by Orr Kelly
The combat losses at Paitilla Airfield—four dead and nine wounded—made that brief action the deadliest for the SEALs in the nearly thirty years since the Sea, Air, Land teams were formed. In a decade of fighting in Vietnam, the worst single day of combat was 7 April 1967, when three men were killed in an enemy ambush.
Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama, involved the largest, most varied use of SEALs since the Vietnam War. Days before the attack began, members of one SEAL team began stalking Noriega. During the assault, members of SEAL Team Two carried out a classic operation in which they swam in under enemy fire to disable a Panamanian gunboat with small mines.
The operation in Panama was the first carried out by SEALs since they had come under the control of the new, army-dominated Special Operations Command. It was also the first test of the lessons learned seven years earlier when the SEALs lost four men dead and a number more wounded in the U.S. invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada.
The debacle at Paitilla set off a bitter controversy within the SEAL community. Sickened by the loss of life, veterans of combat in the jungles of Vietnam angrily criticized the leadership and the planning for the assault on the airfield. They were particularly disturbed by the fact that SEALs, accustomed to working in units of no more than sixteen men, and often in clusters of two or three, were sent into combat in an assault involving more than three platoons. To them, the seizure of the airfield seemed more suitable for an army Ranger battalion than for a group of SEALs.
In a scathing letter sent up through the chain of command, one senior officer put it this way: “Our leaders sent to omany troops … when it was absolutely unnecessary in order to achieve our objective. These leaders must be held accountable and not allowed to lead our fine young SEALs into such unwarranted and costly scenarios again.…”
The criticism stopped well short, however, of maligning the actions and the heroism of the enlisted men and junior officers on the ground at the airfield. Once the shooting started, they conducted themselves superbly. As one of them said, “If we had been on the other side, no one would have survived.”
For the SEALs, Panama—and Paitilla in particular—was a moment of truth, forcing them to think more intensely than ever before about the role they should prepare to play in the future in the nation’s defense.
Should they continue to plan and train to operate in small, elite units, as they had in Vietnam? Or was Paitilla the portent of a future in which SEALs would regularly operate in larger units, becoming maritime commandos of as many as 150 men?
Should they plan to operate within a few miles, or even yards, of the water, relying on their swimming ability and their tiny SEAL delivery vehicles? Or should they be prepared to fly or parachute deep in enemy-held territory, far from the seas?
Should they operate primarily in support of the fleet? Or should they be prepared to take on a wide variety of other assignments laid on by the “green machine,” the army commanders of the Special Operations Command?
Truly, Paitilla forced the SEALs to confront their own future, to ask themselves: What makes us special? What is our true role?
In essence, they had to ask themselves: Who are we?
This was not an easy question to answer. But it was not an unfamiliar question. Ever since the early days of World War II, the SEALs and their predecessors, the fabled frogmen, have been struggling to define themselves, to answer that question: Who are we?
CHAPTER
2
Bloody Waters—Tarawa and Normandy
WHEN MARINES OF THE 2D MARINE DIVISION CLAMBERED INTO their amphibious tractors on the morning of 20 November 1943, they were already in deep trouble.
The big battlewagons of the navy’s Fifth Fleet had hammered Betio, the larger of the two islands in the Tarawa atoll, until little more than the stubs of palm trees was visible above the flat surface. Still, the Japanese artillery answered back so fiercely that the transport ships carrying the marines were forced to back off from the landing beaches.
For the first wave, this meant an agonizingly long seven-mile voyage, wallowing at four knots in their amtracs—box-shaped personnel carriers with tracks like a tractor’s, sealed against the seas and equipped with a propeller so they could “swim” ashore.
As the amtracs waddled up onto the beach they would speed up to fifteen miles an hour, according to the plan, and cut through the Japanese beach defenses. Then, coming quickly behind them would be thousands more marines to sweep down the little island—only two miles long and less than half a mile across at the widest.
The first wave met unexpectedly furious resistance at the shoreline despite a bombardment that the navy had promised would obliterate the defenses. That might not have been so bad except for what happened next.
As the landing ships carrying tanks and the follow-on wave of marines reached the coral reef surrounding the island, they ran aground. Instead of delivering the marines ashore with barely a drop of water on their boots, they were forced to discharge men and machines to wade ashore as best they could.
Tanks lurched off the coral shelf and groped toward shore. Many of them dropped into holes in the ocean floor and sank, drowning their crews. Many of the heavily laden marines met the same fate. Others were cut down by the murderous fire from the shore.
At one point that morning, a candid report was radioed back to Pearl Harbor: “Situation in doubt.”
On that November morning, the United States had been at war with Japan for a few days short of two years. But the battle of Tarawa was also an important beginning. It was the first step in the navy’s plan to hop from island to island northwest across the Pacific toward the Japanese home islands. Each island captured would provide a base from which land-based aircraft could reach out and pave the way for the next hop. A failure at Tarawa would not only deny the United States the use of a crucial airfield but also cast in doubt the whole strategy of island-hopping on to the next little Tarawa-like atoll … and the next … and the next.
Eventually, after three days of brutal combat, the marines prevailed. Of the nearly 5,000 in the Japanese garrison, only 1 officer, 16 enlisted men and 129 Korean laborers were captured alive. But the marines had lost 1,027 dead and another 2,292 wounded out of the invading force of 16,800 men. Adm. Chester Nimitz, the overall commander, flew in to find bulldozers scraping out mass graves for the thousands of dead. He likened the scene to Ypres, one of the worst battles during the bloody trench warfare of World War I.
What had gone wrong?
Before the battle, planes swept over the invasion beaches taking split-image photographs. Naval officers carefully studied the shore through powerful telescopes. A submarine circled the islands, taking soundings and photographing fortifications. Former residents of the island, fishermen, and veteran merchant seamen were sought out and interviewed. At high tide, they agreed, there should be four to five feet of water over the coral reef, plenty of room for the landing ships to carry their cargoes of men and equipment ashore.
But there was one catch: at neap tide—the time of the month when the difference between between high and low tide is the least—the winds sometimes caused the level of the water to rise and fall unpredictably, often several times within a few hours. November 20 was the time of the neap tide, and the water level fell just as the second wave of marines reached the coral reef.
But what if men had actually gone in in advance of the first wave and looked at that coral barrier, measuring the depth of the water and scouting for gaps where the landing craft could skim across into the lagoon? What if they had gone in with explosives and actually cut a hole through the coral so there would be no doubt about the ability of the second wave to reach the shore intact?
Almost immediately after the battle, Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner, the amphibious fleet commander, sent out an urgent order for the creation of special teams of men trained to scout out enemy beaches, remove natural and man-made obstacles, and guide the invading forces ashore. With a who
le series of island landings still to be accomplished, the need for such forces was of the highest priority.
In SEAL legend, the battle of Tarawa is counted as the date for the birth of their predecessors, the Underwater Demolition Teams.
Actually, training of such units had begun before Tarawa and a few of them had actually seen combat in the early days of World War II. To military planners, it should have been apparent at the very beginning of U.S. involvement in the war that the fighting would involve many amphibious landings and that specialized units would be needed to help get the marines and soldiers ashore.
By the time the United States entered the war, the Germans controlled almost all the European continent, from the northern tip of Norway to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to deep in the Soviet Union. In North Africa, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps threatened the tenuous British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal.
In the Pacific, the Japanese controlled large sections of China and had swept south to capture the Philippines, Indochina, Singapore, and the islands north of Australia.
Nowhere except in North Africa did the U.S. and its allies have even a tiny foothold. It was obvious that, if they were to come to grips with the Axis powers, they would have to land troops across many beaches against fierce opposition.
Except for a handful of marines, few in the U.S. military had much experience in amphibious operations. What they did know was not encouraging.
They were all disturbed by the memory of one of the worst disasters in recent military history: the Allies’ attempt, early in World War I, to gain control of the Dardanelles, the channel which marks the boundary between Europe and Asia. Control of the waterway would permit shipping to reach the Black Sea ports of Russia, allied with Britain and France against Germany, and cut Germany off from its ally, Turkey.
The plan called for a series of coordinated amphibious landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which forms the European side of the channel, by forces gathered from throughout the British Empire. French forces were assigned to land on the Asian side of the channel. Advancing up both sides of the Dardanelles, the Allied forces would knock out the forts whose guns controlled shipping through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and on through the Bosporus into the Black Sea.
In the predawn darkness of 25 April 1915, some four thousand Australian and New Zealand troops, jammed together in small boats, were towed into position on the northwestern side of the peninsula. They then rowed themselves ashore. What happened to them is every amphibious planner’s nightmare. The boats came ashore well to the north of where they should have been. One unit was confronted with a steep hillside, but the men succeeded in fighting their way to the top. Another unit was even less fortunate. It landed at the base of a line of almost sheer cliffs and was trapped on the beach. A third unit ran into such heavy machine-gun fire that it could not even get ashore.
During the day, thousands more troops landed on the narrow strip of sand at Anzac Cove and tried to fight their way inland. They quickly outnumbered the defending Turkish force, but the confusion resulting from landing in the wrong place, with no open routes away from the beach, left the Anzac forces at a serious disadvantage. By the end of the day there were twenty thousand men ashore, huddled in holes dug in the sand or on the sheer sides of cliffs and fighting for their lives.
For the next seven months, the Australians and New Zealanders, the British at the tip of the peninsula and the French on the Asian coast, fought bitterly to take the forts overlooking the Dardanelles. Eventually, there were ninety-five thousand men ashore and the call went out for another ninety-five thousand. Thousands were killed and wounded. All of the men suffered horribly from disease, clouds of large green flies, a slimy blanket of maggots at the bottom of their trenches, heat, shortage of water and food, and lack of medical care.
Finally, the politicians called it quits. The only real triumph of the entire operation was the surreptitious withdrawal of the landing force while in contact with the enemy. Rifles were rigged to fire sporadically. Explosive charges simulated artillery blasts. Quietly, the men rowed out to sea. The Turks were astounded to find that the beaches, littered with military equipment, held no enemy soldiers. They had all slipped silently away in the night.
The price the allies had paid for this ill-advised adventure in amphibious warfare was appalling: 265,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead. Turkish casualties probably totalled some 300,000, of which about a third were deaths.
The battle of Gallipoli was not an encouraging precedent for those planning multiple amphibious operations. But it was a perfect lesson in pitfalls to be avoided.
First, it is absolutely essential to learn as much as possible about the physical characteristics of the beach—to make a hydrographic survey. What are the tides? How steep is the beach? How firm is the sand? Will landing craft run into submerged rocks or coral reefs?
Then there is the question of the enemy’s defenses. Where are his guns? How many troops does he have, and where are they? How far away in distance and time are his reserves? Has he placed obstacles in the water or on the beach that will have to be cleared? Are there mines in the beach area?
Once the landing area is chosen, the assault force must be directed to the right place at the right time. In a well-planned attack, every soldier or marine knows where he is supposed to go and what he is supposed to do. One unit takes out this pillbox, another assaults a line of foxholes. Still others move in with explosives to silence the enemy’s guns. Someone has to lead the way, guiding the landing craft to their assigned targets.
And once the troops are ashore, where are they going to go? Are there cliffs along the shore, as there were at Gallipoli? Are there roads leading inland? Will the troops have to fight their way up steep, narrow, easily defended passes as they leave the beach, again as at Gallipoli?
A few of these questions can be answered by looking at maps or aerial photos or by talking to those familiar with the area. But answers to many of these critical questions can be obtained only by sending men in to look for themselves. They may have to go back to remove obstacles and return once again to lead the landing craft ashore.
One of the first Americans to become involved in the effort to solve the problem of preparing for an amphibious operation did so by happenstance. The American involvement in World War II was only a few weeks old when Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion, signed up as a navy recruiter. One of his first recruits as a navy physical instructor was Phil H. Bucklew, a tall, rugged, former college and professional football player. Although he could not have foreseen it then, Bucklew’s decision to join the navy was the beginning of a career that was to see him on active duty in three American wars and give him a crucial role in the development of naval special warfare.
It was not long before Bucklew tired of leading reluctant sailors in calisthenics. When he heard of plans to set up a team of what were then referred to as amphibious commandos, he quickly volunteered. In May 1942, he became one of the first ten of the Scouts and Raiders.
The navy considers the Scouts and Raiders to be the direct—and earliest—forerunners of today’s SEALs. But despite the original intention, the Scouts and Raiders did not become broad-based commandos like the SEALs. In most of their operations, they were limited to direct support of the amphibious force, guiding marine and army units ashore. Later a few of them served with guerrilla units behind enemy lines in China, and many were blended in with the Underwater Demolition Teams involved in the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific. Bucklew himself remains a somewhat controversial figure because, although he later commanded SEAL and other naval special operations forces in the Pacific, his career was an unorthodox one.
Bucklew had barely settled in as one of the early Scouts and Raiders when he heard two rumors. One was that preparations were under way for a landing, later in 1942, of American troops in North Africa. The other rumor was that he and his colleagues in the first class of Scouts and Raiders we
re destined to be assigned as instructors rather than going overseas to practice their new trade. He managed to convince his superiors that, if he was to be an instructor, he had better go to North Africa to see what a real-life landing was like.
Altogether, the Americans put some one hundred thousand troops ashore in Operation Torch in November 1942. While one landing force approached through the Mediterranean and struck at the central North African coast near Algiers, another moved through the Atlantic toward the coast of what was then known as French Morocco. There, forces loyal to the French government set up in Vichy after the German conquest of France fought to defend their African colony. It was here that sailors who had been hurriedly trained for the task attempted to pave the way for the first American invading force of the war.
While soldiers on the troop transports prepared to land, seventeen sailors boarded a small, wooden-hulled boat and headed up the Wadi Sebou, a stream that coursed through Port Lyautey (now Kenitra, Morocco). Their task was to cut the cables anchoring a boom and antishipping net stretched across the river directly under the machine guns and cannons in a fort overlooking the river. With the way cleared, American warships would be able to fight their way up the river and protect soldiers moving in to seize the city’s military airfield.
Things began to go wrong even before the small Higgins boat entered the harbor. A sudden rain squall cut what little visibility the sailors had in the dark night. And then a ground swell picked the boat up and sent it careening up the river, almost out of control. A red flare arced into the sky, and searchlights from the fort quickly made the small boat a target for the fort’s 75mm guns. With the chance for a surprise approach to cut the cable gone, the Americans turned and headed for the sea, only to be battered by the waves as they left the river entrance.
The next night, the cable-cutting crew loaded their small boat with explosives and set out toward the Wadi Sebou once more. This time, they slipped into the river without detection and made their way to their target, a one-and-a-half-inch cable, supported by a chain of small boats, holding the net across the river. Moving stealthily, members of the demolition team escaped detection and clamped explosives to the cable, neatly shearing it. The small boats, dragging their anchors, drifted off to the side of the river, taking the net with them. But a smaller cable stretched above the net apparently served as an alarm. As soon as it was cut, machine guns from the fort above sought out the American craft.