Navy Seals

by Couch, Dick

  No doubt impressed by the Scouts and Raiders’ capabilities, Draper Kauffman asked the Scouts and Raiders if they could compress the highlights of their training program into a single week. It quickly became known as Hell Week. And that’s what a critical part of Navy SEAL training is still known as today. “Hell Week isn’t designed to kill you,” wrote modern-day SEAL Rorke Denver. “It’s designed to make you wish you were dead—or at least to push you to the edge of physical and mental endurance to see how you react. While the demands are mostly physical, the journey through them is all about mental attitude.”

  Kauffman and the officers went through the first Hell Week with their enlisted trainees. That established a precedent that continues to this day; officers and enlisted men endure training side by side during the arduous week. Those who survived Hell Week were then trained in demolitions, beach reconnaissance, and hydrographic survey work. Then, as now, they trained in boat crews of six to eight men with an officer in charge. The crews worked as teams during training and in combat, just as SEALs do today.

  Kauffman also set the tone for a special bond between officers and enlisted men. Beginning with the first class, he brought the volunteers into a room, officers on one side and the enlisted men on the other. To the enlisted he said, “I will do everything in my power to see that no officer graduates from this school under whom I would not be happy to go into combat.” To the officers he said, “I will do everything in my power to see that no enlisted man graduates from this school whom I would not want to lead in combat.” The officers and enlisted men then shared alike in the miseries of Fort Pierce and NCDU training. The carnage suffered by the Marines at Tarawa added urgency to the pace of their training, and the need to get them into action in both the Pacific and European combat zones.

  After being transferred to the UDT training base at Maui, Hawaii, Commander Kauffman was called into the Pearl Harbor office of Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, head of the Fifth Amphibious Force of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet. “We don’t want another blunder like the one at Tarawa,” announced Admiral Turner, referring to the costly landings four months earlier when nearly one thousand U.S. Marines were killed in part because Navy planners didn’t have detailed data on the water depths in the landing zones.

  Kauffman watched Turner trace his finger on a map of Saipan, an island that measured fourteen miles long by five miles wide. “Here,” said Turner, “are the beaches on which we plan to land. And here is a coral reef protecting them. At the north end, this reef is about one mile offshore. Down here, about half a mile.

  “Now,” said the admiral, “the first and most important thing is reconnaissance to determine the depth of water. I’m thinking of having you go in and reconnoiter around eight.”

  “Well, Admiral,” said Kauffman, thinking his superior was using civilian rather than military time, “it depends on the phase of the moon.”

  “Moon?” snapped Turner. “What in the hell has that to do with it? Obviously by eight o’clock I mean 0800.”

  Kauffman was stunned. The UDTs had conducted smaller-scale daylight reconnaissance missions earlier in the year, like their combat debut at the island of Kwajalein on January 31, 1944, as part of Operation Flintlock in the Marshall Islands, during which two UDT men, Ensign Lewis E. Luehrs and Chief Petty Officer Bill Acheson of UDT-1, spontaneously decided to conduct the first American swimming reconnaissance of an enemy beach. But the Saipan plan would put hundreds of UDT personnel in extended, point-blank daylight range of enemy gunners.

  Kauffman marveled, “In broad daylight—onto somebody else’s beach in broad daylight, Admiral?”

  “Absolutely,” said his superior. “We’ll have lots of fire support to cover you.”

  “I just don’t see how you can do it in broad daylight,” said Kauffman despairingly.

  Turner cut off the objections by declaring a simple truth: “The main reason is you can see in the daytime and you can’t see at night.” When he got back to the Maui UDT training base, Kauffman oversaw a crash program in daylight reconnaissance, and pushed up the swimming requirement for a UDT man to swim a minimum of two miles. Until now, long-distance swim training wasn’t part of the UDT toolkit, but it quickly became hugely important, just as it is for today’s SEALs.

  The core unit of the UDTs became the classic two-man team of “swim buddies,” who trained together and stuck together in combat at all costs, always looking out for each other, ready to tow the other man if he became wounded or exhausted. Seventy years later, the swim buddy tradition is still going strong with today’s SEALs. As one modern-day SEAL explained to us: “A swim buddy is the man you look after, and that man looks after you. No matter where you go or what you do on an operation or exercise, out of the water or in, that swim buddy is with you. You never, ever, leave your swim buddy. That rule is number one in the Teams. The swim buddy rule especially holds true when you’re operating in the field. If you’re in the water or in enemy territory, whatever you’re in, wherever you are, you take care of each other. You make sure nothing happens to him and he makes sure nothing happens to you. And that basic integrity goes through the whole group. You always take care of your swim buddy.”

  Now, on the morning of the Saipan reconnaissance, the admiral’s prediction came true. The UDT men enjoyed excellent visibility on this clear morning. The problem was, so did the Japanese. And they were raking the demolitioneers with 3-inch and 5-inch guns and 88 mm mortar fire. One mortar shell detonated underwater and blew a UDT man clear above the surface, but he maintained his swim stroke before falling back into the water and continuing his work.

  Draper Kauffman maneuvered his “mattress” to an anchor spot three hundred yards off the beach and waited for the heavy air support that was promised at 10 A.M. “Not one plane appeared,” recalled Kauffman in a letter to his father the next day. “I got to about 100 yards from the beach and even with my bad eyes could see the Japs.” He continued, “I set up my radio and called for the damned aviators, but the aerial was shot away while I was using it.”

  The mattresses, which Kauffman hoped would help him and his team leaders maintain control and communications during the operation, were instead so conspicuous they were acting as magnets for bullets and mortar fire. One of the mattress-riding UDT men was killed by a sniper. When another UDT man’s mattress was punctured by a Japanese bullet and Kauffman offered him a lift, the man waved him off, saying, “Get that damned thing out of here!” It was the first and only time the mattresses were used in combat.

  Watching his men methodically go about their work, Kauffman was amazed. “Every single man,” he recalled, “was calmly and slowly continuing his search and marking his slate with stuff dropping all around. They didn’t appear one tenth as scared as I was. I would not have been so amazed if ninety percent of the men had done so well, but to have a cold one hundred percent go in through the rain of fire was almost unbelievable.”

  For his own part, Kauffman was also a study in courage that morning, as the commander of a nearby ship described: “Learning that two of his men had been left on the reef, [he] returned to the beach and personally rescued his men under extremely heavy rifle and machine gun fire.” For this action, Kauffman was later awarded the Navy Cross.

  When their job was complete, the UDT men collected their data, withdrew en masse to their landing craft, and made it back to their mother ship, the Gilmer, to review their charts with Navy planners. “How we got back with the loss of only one man and seven injured,” marveled Kauffman, “I don’t know.”

  The UDTs were ordered to lay explosives to blast open a path through the coral reef for the Marines’ landing craft the next day, June 15, which was the invasion’s D-Day, and to do it before dawn. But the job was so complex that it took them until 10 A.M. to be ready to detonate their charges. Kauffman himself pulled the nine fuses, set for ten minutes, and the demolitioneers swam to safety as fast as they could. The teams placed so many explosives that they had no idea what t
he blast would look or feel like. Kauffman later explained that the UDTs “were not skilled artists in the use of explosives,” and “we always used far more explosive than we really needed.” The resulting detonation was so powerful it threw a surge of black water up a quarter of a mile before engulfing several American landing ships, and Kauffman later said the blast was comparable to what he witnessed at the nuclear underwater test at Bikini Atoll.

  After the Marines had landed and secured a beachhead, the UDT men followed them ashore for additional demolition work. When Kauffman and another UDT man walked onto the beach, which was under heavy fire, they cut such exotic figures in their swim trunks, baby-blue sneakers, and body paint that one Marine, so the story goes, said, “Christ, I’ve seen everything. We ain’t even got the beach yet and the tourists are here already.” By the end of the day, twenty thousand U.S. Marines were on Saipan.

  Over the course of two days, the UDT men used more than 100,000 pounds of explosives to slice landing paths through the reef and lagoon on the southwestern side of the island, enabling U.S. Marine and Army forces to push in and capture Saipan after more than three weeks of heavy combat. From here American bombers could attack Tokyo itself. In Tokyo, Hideki Tojo was forced to resign his post as Japan’s prime minister. It was a critical turning point in the war.

  Japan’s defensive wall was cracked open, thanks in part to the demolitioneers of UDTs 5, 6, and 7, three of whom died in the operation. Draper Kauffman later sent his Navy Cross to the mother of one of the UDT men who died in the Battle of Saipan, a popular UDT-5 team member named Bob Christianson. “He deserves it far more than I do,” wrote Kauffman.

  AT THE AMERICAN LANDINGS on Guam in late July 1944, UDTs 3, 4, and 6 played a critical role in reconnoitering and blasting open channels for U.S. Marines and vehicles to pour across the beaches.

  Days before the invasion, the demolitioneers paddled toward the beach in small rubber craft stuffed with explosives, then slid into the water towing twenty-pound packs of tetrytol. After tying in the packs with detonation cord on the coral reef and Japanese obstacles, everyone but two “fuse men” swam back to the boats. The fuse men cut fuses long enough to let them swim as fast as they could to safety before the detonating cord blasted the obstacles sky-high. The UDTs joked that the fuse men were the fastest swimmers on earth.

  The UDTs worked for three days and nights blowing up the beach obstacles on the beaches of Guam. “150 obstacles [were] removed using 3,000 pounds Tetrytol,” read a UDT after-action report. “The enemy had placed obstacles in an almost continuous front along the reef. These obstacles were piles of coral rock inside a wire frame made of heavy wire net.”

  At one primary landing spot near the little town of Agat, the night before the Marines were scheduled to storm ashore a team of demolitioneers slipped onto the enemy-held White Beach and playfully erected a five-by-two-foot wooden sign, carefully lettered with black paint and facing the ocean, then slipped back into the water. The sign read:

  WELCOME MARINES

  AGAT USO TWO BLOCKS

  COURTESY UDT 4

  As the war in the Pacific ground on, every landing beach was different and each presented its own unique challenges. So these first UDT demolitioneers became adept at improvisation. As the problems arose, they solved them. A good example is the development of the waterproof firing assembly. From the beginning, the NCDUs and UDTs were trained in the use of demolitions against natural and man-made obstacles. Beach obstacles, from man-made steel tetrahedrons to natural coral reefs, had to be blown out of the way, and that meant the reliable priming of explosive charges—underwater explosive charges. Navy scientists and engineers tried any number of ways to make a reliable waterproof initiator for submerged explosives. None of them worked. Then a bright sailor came up with the idea of using condoms and neoprene cement. It was simple, cheap, and it worked every time. The UDTs in the Pacific became a huge consumer of military-issue condoms, ordering thousands of them while the Navy supply system was trying to figure out what exactly was going on.

  A few years ago, a SEAL team commanding officer stated in his standing orders: “Flexibility is found in the dictionary under Naval Special Warfare.” That all started with the NCDU and UDT demolitioneers of World War II. The conditions were ideal for innovation and spontaneity. All the men selected for this new naval specialty were volunteers, carefully selected and screened. They were then subjected to a physical regime that further cut their numbers, often dramatically. Then they trained as teams, in a competitive environment and with officers and enlisted men sharing the same miserable conditions and dangers. This produced a tightly bonded group of men who were smart, tough, and adaptive. There were procedures for handling explosives, but given the conditions under which these first demolitioneers practiced their trade, they developed the procedures and wrote most of the first manuals. Finally and perhaps most important, they worked alone, with little tactical oversight. They were the first of their breed. Unlike conventional forces, there were no admirals or generals who had experience in this form of warfare. Basically, Admiral Ernest J. King, then chief of naval operations, gave the order to “do it,” and the teams got the job done. This way of doing business became a part of the NCDU-UDT culture and has carried forward to today’s SEALs—to the SEALs now serving around the world. Indeed, an oft-heard command within our deployed SEAL platoons is “Okay, guys, make it happen,” and the job gets done.

  Today’s SEALs are trained to operate from submerged submarines, but this was unheard-of seventy years ago. During World War II, UDT men were never launched underwater, and only once from the decks of a surfaced submarine, which culminated in the tragedy of the Burrfish operation detailed on the following pages. The marriage of UDT diver and submarine was first tried in the late 1940s and made an operational tool in the 1950s. Then, as now, most submarines were only equipped with escape trunks used to “lock out” men trapped underwater in a crippled sub. The locking out and recovering of submerged divers was, and still is, a highly choreographed underwater ballet. A great deal of coordination was needed between the UDT swimmers and submarine sailors. The early lessons and procedures validated by the postwar UDTs are in use today as nuclear submarine crews often train to routinely launch and recover SEALs and their minisubs. The protocols and procedures that drive these complex operations were pioneered by the UDTs.

  Getting UDT men to the job site was one matter; picking them up was another. In World War II, they were often recovered by a rubber lasso of sorts. A speeding small craft with an inflatable Zodiac-type boat tied alongside would race down a line of swimmers. A rubber loop secured to the speeding boat by a bungee cord would be dropped over the swimmer’s raised arm, and he would be flipped into the inflatable as it sped past. Starting in 1947, the UDTs began to experiment with helicopters. Swimmers were cast or dropped from helicopters and retrieved as the helo flew past towing a ladder across the top of the waves. This procedure is still used today, but only when the presence of a slow-moving helicopter offshore is compatible with the mission. Cast-and-recover by helo is still a procedure-driven business; communication between the aircrew and the swimmers is essential. In fact, the last SEAL fatality in Vietnam was the result of a failed jump from a helicopter.

  WHEN OSAMA BIN LADEN was killed in May 2011, the world gained a glimpse into the shadows of the strong partnership between the SEALs and the Central Intelligence Agency. But what few people realize is that the relationship stretches back all the way to the summer of 1943, when the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, formed its own Maritime Unit of spies, boatmen, saboteurs, swimmers, and demolitioneers.

  Although the maverick OSS chief General “Wild Bill” Donovan was often the loser in bureaucratic turf battles with the regular military and the FBI, he did manage to create a maritime force that saw action during World War II on the coasts and rivers of Burma, India, Thailand, China, and Europe. The mission of the Maritime Unit was defined officially as “in
filtration of agents and operatives by sea, the waterborne supply of resistance groups, execution of maritime sabotage, and the development of special equipment and devices.”

  Working out of secret training bases in the Caribbean and California (some of the OSS swimmers were former Santa Monica lifeguards), the OSS Maritime Unit helped pioneer several of the techniques and technologies that flowed into the toolkits of the postwar UDTs and are still used by the SEALs of today. They included face masks, flexible swim fins, limpet mines, waterproof watches and compasses, fast patrol boats, swimmer submersible craft, a closed-circuit, pure-oxygen rebreathing apparatus called the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit (LARU), which was very handy since it let you swim thirty feet down without leaving a trail of air bubbles for the enemy to spot. “The gadgets that OSS Maritime developed were along the lines of capabilities to do their mission of sabotage or get to the shoreline,” explained SEAL historian Tom Hawkins. “They adopted the first usable submersible from the British, which was called ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and it was a submersible canoe. It was a one-man vessel that could be propelled on the surface and then submerged for the attack. They developed a floating mattress that was powered by a 12-volt battery to propel one or two people through the water.” Hawkins sees the pioneering work of the OSS Maritime Unit as establishing early legacy capabilities still seen today in the U.S. Navy’s Special Boat Teams.