by Orr Kelly
Another method is used to drop a string of swimmers rapidly from a moving helicopter. Holding their bodies rigid, so as to present as little resistance as possible when they hit the water, the men jump, one after the other, as the chopper buzzes the drop zone. The trick, the SEALs found, is to match the speed of the helicopter to its altitude: ten knots at ten feet, twenty knots at twenty feet, thirty knots at thirty feet, and forty knots at forty feet. The forward momentum helps the man to retain the exact body position needed for safe entry into the water. Although a fast drop from a relatively high altitude can be made safely, SEALs normally prefer to drop from ten feet at ten knots.
Although the techniques for dropping men safely have become routine for the SEALs, a practical way to retrieve men from the water with a moving helicopter has remained elusive.
The fact that the frogmen found time for long days of experimentation with helicopters is an indication of the extent to which the Korean War was a period when they were again searching for their proper role, again asking the question, “Who are we?”
Except for Inchon, where MacArthur brought his forces ashore in a massive amphibious landing behind enemy lines after the North Koreans had come within a hair’s breadth of overrunning all of South Korea, there were few operations of the kind in which the frogmen had made their reputation during World War II. And since North Korea had only a small navy, there was little opportunity for underwater ship-attack operations. Instead, the UDT men found themselves involved in explosive ordnance disposal—mine clearing. After the landing at Inchon, many mines remained in the harbor, and the UDT men were assigned to help remove them.
The mines were designed to pop to the surface when they sensed the magnetism given off by the metal hull of a passing ship. They were studded with pressure-sensitive horns designed to set off the mine on contact with the ship. The mine clearing was carried out in the depths of the harsh Korean winter, but the frogmen had only primitive diving suits, which were supposed to keep them dry and relatively warm. The suits were made of green latex, and they were bulky, awkward things with the loose material cinched in front with a metal clasp and with a flutter valve to let the air out. They almost always leaked, so the swimmer ended up cold and wet with his legs weighted down by sea water.
Because the mines were magnetic, the swimmers used only equipment made of materials such as aluminum that would not be attracted by the mine and perhaps set it off. Raynolds recalls:
It wasn’t terribly deep, thirty or forty feet of water. The mines had been spotted by some other means. We had a chart, and we knew roughly where they were. So we went down and just looked for them, by feel, really, because the visibility was poor. It was cold as hell, and we had a big fire going on the beach. It was the dead of winter, maybe ten above zero. We’d go down in these stupid dry suits to locate these mines and then buoy them. Then we would attach lines to them and a wooden-hulled sweeper would come and tow them out of the harbor and detonate them. It was hairy. They had nodules sticking out of them, which you don’t want to touch because they go boom.
The big thing was frostbite of the face. We’d really get catatonic because of the cold. When you’re young—twenty-three or twenty-two or twenty-one—you don’t think of the consequences that much. But make a wrong move and poof!
As they searched for a role, the UDT men began to experiment more and more with commando-type operations, either on their own or with Korean guerrilla groups. On several occasions, frogmen swam or rowed their rubber boats ashore behind enemy lines to disrupt North Korean operations by blowing up railroad tunnels.
Whether such raids were worth the risk was questioned even within the UDT community. Even though he had encouraged his men to prepare for commando-type operations, Fane was one of the critics of the attacks on tunnels.
“You don’t blow up a tunnel,” he says. “That just makes it bigger. A tunnel is already blown up. The coolies go in, they get a lot of nice rocks for ballast. They fix the rail in the night, and the trains go through. These are the fallacies of these glory boys. If you use a little logic, you see how inefficient such operations are.”
Sometimes on their own, and sometimes working with the Central Intelligence Agency, they inserted guerrilla units far behind enemy lines and then supported them in their operations. Although still in the navy, Bucklew spent two and a half years working with the Central Intelligence Agency in Korea. Fane also operated against North Korea, launching Korean guerrilla units from the sea and then maintaining contact with them. This was in early 1952, more than a year after the United States and its allies had been driven out of North Korea by a massive attack by Chinese forces across the China-Korea border.
“We landed North Koreans, who had been trained in the south as guerrillas, on the east coast of Korea up within sixty miles of [the Soviet port at] Vladivostok, using the techniques of the UDT,” Fane says. “We landed upwards of fifty a night for a couple of nights, from rubber boats, at two or three in the morning. We’d lie in the rocks while the Chinese passed by twenty or thirty feet away and wait until the coast was clear. They advanced some thirty or forty miles into the mountains, and I went over on a C-47 and dropped rice and explosives for them.”
One of the most ambitious assignments given to the frogmen was to destroy the North Koreans’ fishing nets. A blockade by the United Nations forces had severely cut the flow of supplies into the north. But fishermen working near the shore brought in a harvest of a million tons of fish a year, a major source of food for the North Korean military.
UDT Five made the first foray in Operation Fishnet in the summer of 1952 near the North Korean port city of Wonsan. Twice they hacked away at the nets without attracting the attention of soldiers on shore. But on the third operation, they were spotted by soldiers who fired at them with machine guns while they were in the water, attempting to cut holes in the nets with their knives.
Protected by the combined firepower of a transport ship, a South Korean patrol boat, and their own landing boats, the men managed to escape without casualties. But no longer could the effort to destroy the nets be kept a secret.
Two months were allowed to pass. Then in September, members of UDT Three sailed far north of Wonsan, to within fifteen miles of the Manchurian border. There they rode their small assault boats, with muffled motors, into a cove. Quietly they slipped into their smaller rubber boats and rowed in toward shore. One boat went in too close. The men were startled to hear the sound of a soldier’s footsteps crossing a wooden bridge almost overhead. They waited until he passed and then cautiously paddled back out a short distance.
Other members of the team had located a portion of the huge net and radioed the code name of the target: “Key West.” The net was about three hundred feet across, supported by cork, pieces of wood, and clusters of glass balls. At one end, a large line anchored the net to the shore. Soldiers ashore had built a large bonfire to warm themselves against the chill of the September night. The light from the fire was a god-send to the frogmen, helping them to see what they were doing, while against the darkness of the sea, they could not be seen.
The frogmen quickly set about destroying the net by dragging sections of it up onto their rubber boats, cutting out a portion and dropping it into the sea. Another group attacked the anchor line. But what appeared at first to be a heavy manila rope was, in fact, a steel cable encased in hemp. The men waited while bolt cutters were brought from the landing craft. But the cable was too tough. Again, they waited while explosives were brought in. Just as they finished rigging the demo charge, shots rang out from the shore. The men clambered into their landing craft and sped out to sea.
They listened for the sound of the explosion but heard nothing. Then, just as they began to worry that something had gone wrong, they heard the whump, whump of the two charges going off.
Operation Fishnet made a slight dent in North Korea’s food supply, and plans were made for a renewed assault on the nets at the height of the fishing season in 1953. But be
fore it could begin, an armistice ended the fighting on 27 July 1953.
By the beginning of the 1960s, with the Korean War and many years of experimentation behind them, the navy’s frogmen had vastly expanded their horizons. They had learned how to operate for long periods of time under the water. They had become competent commandos, and they had added the third dimension of the air to the areas in which they felt free to operate. While the navy still had a strong need for the beach reconnaissance and obstacle removal work traditionally done by the Underwater Demolition Teams, the outline of something new was rapidly becoming visible.
CHAPTER
6
Birth of the SEALs
THE ANNUAL WINTER DEPLOYMENT OF THE EAST COAST UNderwater Demolition Teams to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands was an almost idyllic experience, with long days of swimming and long nights of drinking and, often, romance. But, after a while, it could also be rather boring.
The winter of 1960–61 was little different from previous deployments despite the dramatic happenings on the world stage. In November 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president. On 20 January 1961, he took office. On 17 April 1961, American-trained Cuban exiles landed in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro and suffered a disastrous defeat at the Bay of Pigs.
One of the many lessons from the Bay of Pigs was that the U.S. had difficulty carrying out an operation that was too big to be kept secret but smaller than an all-out commitment of U.S. forces.
On 25 May 1961, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress in what he described as his “second State of the Union message.” It was one of the most important speeches of his presidency. In it, he set the goal of putting an American on the moon before the end of the decade and called for a major restructuring of the nation’s military to build up conventional forces and move the country away from sole reliance on “massive retaliation” with nuclear weapons. Two paragraphs pinpointed the gap exposed by the Bay of Pigs.
“I am directing the secretary of defense to expand rapidly and substantially, in cooperation with our allies, the orientation of existing forces for the conduct of non-nuclear war, paramilitary operations and sublimited, or unconventional wars,” the president said. “In addition, our special forces and unconventional warfare units will be increased and reoriented.…”
Kennedy backed up his words with a separate message in which he ordered the Pentagon to take more than one hundred million dollars from other programs to beef up the military’s special operations forces.
Bill Hamilton, by then a lieutenant commander and the commanding officer of UDT-21, was in St. Thomas when he heard the president’s words, and they immediately caught his interest. Fane had since retired, but Hamilton recalled their thoughts of an expanded role for the frogmen.
“It occurred to me that this was what Doug Fane and I had been looking for for years,” Hamilton recalls. “I saw it as a great opportunity.”
With other officers in the team, he set about writing a letter to the chief of naval operations proposing the creation of a new naval unit that would not be tied as tightly to the amphibious force as the UDT had always been. It would, in effect, be a naval commando force capable of operations not only at sea but on land and in the air as well. It would be prepared to work with the navy’s aviators, submariners, and all of the surface fleet.
Even before the letter reached Washington, the admirals had already sensed which way the wind was blowing. Vice Adm. Ulysses S. G. Sharp, deputy CNO for plans and policy, summed up the navy’s thinking in a memo shortly before the president’s speech. He noted that the navy had done little to increase its emphasis on counterguerrilla warfare and warned, “Since this type of operation is held in such high regard in high places, we had better get going.”
Actually, the navy, under prodding from the CNO, Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, who was himself being vigorously prodded by President Kennedy, had begun giving serious thought to its role in this new kind of warfare. At the beginning of May, the navy’s Unconventional Activities Committee recommended the formation of a unit on each coast to be the focal point for navy involvement in guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operations. The SEAL acronym—a contraction of SEA, AIR, LAND—was used by this committee for the first time in a memo dated 29 April 1961. But the role of these new units was still vague: “… an all-around, universal capability.”
Hamilton’s memo obviously fell on fertile soil. Capt. Harry S. (“Sandy”) Warren, who headed a special operations section for Burke, showed up in Little Creek, where UDT-21 had returned from its winter in St. Thomas. “We’re going to cut orders on you,” Warren said. Within days, Hamilton found himself in the Pentagon, with a $4.3 million budget and a yeoman as his one-man staff, charged with preparing for the creation of two SEAL teams, one on each coast.
Navy records from the time reflect the uneasiness which many officers felt about this new venture. It would take money and manpower from other parts of the navy. And it would run counter to the long traditions of a blue-water navy that had plenty of work to do out on the open seas without getting into messy guerrilla operations or venturing up muddy inland rivers.
In later years, after they had proved their worth in just such operations, the SEALs treasured two critical quotes from the navy brass. In the early 1960s, the vice CNO, Adm. Horacio Rivero, had sent out a memo decreeing that the navy should not become involved in any shallow-river, muddy warfare. And Adm. James Holloway, an aviator who was later to become CNO himself, snapped, when someone broached the subject of funds for SEALs, “If it doesn’t have airplanes, I don’t want to hear about it.” In fairness, it should be noted that Rivero later became a strong supporter of the navy’s muddy-water operations in Vietnam, and that Holloway had, at the time he made his comment, a full-time job making the navy’s case for continued construction of supercarriers.
One ruling that Rivero made in the early days of the SEALs did stick, however. When the suggestion was made that the SEALs wear black berets like the jaunty green berets of the army Special Forces, he was adamant: “We call them white hats in the navy. I don’t know any black berets and I want that term wiped out.”
Hamilton never sensed any lack of support from on high. Both Arleigh Burke and his successor as CNO, Adm. George Anderson, continued to push the program. More surprisingly, he also received strong backing from Vice Adm. Charles D. Griffin, an assistant CNO and a destroyer sailor whose surface forces would be expected to bear most of the cost, in money and manpower, of setting up the two commando teams. One obvious solution was quickly ruled out. Existing UDT units could not simply be converted into SEAL teams because the amphibious force still needed its frogmen. Although the first SEALs would come from the UDTs, they would have to be replaced by new trainees.
“The amphibious force had to continue to have the support of the UDTs. That meant this would be a new organization with new bodies, new billets, new money, new equipment and a new mission,” Hamilton recalls.
Much of Hamilton’s time in the latter half of 1961 was devoted to questions such as, How big should the SEAL teams be? How should they be armed? What should their training be like, and where should it be conducted? What kind of boats, weapons, and other equipment should they have?
A basic decision followed the UDT model. There would be one team on each coast: one at Little Creek and the other at Coronado. They would have fifty enlisted men and ten officers, with a lieutenant as commander. This guaranteed a youthful organization but it also meant that the low-ranking SEAL officers would have relatively little clout with the navy bureaucracy—the same problem that had bedeviled Kauffman and the other UDT officers of World War II. Following the UDT precedent, it was decided that each of the teams would conduct its own training. This meant each team was free to develop its own individual culture and that, in many subtle ways, East Coast and West Coast SEALs would be somewhat different from each other, as well as rivals.
Well before the creation of the SEAL teams was actually authorized, Lit
tle Creek was moving rapidly ahead. One reason was its proximity to Washington. Hamilton, who had come from Little Creek, tended to rely on the UDT teams there to help work out the structure of the new teams. Another reason was that Lt. Roy Boehm, a mustang who had come up through the ranks as an enlisted man before earning his commission, was executive officer of Hamilton’s old team, UDT-21, and he sensed the changes on the horizon. At least half a year before the SEALs became operational, he had placed men in specialized schools learning such untraditional skills as hand-to-hand combat, cracking safes, and breaking locks.
The SEALs were formally authorized in December 1961 and commissioned in January 1962. Lt. John Callahan was named as first commanding officer of SEAL Team Two, but he was delayed in reaching Little Creek, so Boehm was named as acting commanding officer awaiting his arrival. The creation of the new teams was considered so important that they were given a high presidential priority for both men and equipment. But Boehm moved so fast that he soon found himself in trouble with his more stodgy superiors.
His men needed new underwater breathing devices, so he bought them on the open market and then—even worse—modified them without going through all the required paperwork. A formal inquiry was triggered.
Then he bought so-called HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) parachutes so his men could practice surreptitious entry into enemy-controlled territory. The parachutes, too, needed modification. And another inquiry began.