Run Silent, Run Deep. Edward L. Beach

      Naval Institute Press

      291 Wood Road

      Annapolis, MD 21402

      © 1955, 1983 by Edward L. Beach

      Introduction copyright © 1985 by the U.S. Naval Institute

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Reissued by the Naval Institute Press in 2016.

      ISBN: 978-1-68247-167-8 (eBook)

      This book was originally published in 1955 by Henry Holt and Company.

       The Library of Congress has cataloged the first edition as follows:

      Beach, Edward Latimer, 1918–

      Run silent, run deep.

      (Classics of naval literature)

      1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

      PS3552.E12R8 1986 813 .52 85-21801

      24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      First printing

       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