A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (41 page)

The “SeaBees” came into existence shortly after the beginning of World War II, when the use of civilian workers to build naval bases in war zones proved impractical. Under international law, civilians were not permitted to resist enemy military attack; participating in combat actions, even defensive ones, could result in summary execution as guerrillas. To counter this problem, skilled workers were recruited into the Navy directly from the construction trades to form “Construction Battalions.” In typical Navy
fashion, these were soon referred to as “CBs,” and that evolved into the now-famous term SeaBees.

During World War II, the SeaBees performed now-legendary deeds in both the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters of operation. Earning thirty-three Silver Stars and five Navy Crosses, they built more than a hundred major airstrips, nearly five hundred piers, several thousand ammunition magazines, hundreds of square blocks of warehouses, hospitals to serve more than seventy thousand patients, tanks for the storage of a hundred million gallons of gasoline, and housing for one and a half million people. They suffered more than two hundred combat deaths, earned more than two thousand Purple Hearts, and served on four continents and on more than three hundred islands.

When the Marines invaded Guadalcanal early in the war, the men of the 6th Naval Construction Battalion followed them ashore and thus became the first SeaBees to build under combat conditions. The airfield there was vital, and the SeaBees kept it open by continuously repairing the damage despite almost constant bombardment by the enemy. The first decorated SeaBee hero of the war, Seaman Second Class Lawrence C. “Bucky” Meyer, was among the SeaBees working on that airfield. In those precious few hours of off time, when others were grabbing catnaps or dashing off a quick letter home, Seaman Meyer worked on an abandoned machine gun until he had it in working order. On 3 October 1942, during an air attack, he used his salvaged machine gun to do battle with a Japanese Zero fighter that was strafing the field. His courage in facing and defeating the enemy aircraft earned him the Silver Star.

During the landing on Treasury Island in the Solomons in late 1943, Fireman First Class Aurelio Tassone of the 87th Naval Construction Battalion was driving his bulldozer ashore when it became evident that a Japanese pillbox was holding up the advance from the beach. Tassone headed straight for the pillbox, using the bulldozer blade as a shield against the enemy fire, while Lieutenant Charles Turnbull provided covering fire with his carbine. Despite the continuous heavy fire, Tassone crushed the pillbox with the bulldozer, killing all twelve of its occupants. Tassone's courageous action earned him a Silver Star and inspired the now legendary image of the SeaBee astride his bulldozer rolling over enemy positions.

Yet another milestone in SeaBee history occurred in Hollywood rather than in the South Pacific. The release of the motion picture
The Fighting SeaBees
in 1944, starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, made SeaBee a household word. (Interestingly, John Wayne's last motion picture was
Home for the SeaBees,
a Navy documentary filmed in 1977.)

During the Normandy invasion, 6 June 1944—known more popularly as “D-Day”—the SeaBees were among the first to go ashore as members of
naval combat demolition units. Working with U.S. Army Engineers, their crucial task was to destroy the steel and concrete barriers that the Germans had built in the water and on the beaches to forestall amphibious landings. When dawn betrayed their presence, they came under murderous German fire. Whole teams were wiped out when shells prematurely detonated their explosives, but the survivors pressed on, planting their explosive charges to blow huge holes in the enemy's defenses.

The SeaBees remained with the armies battling their way into Europe, providing vital assistance in overcoming natural and man-made obstacles as the great invasion continued. The final great SeaBee effort in the European Theater took place during the crossing of the Rhine River in March 1945. The U.S. Army, concerned about the river's swift and tricky currents, called upon the SeaBees to help transport General George Patton's armored forces across the Rhine at Oppenheim in a frontal assault that swept away the German defenders. The SeaBees operated more than three hundred craft to shuttle thousands of troops into the heart of Germany, playing a major role in the defeat of Hitler's forces and the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny.

Following the victories in Europe and Asia, the SeaBees helped warravaged nations to rebuild while also building and maintaining advanced bases important to the Cold War. Cubi Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines and a huge floating dock at Holy Loch, Scotland, for the repair and service of the Polaris missile submarines are both SeaBee projects.

At the landing in Inchon that changed the course of the Korean War, the SeaBees positioned vitally needed causeways while battling enormous thirty-foot tides, swift currents, and continuous enemy fire. In an incident that came to be known as the “Great SeaBee Train Robbery,” the need to break the equipment bottleneck at the harbor inspired a group of SeaBees to go behind enemy lines and capture some abandoned locomotives. Despite enemy mortar fire, they succeeded in bringing back the engines and turning them over to the Army Transportation Corps. For the rest of the Korean War, the SeaBees built and maintained air bases, aided in evacuations, and helped keep vital seaports functioning.

In Vietnam, the SeaBees built remote bases, roads, airfields, cantonments, warehouses, hospitals, storage facilities, bunkers, and other facilities that were critically needed to support the combatant forces. In addition to the many SeaBee team activities in remote locations, such as when Marvin Shields fought alongside the Green Berets in Dong Xoai, construction battalions built large coastal strongholds in the northernmost provinces and huge port facilities at Da Nang, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai.

Since the Vietnam War, the SeaBees have carried on their unique naval functions in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Haiti, and the Saudi Arabian
desert. Virtual miracle workers when it comes to quickly building naval bases and airfields in remote locations, they are unlike most other construction workers because these men and women must sometimes take a break from pouring concrete and laying cables to pick up their weapons and do battle. For more than half a century these largely landlocked Sailors have upheld the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy, providing vital services without which the operating fleets could not function, often under difficult and dangerous circumstances, and always guided by the principle embodied in their simple but meaningful motto: “Can do.”

In 1960, Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard left the destroyer escort USS
Lewis
and climbed into a strange vessel that had been named
Trieste.
Less than sixty feet long and known technically as a “bathyscaphe,” this oddity was a submarine of sorts that used a combination of iron pellets (nine tons of them) for ballast and gasoline (twenty-eight thousand gallons) for buoyancy. The two men were crammed into a sphere on
Trieste
's underside that was made of an alloy of nickel, chromium, and molybdenum and had an interior diameter of just six and one-half feet.

Casting off from
Lewis,
Walsh and Piccard headed down toward their destination—the bottom of the Marianas Trench, at the time believed to be the deepest point in all the world's oceans at 35,800 feet, or nearly seven miles. At about 800 feet, all light was gone, and they continued down into inky darkness, where no man had ever gone before. At about 6,000 feet, it became so cold they had to put on warmer clothing. As they continued their descent, they suddenly felt the vessel shake violently as though an explosion had taken place; one of the windows in the entrance shaft to the vessel had cracked from the tremendous pressure that was building as the vessel went deeper into the ocean. This was not a venture for the fainthearted.

After four hours and forty-eight minutes, the two men felt a soft bump, and they knew they had arrived at the deepest point in the world's oceans. The pressure at this depth was more than one hundred thousand tons, and Walsh and Piccard were astonished to see a flounderlike fish and some shrimp on the bottom as they peered out through their eight-inch-thick glass window.

Their ascent to the surface took three hours and seventeen minutes, and when Walsh emerged from the confines of the bathyscaphe, he tossed a weighted American flag over the side so that it would go to the bottom and mark the spot of the record-setting dive. To this day, that record has not been broken.

Meeting in Philadelphia on Friday, 13 October 1775, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress voted to fit out two sailing vessels with ten carriage guns and eighty-man crews and sent them out on a cruise of three months to intercept transports carrying munitions and stores to the British army in America. This was an audacious move, considering that it would be nearly nine months before that same Congress would produce the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the new United States of America. One might argue that it was also a move bordering on the irrational, considering the size and incredible power of the Royal Navy. One might also note that Friday the thirteenth was not the ideal date to make such a move. But undaunted by such things, men like John Adams, who understood the importance of sea power, got the resolution passed, little realizing that they had signed the “birth certificate” of what would eventually become the most powerful navy in the history of the world.

In 1972, the CNO issued a long-overdue decree, officially authorizing recognition of 13 October as the appropriate date for celebrating the Navy's birthday. Since that time, each CNO has encouraged a Navy-wide celebration of this occasion “to enhance a greater appreciation of our Navy heritage, and to provide a positive influence toward pride and professionalism in the naval service.” On that date every year, Sailors the world over gather for formal parties ashore, or have a piece of cake specially prepared by the cooks in the ship's galley, or simply pause for a moment before assuming their next watch to reflect on what it means to be part of an organization that is hundreds of years old, has changed in countless ways, and yet carries with it the same bold spirit that was present at its birth.

Herman Wouk is one of the greatest writers of naval fiction and was once a Sailor himself. Countless Sailors have read Wouk's Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Caine Mutiny,
which has often been used as a textbook at the Naval Academy for its insights into a portion of the Navy's heritage and for its lessons on leadership. And Wouk's two books chronicling the history of World War II,
The Winds of War
and
War and Remembrance,
stand as monuments to the Navy's great struggles in the victory at sea in the Pacific.

Although his works are technically fiction, they are filled with historical facts and, more importantly, they provide a deeper understanding of the human experience of war than any straight history can ever do. It is
noteworthy, then, that this great writer stepped out of his role as anonymous narrator only once to make an overt comment about what he was writing.

He had been describing the sacrificial attack of the torpedo bombers at the Battle of Midway, telling how these aircraft, manned by an assortment of young men representing most of the states that are combined to make up the United States, charged headlong into battle and certain death, and in so doing turned the tide of battle and altered the course of the world's history. He had been relating how, in just a very few minutes, thirty-three pilots and thirty-five radioman gunners were killed as they distracted enemy fighter aircraft long enough for their fellow Sailors in the dive-bombers to strike a fatal blow into the very heart of the Japanese navy, the same aircraft carriers that had struck at Pearl Harbor on the first day of the war. Describing this incredible moment as “the soul of the United States of America in action,” Wouk wrote that “the memory of these three American torpedo plane squadrons should not die.” He then halted the telling of his story, pausing for several pages to list the names and the birthplaces of each of the sixty-eight men who paid the ultimate price that day.

This unusual tribute to real people in the midst of a work of fiction tells us that there is something truly extraordinary about the Battle of Midway. On its Web site, the Naval Historical Center describes the battle as “the decisive battle of the war in the Pacific,” and few historians dispute that. It was a battle that was won by the courage and sacrifice of those pilots and gunners who took to the air knowing that the odds were stacked against them. It was also won through some exceptional intelligence work by a handful of cryptanalysts working long hours for weeks on end to decipher the enemy's intentions. And by hundreds of shipyard workers who performed maintenance miracles to ensure that three instead of just two American aircraft carriers were available to fight. And by several admirals who made key decisions at the right times. And by those anonymous others who muscled the bombs onto aircraft, found the winds for the launch, kept the steam flowing and the electrons streaming, prepared the meals, kept the records, and cleaned, lubricated, repaired, and performed countless other duties to ensure that this outnumbered and outclassed fleet was ready to do battle, to do what U.S. Sailors are meant to do.

Recognizing the particular significance of this battle and, more importantly, what it represents, the CNO sent out a message to the entire Navy on the fifty-eighth anniversary of the battle, saying: “Midway was won, not by superior numbers or daunting technology, but by the courage and tenacity of Sailors who fought a vicious air and sea battle against overwhelming odds. Their victory helped win us the world we have today, and
it is appropriate that we remember it and those who participated in it.” In that same message, the CNO then decreed: