In January 1942, two memoranda arrived on Holcomb’s desk within a week of each other suggesting the creation of Marine Corps commandos. The first was from his superior, Admiral Ernest J. King, the recently appointed Chief of Naval Operations. As enamored with defense as he was with temperance—“When they get in trouble they send for the

When Kauffman arrived at Fort Pierce in June 1943, he encountered a seemingly untended garden of opportunity, an isolated world where imagination could grow. Stimulated by his combat experience, Kauffman aimed to develop an organization similar in character, if not in function, to the unit that had so impressed him in 1940: the Corps Franc.

Most everyone who has ever tried to casually account for the Navy’s inland creep in special operations has explained it away as simple evolution—essentially, a nearly thoughtless process of natural selection in which the Navy responded to a changing environment by inevitably adapting to new operational opportunities. As I saw firsthand, the problem

In February 1943, Admiral Kent Hewitt—fresh from amphibious invasions in North Africa and equipped with the sailor’s gift to see a red sky at morning and predict the storm to follow—sent a message to the US Army’s commander of ground forces requesting a curriculum addition to the Scout and Raider program to begin training men on the destruction of

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

Because nothing else at Tarawa had made so terrible an impression as the reef, nothing else had so proved its value as the LVTs, a triumph dimmed only by their scant armor, slow speed, and the Navy’s reluctance to bring extras. As a result, the solution for future reefs, according to the 2nd Marine Division’s after-action report, was summed up in

As the Navy saw it, the Marine Corps’ solution was more than just an oversight. It was unacceptable. The coral wasn’t simply a technical problem, it was a tumor—one that needed to be found and cut out. The problem: At the time of the Tarawa operation, there had been only two units that might have been capable of such a venture, both of which had

Chapter 4 Draper Kauffman and the Course That Cracked the Atlantic Wall, Then Laid the First Bricks of the Legend of Naval Special Warfare

In November 1942, well into the Guadalcanal campaign, even Admiral Nimitz had recognized that FTP 167 was a dinosaur and sent along a revision to Admiral King. Both Nimitz and King knew Turner; both knew he would never be constrained by good manners; both agreed to the revision—henceforth establishing the Marine Corps’ invasion commander as the