UNCERTAIN JOURNEY A WWII TALE IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

UNCERTAIN JOURNEY

A World War Two Tale in the South Pacific

After a fierce World War Two battle in the South Pacific, Hollis Rochelle washes up on the shore of Banika Island, badly injured and near death. The islanders bring him to LaGuna, a young woman who nurses him back to health using native remedies.

As Hollis recovers amid the lush beauty of Banika, he and LaGuna fall in love. He discovers an abandoned laboratory and begins searching for a treatment for a disease threatening the islanders' sight. But when a plane crashes on Banika, bringing a group of American survivors into their lives, the peaceful world Hollis and LaGuna have found is threatened.

Hollis's wartime head injury has also left lasting effects that cannot be treated on Banika. To seek the medical care he needs, he must undertake a perilous journey back to the United States, leaving LaGuna behind and facing an uncertain future with the woman he knew before the war.

Written during World War Two while Joseph J. Grimm was serving as a United States Navy physician in the South Pacific, Uncertain Journey was preserved by his family for more than eighty years. This long-lost novel is now published for the first time.

Joseph J. Grimm, M.D. (nineteen o one to nineteen ninety-eight) was born in Hungary and grew up in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A physician and eye, ear, nose, and throat surgeon, he served as a medical officer in the United States Navy during World War Two. Stationed in the South Pacific, Dr. Grimm cared for servicemen at Mobile Hospital Number Ten, a land-based Navy hospital on Banika Island that was later redesignated Fleet Hospital Number One hundred ten.

After the war, Dr. Grimm returned to Wisconsin, where he resumed his medical career and continued writing.

This one's for you, Dad. Dreams really do come true. Dedicated to your family.

A Note from the Author's Family

Dear Reader,

This is our father's novel, Uncertain Journey, written more than eighty years ago. For most of our lives, it existed as a stack of typed pages. We never really thought it would see the light of day.

And now, we are finally able to share it with you.

Our father, Joseph J. Grimm, M.D., began writing Uncertain Journey during World War Two while serving as a physician and eye, ear, nose, and throat surgeon in the United States Naval Reserve. He was forty-two years old when he sailed from California for the South Pacific, not knowing where he was being sent or what awaited him.

He eventually arrived on Banika, a small island in the Russell Islands, where he served at United States Navy Mobile Hospital Number Ten, a massive shore-based, one thousand three hundred bed hospital complex of Quonset huts, later redesignated Fleet Hospital Number one hundred ten. The conditions were difficult-oppressive heat and humidity and demanding medical work. Young Marines arrived from the fighting with terrible wounds. Some had suffered devastating eye injuries and would never see again.

And somehow, amid all of this, our father wrote a novel.

Writing became more than a way to pass the time. It gave him an outlet for feelings that were difficult for him to express. In one of his wartime letters, he wrote:

He wrote whenever he could-after rounds, late at night, and in whatever spare moments he could find. Three young servicemen helped type the growing manuscript. They refused to accept payment, so our father compensated them with bottles of beer from his weekly allotment.

War correspondents Gerald A. Waindel and Hans R. Johansen spent hours reading and discussing the manuscript with him. Others who read the manuscript and offered suggestions included Marine Corps war correspondent and Washington Star journalist James F. Moser, photographer Norris G. McElroy, and our father's medical colleague, Dr. Hollis K. Russell.

He wrote nearly the entire original manuscript on Banika and worked intensively on the final chapters during his last month in the South Pacific, while stationed in Nouméa, New Caledonia.

The manuscript was enormous. In a résumé he later prepared, he recorded that it had once reached eight hundred seventy-six pages. Over the years, he kept returning to it, revising and paring it down-first to six hundred pages and eventually to about four hundred.

I remember him working on it.

As a little girl, I would see him in our living room late at night, hunched over his manuscript, writing and revising. Years later, when my siblings and I were old enough to help, we strapped copies into awkward cardboard boxes and mailed them off to publishers.

Our father did not live to see Uncertain Journey published, but I like to think he would be smiling now.

So here it is for you, Dad. Dreams really do come true.