Doesn’t that last one sound like mid-century specfic? Dr. Wassell could be an astrophysicist or a chemist or a atomico-neuro-physio-roboticist or an explorer or pretty much anything, hero or villain. That’s why YHB picked it up, anyway.
It turns out that Dr. Wassell was a small-town doctor, who happened to be in a tough spot in the Pacific during World War II, and needed to shepherd his charges, wounded in varying degrees, out of danger. It’s a True Story, or at least it’s an Inspired By True Story: there was a Dr. Wassell, who more or less did these things. Mr. Hilton did a good deal of research in a short time, changed the identities of the wounded (to protect them from embarrassment, I think) and touched it up here and there to make a good story. It was marketed as a biographical novel, and marketed successfully.
And it’s a good book, in its way, which is a small way. Gripping, a bit strange, with an eye to telling detail and small increments of comfort or discomfort in an adventure to big to be really visible, moment to moment. No mad scientists, though.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.