Buoyed by the powerful potential of an OSS collaboration with Kauffman’s program, Lieutenant Duncan inadvertently ignited a political firestorm by foolishly engaging in “a discussion with Lieutenant Commander Kauffman regarding the possibility of using men who were trained by the demolition unit,” without first consulting OSS leadership. Duncan pointed out to Kauffman that “the training of these men is closely parallel to that proposed for our [Maritime] Unit, and to open up another training camp seemed to be at the time duplicating effort.” Duncan believed the Underwater Demolition Team’s (UDT) training would qualify Kauffman’s men for recruitment into the OSS’s underwater swimming groups.
As Duncan and the MU swimmers were leaving Fort Pierce, one of Kauffman’s officers relayed to them just exactly what the Navy really thought of the OSS. “I received one of the most severe criticisms expressed in the vernacular, all because the lieutenant in charge, Lieutenant Kirby, had allowed us to proceed to the [UDT training school] on what the commanding officer considered useless orders,” said Duncan. Kauffman’s sound rejection of Duncan’s emboldened overture and the OSS’s rebreather doomed the UDT to lesser technology for years. It would be long after World War II before the Navy would finally utilize the groundbreaking LARU device.
Stunned by the tongue lashing, Duncan and his men proceeded to Silver Springs, Florida, where they holed up in a group of cottages. There they conducted additional tests with one of Stanley Lovell’s Research and Development (R&D) scientists, Lieutenant Alexander. Seemingly in an attempt to keep the overly ambitious lieutenant in line, OSS headquarters had dispatched a hulking, taciturn, combat-hardened Marine captain by the name of Alfred Lichtman to supervise the team and keep the top-secret equipment secure. A Jewish company commander from the 1st Marine Division, Lichtman had earned a Silver Star repelling a Japanese tank attack on Guadalcanal’s Matanikau River. In a letter to Lichtman, OSS leadership emphasized the importance of this mission: “As I have discussed with you, security [of the devices] may have to be achieved by whatever means are at your disposal, for it will undoubtedly be impossible to maintain a 500 yard isolation area around the equipment area where it is stored. Nevertheless, when it is not in use, it should, of course, be kept in one place under guard.”
With security firmly in place, Duncan reported, “Experimentation under Lieutenant Alexander started yesterday and will continue until all of his prospective work has been completed. That should be by Wednesday of next week at the latest [mid-September 1943]. Conditions are good for this work. The water is clear; the weather so far has been clear and warm; the management of Silver Springs has loaned us an electric boat and has been most cooperative in all matters.” This would be the last report Lieutenant Duncan wrote for the OSS; shortly after the training concluded he returned to the fleet due to the flap with Kauffman.
As the training was winding down in the pristine, crystal waters of Silver Springs, an OSS camera crew began capturing on film the remarkable exploits of the LARU-equipped underwater combat team. After the war, the footage would be classified top secret and locked away in a vault for decades before the Navy SEALs would again view it in the 1960s.
SEA
6
CRAZY YANKS: THE MARITIME UNIT’S BEACHHEAD IN EGYPT
LIEUTENANT JACK TAYLOR WAS ON his own in Cairo. As he wandered through the maze of the city’s bazaar, a colorful, exotic scene played out before him. Even though the direct threat from Rommel, the German field marshal who made blitzkrieg assaults across the deserts of North Africa, and his Afrika Korps had since passed, Egypt’s capital teemed with spies, danger, and intrigue. Carts filled with an array of fresh fruits, other foods, and various sundries lined the winding, narrow streets. The sweltering heat of the summer air was heavy with pungent odors, and thick smoke from burning hookahs swirled amidst the crowds and filth. Flies blanketed the vendors’ succulent offerings, relentlessly assaulting man and beast alike. The first OSS Maritime Unit officer to be deployed overseas, Taylor sauntered through the ancient metropolis, grappling with the massive responsibilities that lay before him. With no staff and only the lowly rank of lieutenant, Jack Taylor was charged with building the infrastructure of the Maritime Unit’s first foreign base and training center.
IN AUGUST 1943, the Cairo headquarters fit into Donovan’s greater obsession with the Mediterranean, stemming from his earlier travels and fact-finding mission in 1941. Based in Egypt, the Cairo OSS focused most of its missions on intelligence gathering against German-occupied Greece and the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea. Colonel C. B. Guenther, OSS’s station chief in Cairo, directed OSS’s Secret Intelligence (SI) branch through a program known as “The Greek Desk.” Getting the SI agents in and out of Axis-occupied areas and ferrying supplies by sea were operations ideally suited for the Maritime Unit.
At the Cairo headquarters of the OSS, Taylor would meet some of the agency’s most interesting characters—Indiana Jones–like individuals who crossed the line between academia and international intrigue. Most of the secret intelligence staff were classical archaeologists—men and women who had spent decades unearthing the history of ancient Greece. These scholars-cum-spies possessed an astute understanding of the culture and nuances of Greek politics, and most were fluent in the language. The agents of the Cairo Desk risked their lives by using their scholarly profession as a cover for covert activities. Many considered archaeology to be an overused veil, as the Germans and British commonly used it as a cover throughout World War I. But rather than a classical archaeologist turned spy, one of the first special operators Taylor met in Cairo was a famous Hollywood leading man, Sterling Hayden. Together they would undertake some of the most daring missions of the war.
Hayden cut quite a magnificent figure. He stood “six foot five in his leather jumping boots and weighed close to two hundred and thirty pounds. A British parachute emblem and a small American flag were neatly stitched to the sleeves of his combat jacket. There was also the conventional military insignia, and a .357 Magnum revolver strapped to his thigh.” Hayden attempted to downplay his Hollywood past, even legally changing his name to John Hamilton. Still, the former star remained recognizable.
“‘Haven’t [I] seen you somewhere before?’ Taylor asked.
“‘I don’t know, sir.’
“‘Your face is familiar, did you play football in college?’
“‘No sir, I never went to college.’
“‘Oh.’”
On entering the not-exactly-covert OSS headquarters in Cairo, visitors walked into a luxurious stone mansion in the heart of the city. Observing the opulent scenery surrounding him for the first time, Hayden dryly noted that “the chiefs of the various OSS headquarters overseas had a spectacular talent for living in style. The Cairo villa looked like a bastard version of the Taj Mahal. The high wall around it was pierced by a tall iron gate; there were broad verandahs of inlaid tile and a profusion of shade trees above vast stretches of lawn. A young platoon of servants glided in endless circles, the punkahs [fans] revolved overhead, and through a leafy crevasse you could gaze each dawn on a pair of Egyptian girls as they combed each other’s hair.”
Hayden soon met Taylor and found him an “oddly chilling guy.” Nevertheless, the two men formed a bond and worked together well. Because the Maritime Unit (MU) and Special Operations (SO) spawned from the same branch and Taylor was the only MU personnel in Cairo, it was natural for him to work with Hayden and the other SO men in the theater.
Hayden was a true adventurer cut from the same cloth as Taylor. He had spent years at sea, sailing schooners and piloting boats on transoceanic voyages. The two men also shared a connection to Hollywood. In 1940 and 1941 Hayden was one of the silver screen’s leading men. Paramount, with whom he had a contract, called him “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies” and “The Beautiful Blond Viking God.” But Hayden was no shallow movie star; he possessed a profound depth of character and understanding of life. In his autobiography, he wrote,
To be
truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea . . . cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about. I’ve always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can’t afford it. What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of security. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine—and before we know it our lives are gone. What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in—and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all—in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
Hayden took an interesting path to the OSS. Prior to America’s entry into World War II, Hayden wanted to serve. He knew Donovan’s son through their shared interest in sailing, and Donovan offered the former movie star a cryptic invitation to go to Scotland for commando training. Hayden seized the opportunity with alacrity and was soon parachuting out of airplanes, learning hand-to-hand combat, and mastering small arms. One instructor noted that Hayden took to commando operations “like a duck to water.” As part of his training, he successfully made ten parachute jumps, but on the eleventh he broke his ankle, dislocated his knee, and sustained spinal injuries. That effectively ended his commando days, and he returned to the United States.
There he tried to join the U.S. Navy, but they rejected him due to the extent of his many injuries. Dejected, he took off alone in a schooner for the West Indies, where he proceeded to get thoroughly intoxicated with a group of Marines. The entire group ended up in jail, but Hayden was so taken with his drinking buddies that after his agent bailed him out, he returned to New York and enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps.
After passing through boot camp just as easily as he breezed through commando training, Hayden received orders to transfer to the OSS on Donovan’s orders. He shed his Hollywood past and even his name, legally changing it to John Hamilton. “To complete my metamorphosis and cut my last tie with Hollywood, Madeleine [his wife] went to court and obtained legal permission for a change of name. Henceforth I was John Hamilton,” he recalled.
Hayden made the transatlantic journey to Cairo with a taciturn, tough former State College wrestler, Captain Lloyd Smith. Stocky, with a mind for numbers, the blond-haired, blue-eyed operative was a former wrestler at Penn State.*
CAIRO WAS AN ICONIC STEW of one-of-a-kind personalities, including Captain Hans V. Tofte. Born in Denmark, Tofte had played an active role in resisting the Nazi takeover of his country. When the Gestapo learned of his involvement and began closing in, he escaped and fled to the United States. Almost immediately he began fighting for the Allies as a British Army major in command of a guerrilla team fighting in Burma and China that ran a supply line between the two areas. He later returned to the United States and enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army, where he swiftly rose through the ranks and volunteered for the OSS.
Originally the OSS assigned Tofte to their training facility designated Area F, the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Lacking revenue to pay its debts, the club leased its posh grounds to the OSS. There they turned raw recruits into special operators and Operational Groups—twenty- to thirty-man commando teams with language and cultural skills. Trained in everything from demolitions to guerrilla warfare, these groups were the forerunners to the U.S. Army Green Berets.
An expert on hand-to-hand combat, Tofte instructed OSS agents, as well as Marines and FBI agents who came to the facility, on the deadly art of “gutterfighting,” such as using a single karate chop to an opponent’s neck or face to kill or cripple him. In his day Tofte earned a reputation as “the world’s second best killer”—the “best killer” being Tofte’s mentor, Captain William Ewart “Dan” Fairbairn, the inventor of gutterfighting. Fairbairn was known as the “Shanghai Buster” for all the skulls he cracked while organizing riot squads for the Shanghai police. He summed up the black art simply: “I developed a system that got results . . . there’s no fair play; no rules except one: kill or be killed.”
Fairbairn and Tofte taught recruits the finer points of the “Tiger’s Claw,” a clenched hand whose forceful upward swing was designed to gouge out an opponent’s eyes. Along with offensive moves, Fairbairn had a number of counters, including how to get out of a bear hug: “To break a bear hug . . . go limp . . . grab his testicles. Ruin him.”
Fearless and highly skilled, Tofte didn’t hesitate to put a snarky recruit in line. On one occasion, a hulking, famous professional wrestler named “Jumping Joe” Silvaldi, who was going through training at Area F, challenged Tofte. Tofte drily recalled, “Unfortunately, his insults went a bit over hand and I broke one of his arms.”
The training program turned many Ph.D.s into bar fighters. But Fairbairn remained realistic on the bounds of his training, noting, “In a sense, this is for fools, because you should never be without a pistol or a knife. However in case you are caught unarmed, foolishly or otherwise, the tactics shown here will increase your chances of coming out alive.”
Tofte trained women as well, teaching them to use an umbrella as a weapon “every bit as dangerous as a bayonet.” However, Tofte longed to take a more active part in the war, and recognizing the value of his skills, the Army eventually sent him to Cairo with a mission to destroy the Italian oil industry in Albania. As soon as he arrived, that mission was canceled, but Tofte would soon tackle an equally formidable challenge with the assistance of the MU. Taylor, Tofte, Smith, and Hayden initially went about their own missions but would come back together as a team and thrust themselves into the heart of combat and Allied operations as they moved into continental Europe.
SINCE JANUARY 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt met at the Casablanca Conference to plot their war strategy, the two Allied leaders had faced mounting pressure from the Soviet Union to open a western front. Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed on the best approach. The Americans preferred to use their existing forces in North Africa to invade Europe. Churchill, with an eye on postwar Europe and keeping the Soviet Union in check, favored launching an invasion of southwest Europe through Greece and the Balkans and persuading neutral Turkey and its large army to align with the Allies. But the Turks refused to budge and maintained neutrality. Despite Churchill’s protestations regarding Greece and the Balkans, the Allies decided to first attack Sicily in July 1943 and then advance up the spine of Italy as they prepared for the Normandy landings and the invasion of France. Throughout the remainder of the war Churchill remained obsessed with the Mediterranean. With limited men and shipping to spare, Eisenhower and Roosevelt agreed to only a small increase in guerrilla activity in the area. British General Henry Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson proposed occupying some of the Greek islands by “means of a piratical war,” using small bands of commandos and other specially trained troops to raid German and Italian garrisons. One of the first such raids was on the Greek island of Kos. Swept up in these island buccaneering efforts was the OSS, which provided intelligence services independent of the British and took part in special ops and intelligence operations.
In the summer of 1943, the Allies went to great lengths to inflate the size and strength of their forces in the eastern Aegean. Through deception operations they attempted to convince the Germans that they planned to land in Gree
ce. One elaborate disinformation operation, code-named “Mincemeat,” involved a dead body from a London morgue dressed in a high-ranking officer’s uniform and handcuffed to a suitcase full of “top secret” plans for a fake invasion of Greece and Sardinia. They cast the body into the sea so it would wash up on an Axis shore. The Germans fell for the canard and bought the fake invasion plans. Double agents working for the Allies fed troves of disinformation to the Germans. The deception plan had a measure of success, and the Axis shifted reinforcements to Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica instead of Sicily, where the Allies eventually landed on July 9.
GRAND STRATEGY ASIDE, Taylor’s first priority involved setting up MU’s base camp to train operatives and house vessels. He handled everything from obtaining vessels and office supplies to developing the training curriculum. To his dismay, Taylor discovered that OSS headquarters had already selected a site in Ras el Kenayis, Egypt, which was located on the Mediterranean coast about 140 miles from Alexandria. He found the location undesirable because it lacked “protection from the elements, and the outlying reefs made it a nightmare to navigate in and out of the base camp.” Taylor spent the next several weeks traveling throughout the Middle East trying to find a suitable spot for the base camp, but his efforts to set up operations were in vain. He identified a potential site in Palestine and yet another in Mersa Matruh, Egypt, a city ten miles west of the Ras el Kenayis. However, Colonel Guenther did not approve either location, and the Maritime Unit ultimately abandoned plans for a training facility in Egypt. Lieutenant Taylor’s lowly rank undoubtedly played a role in his inability to win the approvals he needed from colonels and majors. He also faced extreme challenges in building consensus and recognition of the Maritime Unit from the other branches within the OSS, which were reluctant to recognize the nascent unit that had recently broken away from the Special Operations Branch. For months, Taylor and the small team of extraordinary men focused on the mission and, as a result of their sheer determination, overcame the barriers of rank and branch.
First SEALs Page 5
