which make the stay-at-home at once proud and humble.

The Cup and the Sword by Alice Tisdale Hobart (Bobbs-Merrill, $2.75) is the story of a transplanted family. To California, Jean-Philippe Hambeau brought his expert knowledge of grapes and soil, which had been second nature to him in France; he brought his immense industry, his uncompromising standard and his pride — pride in the wines which bore his name; pride in the children, in-laws, and grandchildren whose lives he ruled down to his eighty-fifth year. A taskmaster loving his adopted land, Philippe lived on to see his dynasty topple and his family divided during Prohibition. Martha the frustrated ruler of his household, John the hothead, Lon the dilettante, Elizabeth the granddaughter, so sweet and so pliable — he kept them all enthralled, and so drained the initiative that would have made them bigger. Here in easily flowing scenes is the struggle between age and self-possession.

The book is as brisk as a summer boardinghouse. People come and go, there are flirtations and lends, and the pretty excursions to the vineyards provide a pleasant relief to the family squabbles. But so many characters have the effect of dispersing one’s sympathy. I come the closest to Philippe. John I follow in spurts. But Elizabeth bores me. I am afraid that the story sags without Philippe, and I could wish that an author as versatile as Mrs. Hobart had avoided two noticeable habits of style — the use of cliche sentences at the chapter’s close, and the use of italics when her characters are in thought, a typographical effect which seems to me intrusive.