After this period of intense naval indoctrination, they were granted commissions as ensigns and went directly to the Fleet or to one of the numerous special advanced schools for final training e.g. At the program’s outset, candidates served an initial month as seamen followed by four as an appointed midshipman by war’s end, this was compressed to three. Navy as apprentice seamen and sent to one of the seven Reserve Midshipmen’s Schools: Columbia, Cornell, Naval Academy at Annapolis, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Plattsburg, and Fort Schuyler. V-7 was one in which recent college graduates or men about to complete their college training, were accepted by the U.S. The V-7 program was one of four Reserve officer-intake programs inaugurated by the U.S. Thus, despite his novel being a work of historical fiction, it offers a rare insight and serves as a good primary source as to the functions of a little-studied midshipman organization. Wouk’s descriptions of the place and the program match both Columbia and the photos in The Sideboy. His company barracked at Furnald Hall, as did the protagonist of The Caine Mutiny: Willie Keith. Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Columbia University.įollowing this lead, I consulted a series of the program’s yearbooks – The Sideboy – and found Wouk in the August 1942 class. Soon after completing this reading, I learned that Wouk not only took part in the V-7 midshipman program but he both attended and graduated from the U.S. It accomplishes this by detailing the career of a U.S. The work fashions a re-creation of the culture of urgency that both defined and circumscribed midshipman life during the Second World War. Recalling Captain Queeg, ball bearings, and strawberries, I recently decided to re-read the novel. Almost twenty years ago I read Herman Wouk’s 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny.
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