by Orr Kelly
On one occasion, in the Pacific, the ammo ship was alongside the battleship USS Pennsylvania. Cans containing bags of powder were being transferred to the battleship and then rolled across the deck to a hatchway. Suddenly, friction caused a spark within one of the cans, and it began to burn. The sailor rolling it jumped overboard, and the other crewmen ran. Fane turned a fire hose on the can and washed it over the side, but it hung up on a protrusion on the side of the ship. While the other sailors stood dumbstruck, Fane jumped down and kicked the smoldering can into the sea.
About that time, Fane decided that he had had enough of life aboard an ammo ship—not because of the danger but because he sought the experience of combat. He decided to sign up as a member of the UDT although, because of the secrecy surrounding the program, he knew little about what they actually did except that it involved especially hazardous duty and the use of explosives.
One thing he did know is that it involved swimming, and that posed a problem. Not only did he not know how to swim, but while fascinated by the sea, he feared its forces. Fane theorized that his fear of the water stemmed from something that had happened two months before he was born. His father went for a swim off a rocky shore in England and was lost at sea. Perhaps his mother’s distress transferred itself to her infant while he was still in the womb.
While on leave in Chicago, Fane prevailed on a Red Cross instructor to give him a crash course in swimming, and within a couple of weeks, he had learned to propel himself through the water well enough to qualify for UDT training at Fort Pierce. When the war ended, he had just been assigned as commanding officer of UDT Thirteen as it prepared for the invasion of Japan.
By that time, Fane, using an unorthodox sideways stroke, had conquered his fear of the water and become a strong swimmer. He had learned to work his way through crashing breakers by diving under the big waves and letting the undertow carry him out beyond the breaker line. He had even become a bit of a show-off, running into the water on a public beach and swimming far out to sea as a frantic lifeguard whistled for him to return.
It seemed obvious to Fane that it was a great advantage to a UDT swimmer to be able to remain underwater as long as possible. He began to experiment with breath-holding and found that, by taking a series of deep breaths—by hyperventilating—he could load his tissues with oxygen, reduce carbon dioxide retention, and substantially increase the time he could remain underwater.
Soon he had all his men trained to remain underwater for four or five minutes. One of his men became so skillful at holding his breath that he could swim three lengths of a swimming pool without surfacing for air. Fane himself could hold his breath long enough to dive down a hundred feet and swim under a submerged submarine from one side to the other, a particularly dangerous trick because the current can suck a swimmer up and hold him against the vessel’s bottom. Fane believes that years later, when he suffered a heart attack, he survived because he automatically sucked in oxygen in the moments before he lost consciousness.
Learning to hold one’s breath and swim underwater for five minutes or so was an impressive feat of physical stamina but, militarily, it still gave the swimmer only a short time underwater before he had to surface for air. Surely there had to be a better way.
At this point, Fane heard of Lambertsen, who had returned to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School but retained his wartime interest in underwater breathing. Fane found Lambertsen working with the army, teaching the soldiers how to swim under a river’s surface to mine bridges and small boats and to infiltrate behind enemy lines. Fane arranged for Lambertsen to come to Little Creek, Virginia, to work with him on the development of devices that would permit swimmers to work underwater for long periods of time and still move about freely, unlike the hard-hat diver with his permanent connection to the surface.
Lambertsen’s LARU—Lambertsen amphibious respiratory unit—was basically the same device he had invented before the war and that was used by the OSS combat swimmers. It consisted of a small bottle of oxygen, a container of soda lime, and a rebreathing bag. At the beginning of a dive, the swimmer released a small amount of oxygen into the rebreathing bag. As he breathed, the air he exhaled was channeled through the soda lime, which filtered the carbon out of the carbon dioxide and returned purified oxygen to the rebreathing bag. The system was truly self-contained, and it gave off neither bubbles nor sound. But it did have serious limits. If water got into the soda-lime canister, a choking “caustic cocktail” could bubble up into the diver’s face mask. If the lines got clogged, the diver suddenly found himself without oxygen and in danger of death. If, on the other hand, he ventured too deep and forced too much oxygen into his system, he might be suddenly and unpredictably thrown into a violent convulsion.
Men cannot live for long without oxygen, but too much oxygen can also be lethal. When too much oxygen is forced into a person’s body, it destroys red calls, attacks the neurosensory tissues of the eyes, and eats away at the tissues of the nervous system. If the person is not treated immediately, oxygen poisoning can result in permanent damage or death.
If combat swimmers were to use the LARU routinely in their work, someone would have to calculate its limits: How deep could a diver go and how long could he stay without succumbing to oxygen toxicity? Fane and Lambertsen agreed there was only one way to find out: send divers down into a tank with windows in the sides and see what happened when the men stayed at various depths for varying periods of time.
Fane volunteered. Donning the LARU, he dove down to the bottom of the tank and swam placidly around, totally unconnected to the surface. Suddenly the observers were shocked to see him go into violent convulsions, his face distorted horribly, his arms and legs and body jerking uncontrollably. His pulse raced at more than 140 beats a minute. Then he relaxed into unconsciousness. Divers quickly brought him to the surface. The treatment was simple: he was allowed to breathe air until he regained consciousness, a process that took half an hour or less.
Fane survived without lasting ill effects. And surprisingly, he described the whole experience as rather pleasant, with no consciousness of the convulsions that had so alarmed those observing the experiment.
Gradually Fane and Lambertsen, with the help of other volunteers, worked out a set of rules. They concluded that, breathing pure oxygen, a swimmer could work at a depth of 25 feet for seventy-five minutes. But if he went down to 40 feet, he could only work for ten minutes. This means a diver on oxygen must constantly monitor the time he remains at various depths.
Even after safe limits had been worked out, another puzzler remained: Did those limits apply to all divers, or were there differences among individuals that might cause a person to go into convulsions even though all the rules were followed? The navy has worked out an elaborate procedure in which those who want to become combat divers are tested in the same recompression chamber that is used to treat those suffering from the bends. The air pressure in the chamber can be increased to simulate breathing deep under the water. In the test, the divers are taken to a pressure equivalent to that at 60 feet, where they breathe oxygen for thirty minutes. Then they are taken down to 112 feet for five minutes before returning to the surface. In this test the diver is at rest, so he can breathe oxygen longer at a greater depth than if he were working.
The navy uses an acronym for the symptoms of oxygen poisoning: VENTID. It stands for Vision (blurred or tunnel); Ears (ringing); Nausea; Twitching (usually facial muscles); Irritability; and Dizziness. If the person being tested shows any of these symptoms, he is moved into another section of the chamber where he breathes air until he recovers.
The only trouble with this test, which is required of everyone who wants to become a SEAL, is that Lambertsen and the navy’s own doctors have concluded that it is totally unreliable. A trainee who fails the test might well have performed superbly as a SEAL. Someone who passes the test might suddenly go into convulsions during a dive. Illogically, the navy washes out a trainee who fails the test, but if
a man becomes a SEAL and later succumbs to oxygen toxicity, he will be allowed to remain a SEAL.
Lambertsen himself had a chilling brush with death from oxygen poisoning when he broke two fundamental rules. He went swimming alone, without a swim buddy. And he carelessly drifted far deeper than he should have. Fortunately he had thought through what to do if he got into trouble on such a dive.
“As the process of muscle-jerking began,” he said, “I hit the oxygen valve. That filled the bag, and that carried me to the surface unconscious.”
Those years immediately after World War II were a period of rapid technological development in underwater breathing; but suddenly, much of the progress in military systems stopped. This is how Lambertsen recalls what happened:
Things began to go bad when the French came over and commercialized the Aqua-lung—what people now think of as SCUBA. There are many SCUBAs. It is a term I devised: self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Most people think it is all air—take a breath and blow it away. That has very little military usefulness. And yet it was so easy that Fane got so happy with the ease of doing things that way that he just more or less rolled over and had his people use it. They became a bunch of skin diver types. That’s when that long, nearly fifteen-year period of almost stagnation began. And it was largely because they went from a rapidly advancing technical system to where they were satisfied to train large numbers of people with open-circuit apparatus.
People were too comfortable. The system worked as a breathing apparatus but it was not effective operationally. It made bubbles. It was too heavy. Certainly from the standpoint of detection, surface detection, sonar and radar detection, those big tanks and all the rest of that just were not sensible.
The Aqua-lung was made more attractive to the frogmen by the fact that they often had to make do with LARU devices left over from World War II. The rubber face masks were cracked and the webbing was rotted. Too often, water leaked into a soda-lime canister, creating a caustic cocktail. Undeservedly, the term LARU became almost a dirty word, and the old devices were finally consigned to a bonfire.
The ease of operation of the Aqua-lung was its greatest appeal. Preparing for a mission was a matter of a few minutes: check the air volume and controls, strap on the tanks, and go. Since the tanks were filled with air, there was no threat of a caustic cocktail and no worry about convulsions from oxygen toxicity if a diver went too deep or stayed too long. By contrast, even the oxygen and mixed-gas breathing devices in use today require at least half an hour of tinkering and adjustment, and the swimmer must still keep careful track of his depth and the time of his excursions to lower levels. But a swimmer using an Aqua-lung on a combat mission would, in effect, write his own death warrant in a stream of bubbles.
About the time the French air-tank system came into use, Fane moved to the West Coast and then to the command of a unit based in Japan. Kaine, returning to active duty, became deputy to Comdr. David G. Saunders and later succeeded him as commander of Underwater Demolition Unit Two on the East Coast. Fane took with him his enthusiasm for the air-tank system, and the California swimmers used them almost exclusively. Kaine, on the other hand, liked the bubble-free oxygen system, especially for sneaking up and attaching mines to ships. But money was in short supply, and the rapid development that Fane and Lambertsen had fostered in the period immediately after the war petered out.
It was only much later, after the creation of the SEALs, that attention was again directed toward the development of advanced versions of the bubble-free underwater breathing device Lambertsen had invented so many years earlier. On most operations, today’s SEALs use a similar device known as the Mark XV. To Lambertsen, it is in some ways inferior to the devices his OSS men used in World War II. One problem is that it has an intricate electronic monitoring system to feed in additional oxygen as the diver uses it up. Even the most experienced divers find themselves devoting at least half an hour to adjusting and testing the system before they are ready to dive.
Lambertsen also worries that most of the devices used by the SEALs require the swimmer to grip a mouthpiece in his teeth. This makes it impossible for him to talk. The OSS divers, on the other hand, used a full face mask that left the mouth free to communicate. While today’s SEALs, taught to swim silently with their mouths immobilized by a breathing device, say they don’t really need to communicate with each other except by taps on the shoulder and hand signals, Lambertsen insists there are many occasions when combat swimmers would be better off if they could talk to each other, and that they could do so without detection.
The difference between the East and West coasts over the matter of underwater breathing devices reflected the extent to which the UDT units on the two coasts were free to—and actually did—go their own ways. Although they have grown somewhat closer together in recent years, differences between the East- and West-Coast SEAL teams persist to this day. The differences involve preferences in equipment, style of operating, relationships with frogmen in other nations, and even the way they socialize. The East Coasters, in the resort and farming region of coastal Virginia, tend to party together. The West Coasters, a few minutes from the freeways connecting the vast urban area of southern California, are more apt to take off by themselves to the hot spots of nearby San Diego and Tijuana or up the coast a hundred miles to Los Angeles.
While work on the underwater breathing devices lagged, a good deal of innovation was under way in other areas. It all tended to expand the traditional role of the UDTs, moving toward the creation of the SEALs.
As early as 1949, Fane brought in an army warrant officer, a combat infantryman, to drill his sailors in infiltration and the use of weapons. And he began thinking of ways in which the UDT men could not only survey and clear beaches for the amphibious force, but actually carry out commando raids ashore. But as Fane conceived of these operations, they would be confined within narrow, very carefully defined boundaries.
The key to the success of such operations, Fane realized, was secrecy and stealth. He carried out pioneering experiments with both helicopters and small submersibles as a means of getting his men in and out quickly and safely. He preferred helicopters to parachutes because the helicopter provided a means not only for delivering a man to the target but for retrieving him as well.
He felt his men should work close to the water, not far from the high-water mark that was the boundary of their responsibility in World War II. And he wanted to limit the role of his men to surreptitious attacks using explosives.
“It is all right to go in and mine something, but get your ass away before it blows,” Fane says. “I didn’t think it was our business to be shooting people. The marines are trained to do that. They know one end of a rifle from the other. I felt any land assault should be done by trained troops with heavy weapons. I told my men, ‘You start shooting at people, they’re going to shoot back. Let the guys that are trained to do it, do it.’ Use the marines and let them get their ass shot off.”
Kaine focused his attention on another problem. A strong swimmer, under favorable conditions, can cover about one nautical mile in an hour. If he’s swimming against a one-knot current, he will never get where he wants to go. If he is swimming against a stronger current or fighting a crosscurrent, who knows where he will end up?
One development was a skim boat, capable of carrying a two-hundred-pound man at speeds up to forty knots. It was equipped with antennae like those of a praying mantis. The sensors felt the waves just in front of the craft and adjusted the hydrofoils so it skimmed the surface of the water. But the one-man skim boat proved not to be suitable for the UDTs, who worked in two-man teams.
For swimming underwater, the swimmers experimented with a device called the Aqua Ho motor. It looked like a three-tank Aqua-lung, but the middle tank had batteries and a shrouded propeller, permitting it to travel at three or four knots for as long as forty minutes. Kaine says:
It was a beauty. It was just a great, great thing. But whoever was in the powe
r seat for buying equipment for the UDTs just didn’t want it. I haven’t any idea what happened to the thing. Most of the equipment that was developed in those times was pretty good, but you have a hard time, when you’re an operator, selling to nonoperators. It was very hard to convince them that a thing was a necessity, especially if it looked like a toy. And most of the things you operate with underwater look like toys; they look like fun. The Aqua Ho motor looked like fun. They don’t see the practicality in things.
Our problem many times is that people cannot understand the incompressibility of water. Oftentimes you look for speed, but you don’t really need a lot of speed to improve yourself thousands of percent underwater. A good strong swimmer maybe can swim one knot for a limited time. A piece of equipment that can move three knots for forty minutes is a tremendous improvement underwater. If you get up over speeds of three, four, five, six knots without protective hooding, you lose your equipment. Your face mask will come off, so you just can’t go really fast. But any improvement, even half a knot, is a jump underwater.
One of the serious problems faced by the sailors as they thought about becoming commandos and making surreptitious forays into enemy territory was how to get back out again safely. An imaginative inventor came along with an ingenious answer to the question. His name was Robert E. Fulton, Jr., and inventiveness ran in his family. Fulton says that, according to family tradition, he is descended from the inventor of the steamboat, although he is not sure of the relationship.
The younger Fulton is now in his eighties, but his mind still spins out new ideas at a mile a minute. Often he will awake in the middle of the night, pick up a notebook, and, in the darkness, write down an idea that has come to him in his sleep. What is unusual about Fulton is that his ideas make good sense in the light of the morning.