The Panama Canal appears in the novel as a stage of the USS Caine’s journey home at the end of the war. More than a route between oceans, it belongs to Willie Keith’s passage out of active naval service: he remembers guiding a warship through the canal, then approaching familiar American landmarks as his identity as Captain Keith begins to recede.

Place in the Homeward Route

Two days after Willie argues that the USS Caine should be sent home rather than left behind, the USS Caine and the USS Moulton receive orders to proceed to the Naval Supply Depot in Bayonne for decommissioning, by way of Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal. The route links the ships’ Pacific service to their return to the United States, and the order makes the canal a concrete point on the final leg of their naval careers.

Willie leaves Okinawa with a pang, watching the island disappear behind the ship and recognizing that the war is ending. The later homeward passage belongs to a different kind of transition: the ships are no longer moving toward another Pacific assignment, but toward decommissioning and the end of their service.

The Passage in Willie’s Recollection

As the USS Caine nears its end at Bayonne, Willie reflects on the weeks since leaving Pearl Harbor. He recalls that he had personally taken a United States warship through the Panama Canal’s locks and channels, before continuing past Florida and bringing the ship through New York Harbor. The canal is thus presented through the practical achievement of a young officer who has learned to command a ship, not as a separate account of its construction or history.

The recollection gathers momentum as the voyage carries Willie from the canal toward places tied to his earlier life. He remembers recognizing the Florida coast and, later, the New York skyline and Statue of Liberty from his own bridge. The movement from the Pacific through the canal and onward to the East Coast makes the return home a real navigational journey as well as a reckoning with the person he has become.

A Threshold Between Identities

At Bayonne, with the USS Caine stripped of its guns and its decommissioning ceremony approaching, Willie describes the weeks since Pearl Harbor as dreamlike. The voyage through the canal is part of what makes that feeling possible: he has performed the work of a commanding officer and brought a warship across an immense distance, yet the approach to familiar home ground unsettles the naval identity that had sustained him.

The canal therefore stands within a larger contrast between wartime duty and its aftermath. During the Pacific service, the sea and the Japanese had seemed inseparable to Willie; on the return voyage, the ship is traveling toward home and retirement from service. By the time the Caine reaches Bayonne, Willie feels that his military personality is dissolving, without simply returning him to the earlier self he had been before the war.

Historical Qualification

The novel’s prefatory note identifies the work as fiction set during World War II and warns that operational times, places, ship names, missions, and naval procedures have been altered. It also states that the people and events aboard the USS Caine are imaginary and that no ship named USS Caine existed. The canal passage should therefore be read as part of the novel’s fictional homeward voyage, not as a factual record of a particular ship’s wartime route.