Maverick Navy

Maverick Navy by Moffat, Alexander White. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780819550002.

"Maverick Navy" is an engaging account of a U.S. Naval Reserve officer’s adventures while in command of a subchaser in World War I. With the patriotic but naïve innocence which so characterized the period, and "with experience only in small sailing yachts in coastwise cruising," Alexander W. Moffat was quickly catapulted, in 1917, into the real Navy - the real and earnest, blue water fighting Navy. His command was a subchaser - a small, almost experimental vessel, newly devised to meet a new menace. She was U.S. Subchaser No. 143, 110 long, and only 155" in beam, drawing less than six feet. First crossing the Atlantic in the winter of 1917-18, having to follow other ships in the convoy to which she was assigned because no one aboard had any knowledge of navigation, S.C. No. 143 ultimately served, in a squadron operating out of Plymouth England, to keep the sea lanes off southern Britain free of enemy intrusion. In a series of anecdotes, sometimes comic and often moving, Moffat describes the activities of this Maverick unit up to the Armistice - and his own frustrating attempts to get home again - home to his Sally, home to the civilian life of which the Navy would always be a part. This, then, is the story of a nonprofessional, pragmatic sailor - a born story-teller - serving within the system but with all the resourcefulness and ingenuity and leadership that typify the best of the American character when called upon to don the nation’s uniform.