The Adventure Club with the Fleet

Two boys of the Adventure Club enlist in the Navy the week America enters the war in 1917, go through the training station and ship for European waters aboard the U.S.S. Warren, a small craft of the "Suicide Fleet" that hunts submarines. Ralph Henry Barbour wrote it while the war was on and the details of the chasers, the patrols and the drills are contemporary. The boys' enthusiasm is period-perfect and the book does not pretend the war is a game. Fifty plates of American sea painting, from Thomas Birch to George Bellows, keep the chasers and the Gloucester waterfront in view throughout.