Mister Roberts

Mister Roberts is a 1946 novel by Thomas Heggen, based on his experiences in the South West Pacific theatre during World War II. Several characters, including the eponymous Mister Roberts, were based on real people. (See below.) Lieutenant (junior grade) Roberts defends his crew against the petty tyranny of the ship's commanding officer, while submitting transfer requests on a daily basis. Nearly all action takes place on a US Navy auxiliary cargo ship, the USS Reluctant, which sails, as written in the 1948 play adapted from the novel, "from Apathy to Tedium, with occasional side trips to Monotony and Ennui." Roberts eventually wins his freedom from the “bucket” and assignment to a destroyer, with tragic consequences. Heggen and Joshua Logan turned the novel into a Tony-award-winning hit play, which opened on Broadway in February 1948. A book dramatizing the play, co-authored by Heggen and Logan and also titled Mister Roberts, was published by Random House in 1948. New York Times critic Lewis Nichols praised all three works: “As a novel Mister Roberts won a few million friends, and as one of the more highly regarded of this season's plays it has added a few million more. Now that the printed form of the drama has come out, there is no reason to suppose its progress will be other than in the same direction“. Plot Douglas Roberts, the title character, joined the Navy expecting that he would be assigned to surface combat in a destroyer or a cruiser. He had no idea that the Navy had support ships. To his distress, he was assigned first to a tanker in the Atlantic and then to the USS Reluctant, AK-601, a general cargo freighter ferrying supplies to backwater Pacific bases. Mr. Roberts is the ship's First Lieutenant, meaning that he is responsible for maintaining the entire ship except for the engineering spaces. He hates the ship, but he is more responsible for her than anyone aboard apart from the Captain. The irony is not lost on him. Every month, he submits a request for transfer; every month, Captain Morton, the commanding officer of the Reluctant, forwards it, not recommending approval. Roberts is the balance wheel between the unreasonable behavior of the Captain and the frustration of the crew at being assigned to "this bucket", which never goes anywhere worth going or does anything worth doing.