Submarine Fighter

DEEP SOUNDINGS--Alan Cor by--C axton ($2.50).

Alan Corby is the closely-guarded pseudonym of a famed U. S. adventure writer. Whether he took an alias because he was afraid Deep Soundings would queer him with his usual Boy Scout audience, or because he wanted it to make its own way as a serious literary work, is hard to say. On the literary side the book is a straight throwback to Kipling and Jack London-- a story involving the hazards of convoying merchant ships during the War, with a hero who, through duty and red-hot blood rather than patriotism, faces death as manfully as love. Added to this familiar pattern are modern touches of swearing, sex and disillusionment. As a result Deep Soundings plays hob with the tradition which demands that adventure fiction, no matter how tough its heroes, must preserve a cleanliness seldom found elsewhere in life or literature. As an example of the one serious book which every adventure writer intends to write some day, Deep Soundings is mainly interesting because, unlike most such since Jack London's Martin Eden, it got published.

Rex Dean, young petty officer on the cruiser Baton Rouge, was a Texas-born, square-faced, blue-eyed, accomplished sailor who liked "rough weather and lots of hell." In quieter moments he wrote for adventure magazines, read everything from Kipling to Marcus Aurelius. Coming into Bremerton Navy Yard on April 6, 1917, having known since the Baton Rouge left Mexico that war was not far off, Rex had already got himself straight about his own part in it. Uncle Sam was "Uncle Sucker." From now on you only pretended the Allies were in the right, and killed and got killed automatically; forgot that in foreign bars U. S. sailors always fought on the German side. By the time the Baton Rouge was put in shape for war service Rex had conquered an aloof Bremerton blonde. But when, after their secret outing in Seattle, she begged him to apply for a soft Navy office job, the most Rex would concede was to marry her before sailing, figuring that he would either be killed or she would fall for somebody else before long.

Enroute to New York, trying to make sailors out of a green crew of "gum boots," Rex concluded that the Navy was on the skids and that "the country'll be flooded with malted milk within ten years." On shore leave at Norfolk, thanks to the new prestige of fighting men, he spent the night with a "lovely little savage" at the home of Virginia socialites. While the Baton Rouge waited off Staten Island for a convoy of 16 freighters to be assembled, a hard-drinking pulpwood editor enabled Rex to find out about life in Greenwich Village.

The first trip across, like the ones that followed, came near being the last. Forced by decrepit freighters to crawl along at eight knots, they lost their best defense against U-boats: speed and zigzagging. A submarine needed only 15 seconds to let go with a "tin fish." Tales about previous submarine victims did not help to relax the nerves any. The first attack came at night, in a grey light that made a submarine invisible except for a dim white ripple. The torpedoes missed by a hair. When an oily patch showed where the submarine had been, the five-inch guns on the Baton Rouge stopped firing. The captain's big grin marked the hits. Occasionally they picked up a few survivors from a torpedoed boat ahead. Armed guard duty, which consisted of operating a gun aboard the freighters themselves, was the riskiest job of all. So Rex transferred to that branch. When he met Corra, the beautiful wife of an anemic New York newspaper man, he was tempted for the first time to accept a commission. Instead he decided merely to shoot straighter thereafter. But one day Corra announced bitterly that her husband had tuberculosis and she could not leave him. Rex cut his leave short, took tfiie first boat leaving, an old freighter which was practically made to order for Submarines. When a U-boat showed up, Rex did the best he could with an inferior gun, finally made a direct hit--but a few seconds too late to stop the torpedo which blew the freighter sky high.

With all this complexity to go on, plus the fact that Deep Soundings is published by the remote Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho, readers may find themselves wondering which of the topnotch U. S. adventure writers -- Hawthorne, Daniel Eugene Cunningham, Zane Grey, Barrett Willoughby, Norman Reilly Raine, Ernest Haycox. Max Brand. Albert Richard Wet-jen--mysterious Alan Corby might be.

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