The Caine's aborted approach to the Kwajalein line of departure is a turning point in the ship’s first major operation: the Caine turns away from the approach while landing craft depend on it for guidance, and the maneuver becomes evidence in a later argument over Captain Queeg’s judgment and courage. In the moment, the event is a confused command scene, with Willie Keith hesitant to decide, Steve Maryk acting when the boats are in danger, and Queeg returning to take control of the navigation decision. Its meaning changes again when Tom Keefer questions what happened and Keith recognizes a troubling absence from his own observations.

Approach to the landing craft

The Caine is moving among the crowded ships gathering near the islands in the pearly sunrise. Keith asks Tom Keefer what he thinks of the Navy, gesturing toward the immense fleet; Keefer jokes that taxpayers should be getting something for their hundred billion dollars. The tone of spectacle gives way to work when Queeg appears on the bridge and asks where the LVTs are that the Caine is supposed to take in to the beach. Keith points to APA 17, a transport about four thousand yards off the port bow, and Queeg confirms the identification before ordering the Caine over at standard speed and telling Keith to keep the conn.

Keith takes the order as an opportunity to exercise authority. He enters the wheelhouse, gives commands, takes bearings, calls for radar ranges, and orders rudder changes as the Caine leaves the screen and heads toward the transports. The battleship salvos grow louder as the ship moves inward. The scene marks a brief rise in Keith’s confidence: he feels exalted, but the arrival of the landing craft soon makes the limits of his experience more consequential than the excitement of holding the conn.

A line of attack boats comes out from the transports and heads toward the Caine. Keith looks for Queeg and finds him sitting on a flagbag, out of sight of the transports and beach, smoking and talking casually with Engstrand. Keith reports that Jacob Group Four appears to be heading their way. Queeg glances vaguely out to sea and gives no useful direction. When Keith asks what he should do, Queeg tells him to do as he pleases, then resumes an anecdote about Attu. Engstrand’s brief, helpless shrug leaves Keith without reassurance from either man.

The turn away from the departure point

Back in the pilothouse, Keith watches the attack boats closing in. Through binoculars, he can make out the officer in the lead craft and the marines crouched in front of him, drenched by spray. The glass makes the scene seem like a silent film: Keith sees the men calling to one another but cannot hear them. He thinks the Caine ought to stop, yet fears making that command decision himself. Maryk enters and bluntly points out the danger: the ship is about to run the boats down. After locating Queeg, Maryk orders all engines stopped, takes a red cardboard megaphone from its bracket, and calls to the approaching craft.

The lead boat identifies itself as Jacob Group Four and says it is ready to proceed to the point of departure. Queeg then tells Maryk to take the conn and get the Caine there. Maryk signals that they will proceed and tells the boats to follow. The Caine heads toward Enneubing, the Japanese island the Navy calls Jacob, with only a few thousand yards of choppy water between the ship and shore. Keith can see a hut, an abandoned rowboat, oil drums, shattered palm trees, and two orange fires above the treetops. Behind the Caine, the LVTs pitch in the waves. A sailor in the leading boat waves semaphore, repeatedly falling from his perch as he signals for the Caine to slow down.

Queeg comes back to the bridge, impatiently asking what the boat wants and whether Keith can read the signal. Keith says they want the Caine to slow down. Queeg refuses: the ship is supposed to reach the line of departure at H-hour, and if the boats cannot keep up, he says, the Caine will throw over a dye marker. The dispute becomes a matter of bearings. An officer reports the cutoff tangent on Roi Island as 045 and the current tangent as 065; Urban reports 064. Queeg pushes the signalman aside, sights through the alidade, and calls the bearing 054, adding that the figure does not allow for set and drift. He concludes that the Caine is already inside the departure point and orders right full rudder, full speed ahead, and a dye marker.

The Caine heels sharply to starboard and cuts a tight white semicircle across the sea as it turns back. Within a minute the LVTs are distant specks astern, with a bright yellow stain spreading nearby. The Caine’s maneuver has separated it from the landing group at the moment when those boats were relying on its lead. Keefer will later argue that the Caine turned away before reaching the departure line; Maryk disputes his account, noting that Keefer was not on the bridge. The precise bearing and the ship’s position therefore become central to an argument that cannot be settled by the appearance of the turn alone.

The operation continues

The Caine does not remain away from the islands for the rest of the day. Later, it steams through the channel between Jacob and Ivan with a hundred other ships in the attack force. The American flag flies over both islands, and the Caine anchors in the lagoon. Queeg orders armed guards along the ship’s sides to shoot any Japanese swimmers, then dismisses the crew from battle stations. Hemmed in by transports, cargo ships, and destroyers, the Caine could not have fired at the beach even if ordered to do so. Sailors leave the gun posts where they have spent fourteen hours and go below to sleep; Keith, despite his own tiredness, goes to the flying bridge to watch.

The larger battle is presented as strangely one-sided: the American fleet’s arrival and overwhelming bombardment have already made organized resistance futile. That context complicates the significance of the Caine’s failed approach. The immediate episode is not depicted as a battle the Caine wins by force; it is a test of judgment within a vast operation whose outcome is already determined. The ship’s turn matters because it exposes the officers’ competing responses to uncertainty, not because it changes the invasion’s result.

Dispute and retrospective significance

That evening, after dinner, Keefer asks Maryk what he thought of Old Yellowstain’s performance. He condemns the turn and the abandonment of the LVTs, portraying it as a retreat before the Caine even reached the departure line. Maryk tells him to stop: Keefer had not been on the bridge and, Maryk insists, does not know what he is talking about. Keefer replies that he had been on the flying bridge and had seen and heard everything. His accusation rests on more than the conspicuous yellow dye marker. He argues that Queeg read 054 rather than 064 and that the Caine’s advance during the turn carried it another six or seven hundred yards, so the marker may have been correctly placed.

When Keefer asks Keith whether the Caine fled like a scared rabbit, Keith initially offers a cautious alternative: he was not at the alidade, and Urban could have misread the bearing. Keefer then asks whether Keith ever saw Queeg on the side of the bridge exposed to the beach during the day. The question shocks Keith into recalling that he never did. Queeg’s repeated movements and disappearances had puzzled him, especially because in earlier maneuvers the captain had stayed in the wheelhouse, where he could hear the TBS and watch the helmsman. Keith cannot answer at once. The observation does not establish why Queeg moved about or prove Keefer’s interpretation of the turn, but it changes Keith’s understanding of the day and lends the accusation a more personal, unsettling force.

The event therefore preserves two kinds of uncertainty. The navigation dispute turns on competing readings of bearings, drift, and the Caine’s movement; the later challenge turns on where Queeg was, and what his absence from the exposed side of the bridge might mean. Keith, who first hesitates to make a decision and later hesitates to judge his captain, becomes the witness through whom the maneuver acquires its lasting significance. What looked during the invasion like one abrupt turn among hundreds of ships becomes, after the fact, a test of command—and an early sign that the officers aboard the Caine do not share the same account of what they saw.