Furnald Hall Midshipmen School

Furnald Hall Midshipmen School is the wartime training institution that converts Willie Keith and his classmates from provisional recruits into newly appointed midshipmen, while making the Navy’s administrative machinery part of their daily lives. The school promises advancement but measures its students through examinations, inspections, rankings, and preference forms whose influence is uncertain. For Willie, its routines bring a decisive change in identity and set the terms for his first assignment at sea.

Institution and Setting

Furnald Hall Midshipmen School occupies Furnald Hall, a building that had formerly been a dormitory for law students. Its physical setting remains recognizably collegiate: Willie approaches along a brick walk past the School of Journalism before entering the building. Inside, however, the former dormitory becomes a crowded military institution, governed by instructions, assemblies, tests, and the movement of large groups of trainees. The building’s transformation captures the school’s function: a civilian campus is being used to prepare novice officers for wartime service.

The training population extends beyond Furnald Hall itself. At a Sunday review, its midshipmen join those from Johnson Hall and John Jay Hall in a combined formation of twenty-five hundred novice naval officers. That public display presents the trainees as a large and disciplined body, even though the individuals within the ranks are still young men learning how to meet the Navy’s standards. The school thus has both an instructional role and a visible ceremonial one: it prepares future officers and stages their emergence as a military cohort.

Training and the Threat of Elimination

The school’s first stage places the recruits’ standing at risk. Students spend three weeks as apprentice seamen, after which the top two-thirds of the class become midshipmen; those who fall outside that proportion are sent to the Army. The possibility of being bilged gives ordinary study an immediate consequence. Willie responds to the prospect of elimination with frantic preparation, while his classmates Edwin Keggs and Roland Keefer also worry about whether they will make the cut.

The training day is organized by repeated collective movement. Bugles call students out of Furnald Hall whenever administrators identify an omitted detail in the mimeographed instructions. An ensign announces the new direction from the steps, dismisses the assembled men, and sends them back inside. For students on the upper floors, this rhythm carries a practical cost: the elevator cannot accommodate everyone, so they descend nine flights by stairs and later wait for a ride up or climb again. Lectures, aptitude tests, marches, assemblies, and dismissals accumulate until fatigue becomes part of the course. The school’s discipline is therefore conveyed not only through explicit rules but through the control of time, movement, and shared living space.

The stakes of elimination become concrete when the results arrive. None of the three men in Room 1013 is bilged, but students in neighboring rooms are sent back to civilian life through their draft boards. Willie later learns that Koster, whom he remembers as good-humored and sheltered, died in the first attack wave at Salerno. The school’s sorting process is consequently linked to radically different futures: some students continue toward commissions and naval duty, while others leave the institution and may still encounter the war elsewhere.

Inspection, Ranking, and Merit

Advancement does not end the pressure of assessment. At a large military review, Willie is inspected in dress uniform along with the other midshipmen. Minor defects draw demerits, and an ensign’s flick at the back of a student’s neck signals that five points have been recorded by a yeoman following the inspection. Willie accumulates twenty-five demerits, far more than the nearest competitor, who has seven. The episode shows how the school makes small, visible details count toward a student’s standing, turning inspection into a public demonstration of hierarchy as well as a test of appearance.

The ranking system remains consequential close to graduation. Willie initially has reason to believe he is doing well, but fatigue and the impression that danger is passing cause him to falter; four days before graduation, the final standings place him thirty-first. His changing position illustrates that success at the school is not secured by having crossed the first threshold into midshipman status. Performance continues to be monitored, and a student’s comparative standing can still alter his prospects.

Preferences and Assignment

Near the end of the course, each midshipman receives a form asking for three preferred types of duty and the reasons for his first choice. The school provides no clear account of how much these statements will affect assignments. Rumors range from the belief that a persuasive explanation will secure a first choice to the suspicion that the forms are meaningless paperwork or a way to identify men hoping to avoid dangerous service. The uncertainty makes writing the reasons a task in self-presentation as well as a declaration of preference; some students even pay an enterprising former newspaperman to compose them.

The three men in Room 1013 approach the form differently. Keefer chooses Staff Duty, Pacific, imagining a comparatively comfortable posting in Hawaii. Keggs agonizes over his choices, puts Mine Disposal Training first despite its fearful reputation among the students, then lists Submarines, Pacific, and, in smaller writing, his genuine preference for Local Defense, Atlantic. Willie’s guiding aim is to remain near May Wynn. He lists Staff, Atlantic, then Large Ships, Atlantic, and places Submarines, Pacific last to make his preferences appear more daring. He considers requesting communications school at Annapolis, partly because Keefer’s brother Tom had attended it, but abandons the idea when he learns that Tom had received that assignment after requesting an aircraft carrier. The forms show how the students try to read the institution’s logic without knowing how its decisions are actually made.

Graduation and Narrative Significance

The arrival of orders makes that uncertainty tangible. During a study period just before graduation, envelopes are distributed along the tenth floor. Keefer receives his orders, but Willie’s are missing; the messenger says they have been held up and that another batch is coming. The brief delay separates Willie from his classmates at the moment when the school is turning training into placement. Elsewhere in the narrative, he appears aboard the Caine, where his first living quarters are a cramped clipping shack shared with the work of shipboard service. The contrast makes clear that the school’s orderly processes lead not to an abstract officer’s career but to particular duties and conditions at sea.

Furnald Hall Midshipmen School is presented through the friction between official organization and the students’ limited ability to understand it. The ratios governing advancement are plain, but the meaning of rankings, preference forms, and delayed orders remains uncertain to the men who depend on them. Its bugles and forms impose a shared structure on hundreds of trainees, while individual outcomes diverge through elimination, selection, and assignment. In this way the school establishes a pattern that continues in Willie’s naval service: institutional rules organize a vast system, but the people living under those rules often have to act without knowing how their choices will be judged.