SHALLOWS

War in the Shallows
Bucklew was born on 18 December 1914, and at the age of 16 lied about his age and enlisted in
the U.S. Naval Reserve, where he enjoyed summer cruises on the Great Lakes as well as the pay.
He applied to the Naval Academy but failed the admissions test and instead ended up at Xavier
University on a football scholarship. After graduation in 1934 Bucklew played for the Columbus
Bulldogs of the American Football League and later for the Cleveland Rams. 109
When World War II broke out, the Navy recalled him to duty and assigned him to Norfolk,
Virginia, as a physical education instructor. He quickly was bored with shore duty and volunteered
for a more adventurous assignment with the “Scouts and Raiders.” The scouts surveyed
beaches during the days before an invasion and then guided Army troops ashore on D-Day. On
his first assignment in North Africa, German aircraft torpedoed his transport ship (Leedstown
[AP-73]) off the coast of Algeria on 9 November 1942. He survived the attack and went on to
lead a scout raider team that surveyed the Salerno beaches in Sicily. During that invasion, he
received a Navy Cross for guiding the initial assault teams to the beach under heavy enemy fire.
In 1944 he received a second Navy Cross during the Normandy invasion by repeatedly guiding
boats to the beach despite stiff currents and heavy fire. He also picked up wounded and fired
his boat’s rockets in support of the first wave of Duplex Drive tanks. 110 At the end of 1944, the
Navy sent Bucklew to China to survey locations for potential Allied invasions. Working with
local guerrillas and disguised as a coolie, he set out by foot from Kunming to survey beaches in
southern China for intelligence purposes. 111
Bucklew left the Navy in 1946 and returned to Xavier to coach football. A year later the service
recalled him to duty to teach Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) at Columbia
University. From 1951 to 1956, he commanded Beach Jumper Unit 2 at Little Creek, Virginia, and
then departed for Korea to become an advisor to the director of naval intelligence for the South
Korean navy. In this position, he learned a great deal about the plight of the naval advisor. He
discovered that advisors often worked with officers of higher rank but with less experience than
their U.S. counterparts. “Their militaries were built rapidly under the stress of war,” and many of
their officers were “Johnny-come-latelys.” The tendency of many American officers was to “look
down on their counterparts and always push American weaponry, doctrine, and training,” he
explained. Bucklew, however, tried to understand the situation from the other side. 112 Rather than
press his counterpart Captain Kim Se Won to develop a sophisticated radio communications
network with his agents in North Korea, he accepted the existing carrier-pigeon system and even
signed off on a budgetary request for birdseed. When his U.S. chain of command complained
that the South Korean navy was not doing enough to prevent the infiltration of North Korean
agents along the coast by fishermen, Bucklew went out on a patrol boat to observe the situation
firsthand. He noticed that during the spring rockfish season, thousands of unmarked fishing
boats, both from the North and South, plied the coastline, and that there was no way that the
South Korean navy could possibly inspect every vessel for enemy agents or contraband. 113 In 1964
Bucklew would encounter similar situations in South Vietnam where there were simply too many
civilian craft plying the coastal waters for naval forces to search effectively.
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