By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALs

by Benjamin H. Milligan

Overview

A gripping history chronicling the fits and starts of American special operations and the ultimate rise of the Navy SEALs from unarmed frogmen to elite, go-anywhere commandos—as told by one of their own.

“Deeply researched, well organized, and incredibly engaging . . . This is our legacy with all the warts, the challenges, and the heroics in one concise volume.”—Admiral William H. McRaven, #1 New York Times bestselling author and former commander, United States Special Operations Command

How did the US Navy—the branch of the US military tasked with patrolling the oceans—ever manage to produce a unit of raiders trained to operate on land? And how, against all odds, did that unit become one of the world’s most elite commando forces, routinely striking thousands of miles from the water on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, even Central Africa?

Behind the SEALs’ improbable rise lies the most remarkable underdog story in American military history—and in these pages, former Navy SEAL Benjamin H. Milligan captures it as never before.

Told through the eyes of remarkable leaders and racing from one longshot, hair-curling raid to the next, By Water Beneath the Walls is the tale of the unit’s heroic naval predecessors, and the evolution of the SEALs themselves. But it’s also the story of the forging of American special operations as a whole—and how the SEALs emerged from the fires as America’s first permanent commando force when again and again some other unit seemed predestined to seize that role. 

Here Milligan thrillingly captures the outsize feats of the SEALs’ frogmen forefathers in World War II, the Korean War, and elsewhere, even as he plunges us into the second front of interservice rivalries and personal ambition that shaped the SEALs’ evolution.

In equally vivid, masterful detail, he chronicles key early missions undertaken by units like the Marine Raiders, Army Rangers, and Green Berets, showing us how these fateful, bloody moments helped create the modern American commando—even as they opened up pivotal opportunities for the Navy.

Finally, he takes us alongside as the SEALs at last seize the mantle of commando raiding, and discover the missions of capture/kill and counterterrorism that would define them for decades to come.

Now required reading throughout the US special operations community, By Water Beneath the Walls is an essential history of the SEAL teams, a crackling account of desperate last stands and unforgettable characters accomplishing the impossible—and a riveting epic of the dawn of American special operations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553392197
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/20/2021
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	319,186
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Benjamin H. Milligan became a US Navy SEAL in 2001 and served until 2009. He is the recipient of the Bronze Star and other awards. A native of Indianapolis, he received a BA in History at Purdue University and an MA in International Relations at the University of San Diego. Since the publication of By Water Beneath The Walls, he has balanced his writing with speaking and lecturing on leadership, organizational change, and American history at various universities, military commands, and veteran’s events. When not traveling for research or leading a tour of an overseas battlefield, he lives in the Chicago area with his three sons.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

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

Except for some magnificent excursions into the deserts of Libya and up the slopes of Chapultepec, the US Marine Corps—from the American Revolution to the American Civil War—was mostly an indentured adjunct of the blue-­water American Navy. In peace, a ramrod insurance against mutiny; in battle, mast-­clinging marksmen intended to replicate Admiral Nelson’s fate upon the enemy—Nelson had been killed by a French sniper in a crow’s nest. Later, after the Navy’s conversion to steam stacks and the elimination of mast-­top rifle nests, the Marines had adapted too, matching themselves to meet the national demand for foreign expedition. What followed was a Marine Corps of broad-­brimmed campaign hats and leg-­wrapped puttees, of guerrilla hunters like Smedley Butler and Chesty Puller, of brushfire victories in China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua. It was a Marine Corps that had not only stretched the Navy’s reach beyond the beaches that blocked its ships but along the way had also stretched the Navy’s expectations for its own go-­anywhere utility force.

Because of this history, the Marines of this period seemed poised to evolve into the Navy’s very own corps of guerrilla hunters and amphibious raiders, but this was a logic that was upended during the First World War, when the Marines’ battles at Belleau Wood, Soissons, and Blanc Mont proved as far removed from their small-­war past as was a man from a monkey. More important, these meat grinders proved the Marines were every bit the battlefield equals of their soldier-­cousins in the US Army, an upstaging that the Army sought to avenge by harnessing Congress’s belt-­tightening calls for consolidation in the early 1920s to turn the corps’ 13,000 Leathernecks into soldiers.

Threatened by consolidation with the US Army, by disbandment, by the elimination of their entire branch of service, the planners of the US Marine Corps scrambled for a solution. Their options: 1) decrease in size and thereby stature to return to filling the Navy’s need for a shipborne utility force—essentially to return to their past as the Navy’s guerrilla hunters and not-­quite amphibious raiders; or 2) identify a future enemy and a future mission that would catapult the Marine Corps to an equal rank with the Navy and Army and thereby preserve it for half a century. Actually, this wasn’t much of a choice at all; only one future appealed to the Marine Corps’ planners: the option that would do nothing to satisfy the Navy’s inland ambitions. More important for our purposes, it was a choice that would unintentionally produce a unit of raiders the Marine Corps didn’t want, and a raid so near to disaster that its Navy planners wouldn’t want any more of them, at least not from the Marine Corps.

A composite of islands and rapaciousness, the Empire of Japan was an enemy defended by water and fueled by a lust for resources. After the First World War, the only power that had stood between this lust and the vulnerable islands practically sinking beneath the weight of oil, tin, and rubber was the United States. If war ever came, it would come on these islands; if the US was going to win, it would need an army capable not simply of landing on them, but of stripping them clean of Japanese defenders. Of all the crusaders drawn to this cross and to the salvation it promised his service, none was as fervent as the man appointed to the office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1936.

With a squat frame, round glasses, and retreating, tight-­cropped hair, Major General Thomas Holcomb looked more like a frontier shopkeeper than one of the Marine Corps’ greatest heroes. In fact, he was. At Belleau Wood, in response to an Army superior’s question whether his battalion was “Holding or retreating,” Holcomb had huffed in reply, “When this outfit runs it will be in the other direction.” For an institution built upon smart appearance and fighting, the answer had made him a Marine Corps legend—a reputation he had springboarded to become his service’s savviest partisan.

In a series of postwar assignments, Holcomb never lost sight of his ultimate objective: to build from the bones of his fellow First World War comrades the frame of the future Fleet Marine Force—an amphibious version of the US Army composed of all the same components, everything from artillery to aircraft. It was an objective that led him to seek out staff positions in operations and training, even to cultivate relationships with just about every Roosevelt who had ever served in the Department of the Navy—the closest thing the Roosevelts had to a family business. The most powerful example of this cultivation had been to achieve open access to the White House pool to rebuild the sickly body of his only son, an arrangement made possible by James Roosevelt, the president’s second child and administrative assistant. Justifiably discredited now for his prewar testimony to a Navy panel in which he voiced his opposition to integration—“If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather have the whites”—Commandant Holcomb was nevertheless the man most responsible for the corps’ modernization of old equipment, the testing of new operations, the increase of amphibious exercises, and the improvement of coordination. Surrounded by office walls hung with the watchful portraits of his sixteen predecessors and a framed letter written 140 years earlier by the Corps’ second commandant that exhorted a young Leatherneck to seek vengeance on a Navy lieutenant who had punched him, no Marine in history had so single-­mindedly advanced the corps to an equal ranking in the US military’s order of battle.

On December 7, 1941, the day the Red Sun wings blackened the skies over Honolulu, all Marines awoke to the world for which Holcomb had prepared; amphibious war was upon them. The next day, sitting beside General George Marshall in the House Chamber packed with legislators, secretaries, and black-­robed justices, Holcomb listened to his old friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt articulate the terms of Japan’s future. “No matter how long it may take us,” the president promised, right hand gripping the lectern, his son James seated behind in a shadow to catch him should he stumble, “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Few could understand what this meant in terms of lives and logistics, method and strategy. For Holcomb, it meant a Marine Corps of 500,000 men capable of teaching the Japanese a definition of absolute victory not seen since the Mongols. It definitely didn’t mean a Marine Corps of behind-the-­lines commando raiders; especially not commandos whose service was indentured to the Navy.

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 sons-­of-­bitches,” he was rumored to say upon appointment—King declared in his letter that the president was “much interested” in the “use of ‘commandos’ ” for raiding expeditions in the Pacific. The second letter was from James Roosevelt, a recently activated Marine Corps captain— a subordinate by five whole ranks who had no business in sending his commandant a memorandum, except that his father was the president and the man to whom Holcomb owed the health of his only son. If these proposals were not imposition enough, attached to King’s missive was a wholly unexpected backdoor suggestion as to the candidate who should lead this new capability. Unfortunately for Holcomb, the candidate was not a Marine but a former Army colonel clamoring for a Marine Corps commission. This unacceptable’s name was William J. Donovan.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Unit That Should Not Exist 3

Part 1 Neglect

Chapter 1 The Reluctant Creation and Violent Demise of the Navy's First Commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders 11

Chapter 2 The Sidelining of the Army's Amphibious Soldier-Scouts and the Call-up of the Navy's Second-String Sailors 36

Chapter 3 The US Army's First Commandos and the Raid That Wasn't 62

Part 2 Opportunity

Chapter 4 Draper Kauffman and the Course That Cracked the Atlantic Wall, Then Laid the First Bricks of the Legend of Naval Special Warfare 103

Chapter 5 The Evolving Contest That Created the Mermen of War-World War II's Only Indispensable Special Operations Unit 143

Chapter 6 The Contest for the Guerrilla War in China and the Organization That Had "No Damn Business" Fighting in It: The US Navy's Army of Sailors 187

Part 3 Relevance

Chapter 7 The US Navy's Postwar Plight, and the Sailor-Raiders Who Led Her Back to Significance in Korea 237

Chapter 8 The Resurrection of the Army's Rangers, and the Guerrilla Raid That Failed to Forestall Their Second Death 280

Chapter 9 Arleigh Burke, the Bay of Pigs, and the Launching of the Navy's Limited-War SEALs 327

Part 4 Exigency

Chapter 10 Kennedy's Army of Gladiators and the Counterinsurgency That Blunted Their Swords, Then Cleared the Way for Another Contender 351

Chapter 11 The First SEALs, Their Search for a Mission, and the Report That Found It for Them 380

Chapter 12 The Dam Break of Conventional War in Vietnam, and the Following Flood of Raiders That Failed to Beat the Navy to the Mekong Delta; All but One 401

Part 5 Culmination

Chapter 13 The Derailing of the First Direct-Action SEALs in the Rung Sat, and the Detachment That Restored Their Prospects 421

Chapter 14 The Direct-Action SEALs Who Dodged Diversion, Then Perfected a Mission That Propelled the Teams Past the Riverbanks, into History 437

Chapter 15 The Navy's Skeleton Key to Inland Combat, and the Final Against-the-Current Achievements in the War's Ebb Tide That Exposed the SEALs' Preeminence as the US Military's Go-Anywhere Commandos 483

Conclusion: Nature Abhors a Vacuum 501

A Note on Sources 507

Notes 513

Illustration Credits 595

Index 597

Editorial Reviews

Deeply researched, well organized, and incredibly engaging, By Water Beneath the Walls is one of the finest histories I’ve read about the formation and rise of the Navy SEALs. This is our legacy with all the warts, the challenges, and the heroics in one concise volume.”—Admiral William H. McRaven, former commander, United States Special Operations Command, and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Make Your Bed

“Fascinating . . . Written with gusto and based on years of research, this history spans eight decades. Fast-paced and packed with colorful personalities and close-quarters gunfights, it vividly details the lineage of the SEALs. This tour de force confirms what we all suspected: SEALs are slightly crazy, and our nation is safer for it.”—Bing West, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Call Sign Chaos

“By Water Beneath the Walls is the SEAL book we needed. A deep dive into the SEALs’ roots, it is written with style and insight that could come only from someone who is part of the community. Milligan uses razor-sharp analysis and masterful storytelling to leave us with a clear understanding of not only how the SEALs came into being, but, more important, why.”—Kevin Maurer, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Lions of Kandahar and No Easy Day

“If you want to know how the Navy SEALs became the elite commandos they are today, this is the book for you. Ben Milligan is a detailed storyteller, and his book is a fascinating, page-turning read that deserves a place on any military history lover’s shelf.”—former Navy SEAL and New York Times bestselling author Brandon Webb

“A well-researched, nuanced, and candid look at the evolution of American military special operations and, specifically, the expansion of the role of the Navy SEALs from a maritime/littoral-centric force to an inland, land-based capture/kill special operations component.”—Dick Couch, New York Times bestselling author of The Warrior Elite and Chosen Soldier

From the Publisher

06/18/2021

The culmination of an eight-year project, former navy SEAL Milligan's first book is a study of how and why the United States Navy became the host service to one of the most prominent special operations units in the world. Beginning early in the Second World War and ending with the close of the Vietnam War, the author describes the planning, execution, and aftermath of special missions involving various units from the different branches of service. The text emphasizes successful navy-sponsored operations vs. shortcomings and failures those of other operations saw. A decent number of relevant photos are interspersed throughout the text. While on the whole an acceptable first book, there are some noticeable flaws. First, the jarring use of racist terms, which are transcribed within direct quotes from contemporary individuals, seems inappropriate and adds nothing to the story. In addition, the text is navy-centric and at times dismissive of other branches; Army Special Forces in Vietnam are described as "third world diplomats and well diggers." VERDICT Rich in action-packed narrative but light on analysis, this book is recommended for readers looking for a navy-focused popular history of special operations warfare.—Matthew Wayman, Pennsylvania State Univ. Lib., Schuylkill Haven

Library Journal

2021-06-01
An ex–Navy SEAL digs into the agency’s origins and development.

Milligan delivers a well-researched history beginning after Pearl Harbor, when the Marine Corps commandant learned that the president was “much interested” in the use of commandos. In August 1942, Evans Carlson (“Carlson’s Raiders”) led a raid on Makin Atoll designed to take pressure off Marines at Guadalcanal. It was a poorly organized debacle in which a dozen men were left behind to be captured and beheaded. Some successes followed, but all commando forces were disbanded after 1945, although the Navy retained two specialized units, which foreshadowed the SEALs. They were the Underwater Demolition Teams, who performed heroically in reconnaissance and clearing obstacles before landings in Normandy and the Pacific and the continued development of the Seabees, “the Navy’s builders.” Except for improvised raids during the Korean War, the usual peacetime deterioration followed until the arrival of John F. Kennedy. Though his love of special forces was mostly focused on the Green Berets, the first SEAL team was commissioned on Jan. 1, 1962. Special units flourished during the Vietnam War, but they had little effect on the outcome. Perhaps luckily, the SEALs’ commitment never exceeded 150 during that time. The Green Berets (well over 1,000) specialized in winning hearts and minds and recruiting Indigenous fighters, with spotty success. With no specific role, the SEALs acquired a reputation as pure fighters, and Milligan devotes most of the final 150 pages to small-unit actions, not all of which involved SEALs or ended well. By the war’s end, SEALs were established as America’s elite go-anywhere warriors. Since this book describes their “rise,” the narrative ends with Vietnam. Milligan has scoured archives and turned up much unpublished material. He describes far more small-unit battles and lives of obscure but colorful men (all men) than a focused history requires, but few readers will complain.

Good history with plenty of special-ops fireworks.

Kirkus Reviews