Yes, Frenchie is the nickname of the central character in the book I'm currently writing. He's a motor mac on a PT boat.
So tell us more about the book! please....
Sorry, you'll have to wait until it's published which given the amount of time my employer and other activities are giving me these days will be aways off. Right now I estimate I'm about a third to halfway through the story.
The only thing I will say is it is the story of a single PT boat mission that was carried out in 1943 in total secrecy. It was a diplomatic mission, not a combat mission although it ended in combat. I was told about this mission by four of the surviving crew members who I met in Hawaii when I flew them around over Pearl Harbor in the mid-70s. I'd always been fascinated with PTs ever since reading "They Were Expendable" when I was just a wee lad, so we kind of hung out together for a few days until they went back to the mainland. They told me the gist of this mission which I thought at the time would make a wonderful story (and movie). But I wasn't writing then so the idea just got parked in the back of my mind for the next 20 years.
I started researching PTs in earnest in the 1990s so that if I did tell this story it would be as accurate as possible in terms of the boats and crews and the whole PT "scene." I've interviewed hundreds of PT vets, ridden on the only existing PT powered by its original-type engines, crawled for hours through the Elco PT that's in the naval museum at Battleship Cove, collected just about every book ever published about PTs including some very rare ones from WWII, and so on. But other than the basics of the mission, the reason for it, and its outcome, I'm having to make everything else up. So it's what I guess you'd call a novel based on a true story.
The attached photo is one I acquired in the course of my research. It is one of a series of photos taken early in the war to illustrate the proper way to load and secure a PT on a tanker for shipment to a combat theatre. The photo is unique in that it is the only known photo showing PT109, the boat that eventually was skippered by John F. Kennedy.
I've interviewed a number of vets who knew Kennedy or served in his squadron. Their opinons of him as a PT skipper differ radically from the carefully engineered image that's been put to the public all these years.
PT109 was one of the first batch of 80-footers turned out by Elco in New Jersey and with the 78-foot Higgins became the mainstay of the PT fleet throughout the war. The story I am writing takes place on an 80-foot Elco.
