by Orr Kelly
Central to the great strength of the SEALs, of course, are the men themselves. They are smart, incredibly strong physically, and superbly trained.
Two senior SEALs—Rear Adm. Irish Flynn and Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Rudolph E. Boesch, both now retired—described the effects of the SEAL training course in a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute in September 1989:
We have not found another training course in the armed services that produces men ready to reconnoiter and clear beaches when walls of surf plunge repeatedly in a quarter-mile zone of white water over a reef-studded nearshore. No other course selects those who endure the hours in almost complete darkness during the swimmer delivery vehicle’s transit, shuddering constantly as the surrounding water and compressed gas they breathe suck body heat from them, while still ahead loom struggles with claustrophobia and real perils under a ship. Then—much later, when everyone is at the limit of strain and hypothermia—an underwater rendezvous and reentry with a submarine. Compared to the water-associated work, the SEALs’ other responsibilities—parachuting, explosive demolition, land operations, close-quarter battle—seem safe, almost carefree endeavors.
And yet there are two different, and even somewhat contradictory, concerns about the BUDS (basic underwater demolition/SEAL) course, the crucible in which SEALs are formed.
One concern is the perception of many veteran SEALs that the course has been dangerously softened in recent years under pressure to increase the number of SEAL platoons. In the past, the trainee who found the course too tough or not to his liking simply rang the bell or said, “I DOR (drop on request),” and he was gone. Now there is no longer a bell to ring, and the trainee who wants to quit is counseled by a series of noncommissioned and commissioned officers and encouraged to remain in training. Whether this change is producing a group of SEALs who are not as good as they should be, or who will quit when the going gets tough, no one knows. Although a number of studies have been done of men in training, there have been no solid follow-up studies to measure how well men perform once they have pinned on the SEALs’ “Budweiser” badge.
The other concern is that the SEALs tend to believe that, if a man has successfully made it through BUDS, and through the additional training in his first team, he can then be relied on under all circumstances. That is not always true, as the SEALs learned early in the Vietnam War, when a number of men quit when the dying started. And even if a man can be relied on not to run away, that does not mean he will think well under pressure. And it doesn’t mean that, even if he performs well in combat, he can be relied on to plan a successful operation.
Coupled with this is the worry that some SEALs, having proved themselves in BUDS, think they are so good they don’t have to plan and rehearse for an operation and that they can even play fair in combat. Gary Stubblefield puts it this way:
A lot of guys get what I would call a gunfighter mentality. They think it’s like in the movies. They think you can stand off and trade equal and fair shots and, because you’re a better shooter, you’re going to win. It’s not that way.
Did you ever see Water Hole No. 3, that old movie [1967] with James Coburn? A gunfighter out in the street calls Coburn out of the saloon. The guy is standing out there, his feet spread apart, waiting for Coburn to walk toward him, and he would begin walking. Coburn comes out, walks over to his horse, pulls his rifle out of his scabbard, puts it across his saddle, gets a good bench sight, shoots the guy dead, puts the thing back in his scabbard, walks back in and has a drink.
That’s perfect intelligence. To me, there’s nothing wrong with that. To me, that’s the way war should be conducted. You don’t fight a war to trade bodies. You fight a war to win. And if it means you stand two blocks away and shoot the guy with a rifle, and he only has a pistol, I think that’s perfectly intelligent. A lot of our people don’t have that attitude. They have the attitude that we’re tougher and we shoot better, we don’t get hurt as easily and we can go in and square off with these guys and we’ll win.
It is clear from these important questions that SEALs continue to debate among themselves and that they are still involved in the process of trying to define exactly what it is that they do, how they fit in militarily in a changing world.
Just as the SEALs grew out of the UDTs and created such new and specialized units as Det Bravo, working with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units in Vietnam, and SEAL Team Six, with its focus on antiterrorism, they may well find new and unforeseen ways to use their skills in the future. As long as they keep asking themselves, “Who are we?” they will continue to find an important role to play in the nation’s defense. If they ever find their niche and sink comfortably into it, their usefulness will be at an end.
Image Gallery
Trainees place explosives on a rocky shore on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. (National Archives)
UDTs in bulky dry suits ride a British Chariot manned torpedo. (National Archives)
William Bain and Joseph DiMartino astride an Italian manned torpedo. (Courtesy of Roy Boehm)
The Aqua Ho, powered by gas from a scuba bottle. (Courtesy of Roy Boehm)
Early underwater propulsion devices. From left: two models of the Mark VI, the Sea Bat, the TRASS, two models of the Sea Horse, and the Mark I SPU. (U.S. Navy photo)
Cockpit of the Sea Bat. (U.S. Navy photo)
An early model dry suit. (Courtesy of Roy Boehm)
SEALs going ashore in an area heavily infested by Viet Cong on the Bassac River in September 1967. (U.S. Navy photo by PHI D. S. Dodd)
SEALs leap ashore from an assault river patrol boat just before the enemy’s Tet offensive. (U.S. Navy photo by J01 Tom Walton)
PH3 Fox just before being pulled into the cabin of the plane. Moments later, the line snapped, and he fell to his death. (U.S. Navy photo)
Two men being lifted from the ground during testing of the Sky Hook. (Courtesy of Maynard Weyers)
Frogmen attaching a small limpet mine to a ship’s hull. (U.S. Navy Photo)
In the “cast,” a trainee rolls out of a rubber boat attached to the side of a speeding motorboat. (U.S. Navy photo by PH1 Patrick C. Wilkerson)
During the recovery, the swimmer reaches for a flexible loop held over the side of the rapidly approaching boat. (Courtesy of Roy Boehm)
Bibliography
1. WHO ARE WE?
This account of the battle at Panama’s Paitilla Airfield, in which SEAL losses were the heaviest in their history, is based on interviews with SEALs who were on the ground at Paitilla, were involved in the operation in a support role, or were men with extensive combat experience who later familiarized themselves with the operation.
Unfortunately, at this writing, the after-action reports that might provide a more detailed, and perhaps more revealing, account of what happened at Paitilla have not been made available to the public. And some publicly released information is misleading. A report by the House Armed Services Committee, released on 12 January 1990, Operation Just Cause: Lessons and Warnings in the Future Use of Military Force, erroneously reports, for example, that the SEAL losses at Paitilla were the result of a chance encounter with armored cars.
A detailed account of the Paitilla operation is contained in Bill Salisbury, “When SEALs Die,” San Diego Reader, 4 October 1990. Another account of the battle, focusing on the death of Lt. John Connors, is contained in Malcolm McConnell, “Measure of a Man,” Reader’s Digest, October 1990.
The critical letter referred to in this chapter is quoted in full in chapter 13. Gary Stubblefield, the writer, declined to provide me with the letter, but it was widely circulated in the SEAL community and I managed to obtain a copy.
2. BLOODY WATERS—TARAWA AND NORMANDY
The terrible loss of life when the marines landed on Tarawa in November of 1943 added great urgency to the formation and training of the Underwater Demolition Teams, which are the direct antecedents of today’s SEALs. That battle is described in Comdr. Francis Douglas Fan
e and Don Moore, The Naked Warriors, New York: Appleton-Century, 1956; John Costello, The Pacific War, New York: Rawson, Wade, 1981; and Rear Adm. Edwin T. Layton, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway—Breaking the Secrets, New York: Morrow, 1985.
Details of the doomed landing at Gallipoli came from Richard Hough, The Great War at Sea, 1914-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; and Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli: The History of a Noble Blunder, New York: Mac-Millan, 1965.
The story of the British Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs) is told in Bill Strutton and Michael Pearson, The Secret Invaders, New York: British Book Centre, 1959.
Most of the information about the career of Phil H. Buck-lew is drawn from his oral history interviews conducted in 1980 by John T. Mason, Jr., of the Naval Institute, which I read at the Navy Library in Washington, D.C. His description of his work with the British in the landings in Sicily and Italy corresponds to the accounts in Strutton and Pearson, cited above. Even though Bucklew was involved in various aspects of naval special warfare for more than two decades, he was never a member of an Underwater Demolition or SEAL team, and at least partially for that reason, he remains a controversial figure among some members of the community.
The account of the first naval demolition effort of World War II near the Vichy French port of Lyautey in North Africa is drawn from The Naked Warriors.
My account of the extraordinary career of Draper L. Kauffman comes largely from the oral history interview with him conducted by Mason in 1978 and 1979. It, too, was examined at the Navy Library. His son, Draper Kauffman, Jr., granted me permission to quote from that interview. The Naked Warriors also contains a good deal of information about Kauffman, his involvement in the formation of the Underwater Demolition Teams, and their role in the Pacific War.
The account of the preparations for the Normandy landing and the landing itself are drawn from Bucklew’s oral history, The Naked Warriors, and Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: June 6, 1944, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Although there have been differing estimates of the casualty rate among the gap-assault teams during the Normandy invasion, I have relied on the figures contained in The Naked Warriors, which show that by far the heaviest losses were sustained at Omaha Beach, where 52 percent of the navy men involved in clearing obstacles from the beach were killed or injured.
These figures correspond to a roster of the dead, wounded, and unwounded participants in the Omaha Beach landing that was distributed at a Navy Day Recognition Service on 27 October 1944 at the Naval Amphibious Training Base at Fort Pierce. That roster was made available to me by James Robert Chittum, of Las Vegas, Nevada, who served in UDT Three in the Pacific.
3. FROM SAIPAN TO TOKYO BAY
Rear Adm. Cathal L. (“Irish”) Flynn, now retired, gave me a good overview of the history of the Underwater Demolition Teams and their evolution into the SEALs. Even though he had spent a long and often dangerous career as a SEAL, there was a note of awe in his voice as he spoke, during an interview, of the “breathtakingly courageous things” done by the Underwater Demolition Teams in the Pacific in World War II.
Many details of those operations are contained in the Kauffman interview cited above and in The Naked Warriors. A great wealth of material is contained in the official histories of the UDTs written at the end of World War II. They are available on microfilm at the Navy Library. The UDT histories, as well as the overview provided in the History of Commander, Underwater Demolition Teams and Underwater Demolition Flotilla, Amphibious Forces, Pacific, are contained on one roll of microfilm, NRS II-490-511, available in the Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard. The anonymous authors of the histories of UDT Seven, which took part in many of the Pacific operations and also trained a number of the other teams, and UDT Eleven, provided detailed information on the operations in which they took part as well as very candid comments on some of the problems encountered, such as sand in the food.
Little has been written about the failure of UDT Sixteen to carry out its assignment of destroying the Japanese obstacles at Okinawa. Kauffman refers to the incident briefly, and the history of UDT Eleven tells how the team was sent back in the following day to blow up the obstacles left standing by UDT Sixteen. A detailed first-person account of the incident is contained in Edward T. Higgins, Webfooted Warriors, New York: Exposition Press, 1955. Higgins was a member of UDT Eleven, the team assigned “to finish the job they loused up.” The history of UDT Sixteen makes no mention of the team’s failure to carry out its assignment. The wonder is not that there was such a breakdown but that, considering the hurried training and the great danger and physical demands of UDT work, there were not more such failures.
Irish Flynn first called my attention to the extraordinary career of Frank Kaine, “MacArthur’s frogman.” Kaine described his career in a series of oral history interviews with Comdr. Etta-Belle Kitchen of the Naval Institute in 1981. I examined that interview at the SEAL/UDT Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Lt. Tom Westerlin, “Birth of the Figure 8 Rope,” All Hands, October 1978, describes the method used to retrieve swimmers from the water.
4. A DIFFERENT BREED—COMMANDOS FROM THE SEA
Much of the material for this chapter came from an interview with Dr. Christian J. Lambertsen, M.D., at his office at the Institute for Environmental Medicine, of which he is the founding director, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia.
This list of his accomplishments during World War II is drawn largely from a memo to the director of the Office of Strategic Services on 26 September 1945 from Comdr. H. G. A. Woolley of the Royal Navy. Woolley met Lambertsen in October of 1942 when the British officer was in charge of maritime activities for the OSS.
The commendation of Lambertsen by Lt. Comdr. Derek A. Lee, RNVR, was written 16 April 1945.
The information related to the history of combat swimming comes primarily from Howard E. Larson, A History of Self-Contained Diving and Underwater Swimming, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, 1959, which was provided to me by Dr. Lambertsen.
Most of the material relating to U.S. Navy operations in China during World War II is drawn from Vice Adm. Milton E. Miles, as prepared by Hawthorne Daniel from the original manuscript, A Different Kind of War: The Little-Known Story of the Combined Guerrilla Forces Created in China by the U.S. Navy and the Chinese During World War II, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1967. Miles does not mention Bucklew’s visit to China, which is drawn from Bucklew’s own reminiscences, cited above.
5. NEW HORIZONS—AND WAR IN KOREA
The account of Francis Douglas Fane’s career in underwater work comes from The Naked Warriors and an interview with Fane, who now lives in retirement in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Still lively and combative in his eighties, Fane gave a vivid description of his long career in the navy and his innovative work in the period immediately after World War II.
Material about the careers of Kaine and Bucklew is drawn from their oral histories, cited above.
Details of the training in the use of underwater breathing apparatuses are from interviews conducted at the SEALs’ training center in Coronado. The Draeger Student Guide (locally prepared), used by students in training, lists the depth limits for a diver breathing pure oxygen.
Lambertsen’s recollections were obtained in an interview with him, cited above.
Descriptions of some of the navy’s early attempts to make it easier for combat swimmers to get from one place to another were provided by W. T. (“Tom”) Odum, of the Naval Coastal Systems Center in Panama City, Florida. Kaine also referred to a number of these in his oral history.
Robert E. Fulton, Jr., described the development of his sky hook and other inventions during an interview at his home-factory in a rural area near Newtown, Connecticut.
The fatal accident involving Photographer’s Mate Third Class James Earl Fox was described to me by Admiral LeMoyne, who was in charge of the opera
tion. The accident and the subsequent investigation are also described in detail in the official accident report provided to me by the Office of the Navy Judge Advocate General.
The night pickup off the California coast was described to me by Maynard Weyers, one of the four men plucked from their rubber boats that night, and by Fulton, who was present for the test.
John Raynolds told me of his experiences in the UDT during the Korean War in an interview at his office in Greenwich, Connecticut. Retired Capt. William Hamilton, Jr., also told of his experiences during that period in a series of interviews.
The attempt to destroy the North Korean fishing industry is described in James Berry, “Operation Fishnet,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1990, and Anon., “Frogmen in Korea,” Colliers, 21 February 1953.
6. BIRTH OF THE SEALs
Hamilton, cited above, told me of his work in Washington in the fall of 1961 that led to the formation of the SEALs in January of the following year.
Other details of that period are contained in Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict. Vol. 2, From Military Assistance to Combat, 1959-1965, Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1986.
The formation of the two original SEAL teams was described to me in interviews by David Del Giudice, first commander of Team One, at his office in Burbank, California, and Roy Boehm, first commander of Team Two, at his home in Punta Gorda, Florida. J. H. (“Hoot”) Andrews also told me of the early days in Team Two, of which he was storekeeper, during an interview in Las Vegas.