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INTRODUCTION

Ernest Hemingway once said there are three things necessary for successful writing: a thorough knowledge of what you are writing about, a real seriousness in regard to writing, and a certain amount of talent. In Run Silent, Run Deep Edward L. Beach has provided an unwitting testimonial to the validity of that counsel. The Naval Academy, two years of antisubmarine duty in the North Atlantic, submarine school, and eleven submarine war patrols in the Pacific, five as an executive officer and navigator and the very last in command, supplied Beach with ample experience and information to write a novel of submarine warfare. The fact that Run Silent, Run Deep was written early in the morning, late at night, on weekends, on leave, and in whatever other spare time was left to an officer serving as naval aide to the president of the United States measures the seriousness with which he approached his task. As for his talent, it had been proven six years before with the publication of the nonfiction Submarine! which sold an impressive forty thousand copies in hard cover.

Run Silent, Run Deep was, in fact, a logical step after Submarine! with its dramatically authentic, historically accurate accounts of the combat exploits of actual submariners in actual submarines. Those exploits and others like them, with the personalities of participants modified and their names changed, became for Beach the bridge between nonfiction and fiction. In a sense Run Silent, Run Deep can be classified as only part fiction, since most of the actions of the Walrus and Eel actually took place. For example, the Walrus’s patrol off Kiska and the Aleutians, which Beach calls “the most wasted month any submarine spent during the whole war,” has a precise parallel in his experience on a similar patrol in the Trigger. The circling torpedo that almost finished the Walrus was not the author’s invention; he had experienced the danger of malfunctioning torpedoes three times, and twice the magnetic detonator had exploded the warhead. The torpedo failures that Richardson helps to correct are unhappily grounded in experience. The incident in which Richardson describes a fire on the Enterprise, secretly visiting Pearl Harbor, is also based on fact. Jim Bledsoe’s first patrol in command of the Walrus, “one of the most daringly conducted and persistently fought submarine actions of the war,” was inspired by the Tirante’s first patrol under Lieutenant Commander George Street, which earned him the Medal of Honor. His executive officer, by then Lieutenant Commander Edward L. Beach, received the Navy Cross. The Octopus, on which Richardson serves a long apprenticeship, and the Walrus, which he commands, are both later lost to enemy action; together they have a nonfiction sister in the Trigger, the boat Beach served in two and a half years, the last year as executive officer on four war patrols. And so on.

To cite the historical foundation of Run Silent, Run Deep is not to deny or denigrate Ned Beach’s creative talent. It is rather to credit him with the use of an innovative and effective means of making the often difficult transition from nonfiction to fiction. In his various versions of reality the author found a solid structure upon which his novel could be built.

And it is authenticity, Hemingway’s first requirement for good writing, that is the great strength of this book—that makes it convincing to the reader and gives it the backbone to survive the fads of literary taste. Run Silent, Run Deep is a great and entertaining story which masterfully employs the intimate first person. But long after the pleasure of reading is over and the details of the plot have slipped from memory, what stays with us is a feeling, an emotional realization of “the way it was,” of how it felt to be a submariner confronting an able enemy in his home waters in World War II.

The episodes of Submarine! convey a similar sense of the submarine experience, but the novel, involving the reader more deeply in the story, firing his imagination, drawing him in to identify with the protagonist/narrator, has added intensity, paints the picture in more vivid, indelible colors. From the perspective of the quarter century since its publication, it is apparent that Run Silent, Run Deep is an historical novel, although it was certainly not intended to be. And like the best of that genre, it presents the past more effectively than the best of history books. What history can provide us with an understanding of the burning of Atlanta to equal what we read in Gone with the Wind? What history of the colonists’ campaign against Quebec can compete with the gripping, agonizing account in A Rabble at Arms? What factual narrative is there that recreates with the power of All Quiet on the Western Front the futility, degradation, and despair of trench warfare in the First World War? In Run Silent, Run Deep, Ned Beach has done for the submarine war against Japan what Margaret Mitchell, Kenneth Roberts, and Erich Remarque did for Atlanta, Quebec, and the Western Front.

The book’s authentic detail comes not only from the realm of historical fact. It comes also from the author’s knowledge of the complex mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electronic, optical, and navigational systems that together were the World War II “fleet-type” U.S. submarine. The following quotation amply illustrates Beach’s easy familiarity with his subject matter. After an especially violent depth-charging, a survey of the Walrus finds her engines, battery, propellers and their shafts, and torpedo tubes undamaged,

but quite a few other items had been put out of action for the rest of the patrol. The fire in the after torpedo room had been in the stern plane motor, ruining it. Until we returned to port our stern planes would have to be operated by hand power—not an easy task. The trim pump, cracked right across the heavy steel housing and knocked off its foundation, was beyond repair; we would have to cross-connect the drain pump to the trim line and make shift with it as well as we might. One air compressor was also cracked across one of its foundation frames and could not be used.

In the climactic battle with Bungo Pete, the book’s antagonist, the Eel’s captain wants to show the bow of his submerged sub to the enemy destroyer skipper, who will think it his own submarine. The captain does not say, “I quickly stuck my bow above the surface and submerged again.” He says, instead,

“Tell Al to blow bow bouyancy and stick our bow out. . . . Then flood negative and get us back down quick! We don’t want to get the whole boat on the surface!”

Eel’s hull shivered as the lifting strain of the bow tank came on. Al must have at the same time put full rise on the stern planes to hold the stern down, and we took a large angle up by the bow. I saw our bullnose come out, stay for a long instant, go back down in a smother of externally vented air. There was venting and blowing inside, too, as negative was first vented to flood it, then blown dry, then vented again to take the pressure off.

Less technical but no less authentic, as anyone who has ever been to sea can verify, is the author’s description of the smell of a foreign land from seaward, “a musty tinge to the air, an odor of wet, burned sandalwood, of unwashed foreign bodies. . . . All night we cruised aimlessly about, seeing nothing, never losing the smell of Japan.”

In setting down realistically, in the pages of a suspenseful and entertaining sea story, what it was like to fight under the sea on the approaches to Japan, Ned Beach performed a valuable service for his countrymen. Because winning the submarine war was a major factor in the final defeat of Japan and victory in World War II. Between December 1941 and August 1945 a total of sixteen thousand men in 288 submarines sailed against the enemy in the Pacific. Although only two percent of the U.S. Navy’s manpower, these sailors accounted for two-thirds of Japan’s merchant marine and one-third of her navy, effectively severing the vital supply routes from her conquered empire to the south and isolating the home islands. The cost was high—fifty-two U.S. submarines and more than thirty-five hundred American lives. But the effects of their depredations, which spread far beyond the immediate loss of valuable and needed cargoes, were worth that price.

After the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942, when Japan lost four of her first-line carriers, all their aircraft, and most of their pilots, she had an urgent need for replacements. The planes could be and were replaced but, thanks to U.S. submarines, which sank most of the tankers heading for Japan, there was never enough fuel to train new pilots adequately. How many U.S. lives were saved in the war at sea when bombs, torpedoes, or kamikazes missed their targets because enemy pilots lacked proper training we will never know, but those of us who fought the surface war will be forever grateful to those below the surface whose skill and courage, however indirectly, were responsible for the misses.

The major contribution to victory made by Submarines, Pacific—and Japanese leaders interviewed after the war said it was submarines that were primarily responsible for their defeat—could not have been foretold before Pearl Harbor. On paper the Japanese submarines were better and there were more of them. The Japanese I-boats were larger than U.S. Fleet submarines, longer-legged, faster on the surface, and equipped with hard-hitting, long-range, highly reliable torpedoes. On 7 December sixty-four of them were ready for action, whereas there were only forty U.S. submarines in the Pacific. On that day more than twenty I-boats ringed the Hawaiian Islands. But they did not put a scratch on a single U.S. hull. Japanese submarines were a straw in the wind and had not the slightest effect on the outcome of the war. Sustaining losses two and a half times the number of American losses (which amounted to 127 boats), the enemy subs managed to sink two aircraft carriers (one of which was already dead in the water), a heavy cruiser, a few destroyers and smaller escorts, and fewer than a hundred merchantmen. This compared with the two hundred warships and nearly twelve hundred merchantmen put down by the American submariners.

Why the huge discrepancy in the effectiveness of American and Japanese subs? Several reasons have been advanced.

• Erroneous strategy on the part of the Japanese, who saw only American warships as worth the risk of their submarines and ignored the vulnerable convoys of U.S. merchantmen on their long supply lines across the Pacific.

• The use of Japanese submarines in the passive, defensive role of supplying bypassed island garrisons—a mission forced by the army, the dominant service in Japan.

• Inferior equipment on Japanese boats, including sonar and radar (which was not even available to the Japanese until mid-1944).

• Japan’s waste of submarines in missions that were, in the samurai tradition, dramatic and heroic but which had no useful results, like the 6,500-mile round-trip voyage to drop four incendiary bombs on the forests of Cape Blanco, Oregon, or the nuisance shellings of Johnston, Canton, and Midway islands and Santa Barbara, California.

• The large Japanese submarine force’s loss of face at Pearl Harbor, from which the service never recovered.

But thanks to Run Silent, Run Deep and, to a lesser extent, Submarine! we know the real reason that U.S. submarines were superior. True, they had radar—a huge advantage—better sonar, and better computational devices like the torpedo data computer. True, they were quieter. But in the end it was the men themselves that made the difference—the Richardsons, Bledsoes, Leones, and Kanes, the fictional brothers-in-arms of the Dealeys, Dornins, Ramages, Mortons, Streets, O’Kanes, and Beaches whose determined, aggressive, courageous spirits doggedly carried the war to the enemy in patrol after patrol until the law of averages became a major enemy and death or final victory brought an end.

Reviews back in 1955 were quick to recognize the gripping, sweaty-palmed authenticity of Beach’s prose and correctly placed him in the company of other writers of the sea, especially C. S. Forester, whose Good Shepherd—about a World War II destroyer on convoy duty in the North Atlantic—was published almost simultaneously. The San Francisco Examiner, while ceding the literary edge to Forester’s book, called Run Silent, Run Deep “even more authoritative,” and the Washington Star classified Beach’s Richardson as, like Forester’s Hornblower, a “naval officer with complete technical mastery of his profession and a keen mind that never fails to profit by experience.” Time, somewhat less credibly, compared Richardson to Melville’s Ahab. And the Chicago Tribune related Run Silent, Run Deep to Marcus Goodrich’s Delilah, a gritty novel about a coal-burning pre—World War I destroyer on the China station. The New York Times Book Review wrote, “If ever a book had the ring of reality, this is it.” The San Francisco Chronicle praised the book for “the vivid picture the reader gets of what it is like to be both hunter and hunted in the dark depths of the sea. . . .” The cumulative effect of this flood of highly favorable reviews and the evident appeal of the novel itself landed it on best-seller lists around the country.

When a writer of nonfiction makes the big jump to the more creative form of fiction, as Beach did with Run Silent, Run Deep, he immediately encounters three unfamiliar challenges—plot, characterization, and dialogue. It is odd that only a minority of reviewers took the time to assess those aspects of this first novel or to pay tribute to the author’s success in handling them. A few reviews faulted characterization, most of them citing the character of Laura. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times Sunday Magazine called her “a wartime dream girl [whose] outlines are never as clear as the silhouettes of the submarines.” It should be noted here that if this criticism is valid, it is one that can be applied to other writers of essentially masculine adventure who have difficulty creating believable female characters, including most notably the aforementioned Ernest Hemingway.

The book’s popularity did not end with reviewers and readers. Less than two months after publication, Run Silent, Run Deep received a different sort of testimonial to its merits. The screen rights were purchased by United Artists. And after a sustained joint promotional campaign by that company and the publisher, Henry Holt and Company, the film premiered in Washington in the spring of 1958, starring Clark Gable as Richardson and Burt Lancaster as Bledsoe. Like the novel itself, and despite some startling departures from the original text, the film was an immediate and long-lasting success. To this day it is probably the best-known motion picture about submarines ever filmed.

It is rare for a first novel to achieve such a high degree of public recognition and acceptance, and nearly unheard of for a first novel by an active-duty military officer in a demanding and responsible billet. What did Commander Edward L. Beach, United States Navy, bring to the writing that made Run Silent, Run Deep the exception?

At the beginning there was family influence and example. Edward L. Beach, Sr., was not only a professional naval officer who commanded major warships and retired as a captain but also a professor of history and the author of more than a dozen young-adult books about the navy which his son loved and, as he told a reviewer, “read . . . to shreds.” For a bright, idealistic young man growing up in a navy family those books, with their “brave and bold lads . . . always rescuing some fair damsel in distress—or thwarting some crook trying to steal the country’s secrets,” were especially influential.

Added to that formative background was Ned Beach’s own driven self. When this writer made the acquaintance of the future author, in 1938, he was the midshipman regimental commander at the Naval Academy and he ranked number two in his class. Upon graduation he received the Academy’s most coveted award for being the “midshipman contributing most to naval spirit and loyalty.” Even before commissioning, he had earned the respect and affection of peers and superiors alike.

After leaving the Academy this bright young son of a seaman fell in love with the sea, even though his first taste of it was from the bridge of an ancient destroyer on neutrality patrol in the North Atlantic. And when, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, he graduated (first in his class) from submarine school, that love of the sea was joined by an equally ardent love of submarines and the calm and silent underwater world that is their element. It is this dual passion that he brought to the writing of Run Silent, Run Deep and the three other submarine books following it (two novels, expanding Richardson’s adventures into a trilogy, and a nonfiction account of Beach’s submerged circumnavigation of the world in the nuclear submarine Triton). His passion permeates the prose of Run Silent, Run Deep, giving an almost lyrical lift and charm to the clear-cut expository style in which the story is told. Thousands of submariners had seen, heard, and felt the functional beauty of the heavy opening and closing of the main induction, the spouting of diesel exhaust rhythmically smothered to a muted bubbling by the wash of the sea, the gentle, almost sexual lift and thrust of the bow on a calm night on the surface, but no one until Ned Beach had conveyed those experiences to the reader. And no wonder. It is not often that we find a seasoned and decorated professional warrior who is not only literate but sensitive and even poetic.

And so it is indeed true that Ned Beach brought to the writing of this book, in full measure, precisely those elements Hemingway long ago prescribed as essentials to success: knowledge of his subject, seriousness about his writing, and more than a little talent. As a result, long after no man is left who can remember submarine warfare in the Pacific, Americans of other generations have only to reach for this volume to discover what it was like and what mark of man it was who fought beneath the sea when America’s life was on the line.

EDWARD P. STAFFORD