Why Hell Week Exists - Where SEAL Teams Come From with Historian Ben Milligan | Mike Drop Ep. 210

About this video

Historian Ben Milligan explains the origins of Hell Week in Navy SEAL training, tracing it directly to D-Day preparations. Milligan describes how Draper Kaufman, tasked with creating a unit to manually destroy beach obstacles at Normandy, compressed an eight-week training curriculum into five and a half days after being told the training should be “10 times as hard” given the mission. The resulting NCDU units suffered 52% casualties on Omaha Beach, and Milligan argues this origin story validates the continued use of Hell Week training.

Key takeaways

• Milligan traces Hell Week’s creation to Draper Kaufman’s need to rapidly train units for the impossible mission of manually clearing mined obstacles ahead of the D-Day landings at Normandy
• According to Milligan, Kaufman compressed the Scouts and Raiders eight-week curriculum into five and a half days after a Navy Chief told him training should be “10 times as hard” given the mission requirements
• Milligan reports that the NCDU units trained by Kaufman suffered 52% casualties on D-Day (32 killed, 65 wounded out of 190), one of the highest casualty rates of the operation, which justified keeping Hell Week despite high attrition

Episode details: published October 22, 2024 · 8K views · 9:29 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Stories told by Mike Ritland’s podcast guests are the guests’ own accounts, attributed to them — not independently verified. Commentary is Ritland’s, presented as his analysis.

← Previous: Navy SEAL Historian Veteran Ben Milligan | Mike Drop Ep. 210 · Next: SEAL Team 7 Takes Wadi - Insurgent Combat Stories with SEAL OIC Sean Glass | Mike Drop Ep. 211 →

All Mike Ritland videos · Mike Ritland profile · Mike Drop (official site)