Though he disapproved of Hollywood's rendition of the story in a movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, the veteran of more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy still is most widely known for his best-selling 1955 novel, Run Silent, Run Deep. Naval historians count him both as a peer and as a topic of their own research. In his distinguished naval career, most notably in submarines, he earned the Navy Cross, set a speed and endurance record that still stands with the first submerged circumnavigation of the earth (he captioned the photo above left "'Bulldog Beach' at the periscope"), and served as naval aide to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He is the author of many highly acclaimed books (the most recent written in his office, above right), several published by the Naval Institute Press. His latest project is the newly released From Annapolis to Scapa Flow, the edited and annotated autobiography of his father, Edward L. Beach Sr. He spoke in November with Naval History Editor Fred L. Schultz at his home in Washington, D.C. Captain Beach died on 1 December 2002.
Naval History: What accomplishment in your Navy career made you most proud?
Captain Beach: Quite obviously, taking the Triton around the world submerged. That was a strenuous effort.
Naval History: How were you selected to command that mission?
Captain Beach: I've always thought it was my good looks. But here is exactly what really happened, and I have no idea how. As I was reporting to the Triton, I remember saying, "This ship is an unusual one. We've got to do something special with it. What could it be?" We talked about it a little bit, and nobody had any ideas. Finally, I got an idea. We'll do a stunt. We'll go around the world from North Pole to South Pole. That was my brainstorm. If you take a look at a map of the world, you'll see that's not a very easy way to go.
So we didn't do that. But I do remember thinking of it. And I made a speech to the crew, advising them of my thinking—that we were going to put this ship on the map. Well, that died out. Suddenly—and I remember the date clearly, 10 February 1960—a phone call came, asking me if I could be in Washington tomorrow.
I said, "Sure, what's up?"
"Can't tell you," they said. "Just come. And don't let anybody recognize you on the way." They told me to be in such-and-such a room at 1000 on the fourth deck in the Navy section of the Pentagon.
So I said I'd be there. But then I began to wonder how I could walk through all my friends in the Pentagon and not get recognized. It turned out to be easier than I thought. Navy is fourth deck. I went in third deck. And I walked all the way around the damn Pentagon until I got underneath where I wanted to be. All these Army guys were looking at me, saying, "Who's this fellow?" But they didn't ask anything; they just let me walk by.
When I got where I wanted to be, I came upon a small stairway, and up I went. I found myself next to the door to where they told me to go. So, I opened the door and walked in and found five Navy admirals waiting for me. I'd done that pretty well. Nobody saw me coming.
Then they hit me. "How's your ship, Beach?"
I said, "Fine."
"Have you planned your shake-down cruise?" they asked.
"Yes. We're going to go up to the North Sea to operate with the Northhampton (CLC-1)." We had quite a few schemes for communications and high-speed submarine rendezvousing. She wasn't a real heavy cruiser; she was a command cruiser. So we thought that would be especially good; we could do command cruise functions and think up some good ideas.
They said, "That's fine. But could you go around the world instead?" That was how they hit me with it.
Not wanting to deny such a big challenge, I said, "Yes, Sir."
Then they asked how long it would take. The first thing I told them is I would need more charts. You know a ship doesn't carry enough charts to cover the whole damn world. Even though I was cautioned that nobody except me was to know about this mission, I decided that someone else in the ship needed to know. So I got clearance for our two top quartermasters, who went to ComSubLant (commander submarine force Atlantic), where they had a great big room full of charts. The quartermasters had a list of what we needed, and right away they caught hell. They were told, "We're not going to give away these charts. What the devil do you think you're doing?"
It made for a bit of a fight, because we were taking charts they thought they wanted to keep. But we finally convinced them. Of course, for charts of the entire world, we needed a large area to store them. So we had a special, big chartroom aboard the Triton, which I was very proud of. We filled that rascal solid, with everything indexed so we could find it.
First, we didn't announce our route; we just announced we were going around the world. One of the first things we heard was that if we went through Lombok Strait, we'd be passing through Indonesian territorial waters and passing through straits. If you read the law about straits, ships aren't allowed to go through straits unannounced. If you tried to go through the Strait of Magellan right now with a ship, you'd have a mountain of paperwork just to get yourself checked through. The Panama Canal is even worse.
"Shall we go through the Strait of Magellan," we wondered, "or shall we not?" If we did, we'd have had to go very shallow over the bar on the Atlantic side. I checked it all out. We probably would have had part of the submarine breaking the surface. It's shallow up there at Punta Arenas. With a submarine like the Triton, the minimum depth of the water had to be 75 feet. So I remember going to the Navy Department and saying, "We've got a problem. I can do it, but I'd be a little cautious about it."
And they said, "No. Forget the Strait of Magellan. Go around Cape Horn."
So we went around Cape Horn instead.
Naval History: What was the biggest challenge you faced in the submerged circumnavigation of the Triton?
Captain Beach: It was 84 days of strenuous work just keeping the ship clean. It was amazing how much dirt we created, so I had a field day every weekend. The crew started objecting until they saw how much trash we kept getting rid of. Then they couldn't object. This was one of the first lessons learned in World War II. The crew of one submarine in particular couldn't figure out how to get rid of their trash, so they piled it up in the after torpedo room. She became notorious as the stinkingest submarine in the fleet, because her crew brought her back full of garbage. The endorsement on the patrol report said: "Appropriate administrative measures could probably have solved this one."
Our ship had a garbage disposal—not a grind-up garbage disposal, just a torpedo tube. And I invented it. It was, in fact, not a full-size torpedo tube. It was a tube that went down from the main operating interior deck through the bottom of the submarine. We had a big, strong valve on top that could take anything the submarine could take and one on the bottom likewise. Then we closed the top valve, opened the bottom valve, and started a pump. What happened to the garbage? It went out the bottom.
Naval History: What effect did your writing have on your Navy career? Was it positive or negative?
Captain Beach: I've thought about that. My father wrote quite extensively, too. It may have harmed him some, but I had the bad luck of running into one of the most unscrupulous naval officers we ever had. I won't tell his name.
Naval History: Would that be Joe Blunt [an alias used by Captain Beach for this "unscrupulous" officer and also a character in the best-selling novel, Run Silent, Run Deep]?
Captain Beach: That would be Joe Blunt. He is a very peculiar guy. I was naval aide to the President, sitting in the White House, with an office and a gang of people working for me. There was a phone call: "This is Joe Blunt. As you may know, there's going to be a selection board for rear admiral coming up pretty soon. Do you think you could write an article for the [U.S. Naval Institute] Proceedings that would help me in my campaign?"
One thing that used to be done back then was, when a guy realized he was a candidate for flag rank, he would produce an article for the Proceedings. You can take a look back then, and you'll see some of them.
Naval History: So that contributed to the case they were making, that they were good enough to be flag officers?
Captain Beach: That was the idea. Theoretically, you wrote your own article. But not Joe Blunt. He said, "Would you write an article that says that?" I said, "Well, I'm the President's naval aide. I shouldn't be doing this."
"Oh, come on," he said, and he argued me into it on the telephone. I said I'd give it a try, not being very sure I ought to be doing it. So I wrote such an article. I've got it right here in this room. As I recall, it was still in pencil and I thought I'd better check it out a little bit.
I had two good friends on active duty in the Navy, and I also had quite a number of friends in the White House. So I sent it to some of them, not all of them. The very first one called me and said, "Who the hell got you to do this? Was it Joe Blunt?"
I said, "No, it wasn't."
"Don't lie to me. I know it was." My friend said, "That's exactly what Joe Blunt would do. Don't touch it. You're the President's naval aide. You've got no business messing with this." Of course, I agreed right away.
So I asked a guy in the White House, who also happened to be a good friend in an office not far from me, and he said the same thing: "Don't touch this," he told me. "This is Navy politics, and Joe Blunt will have you hanging on a hook for this."
Then I made my really big mistake. I figured I had to play this straight. Joe Blunt had asked me to do it, and I had the article written. But I called him and said, "Joe, I really can't do this. I'm naval aide, et-cetera."
And he said, "We'll see how that comes out." And he never did see the article I wrote. Like I say, I've got it in a file.
Naval History: And he made flag rank?
Captain Beach: He made flag rank, and then he set it as his business that I would not.
Naval History: Did he ever write anything for Proceedings before he became a flag officer?
Captain Beach: I don't think he ever did. The next thing I heard after I told him I couldn't write it was that I had been pre-selected for captain. The word was out all over the place; Beach has been pre-selected for captain. Then, all of a sudden, the word disappeared. It lasted maybe 24 hours and then was gone.
Naval History: Did you ever confront him with this afterward?
Captain Beach: No. I didn't know how to handle it. I was a babe in the woods of Navy politics. In fact, I did try twice to find out what happened. I went to see two high-ranking officers, both of whom I knew were favorable to me. I went to ask them what was going on and what I should do. The first one was too busy, and all I can remember is he said, "Your problem is Joe Blunt, and he'll never help you."
For the other guy, I made a date and went to his house to see him on a Sunday morning. "Come on over," he told me. "I'll give you a drink, and we'll talk it over."
I got to his place, he gave me a nice drink, and I sat there. I couldn't bring myself to say anything. But I finally got up the nerve to do it. This was very personal, you know. I'm talking about my career. He was a friend, but I didn't quite know how to broach the subject. Well, that wasn't very smart. I should have hit him right away and said, "Admiral, I'm here with a very special problem and I'd like to tell you about it." Instead, we chatted for about five minutes. Just as I was about to say, "Admiral, I've got this problem," a bunch of young children's voices started yelling and shouting. They were his two sons who had just come back from church. Of course, I was wiped out.
Here was more Navy politics. If I had played that one right, would it have come out differently? I think it might have. If I'd got into a good conversation with [Rear] Admiral [W. R.] Smedberg, he might have given me some good advice. But as it was, I got nothing out of it because of the kids. So I left. I probably should have asked for another appointment, but I never did.
Of course, I was still naval aide to the President. Here I was, trying to figure out how to solve a problem that was bigger than I knew. But good old Joe Blunt then made it his business to see that I never got mentioned for anything, anymore.
Naval History: What did you do as naval aide to President Eisenhower? You were essentially in charge of Camp David, right?
Captain Beach: Yes. I was also in charge of the Williamsburg, the Presidential yacht. And I was in charge of the two smaller presidential yachts, the Lenore and the Barbara Ann.
My basic duty was presidential protection, and I decided we needed support. These yachts were beautiful for people to cruise on, but what if something happened? So I wanted a high-speed powerboat. And they gave me one. It was a PT boat with four 7,500-horsepower engines. That thing could really move. My idea was, if we had a problem, we'd run down and get aboard this high-speed boat. Then we would have had the whole Potomac River open to us to do what we could do, if anything.
Naval History: Somebody found a document recently about the Bunker at the Greenbrier in West Virginia with your name on it.
Captain Beach: Yes, I was there. They had a big congressional meeting room in there. It's lovely. You could have had a meeting of the whole Congress in that place. That's where they were to gather. We even had an exercise. I recommended it to the President, and he agreed it should be done. It was a sort of evacuation drill. At a certain time, it was announced in the White House that we'd had an attack, and everybody had to move to their protection zone. We had one for the President and Vice President, too. All this was my doing. The President selected his own, and he picked Camp David. And I thought he got good publicity out of it.
One thing that was kind of bad is that he was presented with a fake problem. Here you are, he was told, moved to Camp David. Now, what are you going to do? It was all fictitious. Finally, President Eisenhower said, "It sounds like a pretty bad situation. I'll declare martial law." Well, at that point, the press didn't give a damn about the drill or Camp David. Here was the President declaring martial law in the United States. And that's bad. So they wrote more about martial law than anything else. Most of them didn't even know what it was. They knew the Army took charge, but they didn't know what it really meant. What it meant was that an Army soldier could walk down the street and say, "Mr. policeman, you're out of a job."
Naval History: If you had the power to change anything in history, what would it be?
Captain Beach: That's a pretty darn pregnant question. But I've thought of it several times. What would I do? I'd be a physical spectator at all the big events. I would be at Waterloo. I'd not only be there, but I'd also know enough history to know what I was seeing, how Napoleon bit the dust at the end.
I would have been at Trafalgar. I would have been alongside Nelson and said, "Hey, Horatio, don't walk up and down the deck like that. You've made yourself a target. You're not doing it on purpose, are you?" That would have got a rise out of him. I personally think he committed suicide—in the sense that he decked himself out with all his decorations, and he walked up and down bravely encouraging the crew. He did not stay behind the big thick bulwarks of the Victory.
Of course, I would have been at the battle between the Constitution and the Guerriére and the Constitution versus the Java. And I would have been present when Stephen Decatur and William Bainbridge had their big confrontation. Bainbridge tried to avoid meeting Decatur, and Decatur managed to get aboard and pay his respects in about three minutes, then got off the ship again. Their hatred was evident already. Why was it? Because, of course, Bainbridge figured that somehow he had a hex on the Mediterranean. That was his ocean, and damned if he was going to let anybody else take over his private domain.
Naval History: So suppose you would have been there. What would you have done, between Bainbridge and Decatur?
Captain Beach: Good question. I hadn't thought of that. I'd thought of what I should have done if I had been Decatur. If I were senior enough, I would have raised hell with everybody. I would have said, "I'm boss here, damn it." But the trouble was, we didn't understand how to run a navy back then.
Naval History: I wish I knew as much about naval history as you do.
Captain Beach: I've made it a hobby ever since I was a kid. I remember in seventh grade, the teacher was Miss Howe, a very fine lady. Every day we had a little test. One day, one of the questions was: Who won the [Spanish-American War] Battle of Santiago?
Before we even answered the question—it was a written test—I stood up and said, "Miss Howe, everybody says it was Admiral [Winfield Scott] Schley who won the Battle of Santiago. But it really wasn't. It was Admiral [William] Sampson. Admiral Sampson was in charge, and he gave the orders."
Miss Howe said, "Very interesting, Ned. That's good to know."
The very first question on the test the next morning was: "Who won the Battle of Santiago?"
I wrote "Admiral Sampson," underlined. "Not Admiral Schley," underlined. It came back marked wrong. I never had faith in Miss Howe again. And every time I ever had occasion to answer that one, it got underlined.
Naval History: What did your father say about it?
Captain Beach: He said she was wrong.
Naval History: What time period in history would you say deserves more attention? Where's the big gap?
Captain Beach: There really is no big gap. World War II was the watershed, in U.S. history at least. It represented what our Navy was, in effect, aimed toward from the beginning. And it laid the groundwork for what it has since become. World War II tested our Navy to its uttermost. And that produced what we now have. Had we not had that war, we wouldn't be anything like where we are today. That was my feeling then, and it's still pretty much my feeling now.
What did the Navy do? It beat the most powerful navy in the world. The Japanese Navy was far better than we had any idea it was.
Naval History: Recall for our readers the action that earned you the Navy Cross.
Captain Beach: I got the Navy Cross because I was executive officer for [then-Lieutenant Commander and later Medal of Honor recipient] George Street. I remember the way we did it. We got this ULTRA intelligence that an important ship was coming with escorts off the northern part of Quelpart Island [south of the Korean peninsula]. I broke out the chart and started plotting, as I usually did. And I always got turned down by the skipper, who would say, "Come on, guys. We don't need to win the war all by ourselves. We'll do what we should do, but let's not distinguish ourselves too much." This time, I went in to see George and I said, "Captain, look at this. We can go in and get that bastard."
And he said, "Let's do it." It was the first time any skipper answered me like that.
I thought, "Boy, this is going to be something." So we went in there, found the place, and flooded down the submarine.
Normally, when you wanted to make high speed on the surface, you'd blow your ballast tanks dry. And when you wanted to conceal yourself, you totally submerged. But if you wanted to retain high speed—the quick maneuver to get up or get down—you flooded down. Our ship was camouflaged; we had sort of grey-white sides and black on top. So as we went in, we flooded down so that the sides were under water, and the deck was only about a foot above the surface.
So there we were, cruising into this harbor. We had reduced our silhouette by 80%. And were we ready; were we ever ready. We had two 40-mm guns on the bridge, and I had about 50 guys with extra ammunition to reload these guns. Of course, we had a 5-inch gun aft, but we didn't even man it. Our idea was the 40-mm would do the job. All you could see of the submarine was her bump in the middle, which was the bridge. We had what I called "battle lookouts." These were the best lookouts we had. They were all gunners' mates, and they were all very familiar with these 40-mm guns.
As we came in, we saw an escort ship there. I remember looking at her very carefully and saying, "Boys, this could be it. We don't let him get close. If I say, 'Shoot,' I want her bridge to go over the side.'"
Well, nothing happened. She didn't see us. So we headed on in and found this ship that was anchored. [According to the after-action report, the ship was either an ammunition ship or a tanker.] My job was to aim the torpedoes from the bridge. The skipper had come up at that time, and I said, "Captain, we don't know the current for sure. Let's aim one at his left edge. If the current sweeps us into a hit, we're in great shape. And if it misses, we'll aim it at the right edge." So we aimed the torpedo, and it missed. I think it missed to the right. We saw the wake. It hit the beach and exploded.
He said, "Oh, boy. This looks like we're getting someplace."
So I aimed the next two fish, as I recall, at the left end of the ship, and they both hit. When they hit, brother, they let go. A lot of people think that when a ship is hit it causes a red, billowing fire. Not this one. I think it had had been filled with gasoline, and what we saw was a white-hot V, out into the heavens. It was at least 2,000 feet high, maybe more. It was like bright daylight.
