World War I

World War I appears in the novel less as a narrated campaign than as a past carried into the Second World War through ships, veterans, and inherited standards of naval service. Its most tangible presence is the U.S.S. Caine (DMS 22), whose name and age connect Willie Keith’s present to an earlier generation of war; elsewhere, older men invoke their own First World War experience to assess the conduct of officers in the current conflict.

The Caine’s First World War Namesake

When Willie boards the U.S.S. Caine (DMS 22), a tarnished brass plaque identifies the ship as named for Arthur Wingate Caine, a destroyer commander in World War I who died of wounds received in a gun battle with a German submarine. The plaque makes the earlier war part of the ship’s immediate setting: before Willie understands the vessel through its daily routines, he encounters its connection to a dead officer and a previous naval conflict.

The ship’s specifications deepen that sense of accumulated history. Willie reads that it was built in Rhode Island in 1918, before his birth. Its age is not merely a date in a record; it marks a separation between the generations represented by the vessel’s origins and the young officer now serving aboard it. The Caine thus carries two kinds of past at once: the personal memory embodied in its namesake and the material history registered in its construction.

Veterans as Measures of Conduct

World War I also survives in the judgments of men who served in it. At dinner, Willie’s uncle recounts his artillery experiences from that war and uses them to argue that he endured commanders worse than Captain Queeg while maintaining what he regards as proper military loyalty. His recollections become a standard against which he condemns Willie’s involvement in the crisis aboard the Caine. The earlier war therefore functions not as neutral background but as a source of authority in a dispute over obedience and responsibility.

Theodore Breakstone’s past offers a different connection. A civilian lawyer serving as a district legal officer, he had briefly navigated a destroyer in World War I and still longed to go to sea and command a transport. His earlier naval experience gives personal context to that ambition, while his present work places him among the officers examining the unauthorized relief of Captain Queeg. The novel sets a remembered seagoing career beside the legal paperwork of a later war, showing how a past life at sea can persist even when a man’s professional course has taken him elsewhere.

A Past Reframed by the Present War

The First World War’s role is cumulative rather than episodic. The plaque, the ship’s 1918 construction, and the veterans’ recollections make it a layer of institutional and personal memory beneath the novel’s wartime action. These references also sharpen the contrast between experience and judgment: older officers interpret current conduct through standards formed in their own service, while Willie faces a crisis whose consequences belong to his own generation. World War I is therefore present chiefly as a remembered measure—one that lends the Caine a history before Willie arrives and shapes how others interpret what he and his fellow officers do.