by Couch, Dick
The very first raid, on the night of August 5, did not go well. That night, a UDT-3 detachment led by Lieutenant George Atcheson left the USS Diachenko (also known as APD-123; “APD” stood for “Amphibious Personnel Destroyer”) in an inflatable boat to attack a railroad bridge and tunnel near Yosu with explosives. Before they could plant their standard Mark-135 satchel charges containing 20 pounds of C-3 plastic explosive, ten North Korean soldiers appeared out of the tunnel riding a handcar, their guns blazing. Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Warren “Fins” Foley was wounded, becoming the first Navy casualty of the Korean War. Several well-thrown hand grenades held back the enemy long enough for the UDT men to scale down the seawall and escape to their inflatable and reach the safety of their mother ship, the Diachenko. “Heading back to the beach,” recalled Atcheson, “one of my own men shot my hat off as I approached [the boat] on the run, mistaking me for the enemy in the dark.” He continued, “Very soon after that first mission, UDT-1 arrived in Japan along with a platoon of Marines from the First Marine Division Reconnaissance Company to act as backup. I joined up with them and we went on to do some fairly respectable operations that worked out considerably better than that first one.”
A typical UDT raid on a Korean target would begin after dark and originate from one of four high-speed transport APDs that rotated through Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan: the Horace A. Bass (APD-124), Begor (APD-127), Diachenko (APD-123), and Wantuck (APD-125). The APDs were World War II–era vessels that were ideally suited for amphibious operations, as they were highly maneuverable and had shallow draughts that let them come close to shore. The APD would stand a few thousand yards off the beach, and launch a landing craft that towed a rubber boat filled with the UDT men to a point some five hundred yards from land. From there, the raiders would paddle in to about 250 yards and launch scout swimmers, who would reconnoiter the landing zone and flash back the “all clear” with an infrared light.
Outside of small arms and grenades, the UDT raiders were not heavily equipped for sustained combat. Their mission was to hit, run, and swim away. In three more operations against railroad bridges and tunnels in mid-August 1950, beach security was provided by Marines under the command of Major Edward P. Dupras, who recalled, “The hardest part of my job was continually to impress the boys that our job was demolition, not fighting. If possible, we tried to avoid any firefights. If there was any interference, or if our party was detected, we withdrew and hit ’em someplace else.”
Korea was a confined, regional engagement with none of the massive amphibious operations of the previous world war. Yet there were the administrative landings at P’ohang, and MacArthur’s dramatic invasion at Inchon, dubbed Operation Chromite. There was little need for obstacle clearance at Inchon because the North Koreans felt the thirty-foot tides there would make a landing impossible, but UDT-1 and UDT-3 personnel did serve in a recon role and acted as wave guides to help steer landing craft to the right beach. The surprise Inchon landing on September 15, 1950, was a triumph for MacArthur and the United Nations forces. It helped turn the tide from total defeat to what for a time appeared to be imminent victory in a dash north to the Yalu River, which served as the border of North Korea and China; ultimately, however, the war culminated in stalemate.
On Christmas Eve of 1950, as communist forces closed in and the support ship USS Begore (APD-127) fired rounds from its 5-inch guns overhead, a U.S. Navy UDT detachment wired up a vast arsenal of explosives and primacord fuse around the harbor area of the port of Hungnam on Korea’s east coast, now part of North Korea. Weeks earlier, a massive Chinese intervention suddenly threw back UN forces from the mountainous northern frontier of Korea. UN forces were completing an amphibious evacuation of some 100,000 allied troops and over 90,000 Korean refugees, and Allied war planners did not want the harbor facilities to fall into the enemy’s hands intact. The demolitioneers activated the delayed fuse, scrambled back to the Begor, and watched the entire harbor erupt in a deafening wall of fire and smoke. It was the biggest blast of the Korean War and the largest nonnuclear explosion since World War II.
In the Korean War, the cooperation between the UDTs and America’s spy agency, which had its origins in similar work in World War II, intensified into full-scale joint guerrilla operations with local forces. “In 1951,” recalled UDT-1’s George Atcheson, “I was again assigned to a CIA clandestine program. My part involved recon swimming, demolitions, and small unit tactics, about which I knew almost nothing. Nevertheless, we formed [a] Special Missions Group [SMG] of about 30 men. They were all North Koreans who had fled south at the time of the initial NK attack, and been recruited by a South Korean Army captain, who was himself then recruited by the Agency. It was from this cadre of highly motivated North Koreans that the E and E [escape and evasion] and SMG volunteers were drawn. Over time I took part in a dozen or so SMG landings.”
In the combat zone, some UDT men even managed to mix business with pleasure. “In July 1952 we were working with UDT-5 on a beach survey near the island of Cheju-do southwest of Pusan,” recalled one of their officers. “Here our froggies soon discovered that someone else was in the water with them, bare-breasted female Korean pearl divers! In a remarkable display of United Nations teamwork the UDT began diving with their newfound ‘friends,’ helping them recover pearls until we left the island a few short days later. UDT-5 always had high morale.” We don’t know if the UDT men challenged the pearl divers to a free-diving contest, but the local women probably would have won by a comfortable margin.
On January 19, 1951, the UDTs suffered their only two combat fatalities of the Korean War, when a UDT-1 beach reconnaissance team was attacked shortly after a night landing near Popsong-ni, on the west coast of what is now South Korea. The firefight was detailed in an after-action report: “About ten [North Korean] men came over the dune line, assumed prone firing positions and commenced firing at the beach party. Immediately all of the [beach party] took to the water and commenced swimming with the rubber boat. . . . Lt (jg) Edward Ivan Frey was swimming to [a towline] when he was hit twice in the head. . . . Lt (jg) Pope and QM2 Boswell attempted to keep the body afloat but, due to the strong current, they were dragged under the LCPR [landing craft, personnel-ramped] and were forced to let go. The body of Lt (jg) Frey was never again seen [Authors’ note: Frey’s body was, in fact, later recovered]. Due to the extreme cold, the swimmers were unable to help [pull other swimmers aboard]. . . . Lt (jg) Paul Vernon Satterfield was boosted to the gunwale where he was shot in the back and died immediately. During this action, the coxswain was shot in the left knee but continued to man his station. He finally collapsed and his job was assumed by a UDT-1 man. The boat’s radioman was shot through the left elbow as he helped to pull Satterfield aboard.” In the vast scheme of the war, two fatalities was not a big number, but it hit the UDT community hard.
One year later, on the night of January 25, 1952, the UDT-CIA Special Missions Group conducted one of its most effective hit-and-run attacks. Leaving from the Amphibious Personnel Destroyer Wantuck, the commandos struck a train parked between two tunnels near Songjin. They knocked the train off the track, destroyed a railroad trestle, and captured eleven North Korean soldiers.
Through the first half of 1952, the joint UDT–CIA–South Korean guerrilla teams launched a series of daring hit-and-run raids on North Korean railroads and villages, landing in rubber boats stuffed with explosive charges and penetrating inland to capture prisoners, ammunition, and records. They were sometimes thwarted by high surf and counterattacks by enemy troops, but they did inflict damage to the North Korean war effort. “We landed North Koreans, who had been trained in the south as guerrillas, on the east coast of Korea up within sixty miles of [the Soviet port at] Vladivostok,” explained UDT Commander Francis Douglas Fane. “Using the techniques of the UDT, we landed upwards of fifty a night for a couple of nights, from rubber boats, at two or three in the morning. We’d lie in the rocks while the Chinese passed by twenty or thirty feet away and
wait until the coast was clear. They advanced some thirty or forty miles into the mountains, and I went over on a C-47 and dropped rice and explosives for them.” In July through September 1952, UDT-3 and UDT-5 also participated in Operation FISHNET (also known as SEANET), an effort to damage the North Korean military’s food supply by cutting fishing nets and sinking sampans in the Sea of Japan, to the north of Wonsan, up to the Russian border.
The UDT’s work in Korea tapered off in the final months of the war, a bloody and bleak confrontation that saw some 54,000 American combat deaths and hundreds of thousands of civilian fatalities. The naval historian David Winkler summed up how his fellow historians viewed the Korean War in three simple sentences: “It opened with a North Korean drive that was checked at Pusan and countered at Inchon. Then a U.N. counterthrust was met by a blow, delivered by the Chinese, that sent the allies reeling back behind Seoul. U.N. counterattacks left the two sides fighting at the 38th parallel when a truce came into effect in July 1953.” In other words, it was a draw.
The Korean War may have been inconclusive in its battlefield outcome, but it did save the people of South Korea from the medieval barbarity of the Kim family, whose nightmarish dictatorship over North Korea continues to this day. And while the UDTs’ contribution to the war effort could not be considered decisive to the outcome, the Korean conflict saw the UDTs migrate from their strictly marine habitat onto land for the first time. The conflict also provided glimpses of skills and techniques that would later be adopted by the U.S. Navy SEALs, including commando training, blowing up land targets, and the use of helicopters for spotting targets and delivering personnel to the target zone. Still, the UDTs in Korea kept their feet largely in the water.
In the decade following the Korean War, the evolution of the UDTs was primarily underwater. Advances in radar and sonar meant that rubber boats and even surface swimmers could be vulnerable to detection. This meant developing the capacity to approach an enemy beach or harbor without being seen or heard. This required an underwater approach. The aqualung was a huge step in taking men under the sea, but had its limits as a tactical diving apparatus. There were the telltale bubbles rising to the surface and the aqualung had limited underwater duration. While the aqualung was simple and reliable, a better tactical device was needed. During World War II, Dr. Christian Lambertsen developed a closed-cycle, oxygen rebreather for use by the OSS Maritime Unit. In 1947 this apparatus, the Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit, or LARU, was adopted by the UDTs. This self-contained underwater breathing apparatus or SCUBA (a term Lambertsen coined) consisted of an oxygen bottle, a breathing bag, and a canister of soda lime. The diver’s breathing medium, pure oxygen, was recirculated within the system, with oxygen added as needed and the carbon dioxide scrubbed out by the soda lime. The standard tactical rig in SEAL teams today is the Draeger LAR-V rebreather, a highly refined version of Lambertsen’s gear.
IN THE WATERS OFF Wonsan Harbor in March 1952, UDT-5 demolitioneer Lieutenant Dick Lyon struggled to the surface and called out to his teammate and Navy explosives expert Dick Edwards who was still hunkered down in the little rubber boat the two of them had paddled close to the North Korean shoreline.
“Dick—I can hardly move!”
Lyon had just successfully snapped the mine’s mooring cable and guided the device to the surface, but he was on the verge of total paralysis from the cold. Edwards pulled him into the raft and the two of them paddled back to their host ship while dodging enemy small-arms fire and towing away the mine. Luckily for the Americans, recalled Lyon, these North Koreans “were rotten shots.”
Later, when the mine was defused and opened up, Lyon and Edwards were amazed to find a warehouse packing slip inside, written in Russian. “Clearly,” remembered Lyon, “the Russians were making the mines, getting them to China, and from China to North Korea. Talk about an oxymoron, putting a packing slip inside of a mine!” It was an important piece of intelligence, but also a sensitive one, given the precarious state of U.S.-Soviet relations at the time.
Lyon was told by his commanding officer that he would receive an award for the action. But soon he reversed himself, telling Lyon, “We’re going to play this down. I’m not going to be able to write you up at this time, but I will.”
“You’re the skipper,” said Lyon. The award never came. It didn’t seem to bother him much. “For most of our operations,” he said, “nobody was writing up awards.” The hoped-for Allied amphibious landings at Wonsan and elsewhere in North Korea didn’t materialize, and the harbor remains in North Korean hands to this day.
Six decades after the end of the Korean War, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, ninety-one-year-old former UDT officer Dick Lyon reports twice a week to Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, across the bay from San Diego, California. It’s been more than seventy years since he joined the Scouts and Raiders in World War II. He qualified to be a Navy SEAL, and in 1974, while on active reserve service, he was promoted to rear admiral. He went on to become a two-term mayor of Oceanside, California, and founder of Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
Today, former frogman Dick Lyon is helping to train the next generation of Navy SEALs, by giving lectures on the history of Naval Special Warfare and acting as a mentor to the new SEAL officers in training.
This latest class of SEAL trainees, he told us, “are about the finest bunch I’ve ever seen.”
CHAPTER 4
THE BIRTH OF THE SEALS
DECEMBER 23, 1963, 2:30 A.M.
OFF THE COAST OF THE ISLE OF PINES, CUBA
THE FORCE:
One U.S. Navy SEAL, 10 Cuban exile frogmen
THE MISSION:
Observe Cuban exiles attack Soviet-made missile boats
Bill Bruhmuller could see the lights of Cuba glowing on the horizon.
The sky was pitch-dark, the water calm and warm. It was a perfect night for an attack. He slipped off his face mask and took a compass bearing to make sure he was on the right course, and he felt the hum of distant land-based power generators vibrating through the water.
Spread around him was a formation of ten Cuban exile combat swimmers, or “frogmen,” each wearing a dark T-shirt, swim trunks, swim fins, and a face mask. They were towing a rucksack containing a supply of large, plate-sized limpet mines, and they were all equipped with a depth gauge, compass, and CIA-issued oxygen rebreathers, which would enable them to remain submerged at the point of attack without leaving a trail of telltale bubbles. The Cubans were volunteers, eager to liberate their homeland from the communist Castro dictatorship.
Their target was four Cuban navy Komar missile boats that were moored at a dock on the Isle of Pines, an island just south of the main island of Cuba, and home to one of Cuba’s biggest military and naval bases. The Komars were fast-attack and patrol boats capable of firing a radar-guided, 2,000-pound missile that could sink a full-sized warship at a range of fifteen miles. They posed a potential threat to American shipping, and they were a recent gift from the Soviet Union to its Cuban client state.
In the darkness a few thousand yards behind Bruhmuller and the Cuban frogmen was the twenty-one-foot, radar-equipped boat that had launched them into the water, with a Cuban volunteer at the helm, holding position to pick up the raiders when their operation was complete. Stowed inside the boat were a couple of Browning Automatic Rifles and .45-caliber and 9 mm handguns. On this mission Bruhmuller was to be an observer, not a participant. The attack would be made by the Cubans alone.
Several miles behind those boats, out of sight over the horizon, was their host vessel, a leaky Central Intelligence Agency spy ship named the Rex, disguised as a Nicaraguan civilian trawler.
Every man in the water knew that if they were caught, they could be lined up against a wall and shot for being spies and traitors to the revolution. Cuban security forces had condemned exiled Cuban fighters to death in absentia. Or if they were lucky and escaped execution, the frogmen, along with their American colleague Bill Bruhmuller, could expect to b
e condemned to years of misery and torture in the gulag of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s prisons.
The frogmen were swimming toward a doorway to Hell. The Isle of Pines was home to one of the most notorious prisons on earth, the old colonial fortress of Presidio Modelo, where 10,000 Cuban political prisoners were currently being held in conditions of unspeakable cruelty. Torture and sadism were routine, common criminals were enlisted to beat anti-Castro inmates with pipes and clubs, and the complex was laced with mines to kill the prisoners if a rescue or invasion tried to free them. All told, Castro’s jails held some 75,000 political prisoners, or 1 out of every 94 Cubans.
Bill Bruhmuller was a member of the very first group of U.S. Navy SEALs, a covert military unit created in January 1962. But on this night he was technically detached from the SEALs, on assignment for the CIA, as part of the Kennedy administration’s anticommunist clandestine campaign of sabotage, assassination plots, and assorted psychological warfare and dirty tricks that unfolded from 1961 to late 1963, all aimed at toppling the regime of Fidel Castro.
“Operation Mongoose” was personally supervised by U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and was run out of the CIA’s super-station in Miami, Florida, which controlled a $50 million budget, more than three hundred full-time staff, and a payroll of thousands of Cuban exiles. “My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by the Cubans themselves,” wrote the attorney general on November 7, 1961. The operation’s headquarters was an office on the campus of the University of Miami that used the cover name of Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc. The operatives also ran other properties, including merchant ships, aircraft, safe houses, marinas, hunting camps, and exile-operated publishing outfits. What very few people knew was that the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams and SEALs played a role in the secret wars against Fidel Castro, especially in training Cuban exile frogmen, performing reconnaissance missions, and on occasion, preparing to land on the island itself.
