Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  One of the first teams to arrive was UDT Seven, commanded by Lt. (jg) A. B. Onderdonk. As they debarked after a rough passage from Pearl Harbor, they found that the mess hall had burned down. During the entire month and a half they remained there in training, there were no mess hall or galley facilities available. Food was prepared in fifty-five-gallon GI trash cans and ladled out into mess kits in the open air. When the wind blew, the food became liberally coated with sand. The eighty men and sixteen officers of UDT Seven felt as though they had arrived in a different world—as, in many ways, they had. An anonymous team historian later described the scene at Maui:

  From the very first it was apparent the training program here was not integrated or coordinated in any way to that of Fort Pierce. In fact, the general impression created by the very meager training staff at Maui, consisting of one officer and five enlisted men, was that much of the Fort Pierce training had best be forgotten. While Maui training was intended to be specific and detailed for the needs of amphibious warfare in the Pacific, much of the basis of the training program was at complete variance and new and different from that of Fort Pierce. Major points of difference can be summed up as follows:

  1—Emphasis on developing strong swimmers.

  2—Minimizing the use of rubber boats.

  3—Conducting training operations while in the water without life belts—a violation of a Fort Pierce order.

  4—Working in the water or on the beach wearing swim trunks and swim shoes as compared to the combat greens, field shoes, and helmets required at Fort Pierce.

  5—The use of face masks.

  The completely different atmosphere at Maui came as a particular shock to Draper Kauffman, who had set up and commanded the training facility at Fort Pierce. Not one to be sidelined in a training command while a war was on, Kauffman had arranged through friends to have messages sent up through the chain of command requesting his assignment to combat units in both England and the Pacific. His ploy worked, and he was in command of UDT Five when it sailed for Maui—although the fact that the messages coming in from commanders in both the Atlantic and Pacific were identical was a cause of some embarrassment.

  Shortly after his arrival, Kauffman was called to Oahu by Admiral Turner and shown what he later recognized as a chart of the island of Saipan. He suffered two quick shocks. One was the realization that his men would have to swim a mile in to the beaches and a mile back again—much more demanding than the four-hundred-yard swims that were part of the training at Fort Pierce.

  The second shock came when Turner told him: “Now, the first and most important thing is reconnaissance for depth of water, and I’m thinking of having you go in and recon around eight.”

  It never occurred to Kauffman that Turner meant eight in the morning. So he replied, “Well, Admiral, it depends on the phase of the moon.”

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

  Kauffman gasped: “In broad daylight? Onto somebody else’s beach in broad daylight, Admiral?”

  The decision to send the swimmers in during the daytime was just the opposite of the practice of the British COPP swimmers, who used the cover of darkness, but suffered because of the difficulty of working at night.

  As soon as Kauffman got back to Maui, he instituted a new training requirement: a one-mile swim before breakfast each morning. Realistically, he should have required a two-mile swim. But he personally hated that early morning swim—and he figured that, if his men made it in to the beach at Saipan, they’d muster the strength to swim back out again.

  Kauffman also quickly realized something that had been apparent to Turner and other veterans of the Kwajalein operation: daytime reconnaissance of an enemy beach could only be done successfully if the swimmers had overwhelming naval gunfire support to suppress enemy fire. On his next visit to Oahu, Kauffman sought out Turner again.

  “What I would really like is to borrow, just for a weekend, a couple of battleships and cruisers and destroyers,” Kauffman told him.

  Turner, who was not known for a placid disposition, thundered, “What in hell would you like to borrow my battleships and cruisers and destroyers for?”

  “Well, sir,” Kauffman replied, “you speak of this very heavy fire support, these guns firing directly over us, and I would guess that this would be a very unusual experience, to be swimming in with eight- and sixteen-inch guns firing almost flat trajectory right over your head.”

  Perhaps it helped that Kauffman’s father was, at the time, COMCRUDESPAC—commander of cruisers and destroyers in the Pacific. Turner agreed to loan Kauffman his father’s ships. It is some measure of the naval might the U.S. had mustered in the Pacific in the two years since much of its fleet went to the bottom at Pearl Harbor that, the next weekend, two battleships, three cruisers, and a squadron of destroyers arrived off the coast of Maui to give the swimmers a feel for what it was like to approach the beach under heavy gunfire. It was the same lesson Bucklew had learned the hard way off the coast of Sicily.

  All of this activity at Maui was part of the preparation for a new phase of the war. On 17 February 1944, less than three weeks after Kwajalein, the men of UDT One had done the beach reconnaissance—again in swim trunks—for the marine landing on Eniwetok, directly to the west of Kwajalein. This successful landing was the final battle of the “atoll war” in which the United States worked its way north and west, taking the flat little islands of the central Pacific. Next to come was the movement toward the larger islands of the Marianas, where strong defenses had long been in place and where caves and rocky hills added to the man-made defenses.

  A key target in this new phase was the island of Saipan. Except for the symbolic raid on Tokyo in 1942, in which Jimmy Doolittle led a flight of B-25 bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet, the Japanese home islands had remained immune from Allied attack. The capture of Saipan would bring Tokyo and other major cities of Japan within range of the new B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force. For both sides, the battle for Saipan would be one of the most crucial of the Pacific war.

  On 30 May 1944, Underwater Demolition Teams Five, Six, and Seven left Hawaii on three destroyers to begin reconnaissance of the Saipan shoreline. The men found themselves jammed into tiny spaces deep down in the ship’s hold with bunks stacked four deep. Under the bunks and in any spare space, they stored their tetryl, which was not supposed to explode but was highly flammable. Their explosive fuzes were carefully stored away in metal lockers.

  Three days before they left Pearl Harbor, Turner put Kauffman in charge of the three teams. Kauffman was a worried man. He still had grave reservations about Turner’s plan to send them in to survey the enemy beaches in daytime, and he feared a terrible loss of life. One order he issued on the way across the Pacific indicates his state of mind: all his sailors were required to memorize the chain of command so that, no matter how many were picked off, they would still know who was in charge.

  Even as their crowded old four-stack destroyers sailed westward, the sailors were still trying to work out the best way to chart the contours of a beach while under enemy fire. One plan called for the men, working in two-man teams, to carry slates and pencils capable of writing underwater and to use them to note the estimated depth of the water and plot the location of coral heads, mines and man-made obstacles. Another, more ingenious, plan called for the men to paint stripes on their bodies, with a solid line every foot and a striped line each half-foot. This way they could quickly estimate the depth of the water.

  Supply officers puzzled over the strange orders they received from these UDTs, whose role in the invasion was a closely guarded secret. They demanded fifty-five miles of fishing line. Then they wanted dozens of empty four-inch-diameter milk cans welded end-to-end. Oddest of all was the insatiable demand for condoms.

  To the team members, this all made sense. The fish line would be knotted every twenty-five feet and attached to buoys. The milk cans would serve as ree
ls for the line. Counting the knots in the line, painted swimmers would be able to signal both their depth and their position to officers in rubber boats bobbing a short distance offshore. And the condoms? They were used to protect watches, fuzes, and other equipment from the salt water.

  As the beach reconnaissance began on the morning before the invasion, scheduled for 15 June, Teams Five and Seven each took separate beaches. Team Six remained on its destroyer, ready to replace the losses Kauffman fully expected. Turner, true to his word about gunfire support, lined up four battleships, six cruisers, and sixteen destroyers to plaster the Japanese defenses. When the swimmers closed to within seventy-five yards of the beach, the ships, fearful of hitting the men in the water, aimed further inland. Waves of carrier aircraft were supposed to swoop in at that moment to make strafing runs just above the waterline, but they failed to show up.

  Despite the lack of air cover, the teams swam to within fifty feet of the beach, close enough to see the Japanese standing up in their trenches and firing at them. They returned with information that changed the basic plan for the operation. If the tanks took the planned route, they reported, they would be drowned in deep water. But another route was feasible. This meant shifting the tanks from one flank of the infantry assault over to the other side, a major last-minute change in the operation.

  All of the fears about heavy losses proved groundless. Of some two hundred men in the water, a number were wounded, but only one was killed. No one had realized how hard it is to hit a target as small as a man’s head bobbing up and down in the surf, especially since the swimmers would dive under the surface, come up for a breath at a different place, and dive again. The low casualty rate was not for lack of trying on the part of the Japanese. The swimmers were fascinated to see bullets drifting down through the water like autumn leaves.

  When the time for the landing came the next morning, Kauffman was in the lead boat, marking the channel with buoys for the tanks following closely behind. Later he visited the beach, wearing swim trunks, canvas shoes, and a face mask, his body still showing the depth-marking paint lines. A startled marine looked up from his foxhole and exclaimed, “We don’t even have the beachhead yet, and the so-and-so tourists have already arrived.”

  The UDT operation at Saipan was very much a matter of on-the-job training. Although the fishing-line method of measurement was used in later operations, many of the UDT men found it awkward and no more accurate than swimmers making their own estimates. And while slates and waterproof pencils are still used today, members of Team Seven, under fierce enemy fire at Saipan, found themselves too busy to do much writing.

  One practice which had worked fine in the peaceful waters off Maui quickly proved to be a major hazard while under enemy fire. At Maui, the landing craft that had brought the men in close to the shore circled slowly. Then when the time came to pick them up, the boat would stop beside each man while he was helped aboard. The coxswains of the waiting boats quickly learned to careen about in unpredictable high-speed maneuvers. That made the waiting boats somewhat safer, but how could they pick up the swimmers without stopping? The first solution was for a man in the boat to throw a lifebuoy attached to a line to the swimmer as the boat sped past. Then he could be pulled aboard. A better method was soon devised: A rubber boat was attached to the side of the landing craft and a man crouched in the smaller boat holding one end of a line with loops at both ends. As the boat sped toward the swimmer, he held one loop over the side. The man in the water thrust his arm through the loop—and suddenly found himself in the rubber boat. The sudden jolt could easily dislocate a man’s shoulder, so the double-loop was soon modified to give it some elasticity. That method is still used to recover swimmers after they have completed their missions.

  Other precedents were also set at Saipan. After the operation, Turner ordered medals for the swimmers who had actually swum up onto the enemy beaches: the Silver Star for the officers, the Bronze Star for the enlisted men. Kauffman argued that they should all get the same medal, a Bronze Star, or share in a unit citation. But a lieutenant commander can only go so far in arguing with a three-star admiral. Turner won that argument, and that same pattern was followed throughout the war.

  Kauffman was more successful in another argument. The battle for control of the island became a long and bloody one, with more casualties than had been suffered at Tarawa. Ground commanders looked for more troops to throw into the battle and spotted the UDT men, the equivalent of about two infantry companies. But Kauffman argued that his men were too valuable to be used as infantry, for which they had no training. Some, he noted, had never even fired a rifle. He won that argument. But the temptation to use SEALs in tasks for which they are not suited persists to this day, and it is a risk from which their relatively low-ranking commanders have a difficult time protecting them.

  Saipan was an exception to many of the other island landings in that it did not require the demolition of underwater obstacles before the landing itself. But on the night of the invasion, Kauffman’s men were called upon to enlarge the landing area where supplies were being brought ashore. They worked until 10 P.M., placing 105,000 pounds of explosives in twenty-pound packs to blow a channel three hundred feet long, forty feet wide and six feet deep.

  In the last hour, the Japanese zeroed in with mortar fire, and the men worked with the fear that a mortar round might trigger a premature explosion. In the eagerness to get the job done and blow the channel, no one remembered to warn the task-force commander. Suddenly a wall of black water erupted far into the sky and then began spreading out, coating many of the ships with the black residue from the thousands of pounds of powder. Kauffman was not to see anything comparable until, after the war, he witnessed the test of an atomic bomb at Bikini.

  Despite the success of daylight operations by the frogmen at Saipan, the fear of going onto an enemy beach in broad daylight did not disappear. At Guam, where the invasion came on 21 July, Team Three worked for four nights without making any progress. Finally they were ordered to go in the daytime to blast the beach obstacles. James R. (“Jim”) chitturn, a chief petty officer, recalls his reaction: “I can remember what I thought of that goddamn idea. I thought somebody had sold the goddamn farm. There was no way in the world we were going to get by with it.” But in the next four days, they took out some six hundred obstacles with the loss of only one man.

  For many of the men of the Underwater Demolition Teams, the war involved long periods of training or rest at Maui or at camps set up in the western Pacific, interspersed with a few days or just hours of intense physical activity and terrible danger. And sometimes there was the frustration of standing by in reserve while other teams did the dangerous work. Team Six, for example, was the reserve force at Saipan and again at Guam. In both cases, the team was called upon after the initial invasion to blast coral heads and expand the landing area. The days of boredom ended for the men of Team Six in September, when they went in before the assault on the little island of Peleliu. A team historian later chronicled the operation:

  This operation, conducted three days prior to the assault, was accomplished under heavy machine gun and sniper fire. The data assembled showed the areas were strewn with large coral boulders which would prevent the passage of tanks, DUKW’s [an amphibious vehicle] and other vehicular equipment. Furthermore, the enemy had erected lines of heavily braced posts near the shore abreast of the beaches. Finally it was reported that heavy machine guns effectively covered the area. On the following two days, although constantly exposed to enemy fire, the operating platoons blasted the large coral boulders just off the beaches. On the second night eight picked units proceeded to within 50 yards of the enemy’s rifle pits and machine guns to place over 1,000 demolition charges which successfully cleaned out the obstacles on the beaches. A fortuitous combination of good fire support, coolness and battle-wisdom and good luck enabled the team to accomplish this whole operation without a casualty.

  Normally the work of the UDTs was pre
tty well finished when the marines or soldiers had secured their beachhead. But on the twelfth day of the battle for Peleliu, when the marines had driven the enemy to the northern end of the island, Teams Six and Eight were assigned a dangerous task. The Japanese still controlled neighboring Negesebus island and, at night, slipped supplies across to troops holding out on Peleliu. The two islands were connected by a causeway, but if marines tried to cross it, they would be exposed to concentrated artillery fire. The UDT swimmers were asked to swim the length of the strait dividing the two islands to see if tanks and other vehicles could ford the strait rather than feeding themselves into the gunfire concentrated on the causeway.

  Thirteen men set out to swim up the strait, a total of three miles in water no more than four feet deep. Ships could not approach closely enough to shell the Japanese on both sides of the strait, so the only protection the swimmers had was a few strafing runs by navy fighters. They swam in as close to the causeway as they could until machine-gun fire forced them to stop, then swam back out to sea. The mission was a complete success. Not only were they able to pinpoint a safe route across the strait for the tanks, but all of the swimmers returned unharmed.

  The attack on Peleliu reflected a major decision in the strategy for carrying out the war against Japan. The navy favored a direct approach toward the home islands, employing both naval and air power. The successful capture of Saipan and its airfield was part of that strategy. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was in command of forces in the southwest Pacific area, favored a different strategy built around the recapture of the Philippine Islands. MacArthur, who had fled from the Philippines by PT boat and B-17 bomber to escape the invading Japanese, had vowed to return.