Seabees
The Seabees ( English "sea bees") are the construction troops of the US Navy . The name comes from the abbreviation CB for Naval C onstruction B attalion . Their motto is Construimus, Batuimus ( We Build, We Fight ).
history
The origin of the Seabees lies in a construction regiment that was set up on December 30, 1917 at Camp Paul Jones with 1500 men.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941 and the beginning of the Pacific War , the leadership of the US Navy had no question that new bases and strongpoints had to be built in the war zone. The decision to set up an appropriate construction regiment was made at the end of 1941, and the recruitment of personnel for the three battalions of the regiment began on January 5, 1942. There was a training center at Camp Allen and Camp Bradford , near Norfolk in the state of Virginia .
After initial operations in the Pacific , the Seabees were also used in the Atlantic and landings in the Mediterranean . The regiment carried out its most important mission as part of " Operation Overlord " when they built the two artificial Mulberry ports off the coast of Normandy .
At the end of World War II , the association consisted of 7,960 officers and 325,000 soldiers .
The Seabees' largest project in peacetime was the construction of the military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean from 1971. Construction took 11 years and cost 200 million US dollars.
structure
Since 2013 the Seabees have been divided into three large units with a total of nine battalions. On the Atlantic coast , three Naval Mobile Construction Battalions are stationed in Gulfport , Mississippi . On the Pacific Ocean are three Naval Mobile Construction Battalions in Port Hueneme , near Oxnard , California . Five Naval Mobile Construction Battalions are part of the Naval Reserve and have their home bases in Naval Air Station Jacksonville , Florida , Port Hueneme, California, Fort Worth , Texas , Fort McCoy , Wisconsin and Westover Air Reserve Base , Massachusetts . The reserve battalions have each assigned individual units to various decentralized bases.
Movie
The film Alarm in the Pacific , starring John Wayne , tells a fictional story about the founding of the Seabees from the time of World War II.
