by Couch, Dick
The story of one legendary OSS maritime operative offers a good picture of what amazing work they did. His name was Walter L. Mess. He played pro football and got his law degree before blazing a trail through the China-Burma-India Theater of Operation. As an OSS patrol-and-rescue-boat skipper, Walter Mess reported having conducted thirty-six operations in the Bay of Bengal, picked up scores of downed Allied pilots on the Burma coast, and made a series of parachute jumps leading teams of Burmese forces to clear seven landing strips. He recalled ferrying swimmers and spies fifty to seventy miles into enemy territory, quietly slipping through narrow channels from where he could see enemy campfires. “Shooting wasn’t our mission,” he told espionage historian Patrick K. O’Donnell. “Our mission was taxi driver, our mission was not to fight, but we were prepared to do it.” He described it as “a river war like the movie Apocalypse Now.”
ON THE NIGHT OF August 18, 1944, a UDT special mission group that included volunteers from UDT-10 and OSS Maritime Swimmers assigned to the UDT-10 set off in a rubber raft from the submarine Burrfish toward the island of Yap, in the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific. It was the first submarine-borne operation in Naval Special Warfare history. Their mission was to conduct a reconnaissance survey of the beaches for a possible amphibious landing. On the second night of the operation, three men, Howard L. Roeder, John C. MacMahon, and Robert A. Black, became separated from the others, missed their post-midnight rendezvous, and were never seen by Americans again. They were captured and executed by Japanese forces.
The reality of UDT operations in the Pacific was one of constant danger and routine courage, as UDT-10’s Robert Kenworthy described when recalling his first mission off the coast of Angaur Island in September 1944: “I jumped up like on a diving board, curled my body, and dove [from the boat] into the water. This was in broad daylight; we were at least 300 yards from the beach, all the while avoiding getting shot. As we were approaching the beach, we were expecting them to open fire but they were waiting for us to get closer. You are looking at the beach expecting to see a flash. We were perfectly at home in the water, if it was two or three miles out, it wouldn’t make a difference. There were four landing craft. I was with Platoon Number 3. I’m looking out at my 500 yards of beach. The water was mighty cold but crystal clear. But we were used to it. Fifty-four-degree water after several hours becomes very untenable. Your testicles climb up inside, it’s later when they come down that it is not very nice.
“On the left of the section I had to cover a concrete pillbox,” recalled Kenworthy. “Just remembering it makes the hair stand up on my arms. The Japs knew that this was the best beach for a landing and accordingly set up a pillbox. We were about 75 to 125 yards away from it when all hell broke loose. I turned my head and from the right end of the beach I saw three Jap soldiers push palm fronds aside and open fire. We were caught right between the two machine guns.” Several American planes accidentally opened fire on the UDT men. “Bullets were hitting the water all around us,” according to Kenworthy. “Our CO broke radio silence and told the admiral, ‘Get your goddamn cowboys out of there!’ Luckily, they broke off the attack and none of our guys were killed.”
When the demolitioneers returned to clear a path for landing craft through the coral reef with C-2 explosive charges, Kenworthy remembered, “I held my breath over two minutes so we could go down and stay down and set the charge. Boom! We detonated it. Coral shot into the air.” On D-Day, Kenworthy helped guide the landing craft in passages through the remaining coral. He remembered watching the Marines as their craft passed by: “This was a powerful thing as you looked at the clenched faces of these 18- and 20-year-olds and in another 15 or 20 minutes they were dead. It’s a visual thing you carry with you all your life.”
At the amphibious invasion in late 1944 of Leyte, the first big island in the Philippines to be recaptured by the Allies, UDT demolitioneers conducted surveys and laid charges to clear beach obstacles while under fire from Japanese machine-gun and sniper fire. A UDT-10 man later described the scene on October 19, the day before the invasion, “At about 400 yards we dropped off the side of the boat and loaded up with the amount of tetrytol that we anticipated we would need to level the beach [obstructions] so the LSTs could land, open their doors, and tanks could roll out. As we swam forward the water around us was being peppered with machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire. Water was splashing up around me from the rounds. I noticed that the Japanese had fish traps in the water in front of the beach. They turned out to be markers that allowed them to direct their mortar and cannon fire.”
Having witnessed the UDTs in action in the Philippine campaign, the commander of the Amphibious Forces of the Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Daniel Barbey, marveled, “The results achieved by these UDTs are far above anything one might imagine. It seems incredible that men in small boats and men swimming should be able to close a heavily defended, hostile beach in broad daylight to almost the high-water mark without receiving such severe damage as to make their operations a failure.”
On October 20, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur, fulfilling his 1942 promise to the Philippine people that “I shall return,” strode onto a beach on Leyte that had been surveyed by UDT personnel, and the liberation of the Philippines began. The American and Filipino forces made tough but steady progress until the last pockets of organized Japanese resistance on the islands surrendered the following August.
ON THE MORNING OF February 16, 1945, some four hundred Underwater Demolition Team men staged another daring broad-daylight reconnaissance operation, this one on the beaches of the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima, a key strategic stepping-stone on the path to mainland Japan. Their mission was to survey the landing approaches that Marines would storm through two days later, and to retrieve soil samples from the beach to help planners figure out how landing craft would perform.
One of the demolitioneers recalled, “We were rigged in just swim trunks, swim fins, a face mask, knife, several mine detonators, and a lead weight with line for determining depth, but beads of sweat took the place of goose bumps. And instead of having choppy water as we had expected and wished for, we had a sea as calm as a mill pond.” Calm seas meant they were easier to spot by enemy gunners.
The wave of approaching UDT landing craft must have looked like the start of an actual invasion to Japanese forces dug into fortified positions in caves and cliffs on the island, and in response they let loose a terrifying barrage. When the landing craft reached 1,500 yards offshore, the Japanese unleashed a torrent of machine-gun and mortar fire.
As the UDT swimmers launched themselves into the cold water close to the Iwo Jima beach, they were backed up with steady fire from their landing craft and a picket line of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships farther offshore, plus rocket-firing aircraft. Underwater, they could see shrapnel and bullets floating down around them, in the words of one UDT man, “as thick as snowflakes.” Some swimmers crawled onto the beach and scooped up samples of black sand into pouches and slipped back into the water. When they returned to their command ship, the USS Gilmer, they enjoyed some soothing shots of brandy. While drinking aboard ship was against Navy regulations, brandy for “medicinal purposes” was permitted because of the cold water.
The UDT teams reported encouraging news for the upcoming invasion: few mines or obstacles, no coral reefs, deep-enough water for the landing ships. However, Navy analysts misinterpreted the soil samples, which seemed packed hard enough to support vehicles with tires like armored cars and jeeps. In fact, the powdery volcanic sand a few feet inland of the beach was as loose and slippery as ball bearings, and only tracked vehicles could drive over it. This caused a traffic jam when the invasion of Iwo Jima began two days later. The landings at Iwo were initially unopposed but after the Marines crowded onto the landing beaches, the Japanese opened fire. A UDT-14 demolitioneer named Jack Basham recalled the “extremely hairy” experience of combat at Iwo Jima: “I can remember, very vividly our cover ship being sunk before we
got into the water to swim, the mortar fire from the island, shelling falling short from our own gunners. I can also recall those machine gun bullets hitting the water over me and the bullets settling down in front of me, the smoke shells and a lot of other things. Three of us decided to go ashore at Iwo after we had gotten our swimming work done. We wanted to take in some of the land fighting. Of course we had absolutely no business doing it. They were still fighting on the beach. We didn’t have any weapons to defend ourselves with and finally picked up carbines from dead marines on the beach. The Japanese snipers would shoot at us and we would run and jump into shell holes for protection. We worked our way up to the edge of an airstrip and found seventy-five or more marines laying dead and stripped of their uniforms.”
Tragically, on the same day the invasion of Iwo Jima began, February 18, 1945, a 500-pound bomb dropped by a Japanese “Betty” twin-engine bomber fell through the stack of the USS Blessman and detonated in the mess hall, killing forty men, including eighteen sailors from UDT-15.
On the morning of February 23, the UDT men paused from their work to let out a cheer when they spotted the American flag being hoisted atop Mount Suribachi. But the battle was far from over. Altogether it took the American Marines, Army, and Navy forces eighty-two days to wrest Iwo Jima from over 100,000 Japanese troops who were dug into the hills of the island.
AT 3:33 P.M. ON March 29, 1945, Ed Higgins of UDT-11 was swimming in cool water toward the beach of Okinawa, trying to figure out why his body was pounding so severely.
“Behind us every ship in the fleet thundered, blasting the beach and shore line with thousands of tons of hot steel,” Higgins recalled. “Overhead, fighters and dive bombers from the fleet carriers wheeled and dived, with their blazing guns and smoking rockets bombing and strafing every Jap position they could locate or even suspect.” Like NCDU man Ken Reynolds at Omaha Beach the year before, Higgins felt he was in the middle of an epic scene: “It was the most magnificent and awe-inspiring spectacle I ever saw or expect to see or hear.”
Higgins knew he was absorbing the rhythmic slamming of the U.S. Navy guns pasting the shoreline with supporting fire as he and his fellow UDT men got ready to go to work, but this feeling was different. The vibration was so strong that Higgins figured there must be a heavy machine gun somehow following him close by. Then he realized it wasn’t a gun that was creating the jackhammer effect on his body. It was his own teeth. They were vibrating so violently from chattering in the frigid water.
Higgins was taking part in one of the biggest formations of men and ships of the Pacific War: including nearly 1,000 UDT demolitioneers, comprising the largest UDT operation of World War II. They were charged with reconnoitering, surveying, and clearing the landing beaches for D-Day on April 1, when the first waves of nearly 450,000 U.S. troops from four divisions of the U.S. Tenth Army (the 7th, 27th, 77th, and 96th) and two Marine divisions (the 1st and 6th) would take on 100,000 Japanese forces dug into the island. The Americans needed a big base to strike from that was close to the main Japanese islands, and Okinawa fit the bill perfectly. It was just 340 miles south of Kyushu, and would be the essential final piece of the Allies’ long island-hopping campaign.
In the waters off Okinawa, Higgins and his UDT colleagues got to work dropping weighted fishing lines to check the water depth, measuring the surf, checking for mines and other obstacles, and writing their data on waterproof slates. They were fifty to sixty yards offshore and Japanese gunners were opening up with sniper and machine-gun fire. In response, U.S. landing craft fired 3-inch guns and 20 mm and 40 mm artillery toward the shore over the bobbing heads of the UDT men.
UDT member Edwin R. Ashby, a boatswain’s mate, second class, reported, “The ship wasn’t my blanket, the water was my blanket. As soon as I got into the water, things were all right. Everything seemed to calm down and I could concentrate much better on what I was supposed to do. The first thing you would notice, especially off of Okinawa, was that the water was more than a little cool. That shock brought you to your senses pretty quick. Then you and your swim partner would take a look and make sure everyone was in line before striking out for the beach. Moving on to the beach, we would take our soundings and make notes on our pads. . . . As soon as the stuff started flying, the whole situation started to seem a little like a dream. It was happening all around you, but it didn’t seem real. You would psych yourself up and even the sound of the shells and rifle fire seemed to get less. They were kind of muffled, though you could still hear everything. But you just kept going, did your job, and turned back out to sea, for pickup.”
The waters off Okinawa were so cold that the UDTs worked at an increasingly frantic speed as they felt their limbs go limp from numbness and severe cramps. They finally made it back to their ships for a warm brandy, a hot shower, and intensive debriefings. They came back with no casualties and a wealth of detailed information. The UDT’s survey had revealed a giant underwater field of pointed Japanese pole obstacles, as many as three thousand of them, laced with barbed wire and some tipped with mines, blocking the planned landing paths to the beach. Based on the data, American planners decided the UDT men would return the next day to stage a demolition raid to remove them.
At 9:30 A.M. on March 30, UDTs 11 and 16 were sent in to blow up the pole obstacles on Beaches Red 3 and Blue 1 and 2. “As we went in,” wrote Edward Higgins, “the fire from the fleet increased until it reached a crescendo that threatened to split the very air and water around us. Straight ahead we went until the boats were within 400 yards of the obstacles in the surf. Then the demolition packs went over the side and after them the swimmers.” Many of the UDT swimmers were towing five packs of 25-pound explosive charges. The demolitioneers came to fifty yards off the beach, within close range of the Japanese pillboxes. Splashes of automatic weapons fire closed in on Higgins as he zigzagged in the surf.
Higgins, who was wearing highly visible long john underwear in a vain attempt to fight the cold, swam toward one of his buddies, who yelled furiously at him, “You son of a bitch, get away from here with that goddamn white sweatshirt! Do you want to get us all killed?”
Higgins recalled that the carrier-borne American fighter planes and torpedo bombers “added their own individual tones to the murderous symphony, loosing their bombs, rockets and machine guns barely above the heads of the entrenched enemy . . . To avoid fire from the shore, all crossing from post to post was done underwater. Swimmers came up to breathe only when they were safely behind a post. The pattern had been drilled into us by many months of rehearsal: dive to the bottom of the post, fix the charge with the soft metal wire twisted around the post, surface behind the post with the prima-cord lead, tie the lead into the trunk line, dive under-water to the next post and repeat, repeat until all the posts were tied and all charges connected to the trunk line.”
Just minutes after the teams began placing the charges, something mysterious happened. The men of UDT-16 abruptly pulled away from the scene. Something, thought the nearby UDT-11’s Higgins, must have gone radically wrong, but he couldn’t imagine what it was.
When the explosives were detonated at 10:43 A.M., spotters concluded that all the targets in UDT-11’s area were cleared, but few in UDT-16’s zone were. Late that afternoon, the UDT-11 men were stunned to learn they were going back in at 9:00 A.M. the next day to finish UDT-16’s aborted mission. “Our sympathy for UDT 16 hit a zero reading at that point,” Higgins later wrote. “Going in on the same beaches for the third straight day was asking for it, and we knew it.”
The exact sequence of events that befell UDT-16 and triggered the failure of their first mission will probably never be known, but at least some of the men may have withdrawn too early when Japanese snipers opened fire on them. Petty Officer First Class John A. Devine of UDT-16 believed that the failure of the team’s explosives was the product of wave action that severed the connecting wires. He later reported that “approximately fifteen men and a few officers from our team volunteered to swim
back out in the afternoon, to wipe the remaining obstacles out. I was one of the men that swam back in, after the tide had receded and without any gunfire support. With the Japanese firing at us, we crawled on our bellies across the coral to get to the obstacles. We did blow some of them out, but again left some still standing—for whatever reason, only God knows.”
Whatever the truth was, the men of UDT-11 had to finish the job on March 31, a day prior to D-Day. They spent three hours in the water, rigging up 2.5-pound charges to each pointed stake and connecting them with primacord. “As on the previous day, the barrage from the ships and carrier planes was tremendous,” recalled Edward Higgins. “Around me heads were bobbing and ducking in the water as the men dived and surfaced in evasive action against the Jap gunners firing from the trees and cliffs on the shore.”
In the landing craft right behind them, officers of UDT-16 acted as spotters and guides for the UDT-11 men. Higgins noted, “We had to admit that the Team 16 officers, having fouled out on their own time at bat, were doing all in their power to help us finish the job.”
On board a vessel approaching Okinawa on the morning of the invasion, Higgins spoke with a group of Marines destined for the battle. “They considered all of us as crazy as they had ever seen,” he reported. “They thought the idea of swimming in to the beaches almost naked was insane and they wouldn’t have our jobs for anything.” The Japanese contested the American beach reconnaissance and obstacle clearance at Okinawa, and again struck hard once the Americans had moved inland.