I came across this in The Good Shepherd by CS Forester, but I think it’s a historic term, so I’m putting it here.
The novel is about a USN captain who is commanding a convoy escort soon after the US enters the war. Some of his backstory is that his marriage failed, in part because of a rating he got as part of a review: “Fitted but retained”.
Forester never explains that phrase, but the captain apparently thought it was a serious comment on his abilities.
Any idea what it meant?
Sorry just a guess.
But I suspect the rating fitted whatever negative thing he had done. But he was retained.
It seems to say that in some other cases such an infraction that merited such a poor rating could be cause for dismissal. But for some reason they did not dismiss.
That would leave a big question mark.
Doing a quick online search, I found this. It removes the descriptions of “best fitted”, “fitted but retained”, and “fitted” from officer evaluations.
Another link is here:
Before the war, he was “fitted and retained” (meaning, in naval parlance, judged adequate but not good enough for promotion), and only got his promotion to Commander when the war began.
Could it perhaps be code for a man having a drinking problem? Any hint at drinking in his backstory or instances in the story where he has a drink to “steel his nerves”??
I don’t think it’s necessary to assume it’s code for anything, other than (as @Monty essentially describes) a term of art in the bureaucracy of the interwar US Navy (and honestly, the pre-WWI US Navy, and really the Army as well). It comes from the limited promotion opportunities available, particularly to officers as the number of commissioned officers who can serve at any particular pay grade are set by Congress. So before someone like, say, Lieutenant Commander *Tom Hanks can be promoted to Commander, a spot needs to open up. That would require:
(a) Someone holding the rank of Commander to die
(b) Someone holding the rank of Commander to retire
(c) Congress to increase the statutorily allowed number of Commanders
(d) Someone holding the rank of Commander to be promoted to Captain (but then see a thru c above, and replace Commander with Captain as the same basic constraints apply)
This is, by the way, essentially still true today. But today, officers who don’t get promoted are more likely to be… well, you know how Hanks was founded “fitted but retained”? The “fitted” part means found to have possessed the minimum qualifications for promotion (as we today would call “fully qualified”). The “retained” part means, not promoted, (and so not, as we might say “best qualified”) but also not kicked out. Just drop the “retained” part and you’ll see where I’m going. Or at the very least, someone passed over for promotion a number of times will not be retained all the way to 62 (or whatever the statutory retirement age is). They will either be separated from the military if they’re a junior officer without many years in, forced to retire at 20 years of total serve if they’re a Lieutenant Commander (or heir landed equivalent), or forced to retire at one of a number of other statutory limits applicable to the grades of Commander and Captain.
Point being, back in the day, the military was much more likely to “retain” officers who were “merely” fit to continue serving, but with the down stream effect of making it much harder for more junior officers to promote (because someone staying in at a higher grade was… allowed to stay in at a higher grade instead of opening a spot up).
So the truth is, probably the majority of officers in Lieutenant-Commander-turned-Commander Hanks’ situation would have been “fitted but retained” or the like many times throughout their mid-career, and then only promoted with the rapid wartime expansion (and looking forward to Hanks’ future, he might well have spent only a year or two as a Commander, and then been rapidly promoted to Captain and into the grades of Admiral).
If fitted but retained is code for anything, it’s code for “sorry, you’re just like everyone else.” Not special. Not god’s gift to the Navy. Not even a monster or a drunkard or a fool. Just like everyone else who has to wait their turn (or, as West Point cadets even wrote into the lyrics of one their songs, for war to come and “the army be augmented, promotion be less slow”). It speaks to his insecurity, not to any particular flaw in his character or ability (except, again, that he may be merely human, like everyone else).
Nevertheless, Hanks, like a great many people who join the Navy in their youth, fueled by lines like “I have not yet begun to fight!”, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”, and of course those immortal words “The needs pf the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one,” it can then be a bit deflating, even demoralizing, to fine oneself in a long peace, without much opportunity for distinction, and nothing to force one’s more senior officers out (or to at least open up the flood gates to move past them).
*I have read the book and seen the movie. For the life of me, I cannot remember the main character’s name, or if he even had one. Which is perhaps the point. Part of being “just like everyone else” is being a good stand in for the Everyman.
I realize that, but I was asking in relationship to the story arch. Was it woven into storyline as part of this guys reason for being who he was? Like “In all the gin joints in all the world” type of thing. Storylines can infer things that are not necessarily an accurate interpterion of the phrase.
No. There was no suggestion that he was a frequent drunk or flawed in any way. Except, again, that he at times doubted himself, even felt at times the imposter in his role as the senior officer in the convoy (contrasted against more junior officers from allied navies commanding the other ships in th squadron: more junior, but also with more experience in anti-submarine warfare).
So, again, I think it’s speaks to his perfectly usual human insecurity, which does come up again in the plot, as he must continue to overcome it. Just like any other red blooded patriot would!
Thanks, I may have to check this one out myself.
Nope. As @ASL_v2.0 says, no indication of that in his backstory. Rather, he’s a straight arrow, for whom his duty means everything, yet he got classified as “fitted but retained”. The explanations given in this thread make sense. Thanks, all.
Side note: I’ve just read the book, not seen the Hanks movie - is it good?
It’s… fine. It’s almost a straight adaptation, which is good and bad. The bad being that, as you will know, much of the tension in the book is internal to the Captain, and so not something he outwardly expresses often. Which means you have to either deviate from the book and let the Captain speak out a little more, possibly even invent whole new scenes in which he can bounce ideas off a trusted confidant (and I don’t mean a mess steward who urges him to eat more), or… you have a somewhat dull/unengaging film lacking tension outside the battle scenes. Unfortunately, we got the latter, plus some comically misdirected taunting from the U Boats thrown in (some real “The Statue of Liberty is kaput!” level taunting, I think to help build tension and make the conflict seem more personal, but really it was just ridiculous).
That’s what I was wondering about. So much of the book is inside the captain’s head. He’s a stoic, unemotional guy, who does trigonometry problems in his head to decide when to drop depth charges. I would think even Tom Hanks would have trouble making that exciting.
Krause. He’s the son of a Lutheran pastor of German ancestry from California.
Of course, his crew nicknamed him “The Kraut”.
That, and his delayed trips to the head, were indicators of his devotion to duty. I think it was over 36 hours that he was on duty on the bridge, while the watches came and went, and his XO and mess steward worried that he wasn’t remembering to eat while he did his trig problems in his head.
And a technical question - there’s something called a “TBS”, which allows him to talk to the officers on the other naval ships. However, that’s not the same as breaking radio silence to contact London to call for help. What would the “TBS” be?
If memory serves, TBS would be… Talk Between Ships (which I suspect is the equivalent of what we might today call BTB: Bridge-to-Bridge). Which would sort of be breaking radio silence, although it might (might) be distinguished from other forms of radio communications by being on a higher frequency, and so less likely to be intercepted and used for direction finding, especially given the limitations of the day.
You might, for example, recall reference to Huff-Duff in the book, which whether they explained it or not was High Frequency Direction Finding (HFDF). Which is why radio silence is important (because signals can be intercepted by distant stations and then the direction of the signal can be compared between those stations to develop a cross-fix at their intersection), but the very name (HFDF) also betrays the limitations: high frequency (or lower) is indeed what ships would use for long range (over the horizon) communications absent satellites, but then higher frequencies (Very High Frequency on up) would typically be line of sight only, and so less susceptible to being picked up by shore-based (which is what they would have been limited to at the time) signal stations and used for direction finding.
At least back in the day.
So it may be that they were comfortable using VHF line of sight communications to talk among ships in the convoy, as they had reason to believe (rightly or wrongly, I honestly don’t know what Germany’s VHF direction finding capabilities were circa 1942) that the Germans would not be able to intercept those signals at range and use them to locate the convoy. Anyone who could intercept those signals would presumably already be within sight of the convoy (although that’s not strictly true, it may have been true enough for their purposes).
They do mention that it wasn’t secure, because “Jerry” kept interjecting insults to one of the ships. The captain of one of the other ships wanted to report he was low on fuel, and didn’t want that heard by the U-boats. But that sounded like local U-Boat stuff, not land-based, and the U-Boats already knew where the convoy was.
His concern about breaking radio silence was that the only reason for doing so would be to call for help, because they were running low on fuel and depth charges, and that information alone would be valuable to the U-Boat command in l’Orient, even if the Germans couldn’t decode it.
Oh? The insults were in the book? Well, it’s unfortunate the chose to keep that in the movie then, because it wasn’t menacing, it was ridiculous. But, yeah, it would almost certainly have been the U-boats in the immediate vicinity. Radio silence isn’t about not letting people hear you so much as it’s about not letting people find you. If they are close enough to be cutting into your line of sight communications to make quick barbs, then they are close enough to see you, and so already know where you are relative to them.
They didn’t actually say what the insults were, simply that “Jerry” kept interjecting.
That makes sense. At one point, one of the ships is so far off station chasing a contact that it can’t be reached by TBS.
Radio-telephony allowed captains to talk directly for the first time, and was seen as a great advance over lamp signals and flags, but senior officers were not trained in voice procedure (they had always had someone else to do that stuff) and made some dismal security mistakes at first (got a transcript of it in a book somewhere round here)