Temporary Archive: Suzanne Brockmann's Message Board

Cataloging books is my thing and the libraries I work for are 2-year junior college libraries. As such, the collections are designed for basic research. I don’t get a lot of novels to catalog, but a great variety of subject material passes my way. Some books cross my desk quickly, while others linger for a while. Paging through this particular title, dealing with WWII in the Pacific (Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa) I come across a picture that grabs my attention – two guys in swimming trunks and diving masks, lying in the bottom of an inflatable-type boat, speeding along the waves. Gotta be Navy, I say. So I read the chapter. And I have to share this excerpt with you. It talks of Navy Frogmen, forerunners of the SEALs, specifically one man’s remembrance of hitting Iwo Jima beaches. Some of Suz’s books had those WWII flashbacks – reading this brought a smile to my face, and only increased my respect and admiration for those who called themselves ‘frogmen.’

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First to hit the beaches were the frogmen. Navy underwater demolition teams swam into the landing areas two days before D-Day, covered by the fire of a dozen gunships, backed up by destroyers and cruisers. In an interview given long after the war, frogman Andy Anderson describes the work of the men who were known as “half-fish and half-nuts.”

“I’ll never forget when we first arrived in the waters off Iwo on D minus three and stood on the deck and looked at that island. It was the most godforsaken place I’d ever seen, with the rising smoke and haze and that frightening-looking volcano.”

“Our job was to swim in to the invasion beaches, locate mines and detonate them, identify other beach obstacles, and bring back samples of the sand to see if our landing vehicles could operate on that brown volcanic ash. The operation was to be done in daylight to be sure we got all the mines. At a thousand yards, the gunboats fired their rockets and we raced by them in speedboats and were dropped into the water 700 yards off the beach. Five pairs of swimmers went in at 100 yards apart.”

“Our first shock was the temperature of the water. When you hit that water at fifty-eight degrees it was a real character builder. We had no rubber suits or scuba tanks. They weren’t in use until the Korean War. We were the naked warriors; that’s what they called us. We went in with swim trunks, a pair of fins, a mask, a knife, a slate and pencil, and blasting caps for detonating mines, which we kept in condoms to keep the powder dry. We strapped the condoms to our belts. In fact, we used so many condoms in training back in Florida that the Navy sent down a morale officer to look into the situation.”

“We painted our bodies with grease that was mixed with silver paint, to give us camouflage. When we got close to the beach, an awful lot of enemy fire was coming at us. I rolled over in the water and looked back and all those gunboats that were supposed to be giving us cover had been either sunk or disabled. When the Japanese mortar shells came down they actually popped us up, almost out of the water. And we could look down in the water and see the shells that missed us, spiraling to the bottom. But bobbing out there, with silver paint on, we were hard targets to hit.”

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There's more, but this excerpt begged to be shared. By the way, the book is a companion volume to the History Channel series on the second world war.