Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  By agreeing to the attack on Peleliu, which guarded the eastern approaches to the Philippines, the admirals were taking what seemed to them a detour on the route to Tokyo.

  While the forces engaged in the navy strategy had been moving west and north across the central Pacific, MacArthur’s forces were moving from Australia through the New Hebrides toward the Philippines. With him was a young navy lieutenant named Francis Riley (“Frank”) Kaine.

  Kaine had been recruited early in the war by Kauffman. First he went through Kauffman’s bomb-disposal school in Washington, and then he accompanied him to Fort Pierce as a member of the first class in underwater demolition training. By one of the happenstances of war, Kaine and a small group of swimmers found themselves under MacArthur’s command in Australia rather than with the other UDT men in Hawaii. The soldiers wondered what to make of these sailors, until Kaine told them. He stood up in front of a thousand members of the army’s 32d Division and explained how he and his small group of swimmers could scout out invasion beaches and help them avoid the fate of the marines at Tarawa.

  “I guess we were convincing,” Kaine recalled later, “because from then on, every landing they had, they had some of our units in it.”

  Kaine himself became known as “MacArthur’s frogman.” The preparation for each landing saw a strange scene where MacArthur would gather with his generals and admirals and then they would all listen carefully as Lieutenant Junior Grade Kaine advised them about the condition of the invasion beaches.

  Kaine’s men were divided into six five-man units, and they took turns, each team going on every third mission. Kaine directed thirty-six UDT operations and participated in a third of them himself. The campaigns in which he was involved sound like a roll call of the war in the southwest Pacific: the Admiralty Islands; a triple play at Aitape, Tanahmerah Bay and Hollandia; Biak and Numfoor in the Dutch Schouten Islands; Halmahera; Leyte; Mindoro; Lingayen Gulf; Palawan; and, finally, Sarawak and Brunei Bay in Borneo.

  The two branches of the UDT family came together at Leyte Gulf for the return to the Philippines. Teams Six, Eight and Ten took part in the difficult survey of potential landing beaches on Leyte prior to the landing on 20 October 1944. The teams went in at three o’clock in the afternoon following a typhoon that had not only muddied the water but also prevented the sweeping of mines close to the shore. This meant they had support from only four destroyers standing more than a mile offshore. Team Eight suffered heavily, with six men wounded by enemy fire. One man later died of his wounds.

  The day after the invasion, representatives of the team were sent ashore to witness the famous scene in which MacArthur fulfilled his promise: “I shall return.”

  Although there was much heavy fighting ahead to complete the liberation of the Philippines and to dig out the Japanese remaining further south in Borneo, the attention of the UDT commanders shifted focus in late 1944 toward the battles lying ahead for the islands guarding the approaches to the Japanese homeland. The number of men in training was expanded dramatically, and several of the teams that had borne much of the burden of the island-hopping campaign were called back to pass on their knowledge to the new men.

  Despite the vital role the UDTs played in the amphibious war, their existence and purpose remained shrouded in secrecy, at least from the folks back home. Ernie Pyle, the legendary war correspondent who lost his life on Ie Shima, often argued with Kauffman, trying to get his okay to tell the dramatic story of the Naked Warriors. Kauffman always refused, arguing that the less the Japanese knew about the swimmers, the safer they were. It was not until the war ended that Kauffman collaborated on an article about the UDTs which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Kauffman’s insistence on secrecy began a tradition, even an obsession, that has continued with today’s SEALs.

  On 16 February 1945, Teams Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen arrived off the tiny island of Iwo Jima, which the Japanese had turned into a rocky, almost indestructible fortress. All four of the teams had been trained by the veterans of UDT Seven but only two, Teams Fourteen and Fifteen, had seen action—in the Battle of Lingayen Gulf a short time before. Team Fourteen, made up of veterans of the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, was the first team drawn directly from the fleets. Among them, the men could count participation in thirty-three landing operations.

  As the size and importance of the underwater demolition command grew, it was placed under a senior officer, Capt. B. Hall (“Red”) Hanlon, Commander UDT, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. Kauffman served as his chief staff officer.

  Despite the bloody reputation Iwo Jima earned during the marines’ battle to dislodge the Japanese defenders, the swimmers who surveyed the invasion beaches suffered few casualties and even the UDT officers who guided the first waves of the marine landing teams escaped without serious injury.

  For the UDT men, Iwo seemed almost to serve as on-the-job training for the bigger operation a month and a half later at Okinawa. They had even escaped the pounding by Japanese kamikaze planes that had begun during the Philippine operation to make life so perilous for anyone at sea. Then tragedy struck.

  The men of UDT Fifteen were safely back aboard their destroyer, the USS Blessman, on the night before the Iwo invasion when a Japanese Betty bomber, following the ship’s luminescent wake, dropped two bombs. One fell into the water alongside the ship. The other plunged directly into the mess hall, which was filled with men. Eighteen members of UDT Fifteen were killed, as was a marine observer attached to the team. Twenty-three others were wounded or burned. The blast and fire aboard the Blessman was the worst disaster suffered by the teams in the Pacific war. The losses from that one bomb were second only to those suffered at Omaha Beach.

  The memory of this shattering loss hung over the teams as they went through last-minute training and then embarked for the assault on Okinawa—by far the largest operation in the history of UDT. Involved were Team Seven, reorganized after training many of the new teams; Teams Twelve, Thirteen, and Fourteen, veterans of Iwo Jima; and untested Teams Eleven, Sixteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen. Together they would put nearly a thousand men into the water, both on the real invasion beaches and on those where the commanders wanted the Japanese to expect a landing.

  First at Iwo, and even more at Okinawa, the swimmers faced a new and potentially deadly enemy, cold. In the warm waters further south, cold had not been a problem, and most of the training had been done in relatively warm waters off Hawaii and the island of Ulithi. Perhaps the water at Okinawa did not seem all that cold. It still registered about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, reasonably comfortable to a recreational swimmer. But scientists now know that when the water temperature drops below about seventy-five degrees, it sucks away warmth two hundred times faster than air. A man immersed in water below seventy degrees without protection for a few hours is in danger of death.

  The swimmers who went into the waters off Okinawa long before the days of the wet or dry suit had no effective protection against this new enemy. Their legs doubled up with cramps so painful that they couldn’t tread water. One man wore the top of a pair of white long johns, but all that did was single him out as a target for the Japanese gunners. The UDT men, forced to remain in the water for hours, found themselves drained of warmth and energy. And the first thing to go was their power to grip and to manipulate their fingers. Even holding a slate and noting the contours of the beach or tying a fuze in place were almost impossible.

  Aside from the cold, the biggest challenge at Okinawa was an array of sharpened poles, some with explosives attached, stuck into the reef about forty yards out from the high-water mark. Kauffman sent in two teams—Eleven and Sixteen—to blast the poles. More than 160 men swam toward the beaches, each carrying three to five packs of explosives. Overhead whistled the shells from three battleships and a number of smaller ships. Carrier aircraft hammered the Japanese positions with machine guns and bombs. The men swam underwater from one obstacle to the next, surfacing behind each post long enough for a brea
th of air before diving down to attach a pack of explosives and connect the primacord. It was a long, dangerous mission, placing hundreds of charges on the obstacles. Finally the swimmers backed off and waited as the trigger men set off the blast.

  Half the beach erupted in flame and smoke. But when the smoke cleared, most of the posts remained on the half of the beach for which Team Sixteen was responsible. Members of Team Eleven had noticed members of the other team swimming away from the beach while they were still struggling to place explosives on the posts in their sector. It was not until later that they learned that the members of Team Sixteen, shocked by the death of one of their members, had broken and failed to carry out their mission. It was the most serious failure of a team in the history of navy special warfare.

  “It had been badly done,” Kauffman later recalled. “The next day I really made a group of enemies because I refused to send back the team that had botched the job to fix it. Naturally, they wanted very much to go in, but I didn’t dare take a chance because this was almost our last opportunity. I sent my best team back in and they did a very fine job.”

  Sympathy for the members of Team Sixteen quickly evaporated when the men of Team Eleven were told they had to go back in the next morning—the day before the invasion—to destroy the remaining obstacles. It would be their third straight day under Japanese fire, and this time the Japanese would be prepared for them. The men worked until 2:00 A.M. preparing a thousand charges and checking all their equipment. When everything was in order, most of them sat up the rest of the night, drinking coffee and smoking. A few went to sleep and were excused from responding to general quarters while kamikaze planes made their early-morning attacks.

  The anonymous historian of UDT Eleven reported:

  In this operation over 1,000 charges were carried to the obstacles, all were placed and some 50 or more others were salvaged from the previous day’s work and used. It is estimated over 1,000 obstacles were demolished in this operation. Combined with the previous day’s results, it appeared that UDT 11 had cleared some 1,300 yards of beach of nearly 1,400 obstacles.

  On the day of the invasion, members of UDT Eleven led wave after wave of amtracs, which could swim ashore. But when the landing craft carrying the first wave of tanks reached the reef, the commander insisted he wouldn’t send his tanks into the water until he had specific information on the water depths between him and the beach. Gunner’s Mate First Class S. C. Conrad gave the army officer a withering look, jumped into the surf, and waded ashore, signalling for the tanks to follow him.

  Despite the failure to blow the beach obstacles, five officers of UDT Sixteen received the Silver Star and fifteen men were awarded the Bronze Star following the Okinawa operation. But the team, one of three recruited from the Pacific amphibious command, was sent back to Oceanside, California, and remained there on stateside duty as UDT Eleven and the other teams prepared for the invasion of Japan.

  The plan called for at least thirty teams—some three thousand men—to pave the way for the landings. Kauffman, who had dropped from his normal 175 pounds to a scrawny 126, was deeply worried. He had been given a temporary promotion to captain and responsibility for preparing for the landing on Kyushu, the southernmost of the main Japanese islands. He concluded the teams would be lucky if they lost only two-thirds of their people. Therefore each area had ten teams assigned, with yet three teams to go in first, then be relieved by three more teams, with three more teams prepared to replace the second wave. The last team would remain in reserve.

  The Japanese had used frogmen in the very early days of the war to clear a British minefield at Hong Kong. But despite several false alarms, the UDT men were never confronted by Japanese swimmers. That might well have changed during the invasion. After the war, it was learned that four thousand men had been gathered at the Yokosuka naval base for training as combat swimmers. One of their assignments involved a variation on the kamikaze attacks. The men were trained to remain under the water in diving bells and then to swim up to attack landing craft with ten-kilogram explosives, enough to sink a ship and kill the swimmer.

  Kauffman was home in Washington on two weeks’ leave when the United States bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Within days the war was over, and the plans for the great invasion were laid aside.

  By VJ-day—14 August 1945—one part of the pattern that was to form today’s SEALs was apparent. The UDT man was the Naked Warrior, wearing a jock strap, button-fly cotton trunks, sneakers, and a face mask. Strapped to his leg was a hunting knife. Only in the late stages of the war did he even wear swim fins. He had no breathing apparatus, and his ability to operate underwater was limited by the length of time he could hold his breath, seldom more than two minutes.

  At the same time, other parts of the pattern were beginning to take shape. The scene shifts to an oddball navy operation in the hills of China and to an Office of Strategic Services unit under British command in Burma.

  CHAPTER

  4

  A Different Breed—Commandos from the Sea

  WHILE TODAY’S SEALS CONTINUE TO TREASURE THE IMAGE of World War II’s Naked Warrior, their origins can also be found in two quite different places: in a Philadelphia medical school and behind enemy lines in China.

  More than a year before Pearl Harbor, Christian J. Lambertsen, a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, had developed a remarkably sophisticated self-contained breathing system that would permit swimmers to operate underwater for long periods of time.

  Although the LARU—Lambertsen amphibious respiratory unit—was the result of his studies in human physiology, Lambertsen was not some ivory-tower scientist. With the war already underway in Europe, he quickly understood the military advantages of his system. He could imagine one or two swimmers moving silently and invisibly through the water to sink an enemy battleship. Nothing could be more efficient.

  With the development of this system, the U.S. Navy was in a position to take its place in the front ranks of countries with the ability to send combat swimmers against the enemy. Brimming with enthusiasm, Lambertsen arranged to demonstrate his device for the navy. In those days, the navy’s only divers were in the salvage corps. They wore the familiar bulky suit and hard helmet, tethered to the surface by an air hose, communications lines, and safety rope. Lambertsen was told to make his case to the officers in charge of navy diving and they watched his demonstration with interest. But then they told him politely that the navy had no use for such a device.

  Although the navy failed to recognize the fact, a race to exploit the skills of combat swimmers was already very much underway. Instead of taking its place in the lead, the U.S. Navy simply dropped out of the race.

  The concept of having men swim underwater for military purposes was not, of course, a new one. When their city was under siege by Athens in 414 B.C., the citizens of Syracuse, on the east coast of the island of Sicily, built palisades to impale enemy ships. The Athenians foreshadowed the appearance of the UDTs by having swimmers dive down to cut off the pilings supporting the defense works. Syracuse also used swimmers, sending them out to try to damage the ships threatening their city. Similarly, when Alexander the Great besieged Tyre, swimmers were sent out to cut the anchor ropes of his ships.

  All of these swimmers seem to have done their work without any source of air in addition to their own ability to hold their breath. But there were very early efforts to provide men with air from the surface so they could stay under longer. According to legend, Alexander himself went to the bottom of the sea in some sort of diving bell and remained there for a full day.

  More than eighteen hundred years later, Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for a self-contained underwater breathing device that would permit a swimmer to sneak up on a ship underwater and drill holes in its bottom. But then, horrified by the thought of the death toll from such an attack, he changed his plan so his swimmer would be linked to the surface by an air hose attached to a visible platform tha
t would alert those on a ship to the danger of attack. This self-defeating concept apparently never got beyond the sketch stage.

  In World War II, the Italians were clearly the leaders in the use of combat swimmers. The reason is obvious: Italy could not hope to match the British navy, ship for ship or gun for gun. But by attacking stealthily and attaching mines to ships supposedly safe in harbor, they might be able to change the balance of naval power.

  Using both manned torpedoes and swimmers with underwater breathing devices, they did just that. Men riding torpedoes sank three ships, including a battleship, in the harbor at Alexandria, Egypt. And combat swimmers, working out of a wrecked ship in neutral Spanish waters, made frequent forays against British ships in harbor at Gibraltar.

  Lt. Lionel Crabb, a British officer, was sent to Gibraltar in 1942 to attempt to stop the Italian raids. A twofold defense was devised. At the entrance to the harbor, sailors dropped explosive charges into the water, hoping to kill the Italians or force them to surface. Crabb and a small group of hastily trained swimmers formed the second line of defense, searching the bottoms of ships in the harbor on the chance that the Italians had gotten through. If they found a mine, they had to pry it loose, hoping it had not been booby-trapped.

  Crabb went on to become a legendary frogman, whose exploits were chronicled in a number of articles and books. Then in 1956, he disappeared while apparently attempting to examine the bottom of a Soviet cruiser then on a courtesy visit to Portsmouth, England. Theories of what happened abound. One is that he simply drowned. Another is that he was detected and killed by the Russians. Still another holds that he was captured by the crew of the ship and sent to Moscow. And carrying the conspiracy theory to the extreme, he may have been sent on a secret mission that called for him to be captured and then to penetrate the Soviet combat-swimmer teams.

  In the early days at Gibraltar, the equipment used by the British swimmers was far more primitive than that available to the Italians. They wore swimming trunks and overalls instead of wet suits. And for breathing underwater, they used the almost totally unsuitable Davis submarine escape apparatus, which had been designed to help crew members breathe underwater long enough to escape from a sunken submarine and reach the surface. It was not designed to enable a combat swimmer to remain underwater doing strenuous labor.