CLASSICS OF NAVAL LITERATURE
JACK SWEETMAN, SERIES EDITOR
This series makes available attractive new editions of classic works of naval history, biography, and fiction. Each work contains an authoritative introduction written for the classics edition and, when appropriate, notes. The following are among the titles published or planned for the series:
Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles. Edited by Robert Shenk
Admiral Charles E. Clark, My Fifty Years in the Navy. Edited by Jack Sweetman
Rear Admiral William S. Sims and Burton J. Hendrick, The Victory at Sea. Edited by David F. Trask
Leonard F. Guttridge and Jay D. Smith, The Commodores. Edited by James C. Bradford
Captain William Harwar Parker, Recollections of a Naval Officer, 1841–1865. Edited by Craig L. Symonds
Charles Nordhoff, Man-of-War Life. Edited by John B. Hattendorf
Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World. Edited by Robert W. McNitt
Marcus Goodrich, Delilah. Edited by C. Herbert Gilliland
Fred J. Buenzle with A. Grove Day, Bluejacket: An Autobiography. Edited by Neville T. Kirk
Captain David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean by Captain David Porter, in the United States Frigate Essex, in the Years 1812, 1813 and 1814. Edited by Robert D. Madison
Filson Young, With the Battle Cruisers. Edited by James V. P. Goldrick
Herman Melville, White-Jacket. Edited by Wilson L. Heflin
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
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
