by Mark Moyar
On July 20, the 1st and 4th Raider battalions marched two miles from Enogai to Bairoko, a Japanese redoubt on the opposite side of the Dragon’s Peninsula. After the Enogai raid, the Japanese commander at Bairoko had built additional fortifications outside the town, forming four concentric defensive rings. The Raiders penetrated the two outer rings, which consisted mainly of log and coral bunkers, but they lacked heavy weapons to break down the concrete fortifications of the inner rings, from which Japanese machine guns sawed through Raiders whenever they tried to approach. A requested air strike did not occur, and the jungle canopy prevented the Raiders from using mortars. The two Raider battalions abandoned the attack after sustaining 250 casualties.
Across the Pacific, as across Europe, the increasing size of offensive operations was diminishing the opportunities for raids and other nonstandard operations. By 1944, the mass production of large landing craft in US shipyards and the decline in Japanese air and naval power had led American commanders in the Pacific to concentrate on conquering bigger and more heavily fortified islands, which were better suited to multi-division landing forces—complete with Sherman tanks and heavy artillery—than to lightly armed battalions. The United States increasingly embraced the approach that had produced victory in the Civil War and World War I: deploying ground troops and materiel in overwhelming numbers to grind down a numerically inferior enemy.
Numerous Marine officers came to share General Holcomb’s view that the Raiders had siphoned off too much talent for raids that were not especially valuable and could have been performed by other units. According to Colonel Alan Shapley, the second commander of the 2nd Raider Battalion, both he and Edson of the 1st Battalion decided that “there wasn’t much a Raider battalion could do that a good Marine battalion couldn’t do.” Admiral Nimitz, an early proponent of the Raider concept, decided in the end that regular Marine units were fully capable of conducting raids.
One other major experiment in raiding forces was to take place in the Pacific during World War II, in the form of the 5307th Composite Unit, known popularly as “Merrill’s Marauders.” At the Quebec Conference of August 1943, the British convinced President Roosevelt to create an American raiding unit in Burma to team up with the Chindits, a force of British, Gurkha, and Burmese guerrillas that was wreaking havoc on the Japanese. The organizers of the 5307th Composite Unit sought volunteers, but also asked US infantry commanders to provide personnel, prompting some commanders to offload their least desirable men. “We’ve got the misfits of half the divisions in the country,” one officer in the new unit lamented.
Merrill’s Marauders took their nickname from their titular commander, Brigadier General Frank D. Merrill. As it turned out, though, Merrill would be absent from the field for long spells, being evacuated twice in the middle of military operations after suffering heart attacks. His deputy, the able Colonel Charles N. Hunter, took charge of operations in his absence. The assignment of missions, meanwhile, was the prerogative of the cantankerous theater commander, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell.
In early 1944, Stilwell assigned the motley Marauders to a multinational offensive in northern Burma. They and the Chindits were to conduct raids in the Japanese rear while British and Chinese regulars took on the main Japanese forces. To evade detection, they would steer clear of roads and trails. Embarking on February 24, the Marauders cut through dense jungles swarming with malarial mosquitos, waded across jungle rivers that left a man coated with leeches, and climbed steep mountains made slick by the monsoon rains.
As events would have it, the Marauders bumped into large Japanese forces early in the campaign. Stilwell, lacking other forces nearby, ordered the Marauders to stay where they were and fight as conventional infantry in order to shield the Allied flank. Having been lightly equipped to give them superior mobility, the Marauders ended up fighting heavily equipped Japanese forces in battles where mobility counted for less than big weapons.
During this campaign, Stilwell failed to keep adequate food supplies flowing to the Marauders, with the result that the men lost an average of thirty-five pounds before it was over. He issued senseless orders, demanding blanket transfers of wounded Marauders from hospitals to the front, where they often collapsed from their injuries or fatigue. Indifferent to the plummeting of morale, Stilwell avoided speeches to the troops, decoration ceremonies, and the other tools used by commanders since time immemorial to buoy sagging spirits. In their dejection, the Marauders referred to Stilwell and his staff as “stuffed baboons,” and worse.
Within the first few months of the campaign, half of the Marauders became casualties. Under most circumstances, such losses would have led to the unit’s rotation to the rear for physical and mental recuperation, but Stilwell refused to pull the Marauders off the line. He did have a valid strategic rationale: because the Marauders were the only US force in the theater, their removal would have undermined American exhortations to the Chinese and British to continue fighting. Eventually, 2,400 of the original 3,000 Marauders were lost to injury, illness, capture, or death.
WHILE THE TRAVAILS of the Marauders were reinforcing doubts about organizing infantrymen into discrete raiding units, a different kind of special operations force, specializing in amphibious warfare, was eliciting a crescendo of praise. In 1942, the US Navy had begun experimentation with forces recruited and trained for niche roles in amphibious warfare, principally in the fields of reconnaissance and demolitions. In August of that year, a joint amphibious reconnaissance school opened in Little Creek, Virginia, midway between Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Much of the school’s initial trainee cohort came from the Navy’s Physical Training Program, a repository of college and professional athletes under the leadership of boxer Gene Tunney, former heavyweight champion of the world. The amphibious reconnaissance school’s graduates, labeled the Scouts and Raiders, deployed to the Atlantic and Pacific to reconnoiter beaches, guide landing craft during amphibious operations, and set flares for naval gunfire.
At this same time, the US Navy began systematic training of underwater demolition specialists. To meet the demands of the Allied campaign in North Africa, the first volunteers were rushed through training, making their first appearance in Morocco in November 1942. The demolition men succeeded in destroying the boom and net blocking the Wadi Sebou River in the face of thirty-foot waves and enemy machine-gun fire.
The Navy subsequently formed Naval Combat Demolition Units for employment in the amphibious landings in Italy and France. Despite rumors that the new organization would be a “75 percent casualty outfit,” plenty of volunteers showed up for training at Fort Pierce, Florida, in June 1943. With the Sicilian invasion only a matter of weeks away, the officer in charge of the new program, Lieutenant Draper L. Kauffman, accelerated preparation by condensing the physical training regimen of the Little Creek program into a single week. A grueling sequence of running, swimming, diving, boat-handling, detonating, and mock attacking, with almost no sleep and little food, it was dubbed “Hell Week.” Between 30 and 40 percent of this and ensuing classes of volunteers washed out of the program by week’s end.
Jerry N. Markham, who gave up his draft-exempt job at a Jacksonville, Florida, paper mill to join the Navy, volunteered for the Naval Combat Demolition Units because it seemed far more exciting than the water purification job for which the Navy had been grooming him. Markham had been interested in deep-sea and shallow-water diving since boyhood, his love for the sea fueled by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. After months of demolition training at Fort Pierce, Markham moved to the Welsh city of Swansea for exercises tailored to the invasion of Normandy. As Operation Overlord approached, Markham learned that he would take part in the clearing of a 50-foot-wide by 350-foot-long section of mines and obstacles at Omaha Beach.
On June 3, 1944, Markham’s six-man demolition team boarded an amphibious landing craft that was carrying tanks and towing a 50-foot boat that the team would board when they neared the coast of France.
They slept on the steel decks, crawling under the hulls of tanks to escape the rains that assailed the ship during its amble across the English Channel. On the night of June 5, Markham and his teammates climbed into the small landing boat, which took its place in the endless lines of American boats queuing up for D-Day.
Just as the boat arrived at its predetermined section of Omaha Beach and lowered its ramp, German machine guns opened fire. Heavy bullets hit men in the boat as well as those who sought refuge in the water. A German mortar round landed squarely on a nearby boat, blowing it to pieces. Moments after Markham’s team entered the water, a mortar round killed the team’s commanding officer and blew the head completely off another teammate.
Markham, as the next in line to command the team after the officer’s death, directed the surviving members to move from one obstacle to the next and attach charges. The crisscrossed steel bars of German “hedgehog” obstacles provided enough cover to give the men some hope of surviving and accomplishing the mission, though not enough to shield a man’s entire body. They connected the charges with Primacord, a newly developed waterproof cable that looked like yellow clothesline. By linking a long string of charges with Primacord, a demolitioneer could blow them all simultaneously by time fuse or remote-command detonator.
Short on team members and harried by blistering German fire, Markham’s team had not yet detonated any charges when the first wave of US infantry neared the shore. Some of the infantrymen’s boats were impaled on hedgehogs that should have been blown up already. No detonations occurred before the arrival of the second wave of infantry-laden boats, which piled up behind the first like cars behind a highway accident. Next, bulldozers and jeeps on crawler trailers plowed into the landing area, tearing the Primacord from obstacles before the charges could be blown.
Eventually, Markham’s team and other demolition teams at Omaha Beach were able to detonate some of the obstacles, the pace quickening as American infantrymen eliminated German machine-gun and mortar positions. Only half of the obstacles intended for demolition were destroyed by day’s end, and only five of the sixteen channels on Omaha Beach were fully cleared. Still, it was enough to get US troops on shore in the numbers required to secure the beach and establish a bridgehead in occupied France. Of 175 demolitioneers, thirty-one were killed and sixty wounded.
In the Pacific Theater, the Navy expanded its demolition capabilities after the November 1943 Battle of Tarawa, where coral reefs had sliced open American landing craft and sent Marines and tanks to the bottom. Establishing a new training center at Waimanalo, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the Navy formed Underwater Demolition Teams, whose “Frogmen” numbered 3,500 by the end of the war. In 1944 and 1945, as US amphibious warfare in the Pacific reached its zenith, the Frogmen swam along island coasts to chart terrain and prepare demolitions. Using fish lines to take soundings at twenty-five-yard intervals, reconnaissance teams determined where vessels could pass safely, and where coral or other obstacles needed to be destroyed. On demolition missions, the Frogmen typically arrived by high-speed boat the night before a landing, jumped into the water, and swam to the obstacles with haversacks of explosives and Primacord.
One of the greatest successes of the Underwater Demolition Teams took place at Guam. Annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War, Guam had fallen to the Japanese on December 10, 1941, and hence the island was a point of national pride, as well as the largest prize in the Marianas. The Japanese had garrisoned the island with 19,000 troops, who had enjoyed plenty of time to get ready for the return of the Americans. To block amphibious landing craft, the Japanese had filled hundreds of wire cribs with rocks and put them on coral reefs near the shoreline. Japanese engineers had constructed fortified defensive positions on the beaches and crowded the sand with obstacles.
In the week preceding the invasion, Underwater Demolition Teams swam to the reefs and beaches to undo the Japanese handiwork. Piling boats high with blocks of the explosive tetrytol, they sailed close to shore and then waded through the water to reach their targets. Slowly, blast after blast, they chiseled channels through the coral and pathways across the beaches. By the date of the invasion, July 21, 1944, the US Navy was fully confident in its ability to land 60,000 troops on Guam. The landing craft encountered few troubles in delivering American ground forces, and those ground forces met with little difficulty in passing through the beaches. The Americans destroyed the Japanese garrison and reclaimed the island in just twenty days.
The amphibious reconnaissance and demolition men received widespread praise as the end of the war approached. Rear Admiral Turner pronounced that their contributions at Guam “fully justify the extraordinary efforts which have been made to organize, train and equip the Teams.” Admiral Nimitz asserted, “Assault operations in the Marianas would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, on some beaches without the capable and courageous work of the Underwater Demolition Teams.”
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT’S INSISTENCE on the creation of the Marine Corps Raiders in January 1942 marked the beginning of presidential tinkering with special operations forces. In founding the Raiders, President Roosevelt took the advice of his novice son over the objections of the Marine Corps commandant—objections that subsequent events were to vindicate. Roosevelt approved the creation of Merrill’s Marauders in the interest of meeting a request from an ally, without considering the practical factors that would influence the ultimate roles and effectiveness of the units. Such factors received much greater attention in the formation of the special operations forces that were not objects of high-level political fascination—the Navy Frogmen—which had much to do with the fact that the Navy Frogmen played a more significant military part in the war, and the fact that they outlived the presidentially fathered forces, which ultimately fell victim to a loss of presidential interest.
The Marine Raiders, like the Army Rangers and Forcemen, put their special capabilities to effective use on occasion. Stealth and physical fitness were critical to the success of Edson’s landing on Tulagi and Carlson’s month-long raid on Guadalcanal. But in the Pacific Theater, as in the European Theater, the Axis enemy was too strong and vigilant to be overwhelmed by raids or other light infantry operations. Heavily equipped infantry and armor would be required to snuff out the Japanese island garrisons.
In the Pacific, as in Europe, the limitations and negative perceptions of the special operations forces led to the dissolution of most units before the war ended. The Marine Corps converted its Raider battalions into a regular Marine regiment, the 4th Marines, in February 1944. Six months later, the US headquarters for the China-Burma-India Theater merged the battered remnants of Merrill’s Marauders into the 475th Infantry Regiment. The Army deactivated the 6th Ranger Battalion and the few remaining Ranger battalions in Europe shortly after the war ended. The only special operations forces still in existence at the end of 1945 were a select number of Underwater Demolition Teams, owing to their proven effectiveness in amphibious warfare.
The fact that special operations forces played almost no role in the final defeat of Germany and Japan reinforced the belief among conventional military officers that such forces were an unnecessary and wasteful sideshow. For the next few years, the US military leadership would pay little attention to special operations forces, as it was preoccupied with the postwar decommissioning of military equipment and personnel and the accompanying problems of readiness. When the next war came, those interested in resurrecting special operations forces would have to compete with desperately impoverished conventional forces for coins from the national treasure chest. When that war came far sooner than expected, it ensured that criticism and resentment of special operations forces would still be fresh in military minds.
CHAPTER 3
OSS
Of the twenty-one students who entered Columbia Law School in 1905, the one destined to climb highest on the mountain of earthly power arrived already bearing the name and lineage of the nation’s standing president.
Born on the 110-acre Springwood estate in the Hudson Valley, Franklin D. Roosevelt had spent his youth shuttling between Springwood, a New York City town house, and an eighteen-room summer cottage on Campobello Island. He took an early liking to the sea, spending countless days learning to sail and fish aboard the family’s fifty-one-foot yacht and a flotilla of lesser boats. Among the family’s retinue of servants could be found a housekeeper, several maids, a butler, a nurse, a gardener, a horseman, and a team of farmhands. For his education, Franklin’s parents relied on private tutors until the time came for high school, at which point they sent him off to the nation’s premier boarding school, Groton. In 1900, he entered Harvard College, where he earned “Gentleman C’s” in most of his courses.
For someone of Roosevelt’s social class, gaining entrance to Columbia Law School was not considered an exceptional accomplishment. The mediocrity of his undergraduate record testified to the modesty of the admission standards that scions of the northeastern elite had to meet. Roosevelt certainly did not treat his admission to Columbia as a cherished privilege, as evidenced by grades that were even worse than those on his undergraduate transcript. Failing several of his courses, he would end up leaving the school without a degree.
Franklin Roosevelt could scarcely have differed more from the member of his law school class who would become its second-most-famous luminary, William J. Donovan. For Roosevelt, the future president, accolades and privileges appeared spontaneously, demanding no exertion strenuous enough to dampen his tailored shirt or disrupt his elaborate social calendar. For Donovan, the future head of the Office of Strategic Services, everything had to be earned by rolling up his sleeves and toiling into the night. Yet the acquaintance begun at Columbia between the unlikely duo was to be the genesis of the third type of special operations forces of World War II, a type burdened by the same troubles as most of the others, but one with a more robust legacy.