Night Fighter

I BARELY HAD TIME TO go home—rather, go to Elinor’s parents’ home in Rancho Santa Fe—and kiss my unhappy wife and baby daughter, Linda Jean, hello and good-bye before I found myself back in the Korean theater, where my combat career had begun.

My new assignment was as research and development officer for UDT-5, headquartered at Camp McGill outside Yokosuka, Japan. I could have dreamed of no better slot from which to extend the operating arm of UDTs.

The war was winding down. That was the general feeling as our forces and theirs stalemated along the 38th Parallel. Peace negotiations dragged on as they had for the past two years while the shooting continued. Nonetheless, everyone seemed encouraged that the war was only months, perhaps only weeks, away from an armistice. It seemed the world might escape the cocking of the nuclear hammer for the first time after World War II.

President Harry Truman had fired General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 as commander of UN forces because of his aggressiveness and willingness to go nuclear and replaced him with General Matthew Ridgway. Ridgway was, as politicians like to say, more circumspect.

Pilots in Valley Forge’s ready room and crews throughout the ship fell stone silent that day when the carrier’s skipper played MacArthur’s farewell speech over the intercom. Dad, who knew the general, had told me thrilling stories about General Mac in the South Pacific. Chills broke out down my back as I listened with other pilots to that controlled voice fill the ready room.

“I am closing my fifty-two years of military service,” he said. “When I joined the army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. This world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain of West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that ‘old soldiers never die, they just fade away.’”

I was determined that I not “just fade away,” at least not until I had contributed my best.

For my second Korean tour, I was lodged at Camp McGill in a former officers’ quarters built by Germans for the Japanese during World War II. My roommate was UDT Lieutenant John Reynolds, a lean, mean slab of a man a little older than me and a few inches shorter. Reynolds had dark eyes and a darker sense of humor—“If I were God, I’d have made octopuses and platypuses, but I’d never have made people.”

In response to peace talks, UDT-5 began shutting down its activities against the NKs.

“Sonsofbitches are starting to send out patrols against us,” Reynolds complained. “Bastards are actually shooting at us when we try to go ashore.”

Shortly before I checked in, UDT-5 took significant combat casualties when North Koreans and Chicoms cornered a detachment and the detachment’s accompanying South Korean guerrillas behind enemy lines.

The Korean War ended with a ceasefire on July 27, 1953, four months after Josef Stalin died, to be eventually replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. Some fifty-four thousand American military had died on that cold, dreary trash pile. But while this war may have ended, I was sure more than ever that we needed commandos in a dangerous nuclear world. The ceasefire allowed Reynolds and me the opportunity to work on some of our ideas.

I remembered Commander Fane talking about how, back in 1947, he explored using early-day helicopters to deploy UDT operators. Reynolds and I batted the idea off each other and then decided to revive his efforts. I directed a confidential memo to Commander, Underwater Demolition Unit One (COMUDU-One), UDT-5’s parent command, with a copy to Fane at UDT-1 explaining what we had in mind:

A complete operation might be conducted in the following manner: helicopters, each carrying six swimmers could proceed at low altitude to an objective area from a remote sea or shore base. Swimmers would be dropped and the planes could then retire. The helicopter would later return, lay a protective smoke screen, and pick up the swimmers.

It is believed that the particular advantage in this type operation lies in the ability to conduct reconnaissance operations in normally inaccessible areas with an element of secrecy and surprise not possible with present methods. There need be no surface units within visible distance of the objective area.

I persuaded helicopter pilots from nearby Atsugi Airfield to help Reynolds and me try out our scheme in a series of exercises off the Japanese coast. Reynolds promptly dubbed them “Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Poseidon.” Abbot and Costello were a popular comedy duo starring in such movies as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

A half-dozen Frogmen volunteers from UDT-5 waited with some degree of amused skepticism while pilots and flight crew chiefs under our direction removed cargo seats from a Sikorsky HRS-3 and installed a solid aluminum bar to which we might attach a Jacob’s ladder. The ladder was for recovery purposes.

“It might have been safer if we’d kept the war going,” one of the Frogmen cracked.

Casting looked simple enough. The chopper flew out over the water at the height of a three-story building and at about 40 knots true airspeed. Swimmers jumped out wearing full combat gear—pack, knives, weapons, ammo, fins, and face mask. Equipment exploded in all directions when we struck the water. We ended up half-drowned with perhaps one fin remaining and the rest of our gear sinking beneath the waves.

I gasped my way to the surface and quickly counted heads to make sure no one was missing or badly injured. Reynolds swam over.

“Bad idea, Coyote,” he managed around a lung full of salt water. “Maybe we ought to slow that chopper down.”

But not too much. It was necessary the helicopter maintain some speed during infiltration in order that enemy radar not smell a rat and guess what we were up to.

During the next few jumps we bundled individual equipment around flotation bladders and dropped them first. Not too bad. A few men bounced off the water and skipped across the waves like flying fish. One was knocked unconscious. A trailing safety boat plucked him out of the drink.

We finally got it right after about a hundred jumps without losing a swimmer. The fastest safe drop speed seemed to be around 30 knots at an altitude half that of a three-story building. Optimum body posture was feet first, legs together, arms tucked across the chest, and body bent slightly forward at the waist to allow it to knife smoothly into the water.

A helicopter or two could slide in fast under cover of darkness or a smoke screen, slow to a safer speed, and dump their human loads into the ocean near shore without the land-bound enemy being any the wiser. It was UDT’s first successful foray into becoming airborne.

It was the same principle as recovery by boat at sea, in which a retriever with a loop in a rubber raft towed by a fast boat snatched a swimmer out of the water and flopped him like a netted fish into the IBS. The procedure sounded simple enough to use with a helicopter pickup.

Instead of to a rubber raft, we attached the loop to a flexible Jacob’s ladder, whose other end was secured to the aluminum bar on the floor of the HRS-3 using bungee cord. Theoretically, the bungees took up slack and cushioned the swimmer below when he grabbed the loop as the chopper flew by.

Reynolds discovered what happened when a swimmer was too slow monkey-climbing the ladder to the chopper door. He was halfway up the ladder when the next man grabbed the loop as it passed by. The bungee cord took the shock, stretched like the rubbers on a slingshot, and launched Reynolds off the ladder like a stone.

With a few modifications we now had a workable helicopter cast and recovery system.

I was, after all, UDT-5’s research and development officer. So I needed to continue researching and developing. I talked the South Korean Air Force, now more or less in peacetime mode, into providing a C-46 platform for parachute training. We barely got started before COMUDU and the Pentagon stepped in and closed us down.