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.

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

In the First World War, the US Army’s expeditionary planners—as knowledgeable as Napoleon about the ocean’s exclusive ability to swallow an army whole—were able to avoid the nightmare of amphibious warfare because of the timely availability of four French ports that made possible the invasion of two million dry-shod American doughboys by marching t

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

Chapter 1 The Reluctant Creation and Violent Demise of the Navy’s First Commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders

Fresh from the first successful ground reconnaissance in the Central Pacific Theater, General Smith sent forth his VAC Recon Company like the twelve spies into Canaan. At Majuro Atoll, one of the VAC Recon platoon commanders, Lieutenant Harvey Weeks—a former Yale wrestler, former attorney, and former enlisted man—captured the Japanese commander wit

research into the mechanics of various landing craft, he viewed the coral as a technical problem with a technical solution. To him, that solution was variously known as an amphibious tractor, an alligator, an amtrac, or by its most common name, a Landing Vehicle Tracked, or LVT for short. Conceived by Donald Roebling—grandson of the builder of the

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 t

To oversee the development of the US Army’s first commando unit, Marshall reluctantly assigned Colonel Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., a gravel-voiced, goggle-eyed, rock-jawed horse soldier from Texas who offset his saturnine appearance by routinely wearing the high-leather boots of the cavalry, a polished helmet, a striking red jacket, and a yellow scarf