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Title: The Gun Club

Subtitle: USS Duncan at Cape Esperance

Author: Robert Fowler

Narrator: Robert Fowler

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-04-17

Publisher: Robert Fowler

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The US Navy's first planned battle of WWII is told through the extraordinary, little-known story of USS Duncan, the first Allied warship to penetrate a Japanese battle line. From their first encounter with their celebrated captain and tyrannical executive officer to a deadly night afloat in shark-infested waters to a homecoming turned into a PR campaign, The Gun Club is a vivid day-to-day account of life on a warship, told largely in the words of the survivors, and is one of the most detailed and compelling accounts of a war cruise ever written.

Members Reviews:

The remarkable confluence of naval history and personal experience

The Gun Club is an exquisite telling of a sonâs reaching out across the years to know his father. Robert Fowler never met his father who died in the navel battle at Cape Esperance in the Solomon Islands early in WWII. By interviewing survivors, his father's shipmates, Fowler chronicles of the details of shipboard life, significant and trivial, as the Navy first began to confront the Japanese sweep across the Pacific in 1942. Cape Esperance was our first ship to ship sea battle since the Spanish American War; it was a night battle which went wrong while men on ships did the best they could as the situation unfolded. The courage and dedication of the men on the USS Duncan that night inspired the Navy to adopt new tactics which changed the course of the war. Fowler spins his history with the precise detail of an after action report, never forgetting the man he never met.

Not just a tale told with heroics. The FLUBS are here too.

The combinations of research performed by the author enabled him to generate a comprehensive narrative.

His recollection of statements made by military survivors and relatives provided many views of the battle.

A gripping narrative

A triumph of research into an obscure corner of u.s. History. Interesting and well written. More graphic and close up than any naval battle history that I have read about, a genre I am very familiar with.

~~ A Gripping Tale of a Sea Battle and the 'Spin' the U.S. Navy Gave It ~~

As a woman born after WWII -- with no military experience and therefore perhaps an unlikely reader of such a book -- I nonetheless found it gripping. The sea battle is told largely through the voices of crew members who survived and their memories vividly bring to life both the confusion on board and then the long, dark hours in the water, hoping for rescue and sometimes tangling with Japanese sailors in the same fix . Some were on their own, others in small groups. All wanted to avoid the sharks which were attracted not only by the blood from wounds but also by the white feet of those who had left their shoes and socks behind. One young officer survived losing most of an arm and part of his buttocks to a shark. Another officer bit off the end of his pinkie in the heat of the battle. It is these details and the energy of the telling that kept me reading late into the night.

The author explains why the Navy accepted face-saving reports from officers after this battle at Guadalcanal. First, the U.S. was short of trained officers at the start of the war and, second, morale among troops and at home was a priority. So, though the captain of the Duncan abandoned ship leaving half his crew on board, he was not court-martialed.