St. Lucie County was a tiny, quiet place in 1941. About 12,000 people lived here. Their peace was shattered by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor almost 5,000 miles away on Dec. 7 that year.
The next day, America was at war and the Treasure Coast soon became the training ground for a new kind of sailor that was needed to fight World War II. “Those are the guys that trained here in Fort Pierce,” said Rick Kaiser, executive director of the National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum.
The Navy needed a sailor equipped to fight and sabotage on and in the high seas, or on the beaches. A sailor bold enough to go into enemy territory covered only in swim trunks, armed only with a knife. A sailor who could go onto the French beaches in the predawn hours to start dismantling Nazi Germany’s infamous Atlantic Wall so Operation Overlord could succeed.
Those elite amphibious fighters were the Naval Combat Demolition Units. On June 6, 1944, they had become the tip of the most massive amphibious assault ever. They led the way for the D-Day invasion that landed Allied boots on continental Europe.
“Their whole purpose in life was to take out the obstacles on the beaches, so we could have a successful invasion,” Kaiser said.
Those men were the earliest stirrings of the modern Navy SEAL, some of the most rightly revered fighters in the world. On Thursday, June 6, Kaiser will speak at the museum’s 75th Anniversary of the D-Day Invasion Commemoration. The event will start with coffee and a light breakfast at 10 a.m. At 11 a.m. Kaiser will speak about the historical significance of D-Day to the Navy SEALs.
The joint Army-Navy Amphibious Training Base, the Scout and Raider school, opened in Fort Pierce in 1942. About 3,500 went through the school. The Navy Combat Demolition Unit trainees were 1,200. The SEAL museum is only about 100 meters or so from where those predecessors of the modern Navy SEALs trained.
The NCDUs were involved in Operation Torch – the invasion of North Africa, in what was then French Morocco and French Algeria – then Operation Huskey, Sicily, and Operation Shingle, Anzio, Italy. Some were in the Pacific and Asia doing covert and joint operations with locals. But, military planners long knew a massive amphibious invasion in France was necessary, and the NCDUs would play a major role. “They were the first wave going in,” Kaiser said.
With Allied forces amassing on the English Channel behind them, the NCDUs went ashore to explode away passive obstacles on the beaches designed to make the littoral zones certain death to any in an amphibious assault. “(The beach defenses) also had mines on them,” Kaiser said. “(Landing craft would) hit it and blow up and the German machine gunners would lay waste to our guys on the boats.”
The Germans anticipated the Naval Combat Demolition Units. They were well aware that if the NCDUs could clear openings in the passive defenses, the likelihood of a successful amphibious assault increased dramatically. “They’d get out of the boat and tie explosives to the obstacles, while being shot at, to open lanes,” Kaiser said.
The NCDUs cleared at least eight complete and two partial gaps at Omaha Beach. Those men at Omaha, Kaiser said, experienced a higher than 50 percent casualty rate. That was lower than commanders apparently anticipated. Kaiser learned from Ken Reynolds, NCDU 42, Boat Team #5, that “they didn’t even have a plan for them to get out of there,” said Kaiser. “The planners thought they’d all get killed. They had to beg, borrow and steal to get on ships going back to England, so they could reconstitute after the invasions.”
The survivors did more operations in France and were soon in the Pacific where they sometimes snuck into enemy-held territory with nothing but swim trunks, flippers and masks, and armed only with knives. That earned them the nickname “naked warriors.”
After the war the units were mostly dismantled. But the Korean War showed that the nation still needed the naked warriors. There they earned the nickname “frogmen,” Kaiser previously said.
Not long after the Korean War, things were heating up in Southeast Asia where another new kind of war would be fought. There as an anticipated gap in military expertise that President John F. Kennedy – a World War II Navy man – recognized. The nation needed teams of warriors who could fight from the sea, air or land. Kennedy formally created the SEALs in the early 1960s.
Reservations for the commemoration can be made by emailing elaine@navysealmuseum.org. For more, visit www.navysealmuseum.org. The museum is at 3300 N. State Road A1A, Fort Pierce, on Hutchinson Island.