Navy Seals

by Couch, Dick

  Reynolds pulled a tassel cord to ready the explosive for firing, and repeated the move on more charges on two more posts close by. A teammate hooked up all the charges on the multiple posts together with a long string of primacord, set the fuse, called out the warning “Fire in the hole!” and hauled off.

  Next, Reynolds wired up a series of steel hedgehogs. The hedgehogs looked like giant children’s jacks stuck in the surf. They blocked any large craft or vehicles trying to pass through, and they were interlaced with explosives. From Reynolds’s vantage point, “there was a world of those damn hedgehogs.”

  Reynolds kept concentrating on the universe under his nose, and the theoretical fifty-yard-wide lane he was trying to open up on the beach. Despite the withering fire, it looked like they might eventually do it. Small sections of their gap seemed open all the way to the beach, and they were making some progress wiring up the myriad of remaining obstacles.

  But it was a bloody, often fatal business, virtually a suicide mission for the Navy and Army demolition men on Omaha Beach.

  The NCDU officer in charge of Omaha Beach, Lieutenant Commander Joseph H. Gibbons, recalled that an officer from one boat team on the beach “was standing by to pull the fuses after the charges had been placed when rifle fire cut his fingers off and the fuse assemblies.” Nearby, “enemy rifle fire set off the charges which had been placed on the obstacles which cleared the gap but unfortunately also caused casualties. One unit was decimated, with the exception of three men, by enemy sniper fire. Throughout the entire operation the loyalty and bravery and devotion to duty of the men were most outstanding. All of those who were killed died with their faces toward the enemy and as they moved forward to accomplish their objectives.”

  Seaman First Class Robert Watson was on the first landing craft to head to Fox Green Beach, and the vessel came under fire two hundred yards from the shore. “Our craft hit a mine that blew the front of the boat clear out of the water at the same time we were hit with 88 mm shells from the beach,” he recalled. “It was then that I found myself in the water over my head with a full pack on my back. Somehow I made it to the beach behind a hedgehog, which gave me some cover. There were bodies, body parts, and blood everywhere.”

  One demolition team man sprinted through the labyrinth without a scratch, successfully wiring and blowing up obstacles as a voice yelled at him to keep down.

  An exuberant “F—k!” was all he had to say, and he ran off to continue his work.

  In horror, a wounded naval demolition man lying on the beach witnessed panicked GIs spilling out of a landing craft, falling on top of each other and disappearing in the water. “Twenty to forty guys drowned there,” recalled the injured seaman, Alfred Palacios. “Nobody was even hit.” He recalled standing up and screaming helplessly to no avail, then crying, and finally passing out.

  A landing craft was impaled on a steel tetrahedron barrier just five hundred yards from the beach, offering a stationary target for German gunners. “I ordered all hands to inflate their life belts,” recalled Ensign Herbert Duquette, officer-in-charge of NCDU 128, “then carrying forty pounds of TNT apiece we swam for the beach. Only seven of my men made it in.”

  As he continued attaching explosives to the German obstacles in the water, Ken Reynolds saw incoming American boats and vehicles slicing through some of the priming wires, rendering the charges useless. Scattered infantry troops were tripping through and disabling the wires as well, and enemy fire was shredding other sections of wire.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, Ken Reynolds glimpsed a horrifying sight.

  American infantrymen were taking cover behind the obstacles his team had just wired up with explosives. Their landing craft were coming in and unloading too fast, before the gaps could be blown open.

  When fired, the charges would explode in 120 seconds, creating flying shrapnel of steel fragments that would be deadly for over one hundred yards. And the Army troops were only inches away from the charges.

  “Get out of there! Get out!” screamed Reynolds. “We’re going to blow it!”

  But more Army troops crowded behind the obstacles, too terrified to move forward into the blizzard of German bullets and mortar fire.

  Instead of killing Germans, the U.S. sailors were about to kill their fellow Americans.

  It was nearly 7 A.M. on Omaha Beach. No matter how hard Ken Reynolds screamed, some U.S. Army troops would not budge from the explosives-charged obstacles. Reynolds grabbed one GI and shoved him away with a foot on his backside. “The Army guys were hanging on the obstacles,” Reynolds said. “We’d boot them in the butt to give them two minutes to get away from there, but you really couldn’t talk to them, some of them were so scared,” Reynolds recalled, “so you’d grab and push them away from the obstacle, but after a while you got tired of doing that and tried to save yourself.” Reynolds and his teammates were forced to abandon the attempt to blow the remaining obstacles and head for the beach. By 7:30 A.M., Reynolds staggered to the beach, ran this way and that, and finally collapsed in the shelter of a small ridge. Reynolds was finally able to turn around and absorb what he’d accomplished, plus everything else that was going on. “It was a fantastic hour,” he recalled. “There were ships and bodies all over the place.” Thousands of American, British, Canadian, and German troops lay dead and wounded around the landing beaches and in the waters off the Allied landing zones of Omaha, Utah, Sword, and Juno Beaches.

  Of the 175 NCDU men who went ashore on Omaha Beach, 31 were killed and 60 were wounded. Some of the boat teams were obliterated before they could even start their work that morning. Casualties suffered by the demolition teams at Utah Beach were much lighter, with 6 killed and 11 wounded. D-Day remains the bloodiest day in the history of U.S. naval special warfare. Looking out to the water, Ken Reynolds could see that he and his colleagues in Boat Team 5 had opened up a narrow lane, an opening that they would steadily expand as the day wore on. But for now, he recalled, “We were quite fortunate, we were able to blow most of the obstacles. Some of them we missed. Our gap was wide enough for about two landing craft to come in and land side by side.” Of the sixteen corridors the NCDUs and Army combat engineers were supposed to blast open, only five full lanes and three partial gaps were opened by the time the first high tide rushed in, and most of them were inadequately marked. But that was enough to allow the landings at Omaha Beach to proceed. It was sufficient to pry open the gates of Europe. That afternoon, when the tide went down, the surviving demolitioneers went back to the beach and got to work steadily widening the gaps over the next few days to allow the full-scale invasion and liberation of Europe to proceed.

  ON A SUMMER DAY in 2012, former U.S. Navy Seaman Second Class and Naval Combat Demolition Unit sailor Ken Reynolds sat in his home in Fort Pierce, Florida, a mile or so from a museum that honors the exploits of the U.S. Navy SEALs and their predecessors.

  On his wall was a framed Presidential Unit Citation. It was awarded to the Naval Combat Demolition Units by the secretary of the Navy on behalf of the president of the United States, to honor the work Reynolds and his colleagues did on D-Day in the bloody sands of Omaha Beach.

  Reynolds thought back to that morning in June 1944, and he told us there was one thing he couldn’t figure out. It had puzzled him for the last sixty-eight years.

  “I think I did my job very well and I survived. Some guys did their jobs well and didn’t survive. I managed to survive. Why? I don’t know.” Reynolds showed us the Ka-Bar knife he carried onto Omaha Beach on D-Day.

  “This was the only thing we carried on the day of the invasion,” he explained. “The knife was important to us to cut cords, wires, and so forth. It was never used as a weapon, it was just strictly Navy issue. It was a good knife, it served us well. It’s a memento of what little we had on the invasion that day. That’s all that we had to work with when we were charging all the obstacles to blow them out of the way.” It is one of countless thousands of similar knives issued to U.S. military p
ersonnel from World War II to today, and is a particular favorite of today’s Navy SEALs.

  When he returned from Europe, Reynolds reported back to the Navy base at Fort Pierce, Florida, in September 1944, where he met his future wife. “We met in the USO. She was with her mother. She noticed me first, she said she liked my view from the rear. So anyway, that sparked a conversation. The conversation led to me taking them both to a movie in Fort Pierce, mother, daughter and me, and it went on from there. We stayed married for sixty-one years, and had three children.”

  After World War II, Ken Reynolds became a diesel mechanic, worked for Caterpillar to help construct the Interstate Highway System, and managed eleven steel mills. For many decades, he never talked about the war, including to his family. Then in his final years, Reynolds volunteered at the Navy UDT-SEAL museum at Fort Pierce, where he began telling the story of his work on Omaha Beach to any visitors who were interested in learning about it.

  Over the years, it bothered him a bit that in all the stories he read and movies he saw about D-Day, he never came across the story of the NCDUs, who were among the earliest combat ancestors of the U.S. Navy SEALs. “But we were there,” he told us, “very much so, we were there.”

  A few days after the seventieth Anniversary of D-Day, Ken Reynolds died at the age of eighty-eight. He had recently been inducted into the French National Order of the Legion of Honour.

  CHAPTER 2

  DAWN OF THE NAKED WARRIORS

  SAIPAN, JUNE 14, 1944, 9:00 A.M.

  THE FORCE:

  300 U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) personnel

  THE ENEMY:

  Japanese Imperial Navy and Army troops

  THE MISSION:

  Reconnaissance and demolition of landing beaches to spearhead the assault to liberate Asia and the Pacific

  Lieutenant Commander Draper Kauffman braced himself and slipped into the water. He and three hundred demolitioneers of the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) 5, 6, and 7 were about to try something no one had ever done before: a large-scale combat swimmer reconnaissance and beach survey while under enemy fire.

  They were going to swim toward the shore of a heavily fortified strategic outpost of the Japanese Empire, practically into the muzzles of enemy guns, conduct a complex beach reconnaissance and survey mission while under intense enemy fire, and try to make it back to their ships in one piece.

  It was a clear summer morning in the waters west of the tropical island of Saipan, and through his thick eyeglasses Kauffman could glimpse the coral lagoon and lush sandy beach that formed his target. Onshore, scores of Japanese gunners easily spotted the approaching Americans and prepared to open fire.

  The next day, only eight days after the D-Day landings in Europe, the UDTs would try to blow open a path for the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions to land on the southwest beaches of Saipan and sweep northward to advance the final liberation of Asia and the Pacific. Even though they were backed up by an armada of over 500 American vessels bearing over 100,000 men, including sixteen destroyers, four battleships, and six cruisers patrolling behind them, monitoring their communications, and providing massed fire support, Kauffman feared that the first wave of demolitioneers would be incredibly conspicuous and exposed to Japanese fire. When he first heard of the plan, Kauffman, who was in charge of UDT-5, figured he’d be lucky if his men sustained only 50 percent casualties.

  The island of Saipan is 1,300 miles south of mainland Japan and was technically a Japanese mandate of the impotent League of Nations. But it had become an integral outpost of the Japanese war machine, home to a garrison of thirty thousand Japanese Imperial Navy and Army troops. It was considered a linchpin in the empire’s main defense perimeter guarding the Japanese Home Islands. Crucially, if the Americans captured the island, Japanese cities would fall within range of the United States’ B-29 Superfortress bombers.

  As the landing craft dropped Draper Kauffman and the UDT teams off at hundred-yard intervals along the beach, American warships plastered the shoreline and beyond with covering fire. The barrage seemed unusually intense, and some of the demolitioneers had a theory as to why.

  Commander Kauffman, a tall, bespectacled, sunburned twenty-eight-year-old officer, had a friend in a very high place in the Navy. One of the UDT men, Ed Higgins, later explained: “Draper’s father was Admiral Kauffman and he was not only an admiral, he was COMCRUDESPAC (Commander, Cruisers, Destroyers, Pacific). It could have been normal, paternal concern on the part of Draper’s father that resulted in our getting very extensive fire support covering us. Especially since most of the fire seemed to come from cruisers and destroyers.”

  As a symphony of bullets and shells raged above them, the UDT men got to work surveying the underwater landing zones with anchors, buoys, and weighted measuring string made of fishing line, writing their findings down with grease pencils on Plexiglas slates.

  The demolitioneers hitting the water off Saipan resembled strange warriors from another world. “They looked fantastic,” recalled Commander Francis Douglas Fane, later commander of UDT-13, “clad in blue sneakers, kneepads for crawling on coral, swim trunks, canvas work gloves to protect their hands from poisonous coral scratches, glass-fronted face masks, and helmets.” He added, “Adding a final surrealistic touch, each man was camouflaged blue and was painted from toe to chin, and down each arm, with horizontal stripes of ordinary black paint a foot apart, with shorter lines between. This war paint was not an imitation of the Indian naked warriors; it was Kauffman’s idea for quick measurement of lagoon and reef depths.” Another UDT man wrote that “men from Mars had nothing on us for grotesque appearance.” SEAL historian Tom Hawkins explained, “The ‘naked warrior’ was the UDT operator in the Pacific who went to the beach just in swim trunks, a Ka-Bar knife, a slate around his neck and a stubby pencil to take a string line reconnaissance of the beach, taking depth soundings and then recording it on their slates. They had no weapons with them at all. They had no way to protect themselves as they would go up to the beach.”

  To make the scene even stranger, Commander Kauffman and five other swim-trunked platoon and assistant platoon leaders were gliding around the water on two-man surfboard-type rubber mats, powered by their swim fins, with the officers giving orders on waterproof radios. A Japanese soldier watching the spectacle from shore would have good reason to be befuddled.

  IN NOVEMBER 1943, the need for an outfit like the Underwater Demolition Teams became tragically obvious when a disaster unfolded on a shallow coral reef off a Pacific atoll named Tarawa. Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval power was crippled at the Battle of Midway, and Japan’s advance in the Pacific was finally checked in land and sea actions around Guadalcanal. This is when U.S. forces began the long drive across the Pacific to the Japanese Home Islands, which was to be an island-hopping-and-landing campaign. The first of the island landings was to be on Tarawa Atoll’s Betio.

  With insufficient hydrological data, the Marines went ashore in the early-morning hours of November 20, 1943. Many drowned under the weight of their gear as their landing craft scraped and got stuck on underwater reefs well offshore; many more were gunned down as they waded the shallow stretches between reefs and beach. Nearly one thousand Marines died at Tarawa and more than two thousand others were wounded.

  Amphibious operations are by their very nature risky and costly, but accurate hydrographic intelligence could reduce risk and save lives. It was clear that the Navy needed men to go in ahead of the invasion forces to survey the landing beaches, and demolish obstacles and reefs that blocked Allied landing raft. There was a war on; these men had to be found and quickly trained for this important task. Soon, to accomplish this work, the Navy turned to naval officers like the guiding force of the Pacific UDTs, Lieutenant Commander John T. Koehler, who commanded UDT-2. Koehler set up the new UDT base at Maui, and developed and oversaw the needed comprehensive training programs.

  Another man the Navy turned to was Dr
aper Kauffman. He proved to be an ideal man for the job. The origins of the Navy “frogman”2 can be illustrated by the life of the charismatic Kauffman. Kauffman graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1933, but because of poor vision was unable to pass the commissioning physical. So he entered the ambulance service in France just in time to see its army overrun by the Germans in 1940. After a brief stint as a POW he went to England, where he promptly joined the Royal Navy. Midway through his training to become a British naval officer he volunteered for ordnance disposal work. Soon Sub-Lieutenant Kauffman was crawling through the rubble of London, defusing unexploded bombs.

  In 1943, Kauffman, now a U.S. naval officer, was summoned to a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp at Fort Pierce, Florida, to help oversee the training program of the new all-volunteer group called the Naval Combat Demolition Unit (NCDU), which was tasked with removing obstacles from landing beaches held by Axis forces. The NCDUs saw action in two landings in Europe, Normandy and southern France, with beach clearance being their main job, and six NCDUs remained together throughout the war in the Pacific. The training headquarters was set up in a former casino that housed the headquarters of a naval amphibious outfit called the Scouts and Raiders. Their training called for an intensive eight-week physical training regimen.

  The Scouts and Raiders staged an extraordinary training exercise in mid-1943, an operation that featured nothing less than a simulated, real-world commando raid on South Florida. “Our mission was to capture several military installations and vital national security areas,” recalled U.S. Navy Captain Howard Moore. “In executing it, one of our teams captured the DuPont Building [in Miami], which housed the 7th Naval District Headquarters. Not only did they take the Marine guard in custody and ‘knock out’ its communications center, they bodily carried out the admiral commanding. My team was taken to within a couple thousand yards off Ft. Lauderdale. After paddling rubber boats ashore we got onto the highway several miles from our objective, the Port Everglades docks and oil terminals. We were black-faced, in black jumpsuits, with camouflaged helmets on, and we stopped the first vehicle that came along, a Greyhound bus with a few passengers. We told the driver to turn around and take us to Port Everglades. He complied with our ‘request.’ We ran through the gates as the guards tried to wave us down. Our leader, Ensign Ray G. Walter, told the driver not to pay any attention to them. We kept going for about a half mile and told the driver to let us off near a swampy area. We disappeared into the brush, paired off, and attached a pound or so of modeling clay ‘plastic explosive’ to each storage unit, with dummy blasting caps and fuses. Part of the team also ‘blew up’ the unloading terminal’s structures and pipeline.”