The Davy Jones War

SUBMARINE (301 pp.) -- Commander Edward L Beach--Holf ($3.50).

Ensign Edward L. Beach liked it where he was in the fall of 1941. Just a couple of years out of Annapolis and only 23, he was patrolling the Atlantic in an ugly old four-piper destroyer that, to his loyal eyes, looked "lovely." When he was transferred to submarine school, he tried to have his orders rescinded. But he went, of course. On New Year's Day, 1942, he reported to his new home, U.S.S. Trigger (SS 237). Thought young Beach: "Wonder if I'm looking at my coffin?" Trigger did become a coffin for 89 men and officers in March 1944, but by then, Lieut. Beach had been transferred to another sub. He lived through twelve longdistance war patrols, wound up as skipper of his own sub, today commands the new U.S.S. Trigger. He becomes, in Submarine, the first U.S. underwater fighter of World War II to write fully about a kind of war whose special triumphs and stresses were shared by no other service. Other books about the subs have been written (TIME, March 5, 1951), but they were the work of desk brass. Author Beach saw all his war through periscopes, and heard it--with & without audiophones--crashing vengefuily around him. It was a war of sights & sounds, and Navyman Beach knows how to share them with his readers.

Tokyo Extravagance. The old Trigger's first patrol began with the worst kind of embarrassment: within sight of Midway during the great battle with the Japanese fleet, she ran on to a coral reef and stuck. But next time out, there began the thrill of the chase and the underseas tension that were the normal climate of the subs. As in all forms of combat, the best of training was only partial preparation for the first attack and counterattack. Moving in for the kill, lining up the first ene my ship in the sights, the torpedoes crashing into the sides of the target -- those things made any crew jubilant. But then came the Japanese destroyers, the deep submersion, and the suspense at 300 feet below while depth charges searched for the sub, shaking her like a light bulb on a cord. The first time it happened to Trigger, Tokyo Rose claimed her sunk, then played a recording of Rocked in the Cra dle of the Deep. It was a characteristic Japanese extravagance: they claimed 468 subs in the course of the war. U.S. sub losses in the Pacific from all causes were 52 ships, 3,505 men.

In the beginning, the submarines had to contend with faulty torpedoes. Monotonously the patrol reports recited: "Torpedoes ran true . . . didn't explode." Once they did begin to explode, Japan began to bleed to death. Says Beach: "In 1944, approximately half of the ships departing from [Japanese Empire ports] found their final destination at the bottom."

Submariners' Due. Submarine is packed with crackling descriptions of action. There is the feat of Commander Sam Dealey's Harder, which deliberately went out after the subs' greatest natural enemy, the destroyers, got five on one patrol, and came back to tell about it. There is an account of Commander J. K. Fyfe's Bat fish, which stalked enemy sub marines and sank three in four days. And there is the near-incredible last patrol of Commander Richard O'Kane's Tang, which sank eleven ships and was finally sent to the bottom by one of her own torpedoes.

Many of the officers and men Beach writes about aren't around to read Sub marine. It is unlikely that they'd have wanted much changed. Submarine Officer Beach gives them their due.

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