THE CASTAWAY’S WAR

Nonfiction

The bravest man I ever met

THE CASTAWAY’S WAR:
One Man’s Battle Against Imperial Japan

By Stephen Harding

290 pp. Da Capo

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

In the summer of 1943, a 1,000-pound Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo struck the destroyer USS Strong and sent it to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. A nearby US warship rescued many of the sailors, but Lieutenant Hugh Miller was not one of them. After going overboard, a nearby depth charge exploded and nearly killed him, but he and three others clung to a floating net that drifted ashore onto Arundel, a small island controlled by the Japanese. The Americans’ odds of survival looked bleak.

But that’s the middle of the book. Except for a brief prelude, historian Stephen Harding tells the story chronologically: Hugh Barr Miller Jr. from Tuscaloosa, Alabama learned early life lessons about “the value of self-reliance and ingenuity, of adaptability and dogged determination”; he played in the 1931 Rose Bowl; he had a brief legal career; he joined the Navy as an Ensign. Then the USS Strong’s history gets detailed attention right from its birth as hull 193 in the Bath Iron Works. Readers may need a bit of patience in some of the early chapters as the story builds toward the Strong’s confrontation with the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1943, but the wait is worth it. The author has researched his subject well, including the contemporaneous written recollections of Miller and others.

So here is the core of the amazing story: On Arundel, the wounded Lt. Miller and three able-bodied seamen huddled together:

The night passed without incident, and on the morning of July 11 Hugh dispatched the three young sailors to the spring to fill a few beer bottles and collect a few coconuts. Still suffering intensely, Hugh himself was barely able to move and could only lay on his bed of fronds and try not to cry aloud as wrenching intestinal spasms forced him to pass more dark, clotted blood.

A couple of days later, Miller ordered his men to cross the narrow, shallow waters to New Georgia Island, where rescue seemed more likely. They wanted to bring their Lieutenant along, but he said that in his condition he would be a liability to them. So they left without him and never returned – in all likelihood they were killed. 

And Miller was alone among the enemy:

While the enemy soldiers again passed without discovering him, Hugh was by this point convinced that he was so close to death there was no point in trying to conserve his meager supply of fresh water.

For the next forty days until his rescue, he not only stayed alive but continued to fight and kill the Japanese without them ever knowing he was there. 

How he did that – using courage, intelligence and considerable resourcefulness in attacking the enemy while dealing with agonizing pain – impressed America’s leadership enough for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to pin the Navy Cross on his chest. Then after the war, the accolades continued for a while. Miller became “the Navy’s one-man Army” and the “castaway of Arundel Island.” Miller appeared on the popular TV show, This Is Your Life and was featured in Life and other magazines. Fleet Admiral Bull Halsey tried in vain to upgrade Miller’s Navy Cross to the Medal of Honor, calling Miller “the bravest man I ever met.”

Hugh Barr Miller’s genuine heroism, combined with Stephen Harding’s easily readable style, make this a first-class war story.