The Seabees on Guadalcanal

On 1 September 1942 five officers and 387 men of the US Navy’s 6th Construction Battalion, drawn mainly from its A and D Companies, came ashore on the beach at Lunga Point on Guadalcanal. They brought only two bulldozers with them. They were Seabees, men of the construction battalions formed a few months earlier, and for the first time in the war they were to build on an island that was still being fought over. They dug in along a narrow strip of coconut grove right next to Henderson Field, and the very next day took over from the Marine engineers the construction and upkeep of the airfield on which the fate of the whole campaign depended.

It is usually said that the Seabees “began arriving” on Guadalcanal on this day, and that is accurate: on 1 September only the battalion’s first echelon arrived, while the rest waited on Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. Some older accounts mention “Seabees” at the airfield as early as August, but the name was being used loosely; until 1 September the work on the strip was done chiefly by the engineers of the 1st Marine Division.

Builders in uniform

The idea of construction battalions grew out of the experience of the first days of the war. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor the Navy employed around 70,000 civilian workers of private firms to build its bases overseas. Under the laws of war civilians could not take up arms, and if they did, they risked being treated by the enemy as guerrillas. The defence of Wake Island showed what this meant: more than a thousand construction workers, some of whom had fought side by side with the Marines, went into Japanese captivity after the surrender.

Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, a civil engineer and chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, therefore proposed that bases in combat zones be built by uniformed tradesmen who could defend themselves if necessary. On 28 December 1941 he requested authority to recruit construction workers for a regiment of three battalions, and on 5 January 1942 he received it. From the abbreviation CB (Construction Battalion) the new servicemen soon became known as the Seabees, and on 5 March 1942 the Navy officially authorised the name. Their emblem was a bee armed with a submachine gun, a hammer and a wrench, their motto the Latin Construimus, batuimus (“We build, we fight”), and their unofficial slogan “Can Do”.

The battalions took volunteers with experience in the building trades – carpenters, machine operators, electricians, plumbers and drivers – who because of their skills received higher ratings and pay than ordinary recruits. The age limit was raised to 50; by the autumn of 1942 the average Seabee was about 37 years old. They underwent military training, and they were commanded by naval officers of the Civil Engineer Corps rather than by line officers, a point Moreell won from the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. The first units sailed in the first half of 1942 to Bora Bora and the New Hebrides, where they built bases far from the fighting. The 6th Battalion was the first to go overseas as a complete battalion, and the first to reach a battlefield.

An airfield from Japanese leftovers

The runway at Lunga Point had been under construction since July by the Japanese, who fled before the landing of 7 August, leaving an almost finished airfield behind. The engineers of Major General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division filled in the gap in the middle of the strip and declared it fit for fighters as early as 12 August. Yet they lacked almost everything: the transports had sailed away after the defeat off Savo Island, taking most of the heavy equipment with them. When the first Marine aircraft landed on the airfield on 20 August, fuel was pumped by hand from drums and bombs were loaded by sheer muscle. That same day the officer commanding the 6th Battalion flew in from Espiritu Santo, inspected the site and immediately called for two companies.

The Seabees found a strip some 1,150 metres long and 45 metres wide, levelled and rolled by the Japanese but with no drainage at all. The ground beneath was unstable black mud, reinforced with gravel only along a short stretch. In the dry season the airfield became a bowl of dust that wrecked engines, and after every tropical downpour it turned into a quagmire. The Dauntless dive bombers, designed to land on carrier decks, had hard rubber tail wheels which, according to the official American history, cut into the strip “like ploughshares”. The ruts had already caused several accidents.

The battalion’s task was to finish the airfield: to clear and grade roughly another 400 metres of runway, give it a crowned profile so that water would run off, and cover it with steel matting. Its own equipment was meagre: two bulldozers, six small dump trucks, a grader, a loader, and later a scraper and two smaller ones borrowed from the Marines. The rest came from the Japanese, who had left behind eight small rollers, fifteen lorries, two generators, hundreds of steel girders for hangars, and large stocks of cement and explosives. The Seabees felled hundreds of coconut palms and blew up the stumps with Japanese powder. Where the ground would not compact, they dug it out to a depth of more than half a metre and replaced it with gravel, coral and clay. Throughout, the strip had to stay operational, because the airmen flew from it every day.

Under the bombs

Almost every day, usually around noon, Japanese bombers came over the airfield from Rabaul, and at night ships and lone aircraft harassed it with shellfire and single bombs. As early as 2 September a bomb hit an armed Dauntless parked at the edge of the grove where ammunition was stored; the fire spread to one of the anti-aircraft ammunition dumps and was brought under control only after many hours. Every bomb crater had to be filled before the fighters returned. A method was worked out: the crater was squared off with shovels, then filled in layers, each roughly half a metre of fill tamped down with pneumatic hammers so that the earth would not settle. Lorries loaded with gravel stood ready for runway repairs.

The novelty that was to transform the airfield was Marston mat: perforated steel planks about three metres long, hooked together into a continuous surface. It had been invented just before the war for the US Army Air Forces and took its name from Marston in North Carolina, where it was first used. On Guadalcanal the first planks were laid only on the worst stretches; deliveries were modest, because shipping was being taken up by the forthcoming invasion of North Africa. A damaged section of matting could be replaced within a quarter of an hour or so by knocking out the pins and fitting new planks.

The Seabees did not confine themselves to the main runway. About one and a half kilometres to the east, on a grassy plain, they cleared, levelled and rolled with Japanese rollers a grass strip for fighters, named Fighter One. According to the Navy’s history of its wartime construction it was built in three days using captured equipment alone; by early September it was already in use by the fighters of the Cactus Air Force, easing the congestion on Henderson Field.

Place in the war

The arrival of the 6th Construction Battalion closed the first and most makeshift phase of the struggle for the airfield. For three weeks after the landing Henderson Field had been kept alive by Marine engineers working with captured shovels and wheelbarrows; from September the strip was in the hands of specialists who could fill a bomb crater and lay new planks over it within a matter of tens of minutes. For Alexander Vandegrift this was of fundamental importance: his entire defence rested on the assumption that the aircraft of the Cactus Air Force would be able to take off every day, and after the Battle of the Eastern Solomons it was clear that the Japanese would not give up Guadalcanal and would send ever larger forces to the island.

Guadalcanal was also the first real test of the new formation. The construction battalions, raised from early 1942 and sent first to build bases in the New Hebrides and on other islands of the South Pacific, proved capable of working in the front line, under fire and without support. That experience shaped the way the Americans later waged the war in the Pacific: every scrap of land captured was to become within days an airfield, a port or a depot from which they could reach further. By the end of the war almost 259,000 men had served in the Seabees, and “Can Do” had become one of the symbols of the American war effort.