THE GOLDEN BELLY OF THE
202 U.S.S. TROUT

By Edwin Arnold Kiefer

Point of View

I was on that patrol. So it is with some justification that you will think it is autobiographical. You will be especially led to this because it is called a Memorial, and appears to make appeals to official and definitive documentation. However, don't be too misled. The same things afflict me that agonize most writers. We tend to see the whole world, as is repeated from Submarine Worlds, in a grain of sand, let alone a submarine which literally cries out for the analogy--planetized off in the deeps like it is from
the rest of creation--with its tribes and its provinces and each submarine's own individual Weltanschauung.

Persons.

It is even worse in the case of persons. And here I address myself most
intensely and with particular emphasis to my fellow submariners: No single real person is intended to any substantial detail in this history, with the exception of myself, Edwin Arnold (I use my middle name out of pure orneriness as is the inalienable right of every submariner) Kiefer, and the Trout's Captain, "Mike" Fenno. And, of course, the questions, devotion and raw courage of the strategically abandoned defenders of Corregidor.

The rest are made up and tortured out of all verisimilitude to anyone
on the Trout, or to any other person-past or present. In this, it's not enough that I've cocktail-shakered so many different persons together, and poured them at will into whatever role was needed to illustrate the large and small significances of their and our patrol, the now has also been unceremoniously transposed into their and our past and mid-past to show continuity and development of themes.

So beware of pointing to this or that fictional character and saying, "I know who that is! He's old so-and-so." Oh, to be sure, an old familiar gleam will shoot forth into our consciousness from time to time. But, almost without exception, you will be looking at jigsaw, made-up persons, constructs made to put art in a short compass and humanity into a mere handful of finite human vessels to serve the purposes of love and remembering.

Places and Circumstances.
The Submarine Trout, on one of its very first patrols, was determining how one goes about fighting a submarine war.  

They're all cut pure from life.

SUBMARINE WORLDS

By Edwin Arnold Kiefer

I was a participant in most of the submarines that form the backgrounds of the novel, The Anatomy of Glory, as well as some of the other narratives and tales included. So it is with some justification that you will think it is autobiographical. You will be especially led to this because of its air of familiarity and specificity of detail. And to a great extent this would be well-founded. I, after all, am not writing about events cribbed from a "borrowed" experience like Melville in Moby Dick. I was there! I didn't project myself into the "story." I, myself, was in the "whale's belly." I experienced the events written about.

There are graphs, reconstructions, technical detail, diagrams, confessions, poems, pictures and much much more. 

However, don't be too misled. The same things afflict me that agonize most writers. We tend to see the whole world in a grain of sand, let alone in a submarine that virtually cries out for the analogy planetized off in the deeps like it is from the rest of creation--with its tribes and its provinces, and each submarine's own individual Weltanschauung.

Persons.

It is even worse in the case of persons. And here I address myself most intensely and with particular emphasis to my fellow submariners: No single actual person is intended in any substantial detail in this history, with the exception of those whose real names are used. The rest are all made up and tortured out of all verisimilitude to anyone on any of the magnificent submarines into which you are about to enter, hopefully, into an intensely felt vicarious adventure of the heart and soul or to any other person, past or present.

Exampled here is the interesting personification of history precedent in Aristotle's careful treatment of the anatomically facilitated behavior of the dolphin that may well have motivated his student Alexander's successful and innovative investment of the formerly impregnable city of Tyre.

In this, it's not enough that I've gathered so many different persons together, and poured them at will into whatever role was needed to illustrate the large and small significances of their and our patrols, the now has also been unceremoniously transposed into their and our past and mid-past to show continuity and development of themes. So beware of pointing to this or that fictional character and saying, "I know who that is! He's old so-and-so. " Oh, to be sure, an old submariner or fellow-traveler will thrust himself forward from time to time. Almost without exception, and those narrowly indicated by the use of their real names, you will be looking at created constructs, made to put art in a short compass and humanity into a mere handful of finite human vessels to serve the purposes of love and remembering.

Places and Circumstances
They're all cut pure from life or reported from the careful considerations of an ardent heart and searching mind

470 page blockbuster
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PILGRIM FISH

By Edwin Arnold Kiefer

The main reason for this major workof 467 pages is to examine the distinguishing characteristics of submarine technology and crews; and, the chief thrust here is to characterize the interwoven nature of spirit and machine that wrought the phenomenon of underwater warfare in World War II. Incorporating much of what has appeared in my former publications, PILGRIM FISH finds, here, an interpretive wholeness.

PILGRIM FISH also develops the proto-typical evidences of these things from earliest times in the section called, THE WHITE AND THE BLUE OF IT. It seemed apt to figure the double-sourced gift giver of Upper and Lower Egypt in this way, and to make of them the start of an objective correlative associated with the three parts of the book.

THE WHITE AND THE BLUE OF IT becomes a combined flow into a mainstream of matured and successful American submarine design and personnel and is called THE NILE OF IT.

This long and carefully developed section roots the bringing together of the sea and submarines in an American youth's pilgrimage through the extraordinary events of the California of the fall of 1941.

The section concludes with the same youth, now an apprentice seaman, on his way to Corregidor on the storied Gold Patrol of the USS Trout. It is only a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had abruptly interrupted and thus unceremoniously terminated his training at San Diego Boot Camp. The actual and
carefully developed events that transpire on this patrol make pro forma accounts of the behavior of an American submarine crew on patrol appear to have happened in a different world and in a different submarine force. Discovered here is an anatomy of glory itself, and the metaphysics and muscle of a submarine pure.

THE DELTA OF IT section concludes the book with the working out of the experiential metaphysics and muscle of selected submarines of America and the other nations of the West as they stream out in their different but closely associated courses to the general sea of war. The means by which the book approaches its thematic objectives here is not by point and tell, but by nurturing an objective development from internally generated and true story values outward.

The submarine experience, throughout its universal involvement in World War II, urges its true definition in this work, but that is not the sole or even primary reason. One does not have to be a specialist to appreciate the sense of mystique with which the very idea of the submarine is invested. It compels closer examination by layman and specialist alike.

The heated expression of war, while more clearly and frequently delivering the main lineaments of this mystique, does not by this continuing frequency appear to lessen, but only to heighten the general fascination with submarines and things submarine. The reasons for this lie everywhere around us.

In many ways the submarine is the pre-eminent sign for our time, as Dagon-Jonah was for that generation of long ago. It is as though there are keys to ourselves and portents of the future here that are still needful of being found. Even experienced submarine veterans have an untiring hunger for peering more closely back into the imponderables of the defining moments they experienced in wartime's Silent Service. But the real, been-there submarine veterans do so only privately; and, even here, the raw stuff and verities of matters submarine are too often only shared by the knowing wink, the quick, eloquent, and arcane allusion, and the myriad other individually communitied, submarine by submarine, referents.

Pilgrim Fish Rosetta Stone's this lingua franca of the submarine community and
leads the reader, no matter his nationality, background, position or profession, to read better into his own submarine associations in this world The development of a technology produces a record; and the actual experience of man in association with that technology produces some kind of history. The technological records of submarines as well as the historical context within which that development took place are generously available to the diligent researcher. This is particularly true for the submarine experience in the United States where submarines have been notably present at critical junctures of her military history: The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II.

Within world submarine history generally, the same situation obtains. There is the exploitation of Aristotle's analysis of the diving apparatus of the dolphin arguably motivating Alexander the Great's first underwater descent. There is Van Drebbel and his first submarine taxi service across the Thames. Extensive information exists about that American Renaissance man, Robert Fulton, making a detailed submarine building proposal to the French Directory, and finally to Napoleon himself. The proliferation of stories about the submarine experiences of other nations, particularly Germany, are also plentifully available.

There appears, on the surface, to be no dearth of literature in all three of these categories. However, the rich vein of another value, and one that is at least as important a resource in the matter, the submarine spirit, has been never or only indifferently tapped.The reasons for this state of affairs in the American submarine effort are not hard to find. Patrol reports are, by their very nature, attack or mission intensive accounts. They are, within certain broad constraints, career supportive briefs prepared by submarine captains or their designees. This is an environment not very well suited for the kind of effort that was possible for a Jean de Joinville or a Geoffroy Villehardouin writing on the Crusades.

The organization of any identifiable system of human enterprise has a metaphysical structure, a corporate consciousness, a shared and participative being of place, time and historical precedents. This metaphysical thread, as a kind of helix, winds inseparably about the submarine-extended psyche of the crew.

But a submarine crew is a close-mouthed lot. The American Silent Service of World War II, unremittingly conditioned to ever greater degrees of secrecy, has been even further taught by the changing norms of our culture to equate military glory with the same reprehensibility that used to be reserved for pornography. This is silence layered on silence; and, not the easiest thing in the world to overcome. I have worked with this obdurate attitude during seven years of publishing the quarterly Submarine Journal magazine with the special advantage of being a fellow submariner. Similarly, my war-long submarine experience has provided some measure of discernment in reading evasions, interpreting coded references, and anticipating the subtleties of relationships. One of the saddest things of my postwar experiences is to see furtiveness and uncertainty standing as a barrier between the surface of their stories, and the true submarine values that are to be found beneath them.

The reticence in Germany is doubled again from that to be found in The United States. However, my regular attendance and story-collecting at the annual international conclaves of the International Submarine Association has tended to overcome these understandable barriers. The French, however, have no such inhibitions; nor, for that matter do the Italians. A former French crew member, for a season, on the controversial Surcouf was quite candid about the circumstances to be found aboard her. The English are exuberantly forward in their participation, although, even here, they recently decided to jettison the official black tie of their organization famed for sporting the Jolly Roger. The spirit of a submarine can darken and grow sour. The supportive exoskeleton of the submarine can wrong its intent, and be critically less than it could be. Metaphysics, like poetry, has a soft and vulnerable underbelly of the potential loss of the willing suspension of unbelief. The incremental reduction of hardware effectiveness is usually found coupled to such a darkening crew spirit. The book does not shrink from the careful examination of such things and the events and submarines with which they may be associated. The sensible value of discernible truth is the sine qua non of any book such as this where its acquisition should be accounted of an importance equal to its entertainment or aesthetic worth.

Finally, I can find no better way to conclude with a statement of the values I hope this book provides than the one provided by that old sea-struck poet, Homer:

For none has ever driven by this way in his black ship, till he hath heard from our lips the voice sweet as the honeycomb, and had joy thereof and gone his way the wiser.