About the Book
teSTIMONIALS
“Deeply researched, well organized and incredibly engaging, By Water Beneath the Walls, is one of the finest histories I’ve read … This is our legacy with all the warts, the challenges and the heroics in one concise volume.”
— Admiral Bill McRaven, U.S. Navy (Ret)
“[Milligan] has told a magnificent story, educational, honest and heartening … No other book comes close to what [Milligan] has done and the country is stronger as a result.”
— General James Mattis, U.S.M.C. (Ret)
“Milligan delivers in spades, and I recommend his history to any and all.”
— Neal Bascomb, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Winter Fortress and Nazi Hunter
“From its intriguing title to a lengthy list of source notes, By Water Beneath the Walls is a remarkable book. It is a long book that does not feel long. It is a full-semester graduate course waiting to happen … a seminal work that will anchor academic studies while never failing to entertain the general reader.”
— US Naval Institute, Proceedings Magazine, October 2021
“Milligan's genius in writing is immediately observed on the first page of the book when the odd title, "By Water Beneath the Walls," is explained by a covert mission where ancient frogmen swam through an aqueduct beneath the walls of the fortress. I was hooked immediately.”
— Military.com review, February 7, 2022
Character introduction
Draper Kauffman
Father of Hell Week
One of the most consequential characters in the book is Draper Kauffman. Not because he’s the founder of the SEAL Teams. Not because he’s the father of the UDT. In fact, he’s neither one of those things. He wasn’t even the first frogman. The reason that Draper Kauffman is so consequential in the history of the SEAL teams is because he was the creator of Hell Week. Even at the time, this was a controversial move because of the training course’s outrageously high attrition rate. However, Draper knew from personal experience how difficult sustained combat could be. After all he’d been an ambulance driver in the French Army, a POW in a German prison camp, a bomb disposal officer in the British Navy, and one of the US Navy’s first decorated war heroes for single-handedly dismantling a Japanese bomb in the aftermath of the raid on Pearl Harbor. If you want to know how he convinced planners to keep Hell Week, turn to Chapter 4.
Arleigh Burke
Father of the SEAL Teams
One of the most important figures in the history of the SEAL teams is also its most forgotten: the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke. Not a veteran of any of the Navy’s “elite” branches, he was nevertheless one of the Navy’s most aggressive surface-fleet commanders. More important than that though, he was also the most forward-thinking. Even before President Kennedy came into office and started beating the drum for special operations, Burke was already positioning his fleet for just such a move. To find out just how he overhauled the Navy to make this happen, turn to Chapter 9.
Phil Bucklew
The Indispensable Man of Naval Special Warfare
No one in the history of Naval Special Warfare had as much influence as Phil Bucklew in the transformation of the Navy’s scouts and demolitioneers into the modern concept of Navy’s SEALs. One of the first volunteers in World War II for something advertised as “naval commandos,” Bucklew was initially hoodwinked into a job as a landing craft skipper for Army raiders but ended it by leading guerrillas in China. Only a handful of others in the Navy’s Scouts & Raiders program could boast as steep of a transformation. More than all of the rest of these though, Bucklew stands out because he stayed in. By the time that Vietnam came around, no one was better suited to tell the Navy how to fight an in land war in Vietnam than the sailor who’d spent the most time in the Navy fighting inland. For more of Bucklew’s story, turn to Chapter 11.