Commander Woolley arranged for training of the first operational groups at Camp Edwards. [Liaison] was affected between Commander Woolley and the Naval Combat Demolition Unit. He visited Fort Pierce in this unit’s initial stages and assisted in the preparation of training programs and in advice on equipment and procedure.
During the whole period February 1942 to September 1943, Commander Woolley’s services were devoted entirely to the C.O.I., subsequently the Office of Strategic Services. He was unsparing in effort and highly commended by his associates from time to time for the many successful results obtained.
It should be remembered that Commander Woolley selected camp and training sites in California and Nassau and advised on training programs for swimmers at these locations. In the case of Nassau he made all arrangements with British authorities and was of great value in liaison. On behalf of OSS, at their direction, he took charge of a British Small Raiding forces mission and rendered valuable service in the demonstration of their equipment and technique to OSS, War and Navy Departments. The Navy Department has since ordered quantities of the equipment demonstrated.
At Commander Woolley’s suggestion, the Navy Department became interested in the possibilities of attacks by swimmers against harbour defenses and requested the use of OSS swimming groups for experimental tests and exercises. The swimmers were successful and the exercises were of considerable value. The Navy Department especially expressed thanks for Commander Woolley’s work in this connection (op 30–3N 4 Serial 005930 of 8 January 1945).
Commander Woolley also supervised development of a wooden surface craft submersible. He made himself familiar with intelligence on enemy sneak craft and was frequently in consultation with Navy Department on such matters.
In May 1945, when the Navy became seriously concerned regarding Japanese attacks with sneak craft, OSS was asked to make a comprehensive film report on this subject for use in the field to aid in defensive measures. At the request of the Navy Department, Commander Woolley was appointed to the project and on the 11th of May loaned to the Navy Department to proceed to Europe to obtain specimen enemy craft, operators, etc., so that they could be closely studied. This project has been given high priority by the Navy Department. Commander Woolley was imminently successful on this mission and has been highly commended by the Navy Department for this work.
It is considered that Commander Woolley has rendered unusually meritorious service of an exceptional nature to the United States Government and that he merits consideration for a suitable award in appreciation of his services.
The entire service of Commander Woolley, both prior to and since the service upon which this recommendation is based, has been honorable.
This recommendation is based upon my personal knowledge and from official records on file in this agency.
The recommendation was approved.
After the war, Commander Woolley decided to become an American citizen and returned to Hollywood, where he resumed his screenwriting career. He also started a family.
WARD ELLEN—After sustaining serious burns while serving his country in Italy and providing crucially important service to the Maritime Unit, Ellen was mustered out of the OSS. There is no record of his postwar activities.
FRED WADLEY—He initially returned to the California Beach Patrol and then moved to the Santa Monica Police Department. He passed away in the 1960s of a heart condition.
HANS TOFTE—The Copenhagen native continued his work for the U.S. intelligence community for many years, serving first as a troubleshooter for CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith. He later collected intelligence and supported guerrilla activities for the United States in the Korean War and then accepted several missions to Latin America. After years of valuable service to his country, in 1966 he was dismissed from the agency for keeping classified documents in his apartment, something Tofte said was “customary.” He died of heart failure in 1987.
LLOYD SMITH—For his heroic efforts behind enemy lines, Smith earned the Distinguished Service Cross in acknowledgement of his role in rescuing the nurses from Albania. He was also decorated for his activities on the “Eagle” mission, also known as “The Brenner Assignment,” which is also the title of another book by Patrick K. O’Donnell.
After the war, Smith hung up his cloak and dagger and became an accountant. He settled in northern Virginia and started a family.
JOHN BOOTH—After the war, Booth worked with the CIA training underwater operatives and was involved in the Korean War. Booth had charm and a glint in his eye and remained a ladies’ man until the day he died. He often said, “I screwed my money away on women, but I wouldn’t change a thing.”
At age ninety, he regularly swam five miles out to a reef in Key West, Florida, where he would spear and catch lobsters for food. This was his way to save money so he could purchase cigars and scotch and pick up “senior hotties at the DAV [Division of American Veterans].”
He remained active into his nineties. When camping outside became difficult, he tied a rope to a tree so he could pull himself off the air mattress when he got up in the morning. Uncle John, as the author’s daughter called him when he stayed with them, is greatly missed.
GORDON “GORDY” SOLTAU—Soltau left the Navy in 1945 and then attended the University of Minnesota, where he excelled as a football player. In 1950, he joined the San Francisco 49ers as a place kicker and wide receiver. He was the NFL’s top scorer in 1952 and 1953, and he was the 49ers top scorer for the nine seasons he played, with a total of 644 points. He was also very active in starting the NFL Players Association. At the time NFL players didn’t receive the huge salaries they earn today, and Gordy, like most of his fellow players, had a day job. He worked at a printing and office supply shop that was purchased by Diamond International, and he worked his way up to executive vice president of the company.
After his football career, Soltau remained active in sports as a broadcaster. He is a member of the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, and in San Francisco June 16, 2008, was declared Gordy Soltau Day. Gordy and his wife, Nancy, had one daughter and two sons. Now eighty-nine years old, Soltau continues to live in the Bay Area.
FRANK MONTELEONE—Uncle Frank, as he is known to the author’s daughter, is a good friend to the author and considered part of the family. After the war he married his sweetheart and started a family. He became an expert tailor, specializing in high-end luxury apparel, often custom making suits for celebrities. In 2004, Frank sent the author the scapula he wore around his neck on his most dangerous missions behind the lines in World War II. The author wore it during the Battle of Fallujah and continues to wear it proudly every day.
JOHN P. SPENCE—Spence remained in the Navy after the war, serving as a chief gunner’s mate and master chief gunner’s mate until his retirement in 1961. He and his wife and children then settled in California, where he worked for various military subcontractors. He later moved to Oregon, where he remained active with veterans groups until he died in his sleep at the age of ninety-five.
JUNIO VALERIO BORGHESE—The end of the war did not put an end to the Black Prince’s Fascist political leanings. He associated with several Italian neo-Fascist organizations, gradually becoming more and more extreme in his beliefs. In December 1970, he participated in an aborted coup attempt and then fled the country to avoid arrest. He died in Spain in 1974 under suspicious circumstances.
“WILD BILL” DONOVAN—At the close of the war Donovan served as special assistant to the chief prosecutor at the war trials, a role for which he was uniquely suited given his experience as a lawyer and the head of the OSS. After the trials he returned to his law practice, Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, but continued to advise U.S. presidents and accept assignments for the government. He and the firm helped buy the land for Walt Disney to create the theme park Disney World. He served as U.S. ambassador to Thailand from 1953 to 1954.
He lived to the age of seventy-six, when he passed away due to complications of vascular dementia.
After his death the International Rescue Committee awarded him the Freedom Award. As befits the man President Eisenhower called “the Last Hero,” he is buried at Arlington. Donovan’s legacy and vision lives on in all modern special operations, psychological operations, and intelligence. The past is present as the very agencies and organizations he pioneered are looking back to tackle the present and future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the past twenty-two years, I have interviewed thousands of World War II veterans. In my prior books, the beginning of the thank you section always began with the veterans, and this one does as well. This is their story that they have entrusted to me. Sadly, this year has been a watershed, as many of my friends have passed. Of the scores of men from the Maritime Unit that I interviewed, I only know of two who are still living: combat swimmer and NFL All-Pro football player Gordon Soltau and Frank Monteleone.
I have many other people to thank, including my longtime friend Cyndy Harvey for her excellent editorial advice throughout the entire process. In addition, I’m very grateful to Brian Danis, who has spent many years following the men and researching the Maritime Unit. Thanks also to my research assistant Daniel Hamilton.
I’d also like to thank the innumerable staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, who have come and gone during the last twelve years, including the late John Taylor. I am also grateful to OSS Society President Charles Pinck for his unconditional support over the years, including presenting me with the 2012 Waller Award for my body of work related to intelligence and special operations history. It was a great honor to receive the award in front of the current leadership of America’s intelligence and special operations community.
Great thanks go to my editor and very good friend Robert Pigeon for his vision, belief in the project, and skillful shaping of the draft. Also, thanks to Lissa Warren, the best publicist in the world, and Sean Maher and Kevin Hanover from Da Capo’s marketing department for always doing an excellent job.
I also want to thank several of my good friends and readers: Justin Oldham for his great advice and reading of drafts; my good friend David Mitchell, who offered invaluable suggestions; Ben Ibach, a dear friend and one of the smartest guys I know; Theana Kastens, whose keen eye improved the book; and former photo editor and superb artist, James Noel Smith.
Finally, I’d like to thank Dawn Hamilton, an extraordinary woman, who freely gave her time, input, and editorial advice to this project because of her love for history and heartfelt desire to have the veterans’ story finally told.
NOTES
Back in 2001, I began interviewing the veterans of the Office of Strategic Services. I traveled to their homes and was welcomed to their reunions. Out of the five thousand veterans I have interviewed over the course of twenty-two years, I found them to be some of the most compelling, interesting, and extraordinary individuals I ever had the opportunity to meet and befriend.
They were also the most secretive. The men and women of the OSS remained silent about their war. When I gained their trust, it came with a powerful feeling of responsibility that I took very seriously. I was deeply honored to be named a member of the OSS Society, a postwar association of OSS veterans, and even more grateful when I was awarded the 2013 Waller Award for scholarship into Special Operations History.
I first found a tiny portion of Jack Taylor’s amazing story in the National Archives in 2002. I was drawn in and became obsessed. I wanted to write a book about Taylor and attempted to weave in part of his story in the book They Dared Return; however, it was so vast that it demanded its own treatment. This book focuses on Jack and the core group of men around him. The Maritime Unit is an extensive subject and could easily span multiple volumes, and the book does not attempt to capture MU’s back story in its entirety. In fact, additional treatments are required, especially with respect to OSS operations in the Adriatic and in the Pacific.
This book took more than a decade to produce. Many of the veterans in it are among my dearest friends. Sadly, only a few of them are still alive. Their story resides in millions of documents located in 3.5 cubic miles of records in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I have dedicated years of research in these archives. The vast majority of the material quoted in this book comes from record group 226, the Office of Strategic Services, and entries dedicated to the Maritime Unit. In the notes it will be referred to as “NARA.” The records were miscategorized, sometimes misfiled, and extremely complex. I often felt like an archaeologist sifting through a dig and trying to reconstruct a mosaic from the documents that were scattered about in different record groups and entries.
First SEALs tells a portion of this significant story and attempts to honor the renaissance men of the OSS.
PROLOGUE
1Details on the Shoreham Hotel from the Omni Hotels website: www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/WashingtonDCShoreham.aspx.
2–3Scene in Shoreham Hotel pool comes from Woolley’s letter to Huntington, dated November 1942. NARA.
2SCUBA Lambertsen filed the original patent for the LARU in 1940. He later outlined his invention in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I interviewed Dr. Lambertsen extensively in 2003 regarding the development of the LARU and his experiences within the Maritime Unit. In 1942–1943, Lambertsen makes reference to SCUBA and changed the name of the LARU to SCUBA in 1952. Jacques Cousteau is sometimes credited with the invention of the term SCUBA, but he invented his open-circuit diving regulator in 1943.
3“assist in the . . . and raiding forces.” Dennis J. Roberts, “History of the Maritime Unit.” This is an unpublished report largely cowritten by Theodore Morde and Roberts that resides in NARA.
CHAPTER 1: “CAVITIES IN THE LION’S MOUTH”: THE BIRTH OF UNDERWATER COMBAT SWIMMING
6Scene in Alexandria Harbor comes from Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Black Prince and the Sea Devils: The Story of Valerio Borghese and the Elite Units of the Decima Mas (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 91–106.
6“painfully constricting [their] legs.” Ibid., 91–106.
7“[I had] to drag . . . to avoid drowning.” Ibid., 91–106.
8“Overnight, [the eastern Mediterranean] . . . the dominating power.” William Schofield, P. J. Carisella, and Adolph Caso, Frogmen: First Battles (Wellesley, MA: Branden Books, 2014), 143.
9“Our intelligence organization . . . Spanish-American War.” Michael Warner, The Office of Strategic Services: America’s First Intelligence Agency (Central Intelligence Agency, 2000), www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/oss/art02.htm.
9“through COI and . . . a centralized intelligence agency.” War Report of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), introduction by Kermit Roosevelt (New York: Walker and Company and Washington, DC: Carrollton Press, Inc., 1976), 5.
9“the significance of . . . in modern warfare.” Ibid., 5.
9“knew everybody.” Author interview with an OSS veteran who was one of Donovan’s aides.
10“accepted [the mission] . . . in World War II.” Ibid., 7.
10“It is essential . . . pertinent information.” Ibid., 7.
10“specialized trained research . . . and psychological scholars.” Ibid., 7.
10“that he should . . . securing of information.” Ibid., 8.
11“modern counterparts of . . . of former days.” OSS Morale Operations Branch Propaganda Branch, 1943–1945, NARA.
11“big league professionals . . . bush league club.” Patrick K. O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS (New York: Free Press, 2004), xvi.
11“they were making . . . of faith and hope.” War Report, 6.
11“kill the umpire and steal the ball.” O’Donnell, Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs, xvi.
12“Ph.D. who could win a bar fight.” From author’s discussions with various OSS veterans and the president of the OSS society.
12“The OSS undertook . . . h
istory of our country.” Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 3.
12“All the services . . . turned semi-guerrillas.” Sterling Hayden, Wanderer (Dobbs Ferry, Sheridan House Inc., 1998), 310.
12“To get from . . . disguised fishing vessels.” Dennis J. Roberts, “History of the Maritime Unit,” NARA.
14“a daredevil, bent . . . his own show.” Joseph E. Persico, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1997), 124.
14“[He was] perpetually tense . . . over dry lips.” Ibid.
CHAPTER 2: AREA D
15“She is, of . . . condition reflects this.” NARA.
16“General appearance and . . . port side amidships.” NARA.
16“blacked out . . . submarines.” “History of the Maritime Unit,” NARA.
16“It was necessary . . . and almost steal.” Ibid.
17“Area D.” Ibid.
17“The barracks were . . . they sit outdoors.” Lt. JH Glenn to McDonnell, letter dated July 3, 1943, NARA.
17“There is an . . . are fighting for.” Ibid.
17“[f]our elderly and . . . out mess duties.” “History of the Maritime Unit.”
19“I can’t recall . . . for the Maribel.” Handwritten note by Lt. Jack Taylor, NARA.
19“average Joe.” OSS Evaluation for Ward Ellen, NARA.
19“picturesque language.” Ibid.
19“Considerably disgruntled by . . . inactivity too frequent.” Ibid.
20“to teach each . . . territory by sea.” Lt. Jack Taylor, Report on Maritime School Training, NARA.
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