Salt and Steel: Reflections of a Submariner

I've been a fan of Captain Beach ever since I read "Run Silent, Run Deep" in grade school and have had the pleasure of meeting and talking with him a few times. Thus I've often wondered about several aspects of his life and career, such as why a Naval Aide to President Eisenhower never became an Admiral and the circumstances of his young daughter's death, although such personal items are admittedly none of my business. Salt and Steel goes a long way toward filling in the blanks in my knowledge about this man, whom I've known and admired for years. To his credit, as I expected, he does not gloat about his successes nor complain about his failures. I found every chapter fascinating and hard to put down, even very late in the evening. My only wish about this book is that he had included more information and anecdotes about the ships he served in and the people he served with, especially President Eisenhower, Trigger II and the faulty torpedoes of WWII. With the responsible parties being long-retired and in many cases deceased, I feel that the problems and the principles involved should be aired, in the hope that they might not be repeated. Even so, I would highly recommend this book to anyone with even a casual interest in any of the subjects mentioned, including the politics of the Washington, DC bureaucracy. To Captain Beach, "Well Done, Sir!"

I started reading this book in the evening, and finished it at dawn. What an interesting book! Beach is an excellent storyteller, who clearly loves the US Navy, and the story of his life is intertwined with it. His father also had a storied career, and the tales of Beach growing up, succeeding at Annapolis, submarining against the Japanese in WW II, serving as Eisenhower's naval aide after the war, and then circumnavigating the world underwater is so gripping a story and so well told that I was sorry when I came to the last page. I loved this book!

This "memoir" is billed as a sequel to Beach's "The United States Navy: 200 Years" (1986). As such, "Salt and Steel" is a blend of stories from his 27 years in the U.S. Navy, and his views on theories of naval warfare and the application of grand strategy to national defense policy. The book offers some wonderful stories of his father and mother, and their lives together in the U.S. Navy before the 1920s. The story of the first dinner party given by the new wife of the new base commander is just delightful. The reader who is looking for more of the intense submarine stories which brought Beach fame in his novels "Run Silent, Run Deep" (1955), "Dust on the Sea" (1972), and "Cold is the Sea" (1978) will be somewhat disappointed as he does not spent much time telling any new stories from his submarine career. The tale he tells of the fellow officer who blocked Beach's own advancement to the rank of admiral is chilling in that it does not speak well for the Navy that allows such petty jealousy to have so much impact on a man's career. In sum, Beach is a good story teller, and when telling of his own career he does a masterful job. One can only hope that soon we'll have a full biography of both Edward L. Beach, Jr., and his naval officer/novelist father, in whose footsteps the younger Beach has so faithfully followed.