First SEALs (35 page)

D
URING THE LAST FEW
months of the war in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy grew increasingly concerned about the prospect of underwater commando attacks as the Allied fleets approached the Japanese home islands. For help in gauging and responding to this threat, they turned to America's experts on underwater commando operations: the OSS and Commander Woolley.

At the Navy's request, Woolley embarked on a mission to create a “
comprehensive film report” detailing enemy equipment and tactics. In Europe, he began procuring enemy submersibles and equipment. To complete the study, he conducted interrogations of former enemy underwater combat operatives. According to Donovan, “Commander Woolley was imminently successful on this mission and has been highly commended by the Navy Department for this work.”

Woolley continued to work closely with the Navy, forging the path from World War II's Maritime Unit to the future SEALs program. He “was frequently in consultation with [the] Navy Department” about underwater combat swimming and pioneered the development of innovative equipment, including a “wooden craft submersible.” Woolley's valuable contributions and the technology, tactics, sources, and methods the MU developed would become crucially important in the years to follow.

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Morde was also likely briefed on OSS plans to target Japanese shipping on China's Yangtze River. An MU officer in China proposed outfitting swimmers with “non-magnetic limpets and dependable incendiaries.” In typical OSS fashion, the MU found an expert on the area in Lt. Commander Richard Otter of the Norwegian navy. Otter spent “many years as a piloting officer in Chinese Coastal waters and interior waters, including the Yangtze.” OSS sent Otter to the Bahamas for a crash course in combat swimming and then on to China, but the war ended before the swimmer commandos could be unleashed against the Japanese river vessels.

30

“THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I'VE EVER BEEN IN THE MOVIES”

A
S THE
A
MERICAN TROOPS MARCHED
into Mauthausen, an embedded film crew from the Army Signal Corps rolled their cameras, capturing the shocking images of emaciated prisoners, huddled for warmth in their ragged coats and threadbare striped prison garb. Despite his ordeal and deteriorated condition, Jack Taylor spoke lucidly about all the suffering he had seen and endured, when questioned by the film crew:

I'm lieutenant senior grade, Jack H. Taylor, U.S. Navy. I'm from Hollywood, California, and believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever been in the movies. I've been working overseas in occupied countries in the Balkans for eighteen months. In October '44, I was the first Allied officer to drop into Austria. I was captured December 1 by the Gestapo, severely beaten—even though I was in uniform—severely beaten and considered as a non-prisoner-of-war. I was taken to [a] Vienna prison, where I was held for four months. When the Russians neared Vienna, I was taken to the Mauthausen Concentration Lager, an extermination camp, the worst in Germany, where we have been starving and beaten and killed and, fortunately, my turn hadn't come. Two American officers at least have been executed here. Here is the insignia on one, a U.S. Naval officer, and here is his dog tag. And here is the Army officer's. They were executed by gas in this lager.

When one of the film crew off-camera asked how many ways the prisoners were executed at Mauthausen, Taylor flatly replied, “
Five or six ways: by gas; by shooting; by beating, beating with clubs; by exposure, that is standing outside naked for forty-eight hours and having cold water thrown on them in the middle of winter; dogs; and pushing over a hundred-foot cliff. This is all true. It has been seen and is now being recorded.” He noted that he had been sentenced to death and added with a wry smile that “fortunately, the 11th Armored Division has come through and saved us in time.”
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The U.S. troops transported Taylor out of the camp on May 5, less than twenty-four hours after liberating the camp. He spent his first night of freedom in a house with Sergeant Kosiek and his men. Kosiek recalled, “
The boys rustled up some food; [Taylor] enjoyed his meal. He told us that he would never forget our platoon of twenty-three men as long as he lives. He told us he never expected to see Americans again. He was sentenced to death four times while at the camp, but was spared by the refugees. He was to go to the gas chamber on May 6. . . . We sat and talked with him until 3 o'clock in the morning.”

Freed at last, many of the former inmates turned aggressively against prisoners who had aided their captors. As he was riding away from the iron gates of Mauthausen toward the hospital for recovery from an unimaginably horrific incarceration, Taylor witnessed his fellow inmates impaling those who had served as block leaders and Kapos, brutal enforcers for the Germans, on the barbed wire that surrounded Mauthausen. When Taylor later returned to the concentration camp after having regained some of his strength, many of the Communists who had been inmates had taken control of the facility. They were holding trials and executions of the
vicious block leaders and others who had mistreated prisoners. Eventually the Americans put an end to the practice.

T
HE INCOMPREHENSIBLE DEATH
toll at Mauthausen continued to climb even after the liberation of the camp. Former prisoners were dying at an appalling rate—more than fifty per day from disease and malnutrition. Even the most advanced American medical care and food could not undo the damage inflicted by their barbarous imprisonment. Galvanized by the ongoing suffering he witnessed all around him, Taylor, though still weak, chose to return to duty, even though he could have gone home. He did this not to aid the war effort, but to fulfill a promise he made to many of his former inmates, living and dead, and the countless others he did not know: he would gather evidence against the Germans who ruled the concentration camps to prepare the prosecution for the war crimes trials that he hoped would follow. Lieutenant Taylor returned to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and, with former prisoners, collected testimony, documents, and other evidence of the Germans' crimes against humanity, and along the way he had the satisfaction of “
running down SS men hiding in the area.” He also took time to catch up on all the meals he had missed, gaining thirty pounds in just two weeks.

One of the most important documents he collected was a set of thirteen “
death books” kept by prisoners who acted as camp secretaries at Mauthausen. These recorded the “official” cause of death for everyone who perished at the camp, but unbeknownst to their German captors, the inmate secretaries devised a secret code to document the actual causes of death, such as gas chamber or lethal injection. These records would prove crucial in the Nazi trials at Nuremberg. Military lawyers would call Taylor's report “
outstanding” and some of “the best war-crimes evidence” ever produced for the trials.

During the autumn of 1945, Taylor was honorably discharged from the OSS and returned home to California. Never one to remain idle for long, he actually reapplied to the OSS, pestering his case officer for an assignment. The OSS operations were winding down in Europe, but the agency saw indications of looming hostilities with the Russians and began to mount intelligence operations. Despite his vast intelligence expertise and knowledge, Taylor was not fluent in any foreign languages and had limited understanding of Russian or Eastern European culture. Therefore, much to his disappointment, the OSS declined to assign him on any future missions.

Though the bitter winds of the Cold War were beginning to blow, on October 1, 1945, President Truman prematurely disbanded the OSS for a multitude of political and budgetary reasons. The importance of intelligence operations would once again come to the forefront, but the United States now lacked a national intelligence agency. All the incredibly pioneering special operations forces the OSS created were dissolved, including Operational Groups, Jedburghs, SO, and the Maritime Unit. After completing the high-priority underwater warfare study for the U.S. Navy, Commander Woolley was ordered to close down the MU. Like most of his colleagues in the Maritime Unit, he returned to civilian life and became an American citizen. Practically the only evidence of the MU's existence lay in Top Secret records locked away in government safes and in the minds of veterans sworn to secrecy. The stories of the contributions and sacrifices made by the heroic men and women who served in the OSS were largely left untold.

But Taylor would serve one final mission; arguably his most important. In March of 1946, Jack Taylor was called out of retirement and returned to active duty. Promoted to lieutenant commander, he traveled to Germany to serve as a star witness for the prosecution at the Mauthausen-Gusen Camp Trials held at the Dachau Concentration Camp.

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Remarkably, this film can be accessed on the Internet today.

EPILOGUE

DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP, SPRING 1946

“
Will you describe the type of flames and smoke that emanated from the crematory when an old prisoner was cremated?” asked the prosecutor.

Taylor matter of factly responded, “Ordinarily it was a pale brown, acrid smoke, heavy with the smell of burnt hair, and this was wafted over the camp, particularly block thirteen. It seemed to go up and then settle down.”

Jack Taylor was the prosecution's star witness at the Mauthausen-Gusen Camp Trials, a set of subsidiary trials tied to the Nuremberg Trials. Nuremberg included a series of military tribunals to bring to justice the most notable members of the Nazi Party. “Dubbed the greatest trial in history,” Nuremberg called to account a “who's who” of the surviving members of the German war machine: Alfred Jodl, Albert Speer, and Hermann Goering, among others. American authorities conducted the Mauthausen-Gusen Trials to try officers and camp guards from Mauthausen in the occupied American Zone of Germany at the site of some of Germany's greatest atrocities: the Dachau Concentration Camp.

For days, Taylor stoically kept his emotions in check as he recounted his experiences at
Mauthausen in excruciating detail to the court. He began his testimony by stating, “I have tried to forget most of these things for the past year.”

In his training as an OSS operative, Taylor had learned to pay attention to numbers, quantities, dates, sights, sounds, and smells that might provide clues about enemy movements and intentions. Now those same skills proved invaluable in his testimony against the Germans who had immorally enslaved and killed thousands in violation of international law.

The prosecutor pressed for details on the restrooms, asking Taylor to describe the “sanitary facilities” the Germans claimed to have furnished the inmates. Taylor shot back “I don't remember the number of toilets, but it was, I would say, enough for a normal complement of two hundred (200) prisoners, possibly ten (10) toilets. However, it was so bad, and so many of us had dysentery, that in the daytime they would open up the manholes and the sewer out in the street, and most everyone used the manholes.”