By Water Beneath the Walls

In the decade that followed the Son Tay Raid, the ember of the Army’s interest in direct-action commandos was blown into a flame by the winds of world events. Namely, these included the failure of West German police to rescue Israeli athletes from the clutches of Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and the successes of Israeli co

Shrunk from thirty teams to four after World War II, the UDTs’ narrow role of beach reconnaissance and demolition had devolved into a collage of extracurricular Navy assignments: collecting postblast radioactive water samples; exploding ship paths through Antarctic ice; even ignominiously standing duty as base lifeguards. Given this misuse—misuse t

shoulder. So, upon receipt of Joy’s directive, Doyle immediately summoned the Navy complement to his Mobile Training Team of Marines, a ten-man squad of UDT 3 swimmers. It’s worth noting that Doyle did not ask if such a mission was within their purview.

Because the Recon Marines had not yet arrived, the man who read Joy’s order was technically at liberty to do nothing but wait. Yet because the reader was James Doyle—a man as thin as a cadaver and just as warm—he did no such thing.

On July 24, less than a month after the North Korean invasion, Joy tasked Rear Admiral James Doyle, the commander of Amphibious Group One, to order his Marine Corps cadre in Mobile Training Team Able (MTTA) to stop training US Army soldiers in vehicle waterproofing, landing craft embarkation, and all the skills necessary to execute another D-Day, a

Since not a single one of the US military’s commando-type units from World War II had survived disbandment—not the Raiders, the Rangers, or even the Amphibious Rogers—Joy’s first action was to create some.

In May, a fresh batch of NCDU recruits arrived on Maui. Per the direction of Koehler and Kauffman, the men were told to abandon the bulk of their gear—their green fatigues, their boots, their Mae West life jackets, even their helmets and sidearms—and slip into a pair of black Maui swim trunks and dive masks, their rough rubber edges sanded down to

Admiral King “listened with utmost enthusiasm,” wrote Captain James Doyle, Turner’s operations officer, when describing the UDT efforts at Flintlock. “Excellent,” King interrupted in the middle of Doyle’s briefing, “that business of the hydrographic survey at the first possible moment is a pet hobby of mine.” For Turner, however, a unit capable of

Fifty miles north at Roi-Namur—two islands separated by a causeway as long as a hyphen—Marine Scouts took control of Koehler’s UDT 2 for a night reconnaissance of the lagoon reefs. Riding rubber boats through choppy water, they searched for mines and found none. The next day, UDT 2 attempted their own remote-controlled boat mission. This time the d