Run Silent Run Deep Submarine Service Patch

The skull and crossbones under this boat is the Jolly Roger, the flag submarines have flown coming home from successful patrols since the First World War. Royal Navy boats started the custom, and submarine crews on both sides of the Atlantic kept it. Here it sits right under the hull, as if the boat is already on her way home. The words around it come from the most famous submarine novel an American ever wrote. Every qualified submariner knows both.

Run Silent, Run Deep was published in 1955 by Edward L. Beach Jr., a submariner who knew the work from the inside. Beach made ten war patrols in USS Trigger SS-237, including the Battle of Midway, earned the Navy Cross as executive officer of USS Tirante SS-420, and took command of USS Piper SS-409 into the Sea of Japan in August 1945, finishing the war with twelve war patrols. United Artists made the novel into a 1958 film. In 1960 Beach took the nuclear-powered radar picket submarine USS Triton SSRN-586 around the world submerged, 84 days and more than 41,000 statute miles between 16 February and 10 May. The phrase has belonged to the whole Silent Service ever since, from the fleet boats of the Pacific war to today's ballistic missile and fast attack boats.

The patch is a 4 inch round with a black merrowed edge and an iron-on backing. RUN SILENT arches across the top and RUN DEEP across the bottom in off-white serif letters on a slate blue band. Inside a black ring a submarine with sail-mounted planes and raised masts runs through teal water between dark swells, her hull worked in layered shades of blue. The off-white skull and crossbones sits below the keel, with pale blue eyes stitched into the skull. The palette stays in deep blues and blacks, the colors of a boat that does not want to be found.

The Silent Service paid for its record. The National Park Service counts 52 U.S. submarines lost in World War II and 3,506 officers and enlisted men killed, a casualty rate of about one in five, and submariners still speak of those boats as on eternal patrol. Cmdr. Richard O'Kane's USS Tang SS-306 was lost to her own circular-running torpedo in October 1944, and O'Kane survived to receive the Medal of Honor. The phrase Run Silent, Run Deep carries all of that for the men who earned their dolphins.

Frame it in a shadow box with a set of dolphins and a boat photo, or sew it to the vest you wear to a Submarine Veterans base meeting. It also makes a good gift for a sailor heading to sub school in Groton, or for the grandfather who rode fleet boats or boomers and still talks about the smell of amine and diesel. Run silent, run deep is a good way to live, and a better way to fight.