The Failed Attempt to Sink an Italian Submarine

The Failed Attempt to Sink an Italian Submarine is a wartime episode that becomes, in Romain Gary’s account, an enduring test of conscience. A missed attack near Cyprus leaves no victory to recount; instead, the failure returns in dreams and forces the narrator to confront a source of guilt at odds with his professed faith in human dignity.

Patrol and Failed Attack

Posted back to his squadron, Romain Gary spent what he describes as a peaceful period pursuing Italian submarines off the coast of Palestine. The work was uneventful enough that he took a picnic with him. Near Cyprus, however, the squadron attacked a submarine on the surface. Although the target seemed easy to hit, the attack failed: their depth charge overshot by about a hundred feet.

Guilt and Recurring Dreams

The miss became the source of guilt and remorse that persisted long after the patrol. Gary sets his experience against familiar stories of warriors haunted by acts they have committed, but his own haunting reverses that pattern. In recurring nightmares, he is back at the moment of the missed attack, and he recognizes that his distress comes from having failed to kill, not from having killed. That admission unsettles the noble view of humanity he says he holds, and he asks forgiveness for the feeling.

Moral Contradiction and Consolation

The episode’s force lies in the contradiction between the narrator’s self-accusation and his continuing need to believe in human nature. He calls himself morally repellent, then takes slight consolation in imagining the many decent, sensitive people who are unlike him. The missed submarine thus becomes more than a failed military action: in the narrator’s retrospective account, it is a recurring test of whether he can acknowledge an unwelcome impulse without surrendering his belief in human goodness.