Pick & Shovel Sailors

Youngest of the Navy's forces, but already full of tradition, are the "Seabees"*--the Construction Battalions scattered from Dutch Harbor to Casablanca. Last week they got traditional recognition. North to Narragansett Bay flew the Secretary of the Navy to commission Camp Endicott, their new $20,000,000 training center.

The Seabees were Navy naturals from their start 15 months ago. Their uniformed steelworkers, hard-rock drillers, bulldozer operators, loggers and steamfitters are a tough, horny-handed lot, given to artistic cussing, accurate spitting, and tall-story telling. Having put up skyscrapers, drilled in the mountains and blasted out the roads of the nation, they are good company in the service that requires more special skills than all others. Their motto, in the best Navy classical tradition, is "Constmimus Batuimus" ("We build, we fight").

While most of them, short on schooling but long on practical experience, could not translate their motto, they can and do act it out. The Seabees' gun-toting plumbers and carpenters are the naval counterpart of the Army's combat engineers, manned by construction experts and staffed by engineering officers. Dungarees are their battle dress.

Lesson from Wake. Father of the force, non-Annapolis himself, is blunt Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, Chief of the Bureau of Yards & Docks. After Wake Island, where civilian construction workers were trapped with the Marines, he and the Navy saw the need for uniformed builders who could also be trained destroyers. Ben Moreell began to raise a small army of specialists in every craft.

With the bypassing of naval recruiting to Selective Service, the gathering of the crafts got harder and the upbuilding of Seabees' war strength to the authorized 210,000 men was threatened. But by last week a solution of the new problem had been found.

Draft-age shovel-gunners who volunteer for Construction Battalion service are now assured specialists' "left-sleeve" ratings ("right-sleeve" rating marks are for the seaman branch), can be inducted into the Seabees immediately. Color blindness is no longer a barrier: the ability to tell a lefthand nut from a righthand bolt is more important. Oldsters up to 50 years are still welcome. Many a Seabee is a veteran of World War I, and family men are the rule rather than the exception. (One photographer's mate from Maine acknowledges 13 children.)

Already skilled workers and temperamentally fitted to fight, the Seabee "boots" need only to be taught how to salute, shoot and rig a hammock. When they are turned out (in three weeks) they are full-fledged for service.

No Task Too Tough. Seabees were with the Marines when they hit the beach on Guadalcanal. With rollers and bulldozers they smoothed Henderson airfield between raids, used the rollers also to flatten empty oil barrels into steel sheeting useful for many purposes. Wherever they are put down Seabees are proud of their crafty know-how, brag they can fix anything--"even watches."

Beyond everyday tasks, the Construction Battalions have undertaken and accomplished some fantastically difficult special jobs. One crew, faced with a wrecked floating dry dock, refused to take a famed wreck-raiser's "can't do" for an answer, patched the maimed thing internally, hauled it off the New England rocks and towed it triumphantly to port. Another gang hammered and welded away below decks in a bomb-blasted aircraft carrier while the ship was steaming back into another action, got a "well done" for its job.

The Seabees also build barracks, hospitals, wharves, roads, water and oil tanks, set up plants and radio stations, mend the thin mahogany hulls of PT boats. Their cocky claim is that they are "first to land and last to leave." Not even the Marines (traditionally first ashore) can dispute that boast.

*Nicknamed from C.B.s--for Construction Battalions.

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