Into enemy waters A World War II story of the demolition divers who became the Navy SEALs

Journalist Dubbins delivers a rousing history of the U.S. Naval Combat Demolition Units focused on combat swimmer George Morgan and demolition school commander Draper Kauffman. A former lifeguard, Morgan joined the Navy at age 17 and was given a pair of swim fins and a diving mask (neither of which he had ever seen before) and told he was volunteering for naval combat demolition. After surviving the training program devised by Kauffman, Morgan was assigned to clear obstacles from the waters off Omaha Beach for the D-Day invasion. His unit went in with the first wave of Marines and suffered a 52% casualty rate. Afterwards, Morgan and Kauffman were sent to the Pacific, where Underwater Demolitions Teams destroyed mines and booby traps and conducted reconnaissance missions before invasions began. At Okinawa, Morgan helped map the approaches to the beach and detonate hundreds of wooden stakes that had been sharpened to deadly points and embedded in the coral. Wounded at Borneo, he was training for the invasion of the Japanese home islands when the war ended. Drawing on extensive interviews with Morgan, Dubbins creates a vivid and fast-moving narrative of courage and sacrifice under the most extreme conditions. WWII buffs will be thrilled. (Aug.)

The Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT), created in World War II, were special-purpose warriors (sometimes called frogmen) who preceded an amphibious landing and destroyed obstacles to the landing ships following behind them. This involved swimming up to a defended coast with just a box of explosives and a knife they were trained to use not as cutting fuses and detonation cords, not weapons. They trained hard for dangerous work and saved many infantry lives by preparing the beaches, usually while under enemy fire. Journalist Dubbins's narrative of the UDT focuses on one of the few remaining frogmen, George Morgan, a combat swimmer who survived swimming up to Omaha Beach, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, among others. The development of the teams is related through the acts of Draper Kauffman, who organized, trained, and fielded UDT. There is some greatly simplified World War II history for context. There are extensive endnotes, mostly secondary sources and interviews with Morgan. This is an interesting, popular history of a combat unit that evolved into the modern Navy SEALs. VERDICT Suitable for public libraries and comprehensive World War II history collections.--Edwin Burgess

A rare surviving World War II frogman tells his story. Journalist Dubbins presents a text based on his interviews with George Morgan (b. 1927). During the war, his unit suffered more than 50% casualties clearing obstacles before the 1944 landing at Omaha Beach. Morgan belonged to the newly formed Underwater Demolition Team, led by the book's other principal, Draper Kauffman. Son of an admiral and fiercely adventurous, Kauffman was denied a Navy commission due to poor vision. In 1940, he traveled to France as an ambulance driver during the German invasion. He was captured and released, whereupon he joined the Royal Navy and volunteered for its bomb disposal teams. A month before Pearl Harbor, he returned to Washington, D.C., to "launch the US Navy's first-ever Bomb Disposal School." In 1943, the Navy knew that Germany was constructing obstacles along the coastline. Searching for an explosives expert, Navy officials settled on Kauffman, ordering him to form an elite unit that would reconnoiter enemy beaches and demolish obstacles. Readers will enjoy the author's descriptions of the fast-paced action that followed, as Kauffman, Morgan, and the rest of the team commandeered facilities, recruited men, and designed a brutal program featuring exhaustive conditioning and extensive training in weapons, explosives, and teamwork. That training regime was an important predecessor to what the SEALs would develop 20 years later. Dubbins fills the book with energetic accounts of the unit's operations, including the earliest, Normandy, which was very much a learning experience. The unit found greater success in later operations in the Pacific theater, where the Japanese built few obstacles. Approaching in rubber boats and often under fire, Morgan and his comrades searched for mines, measured water depths, checked beach defenses, and labeled clear paths for landing boats to follow through reefs and shallows. As a result, America's island landings became so efficient that the Japanese stopped defending beaches, preferring to retire inland to dig in and fight. A compelling narrative full of World War II fireworks. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.