12,005 Leagues Under The Sea

AN extraordinary accomplishment," said the President of the U.S., and so saying, he pinned a Legion of Merit on the much-decorated chest of Navy Captain Edward Latimer Beach last week. Ned Beach, 42, had just made the kind of history that even Presidents can envy: under his command the world's largest submarine, the nuclear, 3O-knot-plus U.S.S. Triton, had completed the first underwater circumnavigation of the globe.

Nominally, the trip was a shakedown cruise, but in laying down the global underseas voyage, the Navy also prescribed a variety of psychological experiments for the crew, as well as hydrographic tests, drills in reconnaissance and evasion of detection (Triton was never sighted by ship or plane). For good measure, and possibly for good public relations, Triton followed a course close to the one sailed by Magellan and his men in 1519-22.

Triton is the first nuclear submarine designed for the submarine's classic role of scouting. Her job is to roam out on the surface hundreds of miles ahead of naval task forces, scanning the skies with powerful radar. She carries the biggest crew (about 150), and, powered by twin reactors, can dive faster and cruise farther than any of her nuclear sisters.

Skipper Beach (Annapolis '39) is the son of the late Captain Edward Beach, who commanded the battleship New York in 1918-19 and who wrote Navy stories for children. Ned Beach won the Navy Cross, Silver Stars and a chestful of other medals as a World War II submariner, recorded his adventures in two big-selling books, Submarine! and Run Silent, Run Deep (a novel that was made into a movie in 1958).

With his flair for capturing mood and action on paper, Beach kept an expansive log at sea that recorded everything from depth soundings to "babygrams"--eight Stateside messages informing sailors that their wives had given birth.

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