Built on History Constructing the Future

BUILT ON

Constructing the Future©

BY ARTHUR G. SHARP

The crushing 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor created a significant benefit for all US military forces: the establishment of the first Naval Construction Battalions, which quickly became known as Seabees. Their formation was beneficial to the military’s operations throughout World War II, and set the stage for close US military inter-service alliances with the Seabees that exist today.

Planning for War

Prior to World War II the Navy did not need permanent overseas bases or its own construction units to build them. The wars in which it engaged were of short duration and the deployment of assets such as aircraft and submarines outside the United States was not widespread. That changed after Pearl Harbor, which amended the Navy’s philosophy about establishing foreign bases. During the 1930s Navy planners realized that a war in the globe’s eastern hemisphere was inevitable and that supporting it would require a broader infrastructure and logistics chain than the US had in place. Fortunately, they had a friend in the White House in President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, on 1 December 1937, appointed Commander Ben Moreell as Chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks (BUDOCKS) and Chief of Civil Engineers of the Navy.

Collection of photos related to the construction, commissioning, and first landings at NAS Cubi Point, Subic Bay, Philippines, 1951-1956. Naval History & Heritage Command.

Roosevelt had so much faith in Moreell that he promoted him to Rear Admiral, skipping the captain rank. Moreell justified the president’s faith in him.

Within three years Moreell initiated the construction of two large dry docks at Pearl Harbor and naval air bases, communication stations, and fueling stations at numerous locations in the Pacific, such as Wake Island, Johnston Island, Palmyra Island, American Samoa and Midway. The Navy hired civilian construction firms to do the work. Although Moreell’s decision to build the new facilities was prescient, especially at Pearl Harbor and Midway, it inadvertently created a problem that required a unique solution. Enter the Seabees.

Civilian Workers Can be Guerillas

The dry docks at Pearl Harbor were instrumental in the battleship repair efforts after the Japanese attack. Their availability hastened the ships’ entry in the war, which proved devastating to the Japanese. The timely completion of the facilities on Midway enabled the Navy to win a major victory over Japanese naval forces in June 1942, which some historians consider the turning point in the war in the Pacific. Sadly, events at Wake Island did not turn out as well, but they played a role in the establishment of the Seabees. The US’s declaration of war on 8 December 1941 put the civilian contractors in the Pacific Theater in peril. According to international law, they could keep building but they could not resist enemy troops if attacked. If they did they would be considered guerillas and subject to execution. That happened. On 5 October 1943, the Japanese executed ninety-eight American civilian workers on Wake Island, where they had been kept as prisoners since December 1941. The workers were captured while building a US military base there, and had been performing forced

Of the Third Naval Construction Brigade works on a rod near the demilitarized zone Republic of Vietnam, November 1967. National Archives.

Moving the earth, at the construction Battalion Training Center, Camp Endicott, Davisville, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1943. National Archives.

labor for the Japanese since. Situations like that led to the formation of the Seabees, warfighters who could hold a shovel in one hand and a rifle in the other and knew how to use both. Rear Admiral Moreell made it happen – and quickly. A new chapter in US Navy history began.

On 28 December 1941, he requested permission to create the Navy’s own construction battalions to work closely with the US Marines fighting their way across the Pacific. The Bureau of Navigation granted him that authority on 5 January 1942, beginning a symbiotic relationship that the Seabees and Marines have perpetuated. Recruitment began at once for electricians, carpenters, plumbers, equipment operators and almost anyone who had construction or building trade experience. Sailors responded by the thousands. The original plan was to form one Naval Construction Regiment comprising three battalions to be based at Davisville, Rhode Island, which is now the home of the Seabee Museum. Two weeks later, on 17 January 1942, two hundred ninety-six members designated as the First Construction Detachment left Davisville – before the base was established officially – and arrived at Bora Bora exactly one month later.

On 5 March 1942, the battalions received official permission to call themselves “Seabees,” based on the first two letters of Construction Battalion. A Davisville civilian provided them with their logo, a fighting bee. Moreell added the finishing touch when he established their official motto: Construimus, Batuimus: “We Build, We Fight.”

Battalion after battalion formed, trained at places like Camps Allen and Peary in Virginia and Port Hueneme, California, and left for the Pacific Theater from Davisville, Norfolk, Virginia, Gulfport, Mississippi. They became regiments, brigades, and special battalions that were assigned to Guadalcanal, Tinian, Okinawa, New Caledonia. The Seabees went wherever construction was necessary to support the Marines and Army. They received a recruiting boost from John Wayne and his co-stars Susan Hayward and Dennis O’Keefe in the fictionalized 1944 movie, “The Fighting Seabees,” which recounted how the Seabees were formed.

Their operations extended to the European Theater, although eighty percent of them served in the Pacific region. By the time the war ended over 325,000 Navy personnel and nearly 8,000 Civil Engineer Corps officers had served with the Seabees in approximately one hundred fifty battalions. They fought and applied over sixty skilled trades at construction projects of all types at more than four hundred places.

Seabees earned thirty-three Silver Stars and five Navy Crosses, but at a significant cost. A total of two hundred ninety Seabees were killed in action, including two hundred seventy-two enlisted men and eighteen officers. Slightly more than two hundred others were killed in accidents. The Seabees reward after the war ended in 1945 was drastic demobilization.

Korea, Cubi Point, and Moving Mountains

The number of active duty Seabees was reduced to 3,300 between 1945

and 1950, when the Korean War began. Major training bases, including Davisville, were closed. The Seabees’ name was changed to Mobile Construction Battalions (MCBs); the few members left were assigned support duty in Cuba and the Pacific region. Then, on 25 June 1950, North Korea launched a surprise attack on its southern neighbor to unite the divided countries under communism. The United Nations, spearheaded by the US military, sent troops to aid the South Koreans. The Seabees were back in action.

Between June and September 1950, the fighting did not go well for the United Nations troops. Then, General MacArthur devised a daring plan to stage an amphibious landing behind North Korean lines at Inchon and cut them off. The Seabees played a vital role in the operation by providing pontoon causeways within hours of the initial assault. Reminiscent of World War II, the Seabees worked closely to support the Marine Corps and the Army with construction projects of various types and help defend what they built. Their specialty in Korea became building and repairing airfields.

When it became apparent that the Korean War was going to continue, the Navy reopened its center at Davisville on 8 August 1951. The Seabees

US Naval Seabee Team 4001 Builder First Class C. Shreffler of Pennsylvania, and Vietnamese workers lay tile walls for the carpenter shop, Binh-Duong Province, Republic of Vietnam National Archives.

in Korea were divided into small detachments and assigned to airfields used primarily by the First Marine Air Wing. They built and maintained the fields, sometimes repairing holes on one side of a runway while pilots landed and took off from the other. Then, Navy administrators provided another daunting challenge for their MCBs.

The Navy needed to build an air base at Cubi Point in the Philippines to complement a pier that would accommodate Navy aircraft carriers. Civilian construction experts said it couldn’t be done. The Navy assigned the task to the Seabees. They did not see a problem. All they needed to do was cut a mountain in half and rearrange the local terrain.

The site was located adjacent to the rugged Zimbales Mountains and treacherous jungles. A succession of MCBs arrived at Cubi Point to undertake the task. MCB-3 arrived on 2 October 1951. MCB-5 followed on 5 November 1951. Over the next five years MCBs 2, 7, 9, 11, and 13 pitched in. The combined units spent an estimated twenty-million man hours blasting coral to fill a section of Subic Bay, filling swampland, moving trees up to 150 feet tall and 6-8 feet in diameter, relocating a native fishing village, and flattening a mountain to build a two-mile long runway as part of a one hundred million dollar project that included the desired pier.

The facility, which opened in July 1956, three years after the Korean War ended, operated until October

Navy Seabees brush up on their firing techniques during Exercise Mountain Bee ‘97. The exercise gave the reserve Seabees in-field training on the use of weapons, medical evacuations, communications and logistics and other combat related training. US Navy photo by Photographers Mate 2nd Class Don Peterson.

1992. Once again, Navy prescience proved invaluable to US forces as Cubi Point became an important strategic facility during the upcoming Vietnam and Gulf Wars. More important, the Seabees’ success provided members with critical experience, which they would employ at their next assignment in Antarctica.

The Seabees Take the Cold War Literally

As the 1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY) approached, the Seabees drew the assignment to build a scientific base at the South Pole on Antarctica. They began the project on 1 February 1955, when a Mobile Construction Battalion (Special) was created at Davisville. By December about two hundred Seabees were hard at work at the South Pole. It wasn’t the first time Seabees had been there.

Shortly after World War II one hundred sixty-six Seabees participating in OPERATION HIGHJUMP (1946–1947) accompanied Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd to Antarctica to set up a research base there. Their job was to build new facilities and an air strip, offload supplies, and depart. Despite the harsh weather conditions, they completed their assignment on schedule. There was no reason to believe they couldn’t do so again a few years later. The difference in 1955 was that they and their successors would be staying there on a rotating basis.

The two hundred Seabees spent their winter building a station at the pole and an air operation facility at McMurdo Sound, including a 6,000-foot runway. That part was not easy. At one point a blizzard wiped out their progress. Undeterred, the Seabees rebuilt the air strip in time to accommodate the arrival on 31 October 1957 of a Navy R4D Skytrain, which was the first American aircraft to ever land at the South Pole. Three weeks later more Seabees arrived to build a permanent IGY station, which they completed by December. As is typical of the Seabees, the more projects they completed successfully and on time, the more assignments they received. In the ensuing years, they built snow-compacted roads, underground storage facilities, laboratories, living areas, the first nuclear power plant at McMurdo Station and the Cold War-inspired regional Distant Early Warning (DEW) system. They were not subjected to the pressures of war during those years, until hostilities broke out in Vietnam.

From Tundras to Jungles

In the mid-1950s and early 1960s the world’s political focus changed from IGYs to political unrest in Southeast Asia. As a result the Seabees were called on to carry out diversified assignments in the newly created Republic of Vietnam, well before the Vietnam War began in earnest. They built a recreation facility for US personnel involved in a 1954-55 movement called OPERATION PASSAGE TO FREEDOM, in which almost 800,000

North Vietnamese people moved to South Vietnam, a refugee camp for the emigres, and water and power supply facilities. Their humanitarian efforts earned the members of Amphibious Construction Battalion One the Vietnamese Presidential Unit Citation.

Two years later, a Seabee team was dispatched to the Republic of Vietnam to survey 1,800 miles of existing and proposed roads. They worked seven days a week for two full months in rugged territory to complete the assignment. The results paid off ten years later when US military forces began their extensive operations in Vietnam. The Seabees among them built many of the roads that enhanced transportation efforts throughout the country during the war.

The Seabees were highly visible in Thailand in the 1960s. From 1963 to 1966 small units taught people in rural provinces to build roads and public works facilities. Their public relations focus changed in 1966 when they began working with the Thai Border Patrol Police to develop remote area security. That program lasted for three years. Meanwhile, other small Seabee teams were operating throughout Vietnam.

For the most part, the Seabees’ projects in Vietnam in the early 1960s served a public relations purpose. Between 1960 and 1965, when they usually had two diversified thirteen-member teams at a time operating in Vietnam, their primary mission was to conduct civic action projects in rural areas to counter the Viet Cong’s political influence. (Each team comprised a junior officer of the Navy Civil Engineer Corps (officer in charge), three equipment operators, one utilities man, two construction mechanics, two builders, one steelworker, one construction electrician, one engineering aide, and one hospital corpsman.) They also erected US Army Special Forces camps and worked on military engineering projects as their numbers increased.

In May 1965 MCB-10 landed at Chu Lai, Republic of Vietnam as the fighting intensified and the Seabees reverted to their military construction roots. That landing increased the number of Seabees in Vietnam to 10,000. Eventually their presence increased to 25,000 in twenty-two battalions, two regiments, two maintenance units, and numerous civic action teams. Their numbers dwindled by 1970. But, as history has shown, numbers are unimportant to the Seabees. They function equally well in wartime or peacetime – sometimes simultaneously.

While Seabees built and fought in Vietnam, another contingent started their largest ever peacetime construction project. Their mission, which lasted eleven years and cost two hundred million dollars, was to build a Navy base on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean. Its value became evident when it was used as a staging area during the next war. But Seabees were still fighting the one in Vietnam.

Between 1965, the year Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Marvin G. Shields became the first and only Seabee to ever earn the Medal of Honor, and 1970 they concentrated on their specialties: supporting the Marines by building aircraft support facilities, roads, bridges and other infrastructure components and constructing fortified camps, access roads, and air strips for the US Army’s Special Forces and the Vietnamese troops they were training. Those troops needed fortifications that could withstand the frequent enemy ground, artillery, and mortar attacks. The Seabees built them well until their last team left Ham Tan, Binh Tuy Province, on 18 April 1972. There were more adventures ahead.

More Wars, More Peace, More Achievements

There was a ten-year lull in major projects for the Seabees between 1972 and 1982, as work continued on the Diego Garcia project. Then, on 23 October 1983 terrorists ignited a truck loaded with explosives at the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing two hundred forty-one Marines and wounding eighty more. A detachment of eighty-two Seabees was deployed in Beirut to strengthen the perimeter positions at the site and construct obstacles and concrete bunkers for the Marines. They did not get another chance to display their rapid deployment capabilities until the Gulf War (1990-91), OPERATION DESERT SHIELD.

Active duty Seabees and reservists arrived in the Middle East only eleven days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Their

original mission was to provide construction support for the First Marine Expeditionary Force. As their numbers grew they built advanced bases and air fields for Marine aircraft, provided petroleum and water facilities, and accompanied the Marines into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to install facilities at the four airfields where the Marine Air Combat Element was located.

Per custom, the Seabees provided valuable services to the Marines, including the largest wartime multi-battalion Seabee project since the Vietnam War. They built a headquarters complex for the First Marine Expeditionary Force and a 15,000-man camp for the Second Marine Expeditionary Force, which became known as “Wally World.” But, on 28 February 1991, Iraq accepted a cease fire and all construction ceased. So did the Seabee’s largest military action since the end of the Vietnam War. Their operations became more humanitarian in nature.

In April 1991, a detachment deployed to northern Iraq to provide support for Kurds being harassed by the Iraqi government. Their project, OPERATION PROVIDE COMFORT, included latrine construction, electrical and water-well support, road grading, forklift support, berm construction, and wash-rack construction.

Two months later, the volcanic Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines inundated the Subic Bay US Naval Complex and Clarke Air Force Base with its ash and sand, which was saturated by the ensuing Typhoon “Diding’s” torrential rains. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3 and Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit 302 responded to the disaster and initiated OPERATION FIERY VIGIL. They provided temporary shelter for the homeless people on the base and temporary power and emergency water supplies. They cleared roadways and aircraft runways. Working with public works personnel, they had the sites back to normal in short order.

Similar efforts followed at home and overseas locales. Several battalions responded to Somalia in 1992 to support US Marine Corps and Army units rebuild that war-torn country.

US Navy Seabees construct a Mabey-Johnson bridge apparatus. NMCB-133 is deployed in the area to build a bridge to replace one that was destroyed during OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, while providing construction support to adjacent units and assisting in humanitarian efforts to rebuild the country of Iraq. US Navy photo by Photographers Mate 2nd Class Jacob A. Johnson.

Over eight hundred Seabees provided disaster relief after Hurricane “Andrew” devastated Dade County, Florida, on 24 August 1992. They conducted operations of various types in Honduras, Croatia, Japan, Cuba…the list goes on.

Seabees supported OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM in Afghanistan for thirteen years. The last battalion to be deployed there, NMCB 25, cased its colors on 1 November 2016. That may have been the last Seabee unit in Afghanistan, but their services will always be needed elsewhere.

The Future is Still Building

The Seabees have retrenched in recent years. There are six battalions, two Amphibious Construction Battalions, and two Underwater Construction Teams on active duty today, which composes one-third of the units available to the Navy. Reservists or active, Seabees are always ready to respond to whatever military or humanitarian situations require their professional and diverse experiences. (Active and reserve Seabee units were integrated into two Naval Construction Brigades under the operational control of the Commanders in Chief of the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets respectively in July 1992.)

As the Seabees theme revised to celebrate their 75th anniversary in 2017 proclaims, “Built on history: constructing the future.” They have been doing that for three-quarters of a century – and they remain on call to continue their mission as long as they are needed. In 1966 MARVIN G. SHIELDS, Construction Mechanic Third Class, U.S. Navy, Seabee Team 1104, received the Medal of Honor. He served in Dong Xoai, Republic of Vietnam on 10 June 1965. He entered service at Seattle, Washington. He was born 30 December 1939 in Port Townsend, Washington.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Although wounded when the compound of Detachment A342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, came under intense fire from an estimated reinforced Viet Cong regiment employing machineguns, heavy weapons and small arms, Shields continued to resupply his fellow Americans who needed ammunition and to return the enemy fire for a period of approximately three hours, at which time the Viet Cong launched a massive attack at close range with flame-throwers, hand grenades and small-arms fire. Wounded a second time during this attack, Shields nevertheless assisted in carrying a more critically wounded man to safety, and then resumed firing at the enemy for four more hours. When the commander asked for a volunteer to accompany him in an attempt to knock out an enemy machinegun emplacement which was endangering the lives of all personnel in the compound because of the accuracy of its fire, Shields unhesitatingly volunteered for this extremely hazardous mission. Proceeding toward their objective with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher, they succeeded in destroying the enemy machinegun emplacement, thus undoubtedly saving the lives of many of their fellow servicemen in the compound. Shields was mortally wounded by hostile fire while returning to his defensive position. His heroic initiative and great personal valor in the face of intense enemy fire sustain and enhance the finest traditions of the US Naval Service.