Third and last of Wilson's WW II novels, Lt. Syl Grant is billeted to an Army gasoline tanker that had almost been destroyed by a Japanese plane. After being refitted (more or less) she is sent to refuel assorted airfields, usually acting as a shuttle between the larger tankers and fuel barges tied to the shore connected to tanks on shore. A random spark could send her skyward and the crew is a collection of misfits. Tankers had their own special dangers: "... but the men of a tanker had to live on top of thousands of gallons of gasoline almost all the time for a year or more. The fighter pilots and the marines feared only the enemy, but the tanker men also had to fear themselves and each other … one moment of carelessness or a suicidal impulse could blow them all up. Most people would never understand that, but other sailors treated the crews of gas tankers with sympathy and respect. The poor devils who ran the gas tankers had a right to swagger a little when they went on liberty."
Wilson again touches on racism as he did in Voyage to Somewhere although this book was written some thirty years later. Another theme is the relationship of men to each other, their wives, and the girls they meet while in port. Whether the wives at home at any understanding of the dangers faced by their husbands during the war is problematic.
I would read Ice Brothers first, then Voyage to Somewhere, and finally this book even though that's not the order in which they were written.
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