Before he entered the Navy in early 1942, Navy Reserve Captain Phil H. Bucklew’s first love was football—playing fullback, punter, and tight end at Xavier University, with the 1937–38 Cleveland Browns, and coaching his new team, the Columbus Bullies. As an ensign, he became an amphibious commando, a member of the Scouts and Raiders, participating first in the Operation Torch North Africa landings and then the Allied landings in Sicily and Normandy. He was twice awarded the Navy Cross.
In July 1943, Ensign Bucklew and his Scouts and Raiders unit had the job of safely guiding 15,000 Allied troops through the dark onto Red Beach in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. He captured the action in his Naval Institute oral history:
You had to get your troops in and make certain they were not off target 100 yards, or the Army is piled up and very vulnerable. . . . In the amphibious landings you had to make certain they hit the beach exactly where their little charts said.
We would come in in advance of the landing force. This recon commences in the middle of the night to around one o’clock in the morning. You usually work under the quarter moon so as to have protection of full darkness as the troops near the beach. You try to center your beach, then you make your passes on it to locate your flanks. In most cases you have something like a pillbox on one flank and some tangible, identifiable object on the other. After you center, we would normally make a full sweep. It required dropping off a man at each flank.
By flashlight signal, whatever code you are giving, he would locate himself at that flank and another scout at the other flank. You then back off your boat until you receive the flank signals. Then you can estimate the accurate center of the beach. As the landing craft come in, you have to make them come down the alley. That was the very simple procedure. It did get tough at Sicily, however—they turned airfield searchlights on and it looked like Broadway.
You have to learn from experience in working from the water or working from a boat, and regardless how bright the searchlights are, you are still difficult to see. You feel like you are stark naked there in making your runs, but powerful airfield searchlights over the water provide a glare for the observer also. You may be scared, but you are protected on the water.
I put my flankmen ashore, both of them Army types, and got my two signals. From one flank at almost the same spot where I was receiving my flank light signal, the enemy opened fire. I was getting the flank signal with machine gun fire coming right over it, and it was steady. I found my sergeant on the beach the next morning and said, “What the hell were you doing?” He said, “Well the pillbox was occupied. I felt the safest thing to do was to get my back right up against it.”
He was sitting there safe with a shielded light. He was right under their fire. So, we landed the troops.
Following the D-Day landings, Bucklew volunteered for duty in China doing beach reconnaissance—hydrographic and depth gradient surveys for possible landings—and training Chinese guerrillas in their fight against the Japanese. As he rose through the ranks, his special operations skills were tapped anew in the early 1960s, when he did a survey of pressing Navy needs in the growing conflict in Vietnam.
I was selected for captain about that time, and Vice Admiral [Ephraim P.] Holmes was the commander of Amphibious Forces, Pacific. He called me in and said “I am nominating you for this Special Operations Group, which will include the Underwater Demolition Teams and the SEAL Teams, a Boat Support Unit. You will coordinate the training and command of the special operators.
Bucklew was the first commander of SEAL Team One. In 1987, after his retirement, the Phil H. Bucklew Center for Naval Special Operations was dedicated at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado.