by Orr Kelly
The British, who had almost totally neglected research in this field, were desperate to find better equipment for their combat swimmers. By chance, one of Lambertsen’s teachers, a professor of physiology, was a British citizen, and he heard of the Royal Navy’s frantic search for something better. He arranged a meeting with Lambertsen, then serving his residency, the final phase of his training as a doctor. As a resident, Lambertsen had no office of his own, and certainly no place suitable to entertain officials of a foreign government. So he and his visitors took to meeting in the hospital’s maternity waiting room, quietly discussing military secrets while the others in the room waited anxiously for word from the delivery room. Between their visits, Lambertsen often borrowed a sewing machine used to repair caps and gowns from the operating rooms and sewed together prototype breathing devices from canvas.
The British were quick learners, developing their own manned torpedoes, called chariots, ridden by swimmers equipped with breathing devices based on Lambertsen’s invention. Although at first the British lagged behind the Italians, they made remarkable advances during the war. Much of their effort was focused on finding ways to get at the small but formidable German navy, particularly battleships such as the Bismarck and Tirpitz, which the Germans kept in well-protected ports at home or in Norway where they always posed the threat of a sudden raid on Allied shipping.
Those days in the hospital in Philadelphia were frustrating ones for Lambertsen, who held a commission in the army reserve. He was confident that the United States could have been ahead of the British and perhaps even the Italians in this stealthy form of warfare. But the American navy was not even in the game and showed little interest in getting into it. Opportunities to advance beyond breath-holding slipped by. Instructors at the underwater demolition school at Fort Pierce did experiment with an early-model underwater breathing device and found it so inadequate that they put the idea of such systems out of their minds. They also tried swim fins, but they, too, were rejected because the navy men used the wrong stroke and quickly got leg cramps.
Watching the U.S. Navy slip further behind, Lambertsen turned instead to a new organization with which he had come in contact while working with the British. His proposal for the development of a combat swimmer corps was eagerly adopted by the Office of Strategic Services, an innovative, fast-moving outfit that combined intelligence-gathering with guerrilla operations behind enemy lines.
Lambertsen was called to active duty as an army officer and put in charge of equipping and training about one hundred of what the OSS called operational swimmers. Unlike the navy’s UDT men, who worked close to the water’s surface in the daylight with the support of massive naval gunfire and air strikes, Lambertsen trained his swimmers to operate under the water at night by stealth. Their job was to sneak in and sink enemy ships; to gather intelligence reports from agents; to deposit agents from the sea on hostile shores and pick them up again.
First, they needed a way to breathe underwater. Lambertsen’s device fitted into the stealth pattern perfectly. It permitted the men to breathe pure oxygen, and then it filtered the exhaled carbon dioxide to provide a new supply of oxygen. For the combat swimmer, the Lambertsen device had the great advantage of operating without releasing a telltale stream of bubbles.
Training of the OSS swimmers was done at Camp Pendleton and Catalina Island in California, and at Nassau in the Bahamas where they worked with the British. The OSS swimmers were organized into three teams of about thirty men each. With the preparations for the advance toward Japan taking shape, one of the units was quickly dispatched to Maui and became a part of UDT Ten in June 1944. They took with them all their equipment, including the LARU breathing devices, but the officers in charge at Maui, already seasoned veterans of the landings at Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Saipan, were unimpressed. The one thing they did quickly adopt was the use of swim fins, after the OSS men showed them how to use the fins with a relaxed motion from the knee rather than the rigid-legged kick most swimmers are taught.
When Lambertsen learned that his highly trained swimmers had simply been blended in with the UDT surface swimmers, he accepted the news philosophically.
“This was not unintelligent,” he says. “Someone is unlikely to use his stealth weapon when his cruisers are back in shape.”
Lambertsen and his OSS men hoped to put their skills to use in the South Pacific, but there again they were rebuffed, just as Lambertsen had been in his first approach to the navy. The problem was General MacArthur, who refused to permit the OSS, with its unconventional and unorthodox methods, to operate under his command.
The OSS men—who had come originally from the army, marines, and Coast Guard, as well as the navy—were sent on to Southeast Asia and attached to the British Fourteenth Army on the Arakan coast of Burma. Again Lambertsen suffered a period of frustration. Japanese targets were ruled out of bounds, and the team was involved in only one operation, the preliminary reconnaissance of an island before a British landing.
While the Americans remained on the sidelines, a forty-man group of British frogmen, known as the Sea Reconnaissance Unit, and trained, incidentally, in southern California, led the million-man Fourteenth Army in its crossing of the Irrawaddy River in February 1945. Earl Mountbatten of Burma called the Irrawaddy operation “the largest and most difficult river crossing I have ever heard of.”
Instead of using their stealthy techniques against the enemy, the OSS men spent most of their time in training and development work. But Lambertsen drove his men as hard as if they had been slated for immediate combat. In a letter of commendation, Lt. Comdr. Derek A. Lee, a British naval officer who was Lambertsen’s superior, wrote:
He is a keen officer, continually looking for improvements to keep up the efficiency of the men. This concern is often interpreted by officers and men as an attempt to push them beyond their limits and through his keenness he appears at times to have little regard for personal feeling. He is an extremely hard worker, and willing and able to lay his hand to any and all work. He met with my entire satisfaction.
Lambertsen spent only about a year and a half on active duty with the OSS, but in that short period of time he was responsible for a remarkable list of developments in both equipment and tactics for combat swimmers. He is credited with:
1. Improving his underwater swimming unit and devising tactics for its use in combat
2. Inventing a speaking device built into the face mask that permitted two-way voice communication between divers at ranges up to seventy-five yards (For distances up to a half mile, Lambertsen’s men used a tiny cylinder of ammonia gas. When a brief jet of gas was released, it made a hissing noise, like the crackle of radio static. A swimmer could send a coded message by releasing a series of tiny jets of gas.)
3. Developing an underwater compass that enabled a swimmer to find his way over long distances under the water at night
4. Devising a neutral-buoyancy container that permitted a swimmer to tow as much as thirty pounds of explosives or equipment underwater for long distances
“These all occurred in operations, in the field,” Lambertsen says. “Wherever we were, we just went ahead and made these things.”
He also worked with the OSS in the development of the limpet mine, which takes its name from a shellfish that clings to rocks or timbers. The limpet mine comes with a powerful built-in magnet, which holds it fast to the steel hull of a ship until a timer sets off the explosive.
Lambertsen also found time to work with the British to devise tactics for use of their underwater X-craft.
At the same time that Lambertsen and his OSS swimmers were whiling away the final months of the war, Phil Bucklew was back in the States, about to embark on one of the strangest adventures in a venturesome life. About Christmas of 1944, he was called to Washington and briefed on a secret guerrilla operation in which a U.S. Navy officer was running his own little war behind the enemy lines in China.
Bucklew’s new assignment was to join up with
the guerrillas under the direction of Capt. Milton E. Miles. Then he was instructed to make his way to the coast and personally eyeball the beaches on which Allied troops would land if the decision was made to establish a beachhead in China in preparation for the assault on the Japanese home islands. Bucklew had been on the scene for the landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. No one was better qualified to size up the chances for making a successful landing on the coast of China.
The trip to China was an adventure in itself. Posing as a courier, Bucklew flew to Egypt, spent twenty-four hours in Cairo, then flew on to Calcutta. From there, he flew over the Hump across Burma into southern China, where he was introduced to what Draper Kauffman called “this weird but wonderful operation going on behind the Japanese lines in China.”
This operation was the creation of Miles, who was then in his early forties. While at Annapolis, his classmates had given him the nickname “Mary,” for a silent-screen star named Mary Miles Minter. The incongruous nickname stuck, so it was Mary Miles who was called in by the chief of naval operations shortly after the United States entered the war. He was then a commander and looked forward to a wartime command at sea. But he had also lived in China. Instead of the coveted command at sea, he received an unusual verbal order:
You are to go to China and set up some bases as soon as you can. The main idea is to prepare the China coast in any way you can for U.S. Navy landings in three or four years. In the meantime, do whatever you can to help the navy and to heckle the Japanese.
By the time Bucklew arrived, Miles had been in China for two and a half years. He had formed a working alliance with a Chinese warlord and set up a thriving training camp for Chinese guerrillas. Named Happy Valley, the camp was near K’un-ming, far south in China outside the area of Japanese occupation. Bucklew found some eighty American sailors, soldiers and marines assigned to the U.S. Naval Group, China. He also found that Miles had acquired still another name. The Chinese had dubbed him Mei Shen-tung, literally, “Winter Plum Blossom Mister.”
For a visitor from the outside world, used to the rigid discipline of the navy, with its sharp line between officers and enlisted men, Happy Valley must have been a shock. No one wore a uniform or insignia of rank. Saluting was forbidden. The officers and men mixed casually in the mess hall. The Americans worked to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, practicing to walk with a bouncing gait like that of the Chinese coolies, to carry their gear on long poles balanced on their shoulders, to squat rather than sit in chairs, and to eat native food with chopsticks.
From Happy Valley, Miles oversaw a network of naval units and raiding groups scattered widely across central and southern China, many of them operating in areas occupied by the Japanese.
Of particular interest to Bucklew was the intelligence net Miles had established along the Chinese coast, beginning just below Shanghai and extending more than eight hundred miles south to Hong Kong and up the Pearl River to Canton. Equipped with binoculars and small radios, coastal watchers kept track of Japanese shipping moving in and out of Chinese ports and provided frequent weather reports. Because of the general west-to-east movement of major weather systems, these reports provided crucial warning to American commanders in the Pacific of what to expect in a day or two.
Valuable as these “eyes” along the coast were, neither the Americans nor the Chinese observers were experts in amphibious operations. Bucklew, who had not only scouted enemy shores but actually led amphibious forces ashore, was assigned to provide that expertise. From K’un-ming, Bucklew set out on foot with a band of guerrillas led by a tough, aggressive Chinese who wore black coolie pajamas, a derby hat, and a Luger on each hip.
Bucklew dressed in a coolie suit and a big hat, with two grenades and a 45-cal. pistol concealed under his baggy suit. The Chinese almost refused to take him because he was so tall, so obviously not a coolie. This strange-looking apparition later served as the model for the character Big Stoop in the Terry and the Pirates comic strip. Worried about being discovered and painfully afflicted with shin splints, Bucklew still saw the humor in the situation.
“We would be walking along and would pass coolies coming head-on, with their minds a hundred miles away,” Bucklew later recalled. “As we would pass one another, I would be looking back at them from under my big straw hat to see if they had detected me, and they would be looking back at me, saying, ‘What was that?’ because I was so out of proportion in size to them.”
Twice they had narrow escapes from the Japanese. Once, when the Japanese learned an American was in the area, Bucklew’s guides smuggled him from one village to another until the enemy patrol moved on.
The other brush with the Japanese was even closer. As a patrol approached, Bucklew hurriedly burrowed into a small haystack. While he cautiously peered out through the hay, he saw his guides sit down around the stack, weapons at the ready. To Bucklew, it must have seemed obvious to the Japanese that something was hidden in the haystack. And it was obvious to him that, if any shooting started, that’s where most of the bullets would go. After a tense few moments the patrol moved on, and Bucklew began to breathe again.
Finally the little group reached the coast. Bucklew was reminded of Salerno, where the Allied landing force was almost pushed back into the sea.
“I recommended strongly against an amphibious landing for the simple reason that there were no exits,” Bucklew says. “The mountains came up to the shoreline. It was a lot like Salerno in that sense. Within three to five miles of the hoped-for landing beaches was a very rugged, mountainous terrain with no roadways whatsoever. It would have been a case of landing and being bogged down on a limited sand strip.”
To his relief, Bucklew’s recommendation was accepted, and the decision was made to advance directly toward Japan rather than take a position on the Chinese mainland. But Bucklew was given another assignment that he found even more personally threatening.
He was sent down to the coast near the port of Amoy to spy on the Japanese. He was not the first American there; a marine working for Miles had rented a little house, hired a cook, and settled down in a village across the harbor from Amoy. Every day, he spent hours on a point of land where he could see not only the city of Amoy but the port and its entrance. On one occasion, he watched as the Japanese carefully camouflaged a destroyer with trees. In response to his radioed report, three bombers showed up. They hit the airfield, fuel dumps, and a small freighter but couldn’t see the destroyer until the marine radioed directions. Then they hit it, too.
Bucklew’s assignment went well beyond observing and passing information along. He had been ordered to prepare for a daring commando raid on the Japanese base in an attempt to acquire a book containing one of the few Japanese codes the Americans had not already broken. The more Bucklew saw, the less he liked the idea, and he was immensely relieved when the raid was called off.
“I am grateful to this day that we never got that far,” he later recalled. “They had a sixteen-inch gun, and that’s a lot of firepower against sampans. I was very much relieved, I truly was … because I really couldn’t see that operation.”
When the war ended there was a frantic rush for the exits. Everyone wanted to go home, and most were gone within a few months, Bucklew among them. He returned to civilian life and became an assistant to Lou Little, the head football coach at Columbia University in New York.
Lambertsen and his team were on a ship headed toward Japan when the war ended.
“The teams were discharged immediately,” Lambertsen recalls. “That meant all the training of the first operational swimmers, the beginnings of the SEAL teams, was gone. I was the only one left. So I pulled a dirty trick.”
He commandeered a truck and scurried around Washington gathering up equipment and documents. No one seemed to ask what right a captain in the army medical corps had to all this stuff. He signed receipts for everything he got and sped off. Then he delivered it to those he thought would want to know how to operate underwate
r: the chief of army engineers, the salvage section of the navy, the commandant of the Coast Guard. Thus Lambertsen salted away a kind of combat-swimmer time capsule, to be opened when the nation once again felt the need for men with these rare skills.
CHAPTER
5
New Horizons—and War in Korea
WITHIN A FEW MONTHS OF THE END OF THE WAR, THE NAVY’S UDT force had shrunk to a tiny shadow of its wartime strength. Officers with stars in their eyes quickly moved on to the “real navy.” Those who remained in the Underwater Demolition Teams had little or no hope of making commander, to say nothing of admiral.
The result was a lean, mean, highly innovative force led by remarkably independent-minded officers, less concerned than most with fitness reports and promotions. Although they could not foresee the changes that lay ahead, they were setting the stage for the transition, years later, from UDTs to SEALs.
One officer stands out in those early days. Although they were to return later, Frank Kaine—“MacArthur’s frogman”—and Phil Bucklew had both left the navy. But Francis Douglas Fane, known to his friends as “Red,” and later, after his hair had turned nearly white, as “Doug,” remained in the navy and took charge on the East Coast.
Even then, Fane seemed an old-timer to the young sailors. Born in Scotland in 1909, he had gone to sea in the midtwenties as a merchant crewman. By the time World War II started, he had his papers as a ship’s master. Enlisting in the navy a year before the American entry into the war, he was assigned to an ammunition ship. Someone in the navy bureaucracy had a twisted sense of humor. Ammunition ships were named after volcanoes. Fane’s was the Mauna Loa.