Rig Ship for Dive

Claude M. Pearson, Gunfish: A Fleet Submarine Goes to War (New York: iUniverse.com, 2005, 220 pp., soft cover, $15.95).

Reviewed by Lindsay Thompson

Retired from a 45-year legal career, Tacoman Claude Pearson has turned his talents to writing. Gunfish — which Pearson describes as “pure fiction intended for adults”— appears nonetheless to draw on Pearson’s own experiences on the submarine Pogy between June 1944 and January 1946.

More than anything, Gunfish reminded me of Noel Coward’s World War II film In Which We Serve (1942). In both film and novel, vessels go out on patrols, are damaged by enemy fire, and retreat to base for repairs and refits. Captaincies change hands. Crewmembers are killed, or transfer to new assignments, and others replace them. Relationships back home thrive, or fail.

Pearson’s central character is Ensign Charley Jason, who arrives with a university ROTC course and four months of sub officer training. Seasickness whacks him before the boat leaves San Francisco Bay. He’s heartsick, too. His squeeze, back in Frisco, is both fabulously wealthy and fabulously talented in bed. By day she takes over the running of her family’s company, China Bank, while her mom fills the family’s 101-room mansion with submariners and their families.

Guys on subs, by the way, thought a lot about sex back in the day. Cram 80 men into what Pearson calls “a steel tube, 311 feet long,” intermix career Navy men with green reservists, and you’ve got a simmering pot of ambition, frustration, boredom, and intrigue, all of which Pearson capably chronicles.

Fleet subs of the Gunfish type worked mainly on the surface; rescuing downed pilots and attacking enemy ships were their mandates.

Everyone on board wants action (the war, not the girl problems), but getting it is a story of long stretches of routine punctuated by sudden calls to quarters, electric torpedo malfunctions, and heavy enemy fire.

Where Pearson excels is in describing life on a sub: operating a big, complex, yet primitive machine in circumstances where a single error could be fatal to all. Surfacing, diving, maintaining trim all required elaborate and swift shifts of air between tanks on the sub. There’s the fear of fire, and the curse of a scheming land-bound supply officer who stuffs Gunfish with enough fruit cocktail for three global wars. The book’s style is informative but not didactic, and I learned a lot more about submarine warfare than I got from the movies.

We all know, for example, in a general way, that America’s World War II effort was breathtakingly enormous, straining the productive capacity of the nation to its limits and then some. But Pearson brings to life how no corner of the country seemed to escape notice by military planners. Gunfish, as well as Pearson’s sub, Pogy, were built on Lake Michigan. The Manitowoc Ship Building Company produced 27 of them in all. Each was floated through downtown Chicago on the Chicago River, then down the Mississippi to be put into service at New Orleans.

Entries in the captain’s Day Order Book create a sense of anticipation as they advance into spring 1945. Then, as Pearson tells it, “Burleigh Roby came into the wardroom. He puzzled over a message he had just decoded. He laid it on the table. ‘What the hell is an atomic bomb?’ he asked.”

So the war ended. Charley Jason, having found his niche in submarines, comes home on leave and gets Dear Johned by the banker sex kitten. Life moves on as everyone tries to adjust to a postwar world.

Pearson includes a helpful — and extensive — glossary of submarine terminology at his novel’s end, along with some personal notes about his service and that of the submarine fleet in World War II. Gunfish is an entertaining adventure tale as well as a survivor’s tribute to colleagues, now long gone, in an epic struggle. He has done them proud.

Lindsay Thompson practices in Ballard and edits Bar News. For more information on Gunfish, the author’s website is www.claudempearson.com.