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

While this last was an overstatement and probably a rumor that Donovan himself had spread, it was not far from the mark. Twenty-two years earlier, when presented the Medal of Honor for actions on the Western Front at an award ceremony in the New York City Armory, Donovan had melodramatically unclasped the strap, then re-presented it to the four

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

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,

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

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.

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

So, how did this happen? How did the US Navy create a unit whose operational center of gravity is not only directed at a mission performed on the 29 percent of the earth’s surface that its ships cannot touch, but one so fraught with difficulties that most units of the Army and Marine Corps—the US military’s traditional tenants of its land

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