Kauffman led in the amphibious tanks from an open-topped amtrac. The next morning, UDT officers rode in small boats ahead of the infantry to guide them into their assigned landing beaches. “You lived with that, and it was tough.”īack aboard the transports, officers collected the swimmers’ intelligence and depth measurements, and Kauffman’s best draftsman created a detailed chart of Saipan’s lagoon, copies of which were distributed to landing forces. “After each mission, there was always going to be one or two empty bunks,” recalls Morgan, now one of the last surviving Veterans of the UDT. He’d been struck by a Japanese bullet while piloting one of the rubber rafts. One man was killed during the morning reconnaissance, a popular officer named Robert Christensen.
Awed by their courage, he’d later say, “Every single man was calmly and slowly continuing his search and marking his slate… I would not have been so amazed if 90 percent of the men had done so well, but to have a cold 100 percent go in through the rain of fire was almost unbelievable.” Others would later drill a hole through the sniper bullets, tie them on strings, and wear them as necklaces.)Įven as enemy shellfire and bullets peppered the water, Kauffman could see many swimmers continuing toward the beach to within fifty yards. (Some swimmers caught the bullets in their fingers and tucked them into their pockets as souvenirs. The men realized that enemy bullets slowed down a few feet beneath the ocean surface, allowing the swimmers to hold their breath and dive underneath the sinking ordnance. “They are not ours.”Īs tall columns of water lifted up like fire hydrants and bullets raked the surface of the lagoon, the swimmers porpoised underwater to escape. “Those are not shorts, they are overs,” his executive replied calmly. “Tell those damned ships to knock off the shorts!” Kauffman barked. Believing it was Navy gunfire, Kauffman lifted the aerial of his cracker-box radio and furiously called up his executive officer, who was relaying coordinates to the warships from a landing craft. Kauffman’s raft was speeding shoreward when a line of shells splashed close astern. Waves spattered over the edges of the rubber rafts as they puttered across the lagoon. (The buddy he’d selected was farsighted, but also color blind, prompting a running joke that Kauffman’s buddy would describe the shore objects, and Kauffman would tell him the color.) Kauffman-who suffered terrible eyesight-wore his Coke-bottle glasses taped to his face in case he needed to plunge into the ocean. Each raft held an officer and his swim buddy, who shared a radio and binoculars.
Kauffman and fellow officers rode ahead of the swimmers on motorized black rubber rafts, dubbed “flying mattresses,” helping coordinate the covering fire.
They’d also painted black lines every twelve inches on their necks, torsos, and legs, turning their bodies into yardsticks for taking measurements in the shallows. Each pair carried a reel of fishing line for measuring water depth and balsa floats for marking underwater hazards. In advance of the Saipan reconnaissance, Kauffman and fellow officers had divided the swimmers into “buddy pairs,” directing them to always work together and to help each other in case of trouble. GIs admiringly called them “Half fish, half nuts.” Decades later, the daring swimmers would give rise to the Navy SEALs. Outfitted with just swim trunks, fins, and dive masks, the frogmen participated in nearly every major amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater. But the contributions of the UDT were invaluable. To this day, few people know about the unit, in large part because its existence was kept top secret during the war to prevent the Japanese from devising a countermeasure. It was the first large-scale daylight operation by the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), an elite unit of frogmen assigned to scout enemy-held Pacific islands and blow up coastal defenses ahead of Allied landings. Lashed to their belts were sheave knives, as well as small charges of rubber-cased explosives for detonating mines. Some wore knee pads and baby blue canvas shoes for crawling over the sharp coral reef. The men wore swimming trunks and were covered from head to toe in blue paint to provide camouflage in Saipan’s lagoon. on June 14, eight days after the Normandy invasion, Lieutenant Commander Draper Kauffman and his team of frogmen motored in four landing craft toward the calm, turquoise, saltwater lagoon of Saipan.
0 kommentar(er)
