| U.S. Navy Dolphin Program |
The coveted Navy Trident insignia of the UDT/SEAL teams. It took some time (months) for the decision to be made on whether or not it was appropriate for this particular class to be able to wear the Trident, but ultimately an affirmative decision was made to award each participant this prized insignia. Even the Army Special Forces officers in this special class were awarded the Trident. This was an interesting time for the Naval Special Warfare organization. The UDT, the long-time WWII underwater swimmers were being phased out and a new breed was coming into existence, an organization that could compete with the Army, Air Force, Marines and even other government organizations in combat operations similar to what had been carried out during WWII with Ranger, OSS, and Special Operations forces. The Navy felt that it wanted to participate in the commando-type warfare, thus the birth of the SEAL teams. The new SEALs did not want former UDT personnel to wear the Trident. Not even the instructors at the Naval Special Warfare School on Coronado Island were to be able to wear the Trident. Many in-house fights took place over this.
But we at the Dolphin Program offices at Point Mugu just wanted someone to be able to take over the operational assignment of trained dolphins, trained to do many tasks in the dangerous situations that man had carried out in the past. This was eventually settled and now we have commando-type units in all the services.
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We had no idea how much fun we were in for when we started this program. No one had ever studied the Dolphin, neither civilian nor military research institutes had ever done any work with this prized animal of the seas. We were to be the first ones. What a privilege this was to be. There were no Sea Worlds or Dolphin Shows anywhere in the world. There were no books written about dolphins, in fact there was nothing in the libraries of this nation on this animal. No anatomical diagrams really slowed down our efforts. I'll say more about this later when we went through the fun of how to take the temperature of a dolphin swimming freely in a large tank. And you can see by the photographs that we eventually took in Sea Lions into the study, and they proved to be excellent students and have helped the SEAL teams on many occasions in their wartime tasks.
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I was a Civil Servant but I was put back on active duty in the Army at the rank of Captain to be able to attend the UDT/SEAL school at Coronado. I didn't know at this time how long this assignment was to last. I learned the future about a year later when I was relieved from my active duty assignment and became a Civil Servant once again.
I had just started a fantastic career working for the Navy as a Physicist/Electronic Engineer in the Electronic Warfare Division of the Naval Missile Center. What a job that was! I was excited! I was in the middle of Soviet/U.S. tactics and techniques in the air, and also on top of the latest in the innovative use of air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles that were being tested and evaluated at Point Mugu. I was as happy as a child getting to play in a brand new sand-box, learning new things every day. I was qualified to fly as a crew member in the Navy jets that we had supporting us in electronic warfare. I got to fly almost every day. Then......one day my life changed when I got a call from the Commanding Admiral's office at Mugu, asking me to come up to his office.....enter dolphins into my life!!
He started off by complimenting me on my work at the Naval Missile Center and especially in Electronic Warfare. Then he dropped the bomb on me. He said he was going to transfer me from Electronic Warfare to a brand new job with a brand new program for the Navy....The Navy Dolphin Program. I told the Admiral that I was very happy where I was, and he proceeded to tell me that he really didn't care what I thought about the move, that for the good of the Navy, this transfer was going to take place. I wasn't a very happy camper at that point, but then again, I didn't know what I was in for.
After working with missiles and electronic systems for several years, now this, that I have just been pushed into - the Navy Dolphin Program, right there at Point Mugu! How do you go from the missile business to the underwater dolphin business overnight? I remembered the words that Dr. Paul Martin, our Physics Department Head had said to me one day when we were discussing why to major in Physics. He said that a Physicist could do anything! That the training I was going to get would enable me to branch out into any kind of effort I made up my mind to do. And here was the test, and the proof of that statement. From missiles and electronics, from electronic warfare to the ocean, an animal, the study of how that animal functioned technically, and the determination if that could help the Navy in doing its job. There I was. I had all the qualifications, so I plunged into it. I did it, not really by choice at the beginning.
I was a certified SCUBA Underwater Instructor, just having gone through the Los Angeles County Underwater Instructor's Program in Los Angeles, and also having been one of the first to put together the makings of the National Association of Underwater Instructors. I had hundreds of hours in the water, first without any equipment as a kid, and then many hundreds of hours with SCUBA. There were just a few of us certified to teach SCUBA at that time, very few in California and even less in other parts of the U.S. and the world. It was a brand new technology to the world. So the Navy Program Managers took advantage of an asset that they had right there at their finger tips exactly where they were going to start this brand new program, .....ME!!! I had a deep faith in God always working in my life, and you can imagine what I thought at this moment in time. Why have I been chosen for this new type program? What is in store for me?
I was spending almost every night and all day on weekends in the water, either in pools or in the ocean. Many, if not most of my students at the beginning were Navy people. Commanding officers at the Naval Construction Batallion base at Port Hueneme were anxious to have all their people go through basic SCUBA courses prior to being shipped out to assignments all over the world, especially in the Pacific where diving was the thing to do. They hoped that the training would save lives among their young sailors.
So I had hundreds of Navy students every day after my normal working hours. And my reputation as an Instructor had grown. So I guess in looking back, it was only a natural selection that pushed the Navy Brass to assign me to the newly organized Dolphin Program.
Things happened very quickly for me at this time in my life. I was transferred from working in Electronic Warfare to the Navy Dolphin Program, both at Point Mugu Naval Air Station. While in my position with the Electronic Warfare Division, the Department of the Navy had made a decision to begin a brand new program, at Point Mugu, the study of the Dolphin as a possible help to the Navy in undersea Naval Warfare. It was no accident that I was selected to be a part of this new effort. Because of my SCUBA diving experience and expertise (see my section on the Ocean in my life), I was chosen as one of six engineers/divers to begin this Navy Special Warfare program.
Even though there were going to be a large number of Naval personnel working on the Dolphin Program, only six of us at Point Mugu were to go to the school; the other five were a Navy Chief, two First Class Petty Officers and two Second Class Petty Officers. All of us were qualified as sportdivers, and the rest of the staff had been through my SCUBA qualification course and had done very well.
The Special Warfare School at Coronado that had the responsibility for training Navy UDT/SEALS set up a special undocumented class for us to go through along with ten U.S. Army Special Forces officers that were going to go back to Florida and start a SCUBA training program for the Army Special Forces. We all made it through the training.
The purpose for our going through this course was that the future employment and deployment of the dolphins we were to work with would be done with SEAL handlers who would be the responsible persons for having a working interface with the animals being trained in the program. We were not going to become members of a UDT/SEAL team, so this was the reason for the special class, but our commanding Admiral wanted his people to be fully aware of the types of people that would become dolphin handlers in the future.
As I have mentioned above, there was one hitch to moving into this new job. Prior to taking on this new assignment, I was to be sent to Coronado Island in San Diego to go through the Navy UDT/SEAL Diver course at the Navy UDT/SEAL Special Warfare Training facility on Coronado. The decision had been made at the Department of the Navy level that Navy SEALs were to become the handlers of dolphins that were to be deployed on Special Warfare assignments. I had been through the tough military schools of the Army, Ranger School and Airborne School, so I didn't particularly fear going to this diving school. Besides that, I had been diving for years and knew SCUBA as well as anyone. As I was to find out, the hardest part of this course was the ice cold water in San Diego Bay and the oceanfront on Coronado Island, and all the time that was spent in the water. The Navy had the intention of exposing the students to the extremes that their bodies could endure to see which were the toughest of the cadidates for this course.
I was also to put on the Army uniform again at the rank of Captain on active duty as a reservist.
This pioneering effort by the Navy to employ dolphins in warfare situations was the beginning of the study of dolphin by either military or civilian organizations. These same dolphins were used in both wars in Iraq, and to this day, Navy SEALS and their dolphins travel from San Diego where the training of these teams is now being done to assignments all over the world.
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| Large pod of dolphin off Santa Cruz Island just off the Point Mugu training facility. We spent many hours sitting in the middle of these pods, getting to know the animals, how they acted and their general characteristics. We jumped into the water to be among them and they got used to us. |
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| The Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin, our primary study subject. This animal demonstrated the best chance we had to determine the value that the dolphin might have in Special Warfare where the animal had to perform as he or she had been taught. |
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| This is Tuffy, one of our earliest recruits from the wilds of the ocean. We flew down to Pensacola Florida where he was being held in a pen for us. A fisherman had caught him in his nets and asked the Navy if they wanted him. He was all cut up from fights with sharks and other marine animals. We found out on the transcontinental trip with him that he was going to be tough to get along with. He bit all of us, and would not quiet down on the trip. We began to call him "the tough one", Tuffy for short. |
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| Tuffy in open water tests in San Diego Bay. He was a natural for the Navy program. |
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As I sit now in my comfortable home, 50 years since the Navy initiated its Dolphin Program, I can hardly believe all that I have been through in my life. This period has to be one of the most fantastic, being among the first to have ever studied the dolphin up close and then learned how to handle them and train them to perform tasks that we wanted them to do. We didn't even know at the start if we could keep these animals alive and well. There were no "study books" on the dolphin. No one had ever treated them for any physical problems. We didn't know if they would eat At this time there were no "dolphin shows" as we know them now, no books on dolphins, and except for the Russians, there was virtually no one studying this magnificent animal of the sea.
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| We wished at the beginning of the program we had had diagrams like this, but there weren't any! No one had ever studied the anatomy. But as we began to lose animals for a variety of reasons, we had a team of physiologists from UCLA and USC that helped with the necropsy of each animal. |
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We began with the very basics, how to feed them and how to keep them alive. We had no idea what the normal body temperature was for a dolphin, and we did not know what they would eat, or how to feed them. We had some very funny experiences in the early days, and some not so funny. Taking the termperature was an experience. We used a horse thermometer and had a hard time figuring out which of the openings in the body to insert this instrument. The dolphins taught us! We also did not know what if any medications we could give them and how to give it to them.
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| Early in the program, we knew we were going to have to teach the animals to jump in and out of boats on their own. So we began this training almost at the start. Now, the SEALS use boats such as this to tranport the animals to the site of where they want them to work. The dolphins leap out of the boat on command and then when they are done, they come back to the boat and leap back into their comfortable pad. They get some goodies to eat, too! |
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| Dick Holt, LA County and NAUI Instructor, U.S. Army Captain, Ranger and Paratrooper, Special Operations/Green Beret, and graduate of the Navy UDT/SEAL school |
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The Dolphin Program was temporarily halted in late 1962. This came about because of the death of most of our animals from a very bad water supply to our tanks. The top Navy Department leaders took this as a time to evalate the benefits of spending more money on the Dolphin Program. During this lull in the Program, I was offered a chance to return to school at Navy expense and get my doctorate in Physical Oceanography at Texas A&M. On the way to school, I passed through Houston where a new government program, NASA was just establishing a new Manned Space Program. I was introduced by my former boss at Point Mugu, Navy Captain Bill Wakeland, to the first NASA Flight Operations Director, Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. who was to lead this country in flying men into space. Captain Wakeland had recently been assigned to NASA as one of the Department of Defense (DOD) reps for the NASA use of military intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) as the launch vehicles for the manned spacecraft they planned to use. Mr. Kraft offered me a position that was too good to refuse. I was enthralled with this new venture, so I agreed to forgo my education and become a member of NASA. I was one of the original team that established the Manned Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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