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America's First Frogman: The Draper Kauffman Story

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Written by Draper Kauffman's sister Elizabeth Kauffman Bush, and featuring a foreword by President George H. W. Bush, America's First Frogman: The Draper Kauffman Story is the biography of the father of the American Navy SEALs. From surviving his time as a prisoner of the Germans, to his acclaimed wartime service disarming enemy bombs and establishing bomb disposal schools, to the underwater demolition teams he led at Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, America's First Frogman is an amazing true story of skill, courage, dedication, high standards, and excellence under extreme pressure. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this fascinating story of a great man's life and resolute determination.

Draper Kauffman is one of the heros of the modern navy. 'Thrown out' of the US Navy shortly after graduating from the Naval Academy for bad eyesight, he first joined the French fighting the Nazi invasion, and then the British Royal Navy as a bomb disposal officer.

After Pearl Harbour the Navy decides that maybe his eyes weren't so bad after all. (It helps of course if your father is an admiral and Chester Nimitz drops by for a drink one evening.) Then too there was the unexploded Japanese 500 pound bomb just outside the door of the ammo depot at Fort Scofield.

From unexploded bombs Kauffman moved to Underwater Demolition where he set up the first UDT school. This was, of course, the forerunner of today's Navy SEALs.

Note the name of the author, she is Draper Kauffman's sister, and President George H.W. Bush's sister-in-law. Ex-president Bush wrote the introduction for the book.

BOOK REVIEW OF: America's First Frogman, a biography of Admiral Draper Laurence Kauffman by his sister Elizabeth Kauffman Bush. Released by Naval Institute Press 2004

America's First Frogman is an exciting war story of one of America's great heroes, Rear Admiral Draper Laurence Kauffman, the flamboyant young "father" of America's famous Underwater Demolition Units, now called the Navy Seals or frogmen.

As told by his sister, the aunt of Jeb and George Bush and God Daughter of the former Duchess of Windsor, the biography spans the "heroic age...of individual prowess and fantastic risks" through several World War II battlefields and back home in the US. It is the colorful Homeric odyssey of a young Annapolis graduate who persists, despite bad eyesight, to prove his courage and ability to serve his country and follow his father, Vice Admiral James Laurence Kauffman, into the US Navy.

Vividly the author reports how her brother, after initially failing the Navy's eye test, continues to successfully "test his nerve... from one nasty job to another" (from ambulance driving in northern France and bomb disposing in London's blitz) to return to the US and slowly prove his genius at pioneering and implementing new ideas and strategies. Quoting from his own letters, as well as those of other contemporaries, the author reports how Kauffman gains the respect from all for his contagious courage and leadership, especially in attracting and training volunteer "frogmen" to join him in their exceedingly demanding work preparing battlefields, often by swimming miles at night under enemy fire, supporting enormous backpacks full of ammunition.

Although the book focuses on Kaufman's founding of the first US Naval Bomb Disposal and Combat Demolition schools, it also follows him through his very significant post war period acting as captain of several ships and chief of many pivotal naval offices including the Defense and Protection Section of the Atomic Warfare Division and Aide to Secretary of the Navy Thomas S. Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC. Ironically, in 1965 he also became Superintendent of the place where he first began his naval career, Annapolis.

The well researched and colorfully depicted battle scenes are taken from his own letters to his father whom he sensitively cautions to hide from his worried mother and sister back home. This stateside backdrop of glamour and courage in the lives of both the Kauffman and Bush families adds to the dramatic scope of the book. Photographs portray both Admiral Kauffmans, as well as many other famous military, political and family personalities. The forward is written by the author's brother in law, former President George H.W.Bush.

The reader will grow to admire the mischievous and bold, but sensitive, hero even as his sister does. Watch for this newly released biography to become a very exciting movie all of us can enjoy. Young and old can learn self disciplined focus, wisdom, wit and service from reading America's First Frogman.

TerryAnn Reed, former history teacher, Sarasota, Florida, January 30, 2005

A wonderful story of a man's life in the United States Navy during World
War II. When men of courage and strength were needed, they stepped forward. Draper Kauffman knew the task before them and trained them to meet every possible hardship the seas and the enemy could throw at them. I doubt he would wanted to be called a hero, but I do think he would want those who served with him and died during those war years to be called hero's! Exceptionally well written by a loving sister, and a story Hollywood should tell, as written. Many thanks go to Elizabeth Kauffman Bush

I was on Admiral Kauffman's staff at the 9th Naval District and present at his retirement, so I have long been aware of his amazing biography. Such a book is long overdue and tells the story of his heroic WWII service -- a life with details that you thought ony happened "in the movies".

The title has it all wrong. Draper Kauffman is not America's first frogman. John P. Spence is actually America's first frogman.

"Although it is widely thought[by whom?] that the Navy UDT's were the first Frogmen, in fact it was the combined efforts of the OSS Frogmen (Operational/Combat Swimmers), USN Scouts & Raiders, and NCDUs/UDTs, that laid the foundation for what would later become the U.S. Navy SEALS. The first OSS Frogman, according to the Naval Special Warfare Foundation was USN Petty Officer John Spence who trained at OSS Maritime Unit AREA D on the Potomac River with USN LT Jack Taylor, who is widely considered the first SEAL. Over half of the OSS Frogmen / Combat swimmers were in fact Coast Guard men sought out for their advanced swimming, diving, and boat handing skills."

Most Americans have heard of the Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs. But before there were Combat Divers of the Green Berets and SEAL Teams, there was a guy who is one of My Hero's and he wears both a Green Beret(and the SEAL Trident...) His name is John Spence, Master Chief Gunners mate, USN(ret.) and He is "America's first frogman." And if you are a operator whose never heard of him and how a Navy man has a Green Beret... Read on!

John Spence was the first person recruited and assigned as an underwater combat swimmer at the beginning of World War II. How that came to pass was classified top secret until 1987.

Spence Joined the U.S. Navy in 1936 and did his first tour of duty in the Navy as a ship's gunner and back then the US navy had diving duty as a supplemental billet to ones normal job. Spence went through Navy Diver and Salvage School and was trained as a Navy Hard hat diver with the classic brass Mark V diving Helmut type rig as light weight " Scuba" as we know it, was available in experiemental not standard practice by U.S. Militiary. For the extra duty and training, his monthly service paycheck was $10 fatter. He mustered out of the Navy in 1940 after a four-year tour.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Spence went to the recruiter and wanted to be in the thick of the action and thus volunteered as a gunner protecting merchant ships.

While he was pending a ships assignment his recruiter mentioned a special request for a Navy diver to the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. Much about the request was unknown, but Spence fit the bill and the recruiter sent him down to the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C."

Spence spent weeks at the Navy yard, all the while in the dark about what he was doing there. He knew something was going on when he received a letter from his mother worried that he was in trouble because some men were in his hometown asking former teachers and classmates about him.

It wasn't until later that he learned he had been recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an espionage organization whose operational groups are the direct forunners to the Modern U.S. Special Operations.

He was trained in espionage at Sequestered secret training centers such as what is now Camp David; what is still the Congressional Country Club in sabotage and related tradecraft - What spooks call skills - and at a secret location on the Potomac River. He was then later sent to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. There, Spence was the combat swimmer who first tested the United States' first bubbleless rebreather aqualung, the predecessor of the rebreather that the Army Special Forces Combat Divers and Navy SEALs use today.

The unit was designed by a boy wonder medical student named Christain Lambertsen who is since regarded as the father of U.S. Combat Swimming. Lambertsen (is at the time of this writing) a genius inventor and though rumors of Italian, German and Japenese had similar styles of equipment The Lambertse-Amphibious-Respitory-Unit (or LARU as it was known) was like nothing before or since!

The LARU Mod 1 was cobbled together by Lambertsen in his garage. The face mask was a converted World War I gas mask. But its performance for a swimmer underwater and ingenious design of it's future upgrades changed and brought about a whole future dynamic to secret warfare Uncle Sam was just beginging to tap into...

While Lambertsen was sworn to such secrecy that he couldn't even tell his medical school dean why he had to take time off from school to make so many trips to Washington. At the end of the tests, the government ordered four of the units at $235 each, a considerable sum in 1941 and made a 2nd Lietenant in the Army Sequestering him into OSS... but that, fair reader is for another hero's tale...

The tests on the LARU were conducted at night under secret conditions in the Shoreham Hotel swimming pool. Spence became the first member of the United States' first five-man combat swimming unit. Soon, an additional cadre of personnel and was sent to the European and amalgamated into the OSS L-Unit. Spence a trained and perfected the use of Underwater swimming on Compass and swimmer beach reconnaissance and Limpet mine attacks - all now considered classic frogman operations but at the time were on the tip of the spear.

Spence and L-Unit cadre trained extensively and deployed on advance reconnaissance operations for Pre D-Day Landings and for operations against Nazi shipping. Spence himself made several sorties into Occupied france as advance missions to pick up downed pilots. Then on the eve of D-Day their Diversion Mission to scuttle the German Subpens On the French Coast was cancelled.

L-Unit Members were regrouped into additional OSS swimmer groups and moved to additional theaters of war. After, Spence and they were sent to train on an island in the Bahamas, were they made many refinements to the equipment.

The OSS, a civilian agency formed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, lasted three years before being dissolved by President Harry S. Truman at the end of World War II.

He brought the LARU and taught its use to Navy UDT training at Fort Pierce Florida where the Navy was at the time. They were disinterested, even though the group he was interacting with was to be known soon after as Navy UDT units.

Distraught with being denied combat after all the blood sweat and cold shivering hands and combat swimming mishaps... and his own service being indifferent to the type of warfare Spence was mastering, Spence opted back into the fleet where he remained throughout the war. With Spence finishing his career in the Navy, retiring in 1961 as a chief gunner's mate first class.

Into the 1990's, Sepences story was still in a classified CIA rcords section. But at the same time, as Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs were attempting to track there history and documenting much of their earlier days, a small camp of Green Berets SEALs realized who were before them and where they came from was not yet what the history books presented as the truth.

Many SEALs did not believe in anything but what official Navy history said. After Army Special Forces inducted John Spence and his co-patriot OSS Maritime Operational Swimmers as Lifetime members of Army Special Forces giving them all Green Berets... Spence and the swimmers were soon after realized by Navy SEALs to be forerunners of that organization and awarded a SEAL Trident. They same was later bestowed to all other OSS Operational Swimmer Group personnel.

Both Organizations oficially recognized Spence as Americas First Frogman. He is a great and true hero and like his SEAL OSS Swimmers co-patriots, perhaps the finest frogman America ever came up with in short notice.

Facts are facts. These facts are now declassified for the public to see.

This book is important to the United States Bomb Disposal/Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)community in that Kauffman established the first American bomb disposal school. The book's story tells the reader about the creation and the early years of American bomb disposal during World War II.

I found the part in the book about the setting up the first U.S. Bomb Disposal School very interesting with all its problems of starting a new program from scratch and in a very short time. One fact that I was surprised to learn from the book was the Navy's bomb disposal school involvement in U.S. fuze design. I also learned about the cooperation between the Navy and the Army bomb disposal schools. The Navy would gather the ordnance, fuzes, intelligences, while the Army would inert the ordnance and do the illustration. The Navy would then publish the manuals for both services, bypassing the Army's lengthy six-month approval process for publication.

The author also recounts some of the deeds the UDTs performed during the Normandy landings and the Pacific Campaigns.

The book was written by a family member unfamiliar with the craft of bomb disposal, thus the book is more about the man than just the early history of the U.S. Bomb Disposal. After reading this book I have a profound new appreciation for what this man did in the name of freedom and the positive impact he made while serving in three countries during a time when the world seemed to have gone mad. Kauffman was a rare breed, in that he was both a Disposaleer and a Demolitioneer. Kauffman's legacy still lives on today in the military's Explosive Ordnance Disposal program and the Navy's SEAL program. Top midshipmen today receive the Rear Admiral Draper L. Kauffman Leadership Excellence Award. The Draper L. Kauffman Naval Special Warfare Operations Facility at Norfolk, Virginia and the Kauffman Explosive Ordnance Disposal Training Complex at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida are named in his honor. I highly recommend this book about a very amazing man.

The reviewer, Mike R. Vining, is a retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major who served in the Army from 1968 to 1999 in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Special Operations field.

We have three sons, all of whom have decided to serve their country, and Draper Kauffman is one of their heroes. What an exciting story! And it's more engaging because it's told by his sister, who has the unique insight to blend his military experiences with his family life. It's a well-rounded account of a man who served our country with honor and distinction.

The title is unfortunate, because younger people have no idea what a "frogman" is. It would have been better to refer to the Navy Seals.