“Bus drivers,” Collins sneered loud enough to be overheard.
One of the chopper trainees took umbrage and swaggered over to our table. “Who you calling a bus driver, asshole?”
Rico was a little shorter than I, lanky, and long-armed. A challenging grin crossed his face as he and Collins pushed back their chairs and slowly stood up. I dropped my chin on my chest. “Oh, shit!”
I rose to my feet as two or three other bus drivers pushed around the table.
Collins’s lip curled, which made the crook in his nose even more pronounced. “Real men light their afterburners,” he said. “Our grandmothers drive helicopters.”
The confrontation among “officers and gentlemen” might have turned into a healthy brawl had not the bar manager called the Shore Patrol. I probably would not have remembered the incident at all except the next day was the day the Soviet Union tested its first implosion-type nuclear device and amped up the stakes by becoming the second power to obtain the Bomb.
CHAPTER THREE
AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS VALLEY Forge (CV-45) rolled gently in the Sea of Japan off the Korean Peninsula. A red sun rising flamed through thin morning mist that left dew on the canopy of my F9F Panther fighter jet as a deck crew hooked me to the catapult cable and I sucked it up for the launch. I had received my wish out of flight school—jets. In plenty of time for Korea.
I was still training in jets when North Korea invaded South Korea in a mass surprise attack on June 25, 1950, that turned the peninsula into the first hot clash of the Cold War and a testing ground of will between the Iron Curtain and the Free World. Resolution 82 authorized the United Nations to assist South Korea in repulsing the action. President Harry Truman selected General Douglas MacArthur, the aging World War II commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, to lead the UN command. Within three months, he landed at Inchon and pushed the NKs back to the Pusan Peninsula, from which they had launched.
On November 24 he flew the front lines in his C-54 Skymaster. What he saw concerned him greatly. The entire line, he informed President Truman, was “deplorably weak.”
China entered the fray the next day, mass-attacked, and drove UN forces into full retreat all the way back to Seoul. The Soviet Union supported the counteroffensive with war supplies—and with the threat of “First Lightning,” the nuclear bomb it had developed and tested fifteen months before.
Each side had its finger poised on the nuclear trigger.
Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Chairman General J. Lawton Collins requested from MacArthur a list of possible targets inside the Soviet Union to strike in the event Stalin should actively enter the war. In April 1951, JCS drafted orders authorizing MacArthur to use nuclear weapons against Manchuria and the Shantang Peninsula if the Chinese launched airstrikes from those locations. At the same time, President Truman arranged to transfer nine Mark 4 nuclear bombs from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to military control. A nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union became a very real option.
If two such weapons could destroy entire cities and wipe out tens of thousands of people, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what might an exchange of hundreds of such weapons do?
Still, MacArthur warned, the Free World must not back down, regardless of consequences. “The communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest,” he wrote in a letter to Truman. “If we lose the war to communists in Asia, the fall of Europe is inevitable. Win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. … We must win. There is no substitute for victory.”
I had so far lived much of my young life under war clouds of varying density—vicariously through Dad, as a bystander while atomic bombs were developed and used, as a student during the first uneasy peace of the Cold War. And now I was right in the middle of it, flying war planes and getting my hands dirty along with everyone else.
As a kid I made bean flips—slingshots—out of forked branches and strips of tire inner tube with which to shoot stones at squirrels and birds—and the windows of crotchety old Mrs. Parnell who lived next door when we were stationed at Norfolk. Being launched off a flight deck in an airplane was a lot like being the stone shot from a bean flip.
I caught my breath as the catapult slung my airplane down the deck. Momentum sucked me back into the seat. The engine throbbed with power that vibrated throughout the Panther and my helmeted body. The sleek craft, nearly the same deep blue hue as the ocean, sank off the end of the flattop, but lifted almost immediately with its engine afterburner growling as I raised the nose and streaked into the sky, heading on a bearing north toward the Pusan Peninsula and MiG Alley.
I glanced over my shoulder from inside the pressurized all-around-vision canopy as the carrier and her destroyer escorts receded to toy boats bobbing on calm water.
“See you soon, Elinor,” I recited jauntily for good luck. Combat pilots all had their little rituals or tokens that we hoped helped keep us safe. See you soon, Elinor, was mine.
I had married Elinor McHale in San Diego only months before I shipped out with VC-61 for Korea. I tried to warn her, God knows I did, tried to warn her hard, that Navy life was no life for a woman. How many times during my “Navy brat” youth had I watched Mother standing at dockside with tears welling in her eyes as Dad went to war, never knowing if he would return alive?
Sweet little Elinor with the long luxurious hair, only twenty-one years old and standing at her first dockside with Mom and Dad as I departed on my way by troop transport to the Philippines, where I would link up with Valley Forge. Tears fell. I even had to bat them back myself. But we were in love, and Elinor was poetic and philosophical about it.
“Love has to be seized like a fragile bird before it flies away,” she recited. “Or before it dies.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I won’t be in direct combat.”
I kissed her hard. Then I turned and walked away and forced myself not to look back. Not even at poor Mom, who had gone through this so many times before.
Direct combat depended upon interpretation. VC-61 (Composite Squadron 61) was a reconnaissance outfit operating off a carrier. Attached Panthers went out scouting, generally alone, unarmed except for cameras mounted in their noses with which to catch images of roads, bridges, railroad tracks, troop concentrations, movements, and other possible targets and strategic locations for the benefit of war planners. This ability to spy downward on the enemy provided the UN alliance a major advantage in fighting and defeating the Red NKs.
Aerial recon aircraft confronted the same missiles, anti-aircraft ground fire, and the occasional bogie as real fighters. The difference was that fighters could shoot back. Our only defense was to run. Run and evade.
Dangerous business either way. During this autumn of the second year of the war, Naval Air Group Five, to which VC-61 was temporarily attached, lost twenty-seven airplanes and eleven pilots.
“It’s a hell of a way to fight a war,” my sometimes-wingman, Lieutenant “Tex” Baker, liked to say in his big Texas drawl, “but, damn, man, it’s the only war we got.”
Valley Forge disappeared in mist and distance as I punched the Panther out through haze that dissipated as I approached Pusan. Yellow bands of sunlight splashed across terrain below that resembled green-and-brown construction paper crushed in the hand of a giant. I kept a sharp eye peeled for bogies and for dam construction on a river that Operations wanted photographed.
I suddenly became aware that I might not be alone in the sky: a sixth-sense feeling stimulated by a flitting, winged shape in the clouds. Like a prowling shark hunting prey on a shadowy ocean reef.
Adrenaline surged as I scanned the surrounding cloud-mottled skies, head rotating, eyes darting as the Panther screamed through another slash of cloud at nearly 600 mph. Even though I was looking for the bogie, the silver MiG nonetheless surprised me as it flashed into sight at my nine o’clock and below at a distance of less than a mile. It closed fast into cannon range.
Heart pounding, I poure
d in power and nosed into a shallow dive, pushing the sleek blue bird to its max. The MiG latched on and opened up with a burst of cannon fire. Tracers snapped past my canopy.
Panther pilots had outflown and outmaneuvered MiGs before, had claimed a number of kills without a single loss of our own. Those were our fighters. I could get this sonofabitch now if I could kill with a camera. Poor Mom, and Elinor, were going to miss me.
The MiG zipped underneath, a shimmer of silver, and executed a sweeping turn for another pass. I nosed into a steeper dive to attain more speed. My teeth clacked from vibration as the aircraft exceeded its limitations, wings clattering. It seemed a matter of which I lost first—my teeth or my wings.
A pilot could live without his teeth.
The MiG made another run, guns blasting. Rounds snapped into the Panther’s rear fuselage.
I pulled G’s in a deceptive, gut-wrenching climb to the left. The MiG lost speed. I threw in the coal and streaked through the sky in a deep plunge toward the blue of the Sea of Japan and my mouse’s hole aboard Valley Forge. I doubted the commie pilot would follow into a certain barrage of anti-aircraft fire from our destroyers.
Valley Forge’s nickname, Happy Valley, had never seemed so appropriate. I bounced once and glued the bird to the deck to tailhook the arresting cable. A landing aboard a carrier was never much more than a controlled crash. The Panther pulled up hard on the cable, thrusting me forward in the harness before movement curtailed. I noticed my hands shaking.
Tex Baker was below decks in the pilots’ ready room debriefing his own flight when he heard my radio exchange about the bogie. He met me on deck while I was inspecting a bullet hole through my horizontal stabilizer.
“Damn!” he cracked. “The bastards are shooting at us out there! It just ain’t fair when all we want to do is take their pictures.”
My hands stopped shaking and my breath returned to normal. I spotted a bunch of ratty-looking seafarers on the fantail as we made our way to the ladder leading below decks. Tex said they had just come aboard after being extracted from a mission on the North Korean mainland. They were awaiting further transport to their mother ship, a high-speed APD transport located in the flotilla to the south.
“Aren’t we lucky, pard?” Tex drawled. “While we’re up there in the wild blue yonder comfy in our clean pressurized bubbles, these guys are down here rooting around in the mud behind enemy lines blowing up shit and scaring the snot out of us Glamour Boys.”
This was my first face-to-face encounter with UDT. Four of them garbed in filthy camouflage uniforms, faces blackened, armed with pistols, knives, carbines, and stubby submachine guns. They were laughing and playing grabass, as men in closely-knit units will do in relieving tension following a dangerous mission.
The sight of them instantly brought back my old fascination with naval unconventional warfare. These guys looked the part of night fighters, like they could go anywhere, anytime, and pull off any damned thing asked of them. At that moment I would have exchanged my F9F Panther, my last pair of clean socks, and my roadway to career success in the Navy for a chance to join them.
CHAPTER FOUR
“IN THE TEAMS YOU go places and do things most men in the world would never think about,” one of the UDTs said to me before a launch arrived to rescue them from Happy Valley.
Tex Baker laughed. “Oh, Bone thinks about it.”
The leader of the band looked me over. He could have been either an officer or enlisted. None of them wore rank or identification. Also, from appearance they might have been hobos, farmworkers, a gang of thieves and robbers, or the Bowery Boys.
“Bone?” The Frogman chuckled at the nickname. “Bone, you look crazy enough to be a Frog.”
I had devoured everything I could find about UDTs and Frogmen from the time I was a little kid and Dad came home on leave from the South Pacific and told me about them. They seemed to be raw material for the super warriors my young and impressionable mind thought possible. Only after I reached Annapolis and the war ended was I able to put together their history, since most of it had been kept secret during the war.
Before World War II began, the United States Navy had no underwater capability other than hard-hat divers used principally for ship repair and salvage. Pearl Harbor and the subsequent demand for men to recon and clear beachheads led to the Scouts & Raiders—and to Lieutenant Philip Bucklew.
A muscled-up ex-football left end for the Cleveland Rams, Bucklew was a physical training instructor at Naval Station, Norfolk, Virginia, when he learned of plans to create “amphibious commandos.” He volunteered immediately as a trainer, along with heavyweight prizefighter Gene Tunney. The first class of ten Scouts & Raiders recruits began in May 1942, their mission to recon landing beaches, mark obstacles and defensive construction, and guide assault troops to the beachhead.
Scouts saw their first action in November 1942. Hitler’s armies, supplemented by traitorous Vichy French, had descended on North Africa like a plague of sand fleas. Americans planned to land 100,000 assault troops to drive them from North Africa and free the way for an invasion of Europe. Big Bucklew and seventeen of his Scouts & Raiders led the way.
Shortly after dark, the small band launched a Higgins boat from an offshore warship and set out silently to penetrate the Wadi Sebou River, their mission to cut cables and anti-shipping nets so American destroyers could fight their way upstream to the harbor and cover infantry moving in to seize the Port Lyautey military airfield. The team passed directly underneath the machine guns of a Vichy fort on higher ground overlooking the river.
Squalls of rain buffeted the small wooden boat and its sodden crew and, along with the darkness, cut visibility to almost zero. Groundswells from tide and wind swept the boat upriver as though it were a wild, uncontrollable carnival ride.
Red flares muted by heavy rainfall arced from the fort and burst over the boat, revealing the Scouts to machine gunners on the walls. Tracers cut through the drenched night. Scouts turned tail and retreated, their first mission as a unit ending in failure. Miraculously, they suffered not a single casualty.
Undaunted, Bucklew and his men returned the following night, this time undetected. They blew up cables supporting the anti-shipping nets and afterward fought their way back out to sea against an incoming tide. A hail of machine-gun fire from the fort drilled thirteen bullet holes in their boat. Again, none of the team was hit.
The American troop landing proved a success. The Vichy fort and the airfield surrendered.
By June 1943, having discerned a need for water demolitions against enemy beachheads, the Navy established Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDUs), which began training next door to an old casino at Fort Pierce, Florida. Bucklew had moved his Scouts & Raiders to Fort Pierce in January. In November, six men of NCDU-11 and four Scouts were dispatched to England under Bucklew’s command to begin preparations for the Normandy invasion.
Operating from small rubber boats, NCDU and Scouts spent weeks snooping the French coast, sketching and mapping it in anticipation of the pending invasion. Bucklew might be considered the first invader of German-occupied Europe after he crawled ashore one night to bring back a bucket of sand so army experts could study its capacity to support tanks and other heavy vehicles.
By D-Day in June 1944, NCDU and Bucklew’s Scouts & Raiders had expanded to number several hundred men. In the predawn on the morning of the invasion, swimmers from the units, under heavy enemy fire, blew gaps in German defenses on Omaha and Utah beaches and cleared yards of the beachheads in advance of Allied landings. Of 175 NCDU and Scouts on Omaha, thirty-one were killed in action and sixty wounded. Four on Utah Beach were killed and eleven wounded.
In the meantime, the momentum toward naval guerrilla warfare continued with the activation of Amphibious Roger, a collection of NCDU and S&R volunteers to fight the Japanese in China with the Sino-American Cooperation Organization (SACO). While some Scouts trained Nationalist Chinese guerrillas, others disguised as coolies employed sam
pans and small steamers to survey the Yangtze River and Japanese-controlled coastlines from Shanghai to Kitchioh Wan near Hong Kong. Bucklew was involved in the operation along with preparing for the Normandy invasion. Because of his large size and his inability to speak Chinese, partisans disguised him as a slump-shouldered deaf-mute. Japanese who heard of the large-bodied American spy dubbed him “Big Slump.”
Over 1,300 men ultimately trained to serve in Scouts & Raiders.
In the Pacific Theater, similar evolutions were occurring in naval special warfare, stimulated by “Terrible Tarawa” in November 1943, where inadequate invasion preparation led to the loss of more than a thousand U.S. Marines and the wounding of 2,500 others on the beachhead. Commander Draper Kauffman was assigned the responsibility of creating a blend of Scouts and NCDUs into Underwater Demolition Teams with an expanded mission. UDTs would operate more clandestinely by taking the mission underwater, a further step toward all-around, all-purpose commandos.
Training and operating out of Waimonalo Amphibious Training Base in Hawaii, UDT teams led by Kauffman participated in every major landing action in the Pacific from their first assignment to the Marshall Islands in January 1944 until the end of the war in 1945. Frogmen caused a stir wherever they appeared.
Following the successful invasion of Saipan, Kauffman and a UDT lieutenant hailed a lift on an amtrac to the sand for consultation with the landing master. A Marine stuck his head up from a foxhole and spotted the two Frogmen garbed in swimming trunks and sneakers with green stripes painted on their near-naked bodies.
“Christ, I’ve seen everything,” he exclaimed in mock surprise. “We ain’t even got the beach yet, and the tourists are already here.”
Draper Kauffman’s foresight may have created the Underwater Demolition Teams, but Francis Douglas Fane’s insight prevented their extinction. Fane could not even swim when World War II broke out, was in fact actually afraid of water after having almost drowned as a child. He took a crash course in swimming and soon assumed command of UDT-13.
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