A Career Limiting Move?

Actually, Maryk wouldn't have faced the death penalty if convicted -at least according to the novel.

In the novel, Maryk isn't even tried for mutiny. The official charge is "Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline". It's described as a catch-all charge for grey areas.

This is how the book describes it:

"This shopper's list of crimes, however, did not provide a charge or specification for the peculiar offence of Lieutenant Steven Maryk. Captain Breakstone had quickly perceived that, though the affair was more like a mutiny than anything else, Maryk's invoking of Article 184 and his subsequent legalistic conduct made a conviction for mutiny unlikely. It was the queerest sort of twilight situation. In the end he fixed on the catch-all charge provided for rare or complicated offenses, 'Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline'."

In the end, even though he's acquitted, Maryk's hopes of a naval career are destroyed. If he'd been convicted, the maximum penalty would have been fifteen years incarceration and dismissal. After his acquittal, he's sent to command an LSI which is described as a humiliation, especially given his skills as a seaman.

Afterwards, the cases of Willie and Stillwell are dropped as the convening authority realized that convictions would be most unlikely given that the main figure in the case, Maryk, was acquitted. Stillwell, however, had undergone a nervous breakdown of his own just prior to the court-martial. Queeg had been persecuting him for pretty much the entire time he'd been in command of the Caine -another point in the book the film overlooks. The impending court-martial had apparently been the last straw. At the end of the book, Willie mentions that he heard Stillwell pretty much recovered after some shock therapy and was put on limited duty ashore. (Willie relates this in a letter to May. He says that Stillwell was driven to his breakdown by Queeg...and Willie now feels equally sorry for the both of them. In Willie's opinion they were both victims of the war).

In the novel, it's described that the vast majority of the officers and crew of the Caine are reassigned afterwards. Only three officers remain aboard from the Queeg days: Keefer, who becomes executive officer and then captain; Willie, who becomes executive officer when Keefer assumes command; and Farrington, who was only joined the ship two month before the typhoon and had nothing to do with the case. Of the crew, it's described that fully three quarters are reassigned with only a handful remaining.

In all likelihood, Willie wasn't punished any further because of the circumstances of the case. It was obvious to all that Queeg's tenure as captain of the Caine, even without the relief during the typhoon, had been a disaster. Supposedly, a regular officer -a trouble shooter- takes over after the typhoon and spends five months restoring order to the ship. After the court martial, Queeg himself is sent to be executive officer of a naval depot in Iowa -which is pretty much a career dead-end. He's later passed over for promotion. Even though the relief should never have taken place (a point which even Willie and Keefer acknowledge later on), it was clear that he was utterly incompetent as a commanding officer.

In the book, Queeg isn't described as veteran of much Atlantic combat. Supposedly he had taken part in Operation Torch (the invasion of North Africa), as he was once telling anecdotes to a seaman.

In the book, Queeg was described has having served on destroyers -albeit ones more modern than the Caine and ones hadn't been converted to minesweepers. He'd only briefly served as an executive officer on his most recent one, then had been sent to an aircraft carrier (the U.S.S. Brandywine Creek) for a short tour prior to his getting orders to relieve Captain DeVriess.

The book suggested that Queeg had seen some combat, but not the extensive battles with submarines that he alluded to in the film. He had, however, been serving pretty much constantly at sea for over four years by the time of typhoon (i.e. constantly assigned to ships and at sea, without any stints of shore duty in between to give him a chance to wind up).

The crucial point that the book suggests is that none of Queeg's prior duty had been as a captain. He was more or less fine as a subordinate officer where the final responsibility for the ship's welfare didn't depend on him. It was the isolating responsibility as captain, with the knowledge that he could conceivably kill over a hundred men with a single wrong decision, that pretty much broke him down.

When he testifies at the court martial, Willie describes how after Maryk relieves him, Queeg actually looks a lot calmer and more relaxed. Willie believes it's because Queeg realized that he was no longer responsible for the ship's safety.

Queeg wasn't insane. However, he was definitely an incompetent and ill-suited officer for command of a ship. His tenure as captain of the Caine was marked by harshness and extreme bad judgement. Willie, when he's able to step back from the situation and look at thing objectively, is able to see Queeg as (instead of the omnipresent monster he's become to everyone on board) as simply a well-meaning man struggling with a job that was far beyond his capabilities.

Greenwald's point -and Willie later concurred with it, when he wrote a letter to May months later at Okinawa, after he himself had become the Caine's executive officer- was that the officer's should have stepped up and helped Queeg. They should have covered his mistakes as best they could and make it look like he was best captain in the navy. Certainly, it would not make Queeg into a good captain. But, at least it would let him know that he had the loyalty of his wardroom and thus wouldn't feel so totally isolated. That's essentially the course of action Willie undertakes when he's executive officer and Keefer is the captain. Keefer is a nervous captain and a poor ship handler. Like Queeg, he's haunted by the potentially fatal responsibility of his office. Willie, however, steps up and covers any mistakes. Even when Keefer performs poorly when the ship is hit by a kamikaze, Willie doesn't criticize his actions and backs him up to the hilt when they give a report to the squadron commander. (To his credit though, Keefer -unlike Queeg- realizes his own shortcomings and openly discusses with Willie how he finds command to be an utter nightmare. He even says that he feels more sympathy for Queeg than Willie ever could, because he -Keefer- now knows exactly how tough a time Queeg had).

Heh. Yes, I do. Thanks. Sometimes it’s possible to revive a discussion thread even when the OP is long gone and, in this case, possibly deceased.