Run Silent, Run Deep. Edward L. Beach
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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