by Couch, Dick
So I’m now an apprentice historian. I’m definitely what the young SEALs consider an old guy. I need my reading glasses, and I do in fact have an old corduroy sports coat with elbow patches. And I hope you find these pages as compelling in the reading as we did in the writing. Thank you, Bill, for allowing me to be a part of telling this story.
Visit Dick Couch at www.dickcouch.com
AUTHORS’ NOTE
This book has been cleared for publication by the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. The book underwent an additional security review by Naval Special Warfare Command. In the course of these reviews, we were asked to not reveal classified details of certain components of the Special Operations Command, including special mission units. We have complied with that request.
The information for this book has been taken from personal interviews, declassified and historical documents, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and other available public sources, and contains the personal perspective and opinions of the authors. Where errors may exist, we apologize for the oversight; where opinions may differ, we welcome your comment.
This work is, by necessity, highly selective and cannot possibly cover every action, individual, development, or relevant discussion concerning the history of the UDTs and SEALs. It is our hope and intention that the following will help to document and celebrate all those who served in Naval Special Warfare, and provide the reader with an overview of the rich history of this very special breed of warriors.
CHAPTER 1
THE FANTASTIC HOUR
OMAHA BEACH,
JUNE 6, 1944, 6:33 A.M.
THE FORCE:
175 Naval Combat Demolition Unit (NCDU) demolitioneers, 500 Army Combat Engineers and 150,000 Allied soldiers and sailors
THE MISSION:
Spearhead the Allied assault to liberate Europe
His job was to blow things up, and fast.
Seaman Second Class Ken Reynolds and his teammates in the joint U.S. Army-Navy Gap Assault Teams had less than thirty minutes to blast open the gates of Western Europe. If they failed, thousands of American soldiers would be trapped and slaughtered in the water, the assault on Omaha Beach would stop at the shoreline of Normandy, and the D-Day invasion would lurch sideways into a disaster of unknown dimensions. The weather was overcast, the seas choppy and the winds were whipping up four-foot waves along the coast of Normandy, which to Reynolds looked like “the longest and flattest beach I’d ever seen.”
Their mission was to open sixteen fifty-foot-wide corridors through a wall of steel, and they had to do it inside a hurricane of machine gun and artillery fire. They were supposed to follow an initial wave of tanks and infantry onto the shore, but in the chaos of the operation, some of the demolition men were the very first to hit Omaha Beach.
Before they could even get out of the landing craft, the Americans were engulfed in a storm of shells and machine-gun fire from German positions dug into the heights overlooking the beach.
A few simple thoughts bounced around in the brain of Ken Reynolds as he jumped out of the landing craft: “Blow the obstacles. Do the job. Don’t get killed. Get to the beach.”
“The team right next to us was all killed except one,” Reynolds told us of his teammates in Boat Team 11, “when a shell landed right in their rubber boat and set off their explosives.” Nearby, a shell hit the landing craft deck and ignited the explosives of Boat Team 14 before the commandos could even offload their rubber boat, killing many of them. Another shell scored a direct hit on Team 15’s boat and detonated their explosives, killing three men and wounding four.
“It was crazy,” Reynolds said. “We were dodging bullets and shells, and if you didn’t improvise you didn’t survive.”
“I saw people dying, I saw dead people in the water, I heard the noise,” he remembered. “I saw the whole gamut, but it didn’t bother me. I knew what we had to do.”
The scene marked a milestone in the prehistory of the U.S. Navy SEALs in combat, as their direct ancestors, the little-remembered Naval Combat Demolition Units, or NCDUs, launched the assault on the beaches of Normandy, the spearhead of an operation that combat historian S. L. A. Marshall described as “an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster.”
Unlike today’s SEALs, who enter battle prepared by an entire year or more of broad-based commando and maritime training and a wide spectrum of high-tech weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment, Reynolds and many of his colleagues had only basic training at Fort Pierce, Florida, a demolition course, and a bare minimum of tools needed to try to blow gaps in the obstacles that Hitler built on the shores of Western Europe. And in sharp contrast to the modern SEALs, the NCDUs were not trained combat swimmers—they were dropped off in shallow water and were expected to do their work mostly as they walked and crawled through the cold surf.
The young warrior’s brain switched off the violence and chaos, and focused only on the pair of pliers and the knife in his pocket, and the two canvas satchels of explosives slung over his shoulders. Each satchel was stuffed with sixteen 2.5-pound sausage-shaped packs of C-2 plastic or tetrytol explosive, for a total of thirty-two charges. The ingenious new explosive delivery system was called the “Hagensen Pack” after its inventor, Naval Reserve Seabee Lieutenant Carl P. Hagensen, who was NCDU-trained at Fort Pierce and officer-in-charge of NCDU-30. The packs could be quickly attached to any type of obstacle by a hook-and-line design. Other men in Reynolds’s team carried blasting caps and detonation cord to wire the charges together.
Incoming U.S. Army infantry troops could feel bullets beating on the drop ramps of their landing craft as the ramps were being lowered, ribbons of bullets raked the surf as the troops tumbled into the water, and many drowned from being overloaded with supplies. Some men scampered over the sides or dove underwater to escape the hail of bullets.
“They just slaughtered us, it was unbelievable,” recalled Ken Reynolds. “There were bodies, body parts, and blood everywhere,” remembered Seaman First Class Robert Watson. “There were more killed and wounded on the beach than those of us left alive.” Joe Amorelli, an Army engineer who landed nearby, said “a guy beside me had his arm blown off, and while he was looking at it, he was shot again. He went right down. They were dying all around me.”
When he jumped into the cold, waist-high water of the English Channel just after 6:33 A.M. on June 6, 1944, U.S. Navy Seaman Second Class Ken Reynolds was the length of two football fields away from the coast of France.
For an instant, he sensed the staggering scale of the spectacle he was at the front of: “It was a fantastic, unbelievable sight,” he remembered. “I couldn’t imagine that there were that many naval vessels in the world.” It was one of the biggest armadas in history, with nearly 5,000 vessels, 11,000 planes, and 150,000 Allied sailors and soldiers striking the coast of Normandy.
Reynolds was eighteen years old, barely out of high school in Providence, Rhode Island, and hadn’t had time to find a sweetheart or have much of a life yet. He was assigned to Naval Combat Demolition Unit 42, Boat Team 5, part of a force of twenty-one “Gap Assault Teams” that included detachments of U.S. Army combat engineers, who were ordered to spearhead the five-mile-long Omaha Beach assault. The job was split at the waterline: sailors would cut fifty-yard-wide gaps in the seaward obstacles, the army engineers would handle the landward barriers. The overall mission was to clear sixteen fifty-foot-wide pathways at each of the U.S. landing zones, Omaha Beach, and Utah Beach, where there were eleven more NCDU teams.
In his brief life as a civilian Reynolds had worked as a commercial fisherman and a welder, and today he was one the volunteer naval demolitioneers who were riding the tip of the spear of the Allied attempt to invade Western Europe and overthrow Adolf Hitler. Ken Reynolds came to England as a regular seaman on Easter 1944 and was one of a group of sailors who were selected to beef up the NCDU forces that came over from the NCDU’s training base at Fort Pierce, Florida. At first, R
eynolds remembered, “I thought it [the acronym NCDU] meant ‘Non-Combat Demolition,’ and my mother was elated because it was non-combat! But, I soon found out that’s not what it meant.”
Reynolds went into training immediately at different sites around the English coast. “The training was focused on how to handle a rubber boat and explosives,” he recalled, “what to do, how to tie it on, how to charge it. There wasn’t too much to it. If you could swim, fine, it was a plus, but it wasn’t mandatory, as long as you weren’t afraid of water.”
In the minutes before approaching Omaha Beach, Reynolds and many other Allied military personnel figured this would be a pretty smooth operation. “Our officers told us the Air Force was going to bomb and clear the beachhead,” he recalled. His superiors said, “They’re going to obliterate everything on the beach. When you land there should be nobody there to bother you. There should be sporadic fire, that’s about all.”
But here they were, being greeted instead by a torrent of German fire from hidden machine-gun nests that “just riddled the devil out of us,” he recalled. Meanwhile they were simultaneously coming under “heavy, heavy, constant fire” from mortars and 88 mm high-velocity antiaircraft artillery, which the Germans were highly effective at using on surface targets.
A Navy after-action report described what Reynolds and his colleagues faced: “The artillery and machine guns were generally sited for enfilading fire along the beaches. In some cases they were completely concealed from a direct view from seaward by concrete walls covered with earth, which extended well beyond the muzzle of the gun. This acted as a blast screen and prevented them from being located by the dust raised near their muzzles, so that when used with flashless, smokeless, powder, and without tracer bullets, as they were in defense of OMAHA Beaches, they were exceedingly difficult to detect.”
As Reynolds quipped, “The Germans had it made.”
“The shells and rockets from our warships were screaming over our heads,” recalled then-nineteen-year-old Tom Koester, another sailor on an incoming landing craft. “You could feel the heat on the back of your neck,” said Koester, “and we had to watch out for rockets that could fall short and explode right on us.”
Expecting to face a lower-grade German coastal defense regiment and assorted East European conscripts in German uniforms, Allied intelligence planners missed the fact that elements of the German 352nd Infantry Division were stationed near the landing areas in greater strength than expected.
Ken Reynolds had no rifle, no sidearm, and no grenades. He wore a green Navy uniform and a steel-pot helmet with “USN” marked on top. “We looked just like the Army,” he recalled to us. “Army boots, no weapons, no toothbrush, and no food, that’s what we hit the beach with.” He added, “We had a wraparound life preserver that was charged with two canisters of CO2 to inflate them. You had to make sure they were under your arms or they would strangle you to death. And we wore a web belt that carried a water can and this knife and a pair of pliers. Other than that, that’s all we had, nothing.”
Some of the NCDU men carried .45 pistols or carbines for self-defense, but Reynolds had neither. His job was strictly to blow things up, hence the stripped-down gear.
At six feet, six inches tall, Reynolds stood out like a tree in the ocean to German machine gunners dug into the cliffs. He crouched down as low as he could in the shallow water as he and five fellow demolitioneers dragged a rubber boat packed with explosives and supplies toward their destination, a vast labyrinth of partially submerged obstacles tipped with thickets of pressure mines, box mines, anti-boat mines and other explosives. Machine-gun bullets were slicing into the little boat, so they grabbed as many explosive satchels as they could wrap around their shoulders, let the boat go, and scampered forward in the surf. Reynolds and many of his colleagues were feeling sick from the cold, choppy ride across the English Channel that morning, and their bodies were stiff and sore from sleeping in the open air on the steel boat decks for the past five days.
The twenty-five-foot tide was rushing in at a rate of a foot every eight to ten minutes, and if the sailors couldn’t open a path through the obstacles and mines before the water covered them up, incoming Allied landing craft and infantrymen would be impaled and the boats sunk before they could touch French soil. Nearly 175 Navy demolition personnel were hitting the water to clear the waterside of Omaha Beach, followed by hundreds of Army engineers who would blow through the obstacles on land, then mark the open lanes with flags.
Even by the usually chaotic standards of combat, everything was falling apart and the intricate invasion plan was in danger of totally collapsing. The pre-assault Allied naval and air bombardments seemed to make little impact. Airborne paratrooper drops hours earlier were badly scattered over the French countryside. Scores of landing craft were being pushed eastward in the unexpectedly strong lateral current, so thousands of incoming infantry were bunching up toward the wrong landing points.
In a nearby scout boat, a horrified Navy lieutenant, junior grade named Phil Bucklew was frantically calling his superiors on a radio, beseeching them not to launch amphibious tanks into the maelstrom. Phil Bucklew was one of the few over-the-beach veterans headed for Omaha Beach that day. A seasoned combat leader in the joint Army-Navy Amphibious Scouts and Raiders beach reconnaissance force, former pro football player Bucklew later went on to command the Navy’s Naval Operations Support Group, Pacific, forerunner of today’s Naval Special Warfare Group One. The Scouts and Raiders were formed in August 1942 at the Amphibious Training Base at Little Creek, near Norfolk, Virginia, and trained in amphibious reconnaissance and commando operations. In that sense, the Scouts and Raiders are symbolic ancestors of the modern U.S. Navy SEALs.
Phil Bucklew himself earned a Navy Cross for helping guide, under intense enemy fire, the Allied landings on Sicily on July 10, 1943, and he would receive another Navy Cross for his actions in support of the D-Day operations. In the months preceding D-Day, Phil Bucklew personally led hazardous reconnaissance missions along the beaches of Normandy, paddling up to the waterline in small boats in the dark of night, taking depth soundings, scooping up sand samples from enemy territory and sneaking back into the darkness. Now, in the opening moments of D-Day, as Bucklew witnessed the heavy seas and murderous fire in the waters off the Omaha Beach landing zone, he quickly realized that the experimental duplex-drive amphibious Sherman tanks that were supposed to accompany the advance wave of American infantry were doomed.
He pleaded with his commanders by radio to call off the tanks, but it was too late. Thirty-two American Sherman tanks spilled into the surf from landing craft into the choppy sea, and their flimsy water-wing flotation collars were quickly shredded by wind, surf, and German fire. They were supposed to lead the Gap Assault Teams onto the beach but twenty-seven tanks floundered or sank in the shallow ocean, taking many of their crewmen with them. Bucklew reached into the water from his craft to save several of the drowning tank men, and stayed in the line of fire all day, helping to guide landing craft.1
The landing zones were a logistical nightmare, according to a later Navy analysis: “Slit trenches were dug for defending riflemen, and tank traps and antitank ditches intervened between beaches and road exits. In addition, there had been installed in the tidal area, between high and low water, several rows of underwater obstacles consisting of hedgehogs, tetrahedrons, Element C [nicknamed Belgian Gates], and pole ramps all interconnected by barbed wire and thickly sown with mines. The obstacles actually encountered were much more numerous than Intelligence Reports had indicated.” As Ken Reynolds later described, “Everything they could think of to make it miserable for us, they stuck on the beach.”
The toughest barriers were the Belgian Gates, which were massive three-ton, ten-foot-tall interlocking solid steel platforms that were designed to be pushed into the surf on wooden ramps to block the beach. The gates were spotted weeks earlier in reconnaissance missions, and for weeks Reynolds and his teams had been practicing on replicas of
the barriers at English training bases.
They discovered that if they detonated charges on the Belgian Gates at the wrong points, they’d just create a jumble of twisted steel and flying shrapnel that would make things worse for the thousands of infantrymen who had to pass over the debris. After many experiments, Allied planners found the trick was to blow sixteen charges at sixteen key points of the structure at the exact same time, which would collapse it flat-down instead of in pieces, so the incoming infantry and vehicles could just pass over them in an open lane onto the beach.
Once through the Gates, there were other dangers, like the Teller mine, a plate-shaped, pressure-triggered German antitank mine. Reynolds got to a steel post and hooked up a charge right next to a Teller mine that was fixed on top. The trick was to blow up the post and the mine at the same time, so American infantrymen wouldn’t walk on the unexploded mines. “To accomplish this,” recalled one Navy officer, “men shinnied up the stakes and stood on each other’s shoulders, all in the face of heavy enemy gunfire.”