Delilah

This novel, published in 1941, is set on the seas around the Philippines during the First World War. The author presumably intended the central character to be U.S.S. Delilah rather than the numerous lively characters serving aboard the ship. The scenes in the novel are informed by the author's own experience as an officer on a similar ship in the same time and place. Even before the declaration of war by the United States, the crew face many dangers in their work and experience casualties due to events such as explosions and shark attacks.

The author, Marcus Goodrich (born 28 November 1897), grew up in Texas. He left school to served in the Texas National Guard on the Mexican border. He then joined the Navy. He served on the U.S.S. Chauncey, part of the Asiatic fleet operating in the seas around China and the Philippines. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the Chauncey was sent to Europe for convoy escort duty. The author was one of 70 survivors of the accidental sinking of the ship in November 1917 near Gibraltar. He received a publishing contract for this novel in 1932 and worked successfully as a screenwriter before the novel finally appeared in 1941. He subsequently was again on active duty in the Navy during the Second World War.

One of the officers on the U.S.S. Delilah, Warrington, prepares for the declaration of war by reading of the events in Europe:
“In these lax, latter days he had gotten so absorbed, so indignantly absorbed, in magazine and newspaper accounts of the havoc being wrought by the Germans in Europe that he had been swept out of his reading routine into a feverish wallowing in the atrocity columns of all the publications that he could buy ashore or that came in the mail to the men on the ship. He seemed to have forgotten his books... in order to torture himself with nothing but the reading of every reported rape, every destroyed cathedral, every executed civilian as if each were a personal affront of his own human dignity.”
When war was finally declared, the crew’s response was somewhat impassive:
“They understood the declaration, most of them, simply in the sense that now, one way or another, there had become part of their daily work a fabulous chaos blazing somewhere half-a-world away, amidst still other scenes and peoples their eyes had not looked upon before.”