by Orr Kelly
Kistiakowsky was a favorite in the training compound until he disappeared one night. Shortly after the war ended, Kauffman saw a picture of Kistiakowsky with Robert Oppenheimer and learned he had been spirited away to work on the first atom bomb. Kistiakowsky later went on to serve as science adviser to President Eisenhower.
Kauffman and his men worked hard not only at training but at developing workable tactics. Still Kauffman couldn’t rid himself of a nagging worry. He couldn’t picture his men paddling ashore in their explosives-laden rubber boats, groping around in the dark, and successfully destroying the enemy’s beach defenses. He had the uneasy feeling that they were really trying to prepare for an impossible mission.
Despite his misgivings, the first six men of the Eleventh Naval Combat Demolition Unit were sent to England early in November 1943 to begin preparing for the Normandy invasion.
A few weeks later, Bucklew and four members of the Scouts and Raiders, still a separate unit, also arrived in England and began stealthy reconnaissance operations along the Normandy coast. In what was quickly recognized as a classic breach of the most basic security rules, an admiral thoughtlessly permitted Bucklew and his men to see the plans for Overlord, the code name for the Allied invasion of France. When it was realized that these men would actually be crawling up on the enemy’s beaches months before the invasion and were therefore in serious danger of capture, they were sent to a special school to teach them how to resist interrogation and to escape, if captured.
Operating from small rubber boats at night, Bucklew and his men took soundings of the water depth all along the planned invasion beaches. Bucklew even crawled ashore one night and brought back a bucketful of sand so army experts could test it to determine how well it would support tanks and other heavy vehicles as they came ashore. Perhaps more important, Bucklew also studied the nighttime silhouette of the French coast so he would be able to guide the invading force as it approached the Normandy beaches for one of the most crucial battles of the European war.
The six graduates of Kauffman’s academy who arrived in England early in November of 1943 made up a Naval Combat Demolition Unit. These units were later enlarged into thirteen-man gap-assault teams. In contrast, the Underwater Demolition Teams being formed in the Pacific were much larger, consisting of about eighty enlisted men and sixteen officers—smaller than, but roughly comparable to, an army infantry company.
Those first demolitioneers were among the initial victims of the great secrecy surrounding plans for the invasion. No one knew who they were, what they were supposed to do, or even where they were expected to eat and sleep. This was in contrast to the situation in the Pacific, where Admiral Turner gave his personal high-level attention to the welfare of the Underwater Demolition Teams. Not until early April, just two months before the Normandy invasion, did the navy men get together with the army engineers to plan the clearance of beach obstacles. And it was well into May before two lieutenant commanders—with no experience in demolition work, but enough rank to gain access to needed intelligence—were sent to England to take command of the units assigned to clear the obstacles at the two American beaches, Omaha and Utah.
The intelligence was ominous.
Field Marshal Rommel himself had visited the potential invasion beaches and sketched out formidable defenses in which steel posts were driven deep into the sand, connected with barbed wire, and reinforced by mortar and machine-gun emplacements. To further strengthen the defenses, the posts were topped by platter-shaped teller mines that would go off on contact.
Even more worrisome were the huge metal structures that had been spotted hidden near beaches all along the French coast. These so-called Belgian gates were steel latticework barriers, ten feet square and propped up by heavy steel braces. Although they weighed three tons, they were designed to be manhandled far out onto the sand at low tide to block access to a beach.
Word of these formidable defenses worked its way down to the navy demolition teams early enough for them to build their own Belgian gates and then try to destroy them. The trick was not only to blow up the structure but to prevent littering the beach with a tangle of steel that would remain as much a problem as the original obstacle. A young lieutenant named Carl P. Hagensen came up with the solution: a waterproof canvas bag filled with plastic explosive and fitted with a cord at one end and a hook at the other so that it could be quickly attached to an obstacle.
Bucklew, who did not like loud noises, was impressed by the practice explosions conducted in a sandy area near Plymouth on the south coast of England. In the States, training usually involved a charge of half a pound, on rare occasions a full pound. In England, the demolition men used twenty-pound charges, enough to “blow that steel for half a mile.” In those tests, the sausage-shaped packages of explosives designed by Hagensen worked perfectly. Attached to the braces of a Belgian gate, they caused the big frontal latticework to fall flat on the beach. By the time of the invasion, ten thousand Hagensen packs were ready for use, and they soon became popular with the Underwater Demolition Teams in the Pacific.
In the weeks before the invasion, every available man was flown from Fort Pierce to England, while other sailors were simply drafted into the demolition teams and hastily trained. As the training ended in late May, the men were organized into thirteen-man gap-assault teams, one for each of the eight gaps planned for the beach code-named Utah and one for each of the eight gaps in the two halves of Omaha Beach. Working in tandem with them were twenty-six-man teams of army engineers whose job was to take care of the obstacles above the high-water mark while the navy worked on those closer to the water or actually submerged.
Long before dawn on 6 June, Bucklew was in a big landing craft in the van of the armada churning across the channel. About fifteen miles off the French coast, his small boat was launched, and he set off on a now-familiar assignment—to lead the troops to the proper landing zone on Omaha Beach. With his little boat stripped of most of its armament, his gasoline engine pushed him along at about fifteen knots, which meant a run of an hour or a little less.
Bucklew had gone only about three miles when war suddenly erupted far down the coast to his right, about ten miles away. The sound of powerful explosions echoed across the choppy seas, and flares lighted up the sky. Bucklew had a terrible feeling that he had missed the time and the place of the landing and that the troops had gone in at the wrong spot on their own. But that was impossible. If he had gone only three of the fifteen miles to the beach, he couldn’t be that far off course. Then he recalled that army Rangers were scheduled to scale a cliff some distance away from the actual site of the landing, and he recognized the sounds of conflict as part of that diversionary operation.
Still he did not feel really comfortable that he was heading for the right spot until he saw the steeple of the church at the French town of Vierville, centered behind Omaha Beach. Not only had the steeple been pointed out in intelligence briefings, but Bucklew had seen it himself in his earlier visits to the landing beaches.
Everything seemed to be going precisely according to plan. In the hours before the landing, waves of bombers swept over the Nazi defenses, dropping thousands of pounds of explosives. Then navy guns took up the task of paving the way for the landing force. Bucklew watched in awe as the salvos from the battleships, looking like huge balls of fire, passed overhead three at a time. The gap-assault teams approached the beaches in one-hundred-foot-long tank landing craft, each carrying a thirteen-man navy unit, a twenty-six-man army team, two tanks, and a tank fitted with a bulldozer blade. Each landing craft towed behind it a fifty-foot boat filled with explosives and other equipment. Watching the gunfire display, it was easy to believe the assurance many of the men had received that they would find nothing alive on the invasion beaches.
The demolition men also had the added comfort, under the plan, of forming the second wave of the assault rather than going in first to take out the obstacles. First would come Sherman tanks that had been fitted with large,
waterproof canvas girdles which permitted them to swim ashore. With the tanks would come infantrymen to clean out the few snipers who might survive the ferocious bombardment. Two minutes later, just as the low tide turned, the gap-assault teams would step ashore. They would race the incoming tide up the beach, doing most of their work on sand not yet covered by water.
The plan and the reality turned out to be two quite different things. The bomber crews, anxious not to hit the Americans, dropped their bombs slightly inland. Many of the navy shells also passed over the positions commanding the beaches and plowed the French farmland, digging long furrows eight feet deep and ten feet wide. The result was that many of the German guns, carefully positioned and sighted to cover the approaches to the beaches from the most advantageous angles, survived and greeted the approaching landing craft with withering fire.
The current along the coast also played havoc with the plan. Many of the gap-assault teams drifted off course and landed in the wrong places, finding themselves the first on the beach rather than following tanks and infantry ashore. Many of the men were killed or wounded before they ever set foot on French soil, either cut down by machine-gun bullets or swallowed up in the blast when their own landing craft were hit by enemy shellfire.
A few of the teams were able to work their way among the obstacles, placing their explosives and linking them together with primacord, a thin, explosive-filled cord that served a dual purpose. It carried the fire to the charge, much like the fuze on a firecracker. And it also gave an extra bang, to set off the explosive. Quickly the men ran for shelter, popped off a purple flare to warn of the impending blast, and then set off the explosion. In some cases, the explosions had to be delayed because infantry had taken shelter among the obstacles, too frightened to move on up the beach. The sailors ran among them, urging them to move, and setting fuzes timed to go off in two minutes. The GIs moved.
According to plan, the gap-assault teams were to land on Omaha Beach at 6:33 A.M. They had twenty-seven minutes to clear sixteen fifty-foot-wide gaps to permit the bulk of the D-day assault force to come ashore. But by noon, only five of the gaps had been successfully opened, and several of them had been partially blocked again by sunken landing craft and shattered tanks.
All through the afternoon, the demolition men followed the retreating tide, fighting to open the remaining gaps. Often, they were handicapped by lack of explosives because of the loss of some of their landing craft. The small mines that the Germans had attached to the obstacles were salvaged to eke out enough explosive power to blast the remaining barriers. At several points, the defenders seemed to hold their fire until a series of obstacles was almost ready to blow. Then they would set it off prematurely with gunfire. In one crew, five men were killed and six more were wounded by such a tactic.
By evening, when the tide turned once more, thirteen of the planned sixteen gaps had been cleared and marked, and the Americans had a firm foothold on Hitler’s “Fortress Europa.” But the cost had been hideous. 6 June 1944 is remembered as by far the worst single day in the history of naval special warfare. Of the 175 navy men involved in the assault on Omaha Beach, 31 died and 60 more were wounded, a casualty rate of 52 percent.
Twelve miles to the northwest, the remaining gap-assault teams came ashore with the second American landing force on Utah Beach. Here the line of obstacles along the beach was incomplete, a much less formidable gauntlet than that arrayed at Omaha Beach. Within an hour and a half, the demolition men cleared seven hundred yards of beach. Then they waited for the tide to recede and opened up another nine-hundred-yard gap. Four of the sailors were killed and eleven wounded when an 88mm shell fell among them, a much smaller casualty toll than that suffered by their colleagues a few miles away.
As the army fought its way inland—with a few of the more adventurous navy demolition men tagging along—preparations were nearing completion for the next major battle in the Pacific, the invasion of Saipan.
CHAPTER
3
From Saipan to Tokyo Bay
IN THE PACIFIC EVENTS MOVED SWIFTLY TOWARD A DIFFERent kind of battle, but one as important, in its way, as Normandy.
Even before Tarawa, the Fifth Amphibious Force had set up a training site at Waimanalo, on the coast of Oahu west of Honolulu. Gathered there were not only men who had been trained at Fort Pierce but also soldiers and marines assigned to develop the tactics for paving the way for the amphibious operations that lay ahead in the American advance across the Pacific.
Their first test in combat came in Operation Flintlock, the attack on Kwajalein on 31 January 1944. This operation, coming little more than two months after the near-disaster at Tarawa, was very much an experiment as far as the newly formed Underwater Demolition Teams were concerned.
Kwajalein, fortunately, was an almost ideal site for the fledgling UDTs to work out their tactics and test their innovative devices. The atoll lies in the Marshall Islands about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines and is surrounded by a cluster of small islands. The original American plan had been to advance step-by-step toward Kwajalein itself by taking the outlying islands. But navy intelligence experts, analyzing Japanese radio transmissions, learned that the bulk of the Japanese forces had been moved to the outlying islands, leaving Kwajalein relatively lightly defended. Instead of hacking away at the heavily defended outer islands, U.S. commanders decided instead to cut straight through to the heart of the enemy complex.
The attack consisted of two spearheads, one aimed at Kwajalein and the other at the nearby twin islands of Roi-Namur. Two Underwater Demolition Teams, hastily formed with a nucleus of Scouts and Raiders veterans, were on hand.
Team One was assigned to support the army’s 7th Division in its assault on Kwajalein.
Team Two accompanied the 4th Marine Division in the attack on Roi-Namur. The training given and the tactics followed showed the strong Fort Pierce influence. Accompanied by marine scouts, the team members set out in rubber boats with outboard motors for a nighttime reconnaissance of the invasion beaches. They were in full combat uniform, and all wore life vests. They were under strict orders—drawn directly from the rules at Pierce—that if any of the men went into the water, they were to be attached to the boat by a lifeline. Although they were hampered by darkness and the choppy water, the recon teams reported back that the beaches were suitable for landing, and they turned out to be right.
As dawn broke, the team prepared for a major experiment. They had brought with them a promising new secret weapon: small wooden landing craft converted into remote-controlled floating bombs. These Stingrays, as they were called, were designed to speed in toward enemy defenses where they would be exploded by radio, clearing a path for the following troop craft. They were one possible answer to the difficulty the marines had had getting ashore at Tarawa.
The first Stingray was aimed at a pier jutting out from the center of the beach at Roi-Namur. Filled with five tons of dynamite, it sped off toward the beach, disappearing into the smoke hanging heavy in the air. First the arming signal was sent. And then as the seconds ticked off, the Fire signal was flashed. The sound of ten thousand pounds of explosives detonating should have been loud enough to be clearly audible, even over the sounds of the naval bombardment. The men in the control amtrac exchanged puzzled glances. Suddenly, the Stingray emerged from the haze and went into a tight turn, directly into the path of the landing craft carrying the first wave of marines.
Three of the UDT men pulled alongside the errant drone in a small boat and two of them jumped aboard just in time to cut the wires to the arming device, which was within moments of setting off the explosion.
One more Stingray was prepared for action. It had barely headed toward the beach when it turned in a tight circle and rammed the boat from which it was supposedly being controlled. Fortunately, it did not go off.
When Team One tried their little fleet of Stingrays at Kwajalein, they had even less success. Of three drones launched, one promptly sank, and the moto
rs on the other two conked out, leaving them wallowing in the waves. Although the Stingrays still seemed like a good idea—if they had only worked—the concept was abandoned, and they were never used again in the Pacific war.
This was one major lesson of Kwajalein: the task of destroying enemy underwater defenses and other obstacles would have to be done by men, not by push-button warfare.
The other major lesson was learned by Team One in two reconnaissance operations before the Kwajalein landing. Although they had planned to make a nighttime survey of the beaches, Admiral Turner ordered two daylight approaches, at the morning and evening high tides. He was worried about a log wall under construction by the Japanese and the possibility of other surprises, perhaps hidden by the water off the invasion beaches.
True to Fort Pierce doctrine, the UDT men began their reconnaissance dressed in full combat gear. But the danger of ripping out the bottom of their boat on the hidden coral heads forced them to stay too far off shore to be sure of the condition of the beaches. Two men—Ens. Lewis F. Luehrs and Chief Bill Acheson, a Seabee—made an historic decision. They peeled off their heavy combat uniforms and stripped down to swim trunks hidden underneath. They spent about forty-five minutes in the water and came back with crucial information. They were able to sketch out the Japanese gun emplacements and the log barricade. Even more importantly, they reported that the coral heads would prevent the landing of small boats but that amtracs could make their way to the beach. They also assured the army commanders that there were no mined obstacles lying beneath the water.
Even to most members of the demolition teams, the fact that two men had swum in close to an enemy beach in the daytime and returned safely must have seemed like a lucky aberration, not a blueprint for the future. But the use of swimmers for daytime reconnaissance made a lot of sense—if they could survive and report back safely. Less than three weeks after the successful assault on Kwajalein, veterans of that operation set up a new Naval Combat Demolition Training and Experimental Base on Maui, one of the Hawaiian islands; training began early in April 1944.
