Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  When we got to Okinawa, we did a reconnaissance. It was pretty much pro forma, nothing exciting although there were some people shooting at us. Then we were set to go in the next day and blow the obstacles.

  We asked for firepower support and we got everything except the atom bomb. We would have asked for that, too, if we knew about it.

  The Japanese had put tetrahedrons in the water. These were made of steel rails, welded together, so three rails stuck up in the air. If a boat hit one, it would hang up.

  The guys put their packs [of explosives] on and we went in. I went with them. It’s pretty safe, if you dare admit it. One of the things is that only your head is showing. And then you can get under the water. We had it much better than the marines.

  We put on the explosives, we put on the primacord, and then we pulled the fuse and nothing happened.

  That afternoon I asked for volunteers to go back in to finish the job. The ships that were providing us cover were pulling out and the tide was going out. I had to ask them to go in bare ass with a receding tide. Everyone except one man volunteered. I took fourteen guys.

  We went back in, hooked it up, and blew it. We got it cleared this time.

  The history of UDT Eleven says they had to go in the next day to clear the obstacles.

  If UDT Eleven went in the next day, it was unbeknownst to me. I went on a destroyer that morning and they sent me over by breeches buoy to an amphibious ship to brief the commander of the 6th Marine Division. I met the CO of the division and told him about the beach, what equipment he could use, what the terrain was like. I never heard that UDT Eleven went back in. We were the ones that went back in and we finally got it to work.

  Did you find out why the explosives didn’t go off the first time?

  We had some five-inch fire from a destroyer and some of those shots were short. I believe one of those shorts cut the line and also killed the Lynch kid.

  Draper Kauffman says in his oral history that he had to send in another team to finish your job. Did he ever tell you he was unhappy?

  No.

  After Okinawa, UDT Sixteen was sent back to Oceanside, California, while other teams continued operations in the Pacific. Did you feel that the team was in some sort of disgrace?

  I can’t think of anything that would make me think that. We went to Oceanside to prepare for the invasion of Kyushu [the southernmost of the major Japanese home islands]. We knew about the cold water up there and we tested some rubber suits but they were no good.

  The UDT Sixteen history says medals were awarded to members of the team after Okinawa. Did you receive one?

  After the war, I got some sort of medal. The recruiting officer called me up and told me to come down and get it.

  Did you go back to the Wall Street firm after the war?

  No, I came home and hung up my shingle. When we were there in Okinawa with our butts showing, the second time we went in, I was thinking: How did I get in this position? I decided when I went back home, I’d do something about the process.

  I ran for district attorney. I served as a special prosecutor for both Governors [Averell] Harriman and [Nelson] Rockefeller and I started an organized crime task force. And I’m retired now after serving on the state supreme court. I trace it all back to that day at Okinawa fifty years ago.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Fishnets in Korea

  James L. “Gator” Parks became a frogman nearly half a century ago and then spent his entire career in naval special warfare. Now retired, he lives in Panama City, Florida, and works at the Naval Coastal Warfare Center, improving the SEAL delivery vehicles (SDVs) used to transport today’s underwater warriors.

  A round-faced man with a full head of silvery blond hair, Parks still speaks with the soft accent of his native Texas. He was in training at Coronado, California, when the Korean War broke out and he soon found himself in hostile waters off the North Korean coast. This is his story of those early days:

  I lived on a farm in Texas outside of Dallas. We grew peanuts. I decided early on in life that wasn’t a real good way to make a livin’. I joined the navy when I was seventeen. That was in January of ’48.

  I went from boot camp to the Philippines for two years. Subic Bay and the Philippines was a terrible place, particularly for a young man. I think they had three bars in Olongapo at that time and unless you were twenty-one—and I was far from that—they wouldn’t let you within a mile of it. There wasn’t much to do except drink Red Cap ale at the EM club, which gets old.

  Every month when they came out with this list of schools on the bulletin board, I would go put in for all of them. I rotated on a normal rotation. When I got back to San Francisco for reassignment they said I had been selected to go to the underwater demolition team. Nobody knew where it was at. They were going to send me to Fort Pierce, Florida, which had been closed down for a number of years.

  Finally somebody heard about them having one in Coronado and I went there. Training was not under a formalized training unit as it is now. We had interteam training. They would hold people in the team until they had enough to have a training class. So I worked with the team for perhaps six months before we started training. That was really kind of a leg up.

  There was very little in academics but you certainly did need a strong back. The folks putting you through were folks that you knew and they were trying to see how bad they could hurt you. And even for an eighteen year old, that was pretty bad.

  Did you have Hell Week then?

  I don’t remember much about Hell Week. It doesn’t stand out as something all that awful to me. But we went to San Clemente Island [off the California coast] in the winter. I was cold when I got there and we stayed about five weeks and I continued to get colder all the time I was there. That was the most miserable month of my life, no question. There was no hot food. There was no hot shower. You lived in pup tents. That was long before the days of wet suits. We would have dawn recons every morning. In late evening, we would put demolition charges on obstacles and blow ’em.

  We wore dry suits when it was cold enough. But most of us didn’t wear anything to keep warm. I found these old black wool diving underwear were pretty good. After I finally got a wet suit, I wouldn’t let it out of my sight for years.

  In June 1950, the Korean War started. Detachments from UDT One and Three went before us. We were still in training. As soon as we were finished—I think it was about July—we caught up with Team Three in Japan. In that class, there were about twenty of us left. We started with a whole bunch of people. Most of’ em dropped out right away.

  I was in the teams for five or six years before I wasn’t a new guy. It was a pretty clannish thing, pretty hard to break in. Most of them were from World War II. They were very different from the people in the teams today. They were more hell raisers. I suspect if you’d transplant all of us as young men into the teams today, they’d kick us all out in a week or ten days.

  After training with the team, we started doing recons up in Korea. One of the things I remember most about is the fishnet cutting. In your last book, you gave that mostly to Team One. But Team Three probably did the vast majority of the net cutting.

  As background for Parks’s recollections, the official histories of Teams One and Three, which later became UDT Eleven and Twelve, give these accounts of their operations in Korea:

  Members of Team Three made the first UDT reconnaissance in the Korean War on a beach beside the fishing village of P’ohang in order to determine if reinforcements could be landed. Shortly after this, small amphibious raiding parties were organized to harass the enemy by using demolitions at strategic points along his supply route. Combined with a detachment of marines, these raider groups were highly successful in penetrating the enemy’s defenses. In September, UDT Three reconned the mud flats at Inch’on and buoyed the fast-flowing channel there. A week after the highly successful Inch’on landing, the team was employed as swimmer-raiders off the beach of Katsupoai-po where
heavy enemy resistance was encountered. Did mine search and clearance in October and November for landings at Wonsan and Chinnampo.

  By December 1950, UN troops were being redeployed. In the ensuing withdrawal, UDT Three demolished the dock area of Hungnam Harbor rather than leave it for the Chinese reds to use. UDT operations for the rest of the Korean conflict consisted mainly of raids behind the enemy’s lines.…

  Command history of UDT One:

  Within a week after setting up base at Camp McGill in Japan, Team One combined forces with a detachment of U.S. Marines to form a raider group whose mission was to disrupt enemy logistics supplying the troops pressuring the UN toehold at Pusan, by destroying tunnels and bridges of coastal railroads and highways, a task at which they were highly successful. Next for UDT One came the familiar job of reconning beaches, including the mud flats at Inch’on, where the masterful amphibious landing occurred in mid-September, and where Team One men served as assault wave guides. During the mop-up of the operation, UDT One was called upon to set buoys, conduct bomb and mine disposal ops, assist in salvage work, and demolish hazardous wrecks.

  Parks’s account continues:

  We had some excitement, we got shot at a couple of times. It was in that period that we lost the only two people we lost in Korea to hostile action. Fry and Satterfield. They were both in Team One. Fry I went through training with. Satterfield had been around for quite a while. As far as I know they were the only two deaths in Korea from hostile fire.

  They were on a—this is secondhand, I guess, but it’s true. They were on a beach. They were up talking to these Koreans. It was just an administrative recon. When they turned and went back to the boat, these people they had been talking to went up behind the dune line and broke out some automatic weapons and started shooting at them in the water.

  Fry was getting in the boat when he got hit and they just got terrible lucky with Satterfield, hit him right in the head while he was swimming. That’s really rare that that can happen.

  They were not in my team and they were at another place. They were getting water depth in to the beach. UDT’s primary mission in those days was from the three fathom curve in. We would gather information for a landing. That’s primarily what they were doing. We did a god-awful amount of recon. We did both sides of the peninsula.

  Early on in the war, we were doing raids because we were the only people they had. We would go in and blow up “radar sites.” I went on a couple of those and I never saw a radar site. The intelligence was just terrible. Both raids that I went in on, there was just a farmhouse and a barn they thought was a radar installation. There wasn’t nothing there.

  Did you run into the North Koreans?

  I think we thought we had a problem one night but I think we were shooting at ourselves. One time we did take some pretty heavy fire. We were in rubber boats. That caused a lot of people to go swimming in the cold water. We swam from the rubber boats on in. We got up on the beach and I think we ended up getting that guy or a couple of them. They brought in the thirty-six-foot landing craft we used and it had .30-caliber guns on it. That quieted it down pretty quick.

  Did you ever blow up tunnels?

  I only know of one time our team blew up a tunnel. There were some people got shot that night.

  That was fairly effective, blowing tunnels. I think Team One did quite a lot of that, trying to knock a big bunch of rocks down in the tunnel. It takes a hell of a lot of demolition to do anything to a rock tunnel, as we found out.

  We would just ride an APD up to Korea from Japan. Then when we got through we went back to Japan, to Camp McGill. One of our room boys was actually a kamikaze pilot. Obviously he never flew a mission. But he was a well-educated young man, very interesting to talk to. We also met a submarine commander who later became vice chief of staff of the Japanese navy. He had some real good sea stories.

  It wasn’t all that much of a shooting war for us in Korea. Consequently, I guess most of us thought that was a lot of fun. Most of us that stayed around learned it wasn’t near that much fun when the real shootin’ started.

  You mentioned cutting fishnets. What did you do?

  We were up north pretty far when we were doing the fishnets. We were up near the Soviet border and back down. In the evening—we had our schedule set up where we would work every night—we would go in in rubber boats. Generally we would leave the boats out a way from where the nets were. We would leave the rubber boats out where they wouldn’t be so easily spotted and swim on in. We would have big bolt cutters and we would cut the top line, which would be a wire rope. We would cut that wire rope in as many places as we could. Then you’d take your knife and cut the rest of the netting that was there and try to leave it so it would be very difficult to repair.

  They were using those nets to catch fish to feed troops with and that was what we were trying to curtail. We got a lot of bad publicity from the [North] Koreans because we were “criminals,” coming in and cutting their fishnets and starving their people. It was rumored they even had rewards out for us, but I don’t know that to be a fact.

  We would do this all up and down the coast of North Korea. I think we were very effective. We cut a lot of fishnets up, I know that. We went in one night and sank some sampans, too, with demolition charges. None of that stuff seemed to be guarded to any extent at all. You could actually see people up on the beach. Either we were doing our job pretty well or they weren’t paying much attention.

  Another thing we did a lot of was take South Koreans up north and land them on the beach [behind enemy lines]. I often wondered what ever happened to all them people. There were a lot of folks. Probably half were North Korean to begin with.

  After the Inch’on landing on 15 September 1950, United Nations forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur recaptured Seoul, occupied the North Korean capital of P’yongyang and the port city of Wonsan and drove north nearly to the Chinese border. On 26 October, the Chinese entered the war, forcing some of MacArthur’s forces to evacuate from Wonsan and others to retreat back nearly to Seoul.

  The other exciting thing we did was in Wonsan Harbor. They had a lot of mines. The Pirate and the Pledge, two minesweepers, were sunk there. They wanted us to be human minesweepers. We would line up abreast in the channel and swim the channel every day, which was a long channel. And we never failed to find contact mines in it. Evidently they were bringing them out under sampans at night. We blew up a lot of mines. We’d just take a half-pound block and strap it under the mine and set it off. Rarely did the mine itself go off. It would just blow a hole in it and sink it.

  By the way, these mines were U.S. mines, every one of them. Every one that I saw. They had probably gotten them out of China after World War II.

  The old contact mines had lead horns on them with an acid vial inside. When you broke the horn, it would allow that acid to run down into a battery and cause an electric current and it would go off. Over these lead horns they had protectors that had soluble washers in them. They were supposed to come off in a day or so after you planted them.

  Well, you know how you get, around anything like that. You get pretty brave after a while. We’d been working on these things for a couple of weeks. Generally, we would just loop a loop around a horn on each side of it for the half-pound pack [of explosives]. Well, I wasn’t much of a mine man. At the time I didn’t know anything about these protectors on the horns. I reached up and put the loop over the horn and one of those things hadn’t come off. But as soon as I touched it, it shot way up out of the water. That caused several of the gray hairs I still have.

  Weren’t you concerned about breaking the horns?

  They’re not that easy to break. They’re fairly heavy-duty.

  How did you find the mines?

  Just swim with a face mask. We’d line up abreast, use a whole team, about sixty people out there in the water. We did it every day for a month or so that they kept us there. They’d plant at night, we’d sweep in the daytime.

  One o
f the strangest things, most profound things, I’ve ever witnessed was a big city without any people in it. It must have been Wonsan. I was a third class then. They didn’t entrust me with a lot of information. Anyway, this huge city. There was absolutely nothing there. The animals were even gone. It was really an eerie thing. We came in there and evidently they moved out in anticipation of our landing.

  Was there fighting during the landing there?

  It was a pretty well secured area. There were no hostilities right on the beach. When we came out of there, when the Chinese came in, we pulled out of the same area. They were pursued pretty heavily. I was in the area but I wasn’t on the beach. I was on an APD, just standing by, mainly doing lifeguard duty at that time.

  How long were you out there during the Korean War?

  Team One and Team Three were out there together for the first year of the war. And then they sent Team One back and six months later they sent Team One out and rotated us back. We were there when the war ended.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Iceberg Caper

  Jack “Blackjack” Macione served briefly as a member of the underwater demolition teams before becoming a SEAL in the early 1960s. He recalled those early days during an interview at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia:

  When I got through training, I went to Tule, Greenland. I went up to Tule as a frogman—UDT—before I got “volunteered” as a SEAL. Not many people got to make that trip. Every year two or three guys go up there to put the Pinelli system around the pier.

  The Pinelli system was a hose with a lot of holes in it. You would put it around the pier and air would come out and keep the ice from forming. That pier was their lifeblood. Ice breakers would bring the ships in but they had to tie up at that pier.

  We were there a few weeks and this big berg breaks off the glacier and bottoms out right off the head of the pier. It stopped the ships from making their turns at the pier.