On 19 March , after due deliberation, the Secretary gave authority for officers of the Civil Engineer Corps to exercise military authority over all officers and enlisted men assigned to construction units.
The Secretary's decision, which was incorporated in Navy regulations, removed a major roadblock in the conduct of Seabee operations. Of equal importance, it constituted a very significant morale booster for Civil Engineer Corps officers because it provided a lawful command authority status that tied them intimately into combat operations, the primary reason for the existence of any military force.
From all points of view, Admiral Moreell's success in achieving this end contributed ultimately to the great success and fame of the Seabees. With authorization to establish construction battalions at hand and the question of who was to command the Seabees settled, the Bureau of Yards and Docks was confronted with the problem of recruiting, enlisting, and training Seabees, and then organizing the battalions and logistically supporting them in their operations.
Plans for accomplishing these tasks were not available. Workable plans were quickly developed, however, and because of the exigencies of the war much improvising was done. The first Seabees were not raw recruits when they voluntarily enlisted. Emphasis in recruiting them was placed on experience and skill, so all they had to do was adapt their civilian construction skills to military needs.
To obtain men with the necessary qualifications, physical standards were less rigid than in other branches of the armed forces. The age range for enlistment was 18—50 but, after the formation of the initial battalions, it was discovered that several men past 60 had managed to join. During the early days of the war, the average age of Seabees was After December voluntary enlistments were halted by orders of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt , and men for the construction battalions had to be obtained through the Selective Service System. Henceforward, Seabees were on average much younger and came into the service with only rudimentary skills. The first recruits were the men who had helped to build Boulder Dam , the national highways, and New York's skyscrapers; who had worked in the mines and quarries and dug the subway tunnels; who had worked in shipyards and built docks and wharfs and even ocean liners and aircraft carriers.
By the end of the war, , such men had enlisted in the Seabees. They knew more than 60 skilled trades, not to mention the unofficial ones of souvenir making and "moonlight procurement". Nearly 11, officers joined the Civil Engineer Corps during the war, and 7, of them served with the Seabees. Although technically support troops, Seabees at work, particularly during the early days of base development in the Pacific, frequently found themselves in conflict with the enemy.
After completing three weeks of boot training at Camp Allen , and later at its successor, Camp Peary , both in Virginia, the Seabees were formed into construction battalions or other types of construction units. Some of the very first battalions were sent overseas immediately upon completion of boot training because of the urgent need for naval construction. There the battalions, and later other units, underwent staging and outfitting.
The Seabees received about six weeks of advanced military and technical training, underwent considerable unit training, and then were shipped to an overseas assignment.
About , Seabees were staged directly through Port Hueneme during the war. As the war proceeded, battle-weary construction battalions and other units in the Pacific were returned to the United States to the Construction Battalion Recuperation and Replacement Center at Camp Parks , Shoemaker, California.
At Camp Parks, battalions were reformed and reorganized, or as was the case in several instances, the battalions were simply disestablished and the men assigned to other battalions. Seabees were given day leaves and also plenty of time for rest and recuperation. Eligible men were frequently discharged at Camp Parks. The construction battalion, the fundamental unit of the Seabee organization, comprised four companies that included the necessary construction skills for doing any job, plus a headquarters company consisting of medical and dental professionals and technicians, administrative personnel, storekeepers, cooks, and similar specialists.
The complement of a standard battalion originally was set at 32 officers and 1, men, but from time to time the complement varied in number. As the war progressed and construction projects became larger and more complex, more than one battalion frequently had to be assigned to a base.
For efficient administrative control, these battalions were organized into a regiment, and when necessary, two or more regiments were organized into a brigade, and as required, two or more brigades were organized into a naval construction force. For example, 55, Seabees were assigned to Okinawa and the battalions were organized into 11 regiments and 4 brigades, which, in turn, were all under the command of the Commander, Construction Troops, who was a Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer, Commodore Andrew G.
Moreover, his command also included 45, United States Army engineers, aviation engineers, and a few British engineers. He therefore commanded , construction troops in all, the largest concentration of construction troops during the entire war.
Although the Seabees began with the formation of regular construction battalions only, the Bureau of Yards and Docks soon realized the need for special-purpose units. While the battalion itself was versatile enough to handle almost any project, it would have been a wasteful use of men to assign a full battalion to a project that could be done equally well by a smaller group of specialists.
The first departure from the standard battalion was the Special Construction Battalion, or as it was commonly known, the Seabee Special. These special battalions were composed of stevedores and longshoremen who were badly needed to break a bottleneck in the unloading of ships in combat zones. Their officers, drawn largely from the Merchant Marine and personnel of stevedoring companies, were commissioned in the Civil Engineer Corps. The enlisted men were trained practically from scratch, and the efficiency of their training was demonstrated by the fact that cargo handling in combat zones compared favorably to that in the most efficient ports in the United States.
Another smaller, specialized unit within the Seabee organization was the Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit, which was about one-quarter the size of a regular construction battalion. It was organized to take over the maintenance of a base after a regular battalion had completed construction and moved on to its next assignment.
Still another specialized Seabee unit was the construction battalion detachment, ranging in size from 6 to men, depending on the specialized nature of its function. These detachments did everything from operating tire-repair shops to dredges. A principal use for them, however, was the handling, assembling, launching, and placing of pontoon causeways.
Additional specialized units were the motor trucking battalions, the pontoon assembly detachments that manufactured pontoons in forward areas, and petroleum detachments of experts in the installation of pipelines and petroleum facilities.
In the Second World War, the Seabees were organized into regular construction battalions, 39 special construction battalions, construction battalion detachments, construction battalion maintenance units, 5 pontoon assembly detachments, 54 regiments, 12 brigades, and under various designations, 5 naval construction forces. All the Pacific roads converged on Japan and the Asiatic mainland. Along the Atlantic front, the Seabees helped forge two roads to victory. From the Caribbean to the ultimate destination of Germany, they played a crucial role in initially opening and later maintaining bases of critical importance to the war effort.
When the United States found itself enmeshed in a two ocean war, the Panama Canal suddenly became the most strategic point on the globe. The convergence of naval and merchant fleet traffic at this point offered German U-boats a vital and tempting target. As a result, it became necessary to ring the canal's ocean approaches with protective bases. Agreements with the governments of Caribbean, Central American, and South American countries made it possible to secure sites for new bases throughout the area.
The Lend Lease Agreement , consummated with Great Britain in September , yielded still other possible bases in this crucial locale. Not only were new base sites rapidly acquired, but United States bases already in existence were enlarged.
Under the Greenslade Program of , the three pre naval installations located in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone were all expanded. The construction program undertaken in Puerto Rico was perhaps the most ambitious. It was so enlarged that it became known as the "Pearl Harbor of the Caribbean".
Most of the construction on existing, as well as on the newly established Caribbean, Central American, and South American bases, was carried out by civilian contractors. By late , however, the Seabees had arrived in these southern reaches to complete unfinished construction jobs and keep this vast, naval network in smooth, technical operation. Along the Atlantic coastal regions, these bases formed a barrier from Bermuda to beyond the Brazilian bulge.
Seaplanes, patrol bombers, blimps, and surface craft operating out of the new and enlarged harbors and airfields hunted down and destroyed roving enemy submarines. At the big Carlsen airfield on Trinidad, Naval Construction Battalion 80 paved runways and built a giant blimp hangar.
Naval Construction Battalion 83 helped cut an eight-mile 13 km , S-curved highway up Trinidad's jungled mountain slopes. Beginning at the sea level town of Port of Spain and climbing to a height of 1, feet m , the construction of this road required that the Seabees move one million cubic yards of earth and rock. On the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador, Naval Construction Battalion Detachment outfitted a seaplane base with tank farms, pontoon piers, and a water system.
Once this mission had been successfully accomplished, the detachment moved to Salinas on the Ecuadorian main- land. There they completed the southernmost seaplane base of the crucial Pacific sea patrol arc.
More often than not, however, the construction battalions, detachments, and maintenance units that served in these areas manned bases already completed. Although far from the receding fronts of war, their tours of duty were, nonetheless, exacting and important. After landing with American assault forces on 7 November , they proceeded to rapidly construct military facilities at Oran, Casablanca, Safi and Fedala.
Later, while the Allied armies moved toward Tunisia and their final showdown with the Afrika Korps , the Seabees built a string of staging and training areas along the northern coast.
Also active on the west coast of Africa, they constructed a huge naval air station at Port Lyautey, Morocco. After the Allies had driven the Axis forces out of Tunisia, the Seabees began a large scale buildup at their new base in Bizerte.
There they prepared a new weapon of war, the steel pontoon, that was to be used for the first time on the invasion beaches of Sicily. Actually, pontoons were not new to naval warfare. Xerxes had used such devices to cross the Hellespont when he invaded Greece in the 5th Century B. The Seabees, however, had added some new innovations and cleverly adapted them to the requirements of modern amphibious warfare.
The classic pontoons were standardized in size and fitted with special tackle so that they could be quickly assembled to form causeways, piers, and other structures.
As a result, these versatile "magic boxes" could be used to meet the exigencies of any number of situations. The beaches of Sicily had previously been considered by both the Allies and Axis as an impossible site for a major amphibious landing. Nevertheless, with help of the Seabees and their new pontoons, the Allies were able to carry off a surprise attack on the weakly defended Sicilian beaches.
The enemy was quickly outflanked and overpowered as large numbers of men and huge amounts of equipment poured ashore over pontoon causeways with a minimum of casualties and delay.
Thus, the Seabees were instrumental in spelling the beginning of the end for the southern stronghold of the Axis. These same landing techniques were later used at Salerno and Anzio on the Italian mainland. Unfortunately, the Germans had learned their lesson from the Sicilian debacle, and this time they were lying in wait. It was in the face of fierce resistance and heavy bombardment that the Allies suffered heavy casualties as they stormed ashore at both Salerno and Anzio, and the Seabees absorbed their share of the casualties.
At Anzio the situation was particularly desperate. Anzio had been a diversionary landing behind enemy lines and, when the Germans staged a massive counterattack, the defenders were in critical danger of being pushed back into the sea. It was the Seabees' task to keep essential supplies and ammunition moving across their pontoon causeways to the struggling forces on their precarious beachhead.
Only with their vital assistance were the Allies able to turn the tide of battle and push inland in the wake of the slowly retreating Germans. For many months, however, the Seabees remained at Anzio and, under continuous German bombardment, built cargo handling facilities, unloaded tank landing ships, and kept supplies moving to the front.
German resistance in Southern Italy finally collapsed and Rome was taken on 4 June Even so, the Seabees had one more task in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Southern France through Toulon. While this was a relatively important job, it was eclipsed by the much bigger assignment they were handed on the North Atlantic road to victory, the Normandy invasion.
Although Seabee accomplishments on the North Atlantic road eventually culminated in the Normandy invasion, operations in that area had begun as early as March The Seabees were first used on construction projects in Iceland, Newfoundland, and Greenland at bases previously acquired by treaty from Great Britain.
Seabees in Newfoundland helped construct a huge naval air station and naval base at Argentia. From these installations, aircraft and surface ships set forth to protect the many Allied convoys sailing the western sector of the North Atlantic. To complete the huge arc of bases stretching across the North Atlantic, even more Seabees were sent to the British Isles.
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