Plot
At Norfolk Naval Base in the opening months of World War II, Lieutenant John W. Harkness (Cooper), a newly commissioned officer, reports aboard the PC-1168 unaware that his civilian background in engineering and his Rutgers education has elected him, by means of a hole punched in an IBM card, to head a secret project and command the ship. The Navy has installed a steam engine and an experimental evaporator-condenser in the ship to test its feasibility in patrol craft and has assigned Harkness to conduct the sea trials.
The crew of the submarine chaser assume that Harkness is Regular Navy. Her chief boatswain's mate, Chief Larrabee (Millard Mitchell), and her chief machinist's mate are the only experienced seamen aboard. PC-1168's crew are all newly inducted civilians, and her officers recently commissioned "90 day wonders". The exec, Lt. (j.g.) Barron (Eddie Albert), is a good-natured idea-man whose knowledge of seamanship is out of books. The engineering officer, Ens. Barbo (Jack Webb), has no training, education, or experience in engineering. And the supply-Mess officer, Ens. Dorrance (Richard Erdman), is plagued by seasickness.
After badly damaging bow of the ship their first time underway, Harkness and his officers butt heads with gruff Commander Reynolds (John McIntire), who oversees the project as the representative of Rear Admiral Tennant (Ray Collins). The first trial results in the ship being towed into port, disparaged as the "USS Teakettle" by the rest of the base. Reynolds restricts the crew to the ship until they make the system work, and as the failures mount, the crew's morale plummets, threatening the entire project. The officers hit upon a scheme to enter a crewman in the base boxing championship to unite the crew. They train an engine room sailor, Wascylewski (Charles Bronson), to represent the ship. The crew bets heavily on their shipmate, and to ensure that the "Teakettle" does not fail a sea trial scheduled for the day of the fight, smuggles distilled water aboard. Wascylewski breaks his ribs during the sea trial, forcing Barbo to stand in, but surprisingly he wins the championship.
The film climaxes with the Official Sea Trial of the "Teakettle" in which the crew improvises a successful run. Even so, the trial ends in humiliation for the crew when the ship rams an aircraft carrier—again. At the board of inquiry that follows, Admiral Tennant reveals to Harkness that the selection of his crew was no fluke: the Navy already knew that experts could run the system; it needed to see if novice sailors, who made up the overwhelming percentage of the wartime Navy, could quickly learn to operate it.
Read more about this topic: You're In The Navy Now
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)