After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, young Americans lined up at recruiting stations across the nation. Crash Boat is the compelling story of an armed United States air-sea rescue boat crewed by volunteers during World War II in the South Pacific. Only months earlier, they had been civilians, living the best years of their lives. In the Pacific, they conducted dramatic rescues of downed pilots and clandestine missions off of enemy-held islands at great peril and with little fanfare. George D. Jepson chronicles these ordinary young men doing extraordinary things, as told to him by Earl A. McCandlish, commander of the 63-foot crash boat P-399. Nicknamed Sea Horse, the vessel and her crew completed over thirty rescues at sea, weathered typhoons, fought a fierce gun battle with Japanese forces, experienced life from another age in isolated native villages, carried out boondoggle missions, and played a supporting role in America’s return to the Philippines.
A vivid, intimate, and poignant record of 18 months of combat service in the South Pacific. . . . This book stands with Dick Keresey’s memoir, PT 105, as an essential record of small-craft combat in the South Pacific.
This would make a bloody good novel!
Crash Boat is an amazing blend of the Greatest Generation learning about the South Pacific overlaid with international politics and a brutal war. The writing is seamless, with the reader drawn in on page one. Stand by to be a couch potato—you won’t be disappointed.
Just when you thought every possible aspect of World War II in the Pacific had been covered to exhaustion, this fresh new memoir of crash boat service in Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and the Philippines turns up. Told in a no-nonsense but vivid style by the skipper of P-399, this is a true tale of service in an air-sea rescue boat, with storms at sea, daring rescues of crashed planes both ashore and at sea, and the welding together of a crew under wartime stress. A terrific read.
