Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces
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They took an army truck, with an A-frame hoist on the back, and it pulled one of them to the top of the frame. His tail was still on the ground. They told us they fed over nine hundred men with that one fish.
The other two fed the whole Seabee battalion. Everyone was eating rations [packaged C- or K-rations similar to today’s meals, ready-to-eat (MREs)]. Those boys were glad to get that fresh fish!
Was your landing opposed by the Japanese?
The Japs still had the island but the landing itself wasn’t that bad. There was fighting going on but we were fortunate none of us got hurt.
Did you reconnoiter the beach before the landing?
No. We just went in on the beach in an LST [landing ship, tank]. Later on, we did recon on different jobs.
Did the army know what you were supposed to be doing?
Not really. We operated under secret orders for damn near two years. I guess only the top brass really knew who we were and what our job was supposed to be. Because when we talked to people, they didn’t know what we were or who we were or anything else. It was kept secret pretty well.
Reportedly, Kaine was called to brief General MacArthur personally.
Kaine was called before most of our ops. Where he went and who he went to see, I couldn’t tell you. Then he’d come back and he had our orders.
What was your understanding of your job?
We knew exactly what we were supposed to do from our training in Florida. Our training covered disposing of all obstacles, sand bars, or anything like that. We even had training in mines and booby traps, disassembling or trying to locate them.
All we wore was trunks and we did have these canvas jungle boots. They even did away with those later on. They had rubber soles. We used them for diving because the coral would cut you. If it was real bad coral, we would wear our pants and tuck ’em in. Sometimes you’d sink in coral up to your knees, laying explosives. The main thing was trunks, boots, and a knife strapped to us was all we had.
We actually didn’t run into too many obstacles in the water other than sand bars and coral reefs until later on in the Philippines and Borneo. We ran into obstacles in Borneo and worked with some of the Australian demolition teams.
From the Admiralty Islands, the frogmen moved west to the island of Biak in what is now Indonesia in LCI-448, a large landing ship. The diary records frequent air raids:
May 27. Arrived Biak, 2 air raids, 5 Jap planes.
May 28. Biak, 2 air raids. One Billy Mitchel.
May 29. Biak, 2 air raids, 2 Jap planes, L.C.I. 448 got one.
May 30. Biak, 2 air raids, 1 Jap plane shot down.
May 31. Biak, 2 air raids, 2 Jap planes shot down.
June 1. Finished Blasting Channel, 2 air raids, bombing at night.
June 2. Three air raids, 10 planes shot down, “Jap,” L.C.I. 448 got one.
June 3. 2 air raids, dive bombers. Jest missed can. One man killed.
June 4. Jap task force headed this way, Biak, two air raids, night bombing, our force arrived.
June 5. 2 air raids, early morning bombing. Left Biak, ship slightly damaged.
Did you ever see MacArthur?
I took a picture of him and his crew. But when I changed my scrapbook, that picture got away from me.
We were in the Philippines before he was. We went in three or four days before D day and made a recon of the beach, checked the depth of the water.
The frogmen left Hollandia 13 October in a 130-ship convoy, headed toward the Philippines. The diary records the landing there:
Oct. 20. Made reconnaissance of beach. Arrived in San Pedro Bay at dawn, landing made on Leyte, L.C.I. 71 and 72 hit from beach. Philippines.
We were walking up the damn beach after one of our recons—on Leyte—and firing started. Christ, I buried my nose in the sand, I’ll tell you. I wanted to dig a hole. When the army hit the beach, they passed by all these pillboxes. And the Japs were still in them. They just went right by them and the Japs opened up. We were walking down the beach after checking the depth of the water. This was about the same time they hit the beach. We were in the water taking soundings and the army hit the beach and we came up out of the water and started walking up the beach and they started shooting.
Did the Japanese fire at you while you were in the water?
Occasionally. There were places where we went in with explosives on our rubber boats—explosive hose, bangalore torpedoes—and snipers fired at us. You could only stay underwater so long. Sometimes we actually hid behind a rubber boat of explosives. There was nowhere else to hide, I tell you.
One operation we were supposed to go on in the Philippines when they were getting ready to invade Manila. We were supposed to take a PT boat down one night. They picked six of us out. We were all ready to go. This PT boat was going to take us in to the harbor in Manila and drop us off. There were some pontoons and cables and buoys and they thought maybe it was a submarine net. And we were going to blow the pontoons and such, drop the cable on the bottom, if that’s what it was.
But the PT boat we were supposed to go on made a run on the beach earlier and got all shot up. So they canceled that trip for us.
Were you attacked by enemy planes?
We were attacked a number of times by planes, in convoys and in the harbors, especially in the Philippines. When we got up to the Philippines—all through the Philippines—the Jap suicide planes, the kamikaze, they’d come in and pick out the biggest ship and head straight for it. We knocked a few of them out of the air. I had the job of painting them on the conning tower when we shot a plane down.
The APD [a destroyer converted for use as a small troop carrier] we were on going to Lingayen Gulf had three Jap planes come in, using us as a shield. They came in real low on the water. Just before they got to us, they had to go up to go over us. They were trying to get to the carriers, the bigger ships. They weren’t interested in the guys running on the sides of the convoy, like us. But we shot all three of them down and one of them almost got us, almost crash-dived us. In Lingayen Gulf, they were just shooting them down all over the place.
Dawson’s diary records a hectic period when the American ships were battered by air attacks, gunfire from the shore, and typhoons:
Oct 24. One air raid after another, (L.C.I. 1065 sunk.) (LCI. 65 crashed by plane.) (Tug sunk.) 29 Jap planes shot down. Think we got one.
Oct. 26. Air raids all day. Bombing and strafing. Big naval battle.
Oct. 27. Seven air raids. Liberty hit by crashdive. Total Jap planes to date 200.
Oct. 29. Three air raids at dawn. A typhoon started at 2330.
Oct. 30. What a night. Typhoon eased off at 0500.
Nov. 3. Air raids all night long. 10 planes shot down.
Nov. 4. Air raid in morning. A.P.T. hit.
Nov. 8. Typhoon started 1200.
Nov. 9. Typhoon quit 0200. We were nearly on the beach.
Nov. 12. Three air raids. 7 ships hit, 4 liberties, 2 L.C.I. one L.S.T. 12 Japs shot down.
Nov. 14. Three air raids. 9 Japs shot down. Blasted P.B.Y.
Nov. 16. Have been blasting the last few days for P.B.Y. slip. [The PBY was a flying boat.] 9 Japs shot down the 14th.
We heard some of the pilots were chained in the cockpit. You really don’t know. They’d just fly over and dive straight into a ship.
Did you lose any members of your two units?
No, we were very fortunate. We got cut by coral a couple of times. Some of the fellows got infected pretty bad. It laid ’em up for a few weeks.
We were training one night in New Guinea, practicing for an invasion. We were diving at night with shallow water diving gear. We used to put rubbers [condoms] over flashlights to waterproof them. When we were underwater, we’d put them under your arm so you could use both hands to tie knots in your primacord [explosive cord that sets off the explosives].
One man’s light didn’t move. We got suspicious after a while. So Kaine and I dove in and pulled him out and got him up on the
beach and pulled his mask off. He looked like he had seen a ghost and it froze on his face. It took about twenty-four hours before the doctor brought him around. He was out colder than hell. We still don’t know what it was—lack of oxygen, just froze up from fear, what it was.
Did you have any contact with the underwater demolition teams?
I didn’t even know they were around until we got to Borneo. Then one of the teams did come over, in June 1945. I think it was UDT Thirteen, but I’m not sure of it. [Unit histories show that both UDT Eleven and UDT Eighteen operated in that area in June 1945.] They more or less relieved us so we could go home.
They tried to send us to Maui because they hadn’t invaded Japan yet. Fortunately, we had been over there for two years and deserved our leave so they sent us back home. We were on thirty days’ leave when the war ended.
CHAPTER
2
UDT Sixteen: A Bum Rap?
If the legend is true, most navy frogmen would just as soon forget about what happened to Underwater Demolition Team Sixteen during the battle of Okinawa in World War II.
According to the legend, the team broke and swam back out to sea, leaving a row of obstacles to be cleared by members of UDT Eleven the following day.
But, while the legend has some basis in fact, the truth of what happened on 30 March 1945 is a more complex story.
The basic facts are agreed upon.
UDT Sixteen was one of three UDT Units recruited directly from the Pacific amphibious forces as the navy carried out its island-hopping strategy that was expected to culminate in a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. Earlier UDT units had been formed from new recruits and members of the Seabee construction battalions.
UDT Sixteen began its training at Maui in the Hawaiian Islands on 1 November 1944 and left Maui for Okinawa on 13 February 1945—a remarkably short period of time compared with the year or more that it now takes a young man to qualify as a SEAL.
Arriving off Okinawa on 23 March, the frogmen began a reconnaissance of three beaches designated Red Three, Blue One, and Blue Two. They found a maze of obstacles. One account tells of twelve hundred posts, each six feet high and eight inches in diameter, that had been hammered into the reef by the Japanese about forty yards out from the high-water mark. One participant remembers, instead, rows of metal tetrahedrons made of lengths of steel welded together.
During the days immediately preceding the invasion, a thousand frogmen were in the water at one time or another. Some were assigned to beaches where there would be no landings, as a diversion. But the three beaches where UDT Sixteen and UDT Eleven had the responsibility for clearing the way were the real thing: this is where the troops would storm ashore. If the obstacles remained standing, they would be trapped at the reef line.
Each team sent more than eighty officers and men in toward the beach. They swam toward the obstacles, each burdened by three to five packs of explosives. Hiding behind the posts and swimming underwater from post to post, they placed the explosives, linking them by explosive cord.
To protect the swimmers, the navy provided an awesome barrage of gunfire from 4 landing craft, 3 destroyers, 2 aircraft carriers, and 3 battleships.
“Fire support was very satisfactory and it kept the Nips well in their holes…” the official history of UDT Eleven reports. “The air support was very satisfactory and contributed much in keeping the enemy fire to a minimum.”
When the explosives were triggered, the beaches where UDT Eleven had the responsibility erupted in a sheet of water, torn pieces of the obstacles, chunks of coral, and bits of fish.
But, in the area where UDT Sixteen had worked, there was silence. The official history of UDT Sixteen says nothing about this. It simply states: “Working with Team Eleven, placed charges and cleared the beaches.”
Word went around that the reason for the failure of the charges to explode on UDT Sixteen’s beaches was that, after one of its members had been killed, the team members abandoned the job and swam out to sea.
Draper L. Kauffman, who had set up the school for training frogmen at Fort Pierce, Florida, two years earlier, watched as one section of the beach exploded but the other didn’t. In an oral history interview years later, he recalled watching as one whole beach failed to go:
It had been badly done. The southern beaches went beautifully. We had one man killed by a sniper in the morning operation, but very little fire. We did have some and, of course, we were in there a long time. This was not a quick job.
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.
The UDT Eleven history gives this version of events on the day after the failure to clear obstacles on one section of the beach:
On 31 March, the team received word that “the job must be done.” Four boats with eighty-nine officers and men moved toward the obstacle line. Landing craft sailed up and down, as close in as they could come, hammering the shore with gunfire. But this failed to stifle the Japanese marksmen.
The commanding officer UDT Eleven called commander UDT teams requesting highly intensified fire support 100 to 500 yards inland along the entire operational area. For the next 20 minutes, the area specified was covered by the heaviest supporting fire imaginable. Enemy fire diminished considerably. One 5-inch projectile was observed to hit at the root of a tree. The tree broke off about halfway up the trunk and a body was seen blown from the upper branches.
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 result, it appeared that UDT Eleven had cleared some 1,300 yards of beach of nearly 1,400 obstacles. There were no casualties, which seems miraculous. Either the Nips were poor shots or it can be accredited to the defensive measures used by the swimmers.
John A. Devine, who now lives in Saint James, New York, has a different recollection of what happened in those two days before the Okinawa invasion. Devine, who retired from the navy in 1959 as a chief warrant officer, was a first class petty officer, the senior enlisted man in one of the UDT Sixteen platoons at Okinawa. This is his account of what happened:
It has been reported that UDT Sixteen did not do their job and were observed swimming out from the beach before their job was completed. This is entirely untrue. What really happened, I suspect, was that one man was observed swimming out from the beach. This was the one man that was killed from UDT Sixteen—Coxswain Frank Lynch.
I was his platoon leader and, as I had all the obstacles on my section of the beach loaded with explosives and this one man still had explosive left, I sent him to the platoon operating on my right flank to use up his explosives with them. After he used his explosives, he was directed to report back to me.
After we were picked up and I reported him missing, the leader of the other platoon told me that he had seen Lynch swimming out to the pickup line instead of reporting back to me. He said that, some time later, one of our five-inch shells landed short. He looked out to see where it landed and he said it appeared to land in the approximate location where the swimmer would be.
We didn’t know the swimmer was killed until the next morning (D day) when we received word that his body was found on the beach with a hole in his forehead.
Team Eleven’s contention that Team Sixteen didn’t complete its job because of sorrow over one of its men being killed doesn’t hold up. It was twenty-four hours later before we knew he had been killed.
I don’t know if the reason the obstacles on Team Sixteen’s portion of the beach were not blown was ever established. My own suspicion is that the trunk line was cut by wave action or, possibly, was not properly connected to the main trunk line.
One fact that has not been mentioned is that approximately fifteen men and a few officers from our team volunteered to swim back in that afternoon, to wipe the remaining obstacles out.
I was one of the men that swam back in, after the tide had receded and without any gunfire support. With the Japanese firing at us, we crawled on our bellies across the coral to get to the obstacles. We did blow some of them out but again left some still standing—for whatever reason, only God knows.
Those were the obstacles that UDT Eleven went in and destroyed.
I’ve heard the Team Sixteen record showed that five officers from Team Sixteen received the Silver Star medal and fifteen enlisted men were awarded the Bronze Star.
I was a member of Team Sixteen from the day of commissioning upon completion of training at Maui until the day of decommissioning at Oceanside, California, and I don’t remember any man from Team Sixteen receiving any awards.
Robert Fisher, a retired judge of the New York Supreme Court, has a somewhat different recollection of those events of half a century ago. Fisher, who lives in a suburb of Binghamton, New York, was then a lieutenant junior grade and the executive officer of UDT Sixteen.
I was already a lawyer, working for a Wall Street firm, when the war started. I was 4-F because of some injuries from playing football in college but a doctor told me how to get around that and I was able to join the navy.
I became executive officer of UDT Sixteen when it was formed at Maui. The CO was a fellow named Eddie Mitchell. He could swim—but not very far—so he pretty much let me run the team.
The team was made up of volunteers from the fleet. When we got their records, we could see that most of them weren’t volunteering for UDT. They were volunteering off the ship they were on because they were in trouble. Some of them had had deck court-martials.
They were tough kids. But they are the kind of guys you want when the going gets tough. We instilled a sense of pride in them. They were a tough, proud outfit.