Dust on the Sea

by Edward L. Beach

World War Two. The battle for the Pacific rages. The most destructive subs in the U.S. Navy are dispatched to Bungo Suido in the Yellow Sea to harass and destroy enemy troop ships--a near-suicide mission in the very heart of Japan's home waters. Reissue.

Genres: Fiction, War, Military Fiction, World War II, Historical Fiction, Nautical, Novels

429 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1972

About the author

Edward Latimer Beach, Jr. was a highly-decorated United States Navy submarine officer and best-selling author.

During World War II, he participated in the Battle of Midway and 12 combat patrols, earning 10 decorations for gallantry, including the Navy Cross. After the war, he served as the naval aide to the President of the United States and commanded the first submerged circumnavigation.

After World War II, Beach wrote extensively in his spare time following in the footsteps of his father, who was also a career naval officer and author. His first book Submarine! (1952) was a compilation of accounts of several wartime patrols made by his own as well as other submarines.

In all, Beach published thirteen books, but is best known for his first novel, Run Silent, Run Deep (1955), which appeared on The New York Times Book Review bestseller list for several months. A movie of the same name, based loosely on the novel and starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, was released by United Artists in 1958. Beach penned two sequels to Run Silent, Run Deep: Dust on the Sea (1972), relating in detail a war patrol by Eel leading a wolfpack, and Cold is the Sea (1978), set in 1961 aboard a nuclear submarine.

In addition to Submarine!, Beach wrote several more books on naval history, including The Wreck of the Memphis (1966); United States Navy: 200 Years (1986), a general history of the Navy; Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor (1995); and Salt and Steel: Reflections of a Submariner (1999).

Keepers of the Sea (1983) is a pictorial record of the modern navy with photography by Fred J. Maroon. For a number of years Beach was co-editor of Naval Terms Dictionary as that standard reference work passed through several editions. His last work, completed shortly before his death, was to prepare for publication his father's manuscript of his own distinguished service in the navy. That book, From Annapolis to Scapa Flow: The Autobiography of Edward L. Beach, Sr (2003), is Captain Beach, Sr.'s personal account of the navy from the age of sail to the age of steam.

In addition to his books, Beach was a prolific author of articles and book reviews for periodicals ranging from Blue Book Magazine to National Geographic, and Naval History to American Heritage.

Reviews

[Chris Gager · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this one up to have an alternative to "Tristram Shandy," which is by turns aggravating, baffling and amusing, but in any case hard to read for more than an hour at a time. So ... back to a WWII Navy drama. I THINK(will check it) that the author was a WWII sub commander. He also wrote "Run Silent, Run Deep," a well-known(for its time) movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. Seems pretty solid so far. The cover pictured is not accurate for my book, which is a Dell paperback from 1972. Rescued from somewhere, probably the town transfer station.

Moving along as the author puts as much effort into the conflicted human dimension of things as he does on the naval warfare stuff. Navy soap opera? Yup ... The writing is not exactly engaging or particularly interesting, including the romantic stuff, but it gets the job done. Still, 400+ pages of it might turn out to be a bit of a slog.

Last night's reading included a rather brutal and contrived-seeming episode(the Eel's captain gets rescued/captured by a brutal and wacko patrol boat skipper who speaks perfect English and says he went to Berkeley). This is followed by a tense and prolonged stalking of a convoy by the Eel that results in the violence and destruction that those readers familiar with WWII sub movies will remember. Our story-teller reminds us regularly of the captain's ambivalence about the violence, but assures us that it's all justified because of Pearl Harbor. I say that it's just what humans do - big scale, small scale - we're a violent species, particularly the males.

- If you have watched any of those movies, this book will clue you in on how much longer it actually takes a sub to stalk and attack a convoy or single ship, as well as how technologically complicated it is. In the movies the process gets drastically simplified.

- Got to the middle of this somewhat elderly paperback and discovered ten pages missing. Sometimes that happens with these old books I rescue.

Moving on as the skipper performs even more acts of heroism. The narrator mentions that the skipper thinks that the crew must have a semi-mythic view of him. He literally holds their lives in his hands. There are plenty of illustrations of how poor decision-making and leadership leads to death and destruction. Seems like a bit much until you read the author's wiki page. Textbook illustration of the term "highly-decorated." Finished last night with an intense surface battle between the Eel and a Japanese DE. On the strength of that I upped my rating to 3.75*. Cdr. Beach isn't a great writer, but he takes the job seriously and the subject matter is obviously compelling.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richardson, captain of the U.S.S. Eel, is in a funk - ever since he used his submarine to destroy the lifeboats of a Japanese antisubmarine task force, in the process dicing up "Bungo Pete," its commander, with the Eel's screws.

Edward Beach's novel Dust on the Sea is a solid WW II submarine adventure. Beach (author of Run Silent, Run Deep) was himself a submarine captain, so the details have a very authentic ring to them; those little details can make or break an action yarn. He immediately defines Richardson's competence by showing how he saves the sub, recognizing signs of an oncoming "Kona" wave as they enter harbor, a freakishly huge wave that poops the submarine, and had the hatches been open, would have most likely sunk it.

The captain of the Eel is assigned to an American wolfpack under the leadership of his old captain, who has begun to exhibit strange behavioral quirks that Richardson is forced to defend to his executive officer. They have been assigned to patrol off the coast of China to prevent the Japanese from sending reinforcements to Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the Allies' planned attacks on those islands.
What makes this book most interesting, aside from its typical WW II story line, is the heart-stopping realism of the -scenes. We Imaw Beach has been there. You participate in the palm-sweating, frenzied rush down the hatch after a plane has been sighted, yanking the lanyard to slam it shut, and crash diving as steeply as possible, remembering that a threehundred-foot submarine diving as vertically as possible, doesn't have much maneuvering room in two hundred feet of water. The scenes of their being depth charged are astounding. Read this book, then watch Das Boot, the greatest of all submarine movies IMHO.

[Jones4 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a sequel to Run Silent Run Deep. The former sort of ends in 1943 and then kind of wraps up the war in 3 pages. This book spends more time after 1943 but still does not take the reader all the way to the end of the war. Almost like the author was going to have a 3rd book on the Pacific war but never got to it. Anyway if you love technical detail of WWII submarines and a little deeper character development from the first book….this is an excellent read. Read them both in sequence. I had run out of good sci fi to read and this narrow genre….WWII submarine warfare …was just the ticket.

[Tim Clouse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Worthy Successor to Run Silent, Run Deep

Goes into more technical detail on how a US submarine operated. Read this one first in order to understand what was going on in Run Silent, Run Deep.

[Kevin Barnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Large amount of writing for a little bit of action.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Further Adventures Of Commander Edward G. Richardson, USN" would be an apt title for a review of Edward L. Beach's follow-up to his bestseller "Run Silent Run Deep."

Published in 1972, "Dust On The Sea" opens as Richardson's sub, USS "Eel", is returning to Pearl Harbor after Richardson's successful elimination of Tateo Nakame, the Imperial Japanese Navy officer who hunted US subs to destruction in "Run Silent Run Deep" and became Richardson's arch enemy after Nakame sank two subs commanded by Richardson's friends Stocker Kane and Jim Bledsoe.

Wracked by guilt at what he had to do to kill Nakame (wiping out three lifeboats containing Nakame's surviving crew after sinking the two ships and one sub Nakame commanded), Richardson -after a short interlude at Pearl seasoned with a brief, passionate fling with a woman named Joan Lastrada whom we first met in "Run Silent" as Bledsoe's lover- it is back to sea for Richardson and the "Eel," this time as part of a three sub wolfpack bound for "Area Twelve," the Yellow Sea, where Richardson and the "Eel" were slated to go in "Run Silent" until Richardson appealed to go after Nakame after he had killed Richardson's friends. The wolfpack's objective: sink anything that flies a Japanese flag. As the novel progresses, three ships in particular are deemed important targets: troopships carrying Japanese Army troops to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, islands Richardson and his fellow skippers know are slated for invasion. However, there is a highly effective Japanese escort group out and about in the Yellow Sea which soon wipes out one of the wolfpack's subs. Richardson himself even comes close to death when "Eel" suffers a mechanical malfunction that makes her submerge shortly after surfacing one night, ultimately leaving Richardson and one of his crew in the hands of a sadistic Japanese patrol boat skipper whom Richardson soon nicknames "Moonface"... .

*Spoiler alert*

I give Beach's sequel three stars because, while good, Beach switched from a first-person to a third-person narrative, leaving me without the sense of emotional connection that I felt via Richardson's own words in "Run Silent." I feel like I had stepped back and was watching Richardson and the "Eel" from a cool remove.

Also, Beach kills off some characters that seemed to survive "Run Silent." Granted, Beach set "Dust" in the interval between Richardson's first patrol in the "Eel" and his narrative of his experiences, which were recorded on tape for possible use in a War Bond drive ("Run Silent" being the "transcript" of Richardson's tape). I admit I was sorry to see the death of crewman Oregon at the hands of "Moonface" and that of a junior officer named Quin during a daring surface action with the last of the three frigates that made up the aforementioned deadly ASW group. Oregon and Quin survived the worse Tateo Nakame (aka "Bungo Pete" due to his operational area, the Bungo Straits of Japan) could throw at them while serving with Richardson in his previous "boat," USS "Walrus." I don't know why Beach chose to "off" them, but die they did along with a few other of "Eel"'s crew.

The most notable -and shocking- death, however, concerns Richardson's old commanding officer and mentor Joe Blunt. Blunt, now a clear-headed superior of Richardson's in "Run Silent" is suddenly depicted as not acting like his old self shortly after "Dust" begins. Despite his odd behavior, Blunt's rank enables him to be awarded command of the wolfpack (soon dubbed "Blunt's Bruisers"). Blunt's odd behavior and subsequent death is revealed to have been the result of a brain tumor. I was very surprise that Beach chose to sacrifice poor Joe Blunt on the altar of story tension (which, admittedly, Blunt's erratic behavior during the patrol to the Yellow Sea contributes a good amount to).

On a brighter note, does "Moonface" get his just desserts? Yep. Richardson is able to paint the name "Eel" on "Moonface"'s boat, which brings "Eel" to the surface and, after a hail of gunfire, rams and pins in place while a boarding party storms aboard. Too late to save poor Oregon but just in time to save "Rich" Richardson. "Moonface" is last seen as a blackened corpse on a life raft "Eel" spots while exiting the area. "Moonface"'s own crew is responsible since they hated their skipper to a man. When Richardson let them sail off in a lifeboat after his rescue, they place "Moonface" on the patrol boat's raft and abandoned him.

*End spoliers*

"Dust On The Sea" is worth a read if you crave more WWII undersea action and adventure by Edward L. Beach, but I would have liked it if he had kept things in the first-person.

[mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The recent crash of the jet-airliner in the Atlantic, & reading about the "... churning mass of plastic known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre" in "Going Green," jogged my memory about this book. I wonder, where does all the information go that we absorb during our lifetimes?

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

another great read

[Tom Nolan]

paperback