"There is seldom a job without casualties. On the Balikpapan job, no one was killed, however. Most of the injuries are from near misses by heavy shells, some of them fired by supporting ships, which must continually rake the beach only a few yards from the swimmers. . . . Strangely enough, the swimmers fear snipers less than heavy shells. They frequently see the snipers in the act of firing at them but their bobbing heads present a difficult target and few are injured. It is not extraordinary for a swimmer to receive 25 or 30 near misses from rifle fire in the two hours or less that he spends on the obstacles. . . . Swimmers occasionally wear steel helmets if sniper fire is extremely heavy."
The foregoing lines are excerpts from notes forwarded to the Navy Department to aid in describing motion and still pictures taken by Combat Photographic Units of the Underwater Demolition Teams during their six days of work prior to the last major landing in the war against Japan.
The notes gave many other facts essential to correct voicing of the films and the captioning of photographs. Just as matter of factly, they explained that the swimmers did most of their work
20 to 50 yards seaward of the high water mark on the beach; that the beach was narrow with considerable brush along the shore; that most of the fire was machine gun, rifle, and 37 millimeter, although heavier shells from coastal and dual purpose guns were thrown at covering ships.
To one familiar with the work of the Navy's Underwater Demolition teams, the notes conveyed a comprehensive picture. To those who knew nothing of their work, as was the case with virtually all folk at home, and even with a large number of people in uniform out in the far places of the Pacific, they would give but an inkling of story about the officers and men who went to war in blue swimming suits, measuring the depths over fire-swept reefs and beaches or pushing along ahead of them water-proofed packs of high explosives to blast a way for the landing craft of the assaulting troops still somewhere back over the horizon.
Good reason the Navy had for not shouting to the world the accomplishments of the Underwater Demolition men. And the last to have sought publicity on their work were the Underwater Demolition men themselves.
After Tarawa on to the end of the war, no major landing operation was attempted without reconnaissance, demolition of obstacles if such were present, or both. The Jap had sought to multiply the normal hazard of coral barrier reefs by studding them with great concrete "scullies" reinforced with sharp-pointed rails or logs, with massive log cribs filled with concrete and coral, with sharp-pointed single hardwood logs wedged down into the reefs. In many places he interwound these solid physical obstructions with barbed wire, and frequently tied in anti-boat mines among them. With these underwater works the Jap's garrison commanders felt confident that they would be able to trap the waves of assaulting boats and blast them and their occupants to bits. If all of them were not stopped in their tracks, the Jap commanders apparently felt certain of exacting such cost in blood that an attacker would give up the job. Such thoughts were frequently reflected in Domei's broadcasts.
If the Navy had not met the problem with its Underwater Demolition Teams, the Jap's reasoning might have borne fruit, a partial yield, at least. At any rate, he most certainly would have exacted higher casualties from the forces pushing westward and northward toward the main islands of Japan.
The initial major operations of the Underwater Demolition teams in the Pacific were highly successful. The amphibious commanders perfected a fire support for these men who went swimming in against Jap defenses in broad daylight that became deadly effective. Under it, the swimmers methodically went about their work of surveying depths, locating obstacles, and blowing out such as were necessary. Fleet Admiral Nimitz' people had the solution for underwater obstacles; but it rested on a precarious foundation.
After one good sample, all the Jap needed to do was to lay traps—anti-personnel mines and other snares specifically designed to destroy the underwater demolition men before they could do their work. It was because the Jap failed to take these steps that the Navy kept rigid silence on demolition work. After the swimmers had finished their work and withdrawn with the ships and planes which had laid down fire support, a Jap garrison commander would announce that an attempted invasion had been repelled. Domei or Radio Tokyo would proclaim another victory to the world. The garrison commanders, either adverse to admitting a mistake, or failing to apprecip.te the import of the Underwater Demolition teams, probably did not inform their superiors that they should concentrate on a method to destroy men who came to war in swimming suits. At any rate, the Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams right through to Okinawa and Balikpapan boated and swam to Jap beaches without meeting with traps they expected the enemy to lay for them.
This does not mean that they were unopposed. The Jap rained down shell, mortar, machine gun and rifle fire upon them; but with doughty LCI(G)'s (landing craft loaded with 20- and 40-millimeter guns), APD's, destroyers, cruisers, even battleships, and the air arm pouring shell and bomb upon the Jap, they were able to carry out their missions with low casualties.
The result was that assault force commanders had complete information concerning water depths on beaches of which we had no previous charts; knew where they could send their landing craft; where amtracs could successfully operate; knew that mines and obstacles were gone. All this information was in their hands from one to several days before a landing. Without this information—without this service of these men who went to the enemy's beaches in swimming trunks, tennis shoes, and one-eyed goggles and carrying little sounding lines and charges of explosives around their waists—most certainly the story of our Pacific landings would have been different. Unquestionably, a lot of young Americans who are going back to civilian life on points would not have come back from the beaches of the Pacific island landings that were steppingstones to victory.
Although there are those who have pointed out that amphibious landings were not new; that United States Marines over their history many times have boated and waded ashore; that Gallipoli of World War I, and even wars of antiquity, employed landing operations under fire—the science of getting assault forces ashore against heavily defended coasts or beaches was basically a new one, conceived and developed after the war was well advanced.
It was in the early part of the summer of 1943 that Cominch's planning people, conscious of the problem that lay ahead, opened the United States Navy's school for training underwater demolition people at Fort Pierce, Florida. Germany could be reached only by armies landing on the shores of Europe. Japan's power could be broken only by seizing the bastions she had created in the islands, minute and great, in the far reaches of the Pacific.
Neither those who organized the school nor those who became its students knew what the German or the Jap would have waiting under the water through which our assault craft would have to travel or on the beaches where infantry would have to wade in under punishing fire.
So Commander Draper L. Kauffman, U. S. Naval Reserve, who was selected to head the school because of his experience in mine and bomb disposal, and his assistants, proceeded to guess at what the enemy would erect in the way of obstacles; then turned to on devising methods of destroying them.
Thousands of Americans who served in England or passed through her ports en route to meet the German saw the improvised defenses a determined Britain threw up after Dunkirk when she expected the Germans to pour across the channel. These hastily conceived defenses included railroad rails driven into the sands with their outward ends sharpened; "scullies," two-ton blocks of concrete with sharpened steel rails protruding from them; miles of steel tubing or piping fashioned into scaffolding. These devices, interwoven with barbed wire, had been placed in the surf along the likely landing places on the coast.
The officers and enlisted men—all volunteers—who entered training at Fort Pierce duplicated these British defenses and conjured from their imaginations innumerable other obstacles. Then they devised ways to blow them out of the waters, theoretically covered by enemy fire. Seabees were used to build and invent obstacles, and they produced some fantastic ones. Seabee volunteers also constituted the backbone of many of the first units trained as demolition teams, and many of them were still at the job when the war ended. The first teams were small, units of one officer and five enlisted men, which grew with experience, until the teams operating in the final stages of the war were composed of 13 officers and 87 enlisted men.
The training the officers and men went through at Fort Pierce, and later in the war at advanced Pacific bases, was rigorous and tough. They had to be able to swim long distances, to dive and work beneath the water; to stand exposure and remain calm under punishing gunfire. They had to learn accuracy and to memorize what they had observed. To most of them high explosives constituted a new field. They had to learn its vagaries. Life preservers of the cartridge inflation type were issued to the swimmers, who in their work in the Pacific would operate in pairs so that one might help the other were either wounded. Actually, many of them worked without preservers. In Pacific operations, they were equipped with fin-like attachments for their feet which gave them greater speed and endurance in the water once they had broken in the muscles on which new strain came. As the war moved on, they really became creatures of the water.
What these officers and men—some 2,500 ultimately passed through the Fort Pierce school or were trained by its alumni— theorized the enemy's defenses would be, became reality on Normandy's beaches and on the reefs and coral strands of Jap-held Pacific islands.
Complete surprise was so over-all important for that morning of June 6, 1944, that there was no opportunity for the Combat Demolition Units to reconnoiter or blast out obstacles in advance of the landings. The Navy and Army combat demolition men poured ashore with the infantry three minutes after H-hour. They landed from LCM's, two units from each. The Navy teams were composed of eight Navy ratings and five Army enlisted engineers headed by an ensign or lieutenant junior grade. The Army teams consisted of 25 enlisted men led by a first or second lieutenant.
The Navy units were scheduled to clear the obstacles farthest from shore; the Army groups, those on the inshore side. The teams were to work together clearing gaps for the landing craft approaches and the paths shoreward which the debarking infantrymen would follow.
Initial landings on Normandy were scheduled at extreme low tide when virtually all of the fields of obstacles built by the Germans were exposed. It would be necessary to blow these out, even while the first wave was still pushing shoreward through them, so that subsequent waves would be unhampered; also that landing craft coming in later when the tide was high would not be blown up.
Only those who landed that first morning can really appreciate the hurricane of fire that came down on the beaches, particularly on Omaha, from the guns and rifles on the bluffs. Some units had their gaps-120 yards wide on the seaward end and 50 yards on the shore side—cleared in half an hour. Some gaps were not cleared until three days later. Some teams were wiped out to a man by death or wounds. When the job was done on Omaha, casualties ran around 52 per cent.
On Utah beach where obstacles were fewer and where fire from the shore was lighter, casualties were low, and the whole job was done in a matter of 40 minutes.
Months later when Vice Admiral Henry K. Hewitt's 8th Fleet moved in to land the Army on the south coast of France, the underwater demolition teams escaped virtually without a scratch after doing a magnificent job of eliminating obstacles. But in this later landing, ships' guns poured fire down on the German positions while the Army and Navy teams blasted out the barricades, the mines and booby traps laid by the Germans to stop boats and men who might come that way.
A week after the landings on Normandy, while the Allied armies were still fighting desperately to widen their foothold on the continent, two of the Navy's enlarged and intensely trained Underwater Demolition Teams in broad daylight swam in to chart the reefs and lagoon depths off Saipan and to remove any obstacles the Jap might have placed there to stop invading forces. In the Marshall Island operations earlier in the year, Underwater Demolition teams had carried out some quick reconnaissance work; but here at Saipan for the first time in the Pacific war heavy fire support had been detailed to protect the swimmers on a complete and comprehensive survey of the Jap's beaches. About 200 officers and men composed the teams assigned. A mile-long swim faced the team members from the time their boats reached the barrier reef. With two battleships and cruisers slapping shells down on the Jap's shore positions, the men swam in, measuring the water depth every 25 yards. At the close of D-minus one they were able to give accurate data on the depth of water over the area to be used; also the information that it was free of man-made obstacles. Their charts showed precisely the only paths tanks could take to reach dry land, vital information for the Marines who piled ashore next day.
After the first units had successfully landed, the Underwater Demolition Teams then blew a wide channel 6 feet deep through the reef around Saipan so that larger landing craft with guns, men, and tanks could pour ashore in volume to support the initial landing forces.
The leaders of one of these teams was Commander Kauffman, organizer of the school at Fort Pierce, who had asked to be permitted to head a team in actual work. Later he was to become chief staff officer to the Commander of Underwater Demolition Teams, Pacific, in which capacity he ended the war against Japan.
At Tinian the Underwater Demolition men along with the Marine Reconnaissance Battalion on D minus thirteen and twelve surveyed the narrow beaches which Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith intended to use. They did the job in black darkness without detection by the Japs. They found the surf and beach free of obstacles, and located the inland mine fields. The Marines landed on July 24 with few casualties, because the Jap had not deemed it possible that anyone would dare use such narrow beaches. He expected the landings off the town of Tinian itself where the beaches were broad—and well covered by Jap gun positions.
The amphibious planners and operators were quick to apply lessons learned in the rapid tempo of the Pacific war. When the time arrived for hitting Guam, the Underwater Demolition Team work was down to a science. New methods were devised for delivering more sharply cut fire support—blistering fire coming down close ahead of the men who swam and waded ashore to discourage Jap machine gunners and riflemen from interfering with their work. Added fire from larger guns was poured on inland gun positions. For further measure, airplanes were detailed to strafe and bomb close along the shore and on island gun positions. LCI(G)'s—the landing craft loaded down with 20- and 40-millimeter guns—were sent close in to the beaches to whip the sands for any targets of opportunity and to clean the trees of leaves and snipers.
In fact, the pattern as supplied at Guam was basically that used on through to the end, a continuous roll of fire rising to hurricane proportions in periods critical to the work of the Underwater Demolition men.
With the screech of shells, primarily their own, streaking down close over their heads and the whimph of bomb and shell hunks flying skyward near them, it is quite easy to understand the comment of the photographer at Balikpapan: "Strangely enough, the swimmers fear snipers less than heavy shells."
But the swimmers knew that these curtains of blasting death were a safety wall; that without them the Japs would be popping away unmercifully, getting large numbers of their people instead of but a few.
For three days and nights the demolition crowd surveyed Guam's reefs and beaches. Four days and nights they blasted out obstacles— more than a thousand in all.
The year 1944 rolled on through with one landing after another—Peleliu, Anguar, Leyte; then 1945 with Lingayen, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Balikpapan, to enumerate a few of the steps that led to surrender in Tokyo Bay.
Each time the Underwater Demolition teams went in for a new job, they expected the Jap to have traps set for them specifically, and each time they found him waiting only with guns, mortar, and rifles. More than 3,000 obstacles they blasted from Okinawa's waters. Before the assaulting troops poured ashore on Balikpapan, a solid line of log cribs had to come out of the water.
Long before these last landings, the demolition crowd had picked up many techniques to improve their work. Recovering swimmers from the water was a highly important problem from the first. Each unnecessary second a man was left in the water an exposed target counted against his safety. It was vital, once he had his job of the moment done, that he be got to the protection of steel-sided landing craft. Likewise, it was vital when a group of swimmers had laid their charges—designed to go up five minutes after the safety fuze was ignited—that they be picked up and quickly carried to safety range. This problem was solved by making rubber boats fast alongside high speed landing craft. Sighting a swimmer signaling for pick up, the landing craft coxswain would head for him top speed. A man, selected for his strength and dexterity, would plant himself astride the outboard gunwale of the rubber boat, and from this position grab the swimmer and plop him aboard.
A reversed technique was used in putting swimmers and their packages of tetrytol overside. The swimmer went off from one side of the rubber boat while the waterproofed explosives kept afloat by a small bladder were tossed off alongside him. He would then swim or wade to the obstacles, pushing the explosives ahead.
At low tide, many of the reefs on which the Jap had built his obstacles were entirely bare, making a swimmer a cold target for snipers or distant gunners. In such cases if sufficient fire could not be delivered to keep the enemy down, the swimmers worked when the tide was partially in to give them coverage. Underwater Demolition men found that it was hard for an enemy to hit them when he had only their heads at which to aim. Also, they found it comparatively easy to escape Jap rifle bullets when swimming simply by diving and keeping under water as much as possible. Many Underwater Demolition men have come through the war, bringing home as souvenirs bullets that were fired at them and which they caught spent under water.
The tetrytol charges were placed in groups, then tied together with primacord, itself an instantaneous explosive. When the last charge was placed, the swimmers would hastily withdraw for pick up. The Underwater Demolition men were equipped with waterproof watches which were synchronized. At prearranged or signaled moment, the fuze, or fuzes if groups of explosives were used, would be ignited. Coral, concrete, logs, steel, and masses of ocean would fly skyward hundreds of feet.
When the job was done and the swimmers and their support craft withdrew, Tokyo's radio on numerous occasions proclaimed that the Americans had attempted another landing and been repulsed.
Next day the Marines or Army infantrymen would come piling on the Jap's beaches to repeat the tough and bloody assignment of eliminating another enemy bastion on the way to final victory.
Lee Van Atta of the International News on the day of Japan's final surrender quoted General MacArthur as having told him some time previously in discussing the Kyushu landings scheduled for November that, "I believe we can land troops on Japan without loss of a single man in actual landing operations."
Unquestionably, the General knew that the Underwater Demolition Teams again would successfully clear the way for the landing craft and men. But it is certain that not one of those hundreds of officers and men who were scheduled for the largest of all Underwater Demolition assignments felt deeply disappointed that his job was canceled.