Narrated by Jack Comley, CAN DO: THE STORY OF THE SEABEES tells the story of the U.S. Navy’s Seabees or United States Naval Construction Battalions. The film begins with footage of Davisville, Rhode Island, home of the CB’s Atlantic headquarters the U.S. Naval Construction Battalion Center. The film provides a brief history of the CBs through photographs showing how the CBs worked in WWII to blast coral reefs, build advance bases, and provide causeways, piers, causeways and other facilities for the Navy in the Pacific. At 4:13, modern day footage (dating from the mid-1960s) shows training of crews to use bulldozers and other heavy equipment, conduct surveys (5:30), telephone line construction (6:20), and more. At 6:40, CBs use a civilian sawmill to make timbers and at 7:50 they learn to use a telephone switchboard. At 8:50 recruits practice building buildings, and at 9:00 weapons training takes place at Sunland Reservation near Davisville.
At 12:00 the film switches gears to show the Seabees operating in South Vietnam. At 12:48 the outskirts of Hue are seen, where the CBs are busy building a base for the Marines and Army. Elsewhere in Vietnam, fleet logistic warehouses are shown at 15:00, and a body and fender shop where Marine and Army vehicles will be repaired. At 17:00, another CB base is seen, this one protected by armed CBs against Viet Cong attack. CBs are shown playing volleyball and relaxing at the mess hall.
At 17:20, the film switches to the South Pole where the CBs maintain the USA’s most distant base in Antarctica as part of Operation Deep Freeze. A C-130 Hercules is shown delivering a Swiss-built snow machine, used to create a new Little America. At McMurdo Sound, a nuclear reactor prepared in Rhode Island is shown being installed at the Antarctic, to provide power for McMurdo. (This was known as the PM-3A (Portable, Medium-power, 3rd generation). It was one of the first shore-based power plants to use solid-state equipment. The plant was air-cooled with the condensers and fan units running glycol. Waste heat was also used for desalination using vacuum flash distillation. The reactor went critical in March of 1962 and supplied useful electricity to McMurdo in July of 1962. With a total of 438 malfunctions during its operational lifetime from 1964 to 1972, when it was decommissioned, the reactor at McMurdo proved to be an unreliable source of power generation, available only 72% of the time.)
At 21:00, Rota, Spain is seen where the CBs are busy building pre-fabricated homes for housing military personnel. At 22:00, some of the support staff at Davisville is seen on Narraganset Bay. Supplies are seen including copper, lead and zinc ingots, stores in barrels, trucks, building materials, rubber, etc. The film concludes with remarks about the impact of the CBs on Davisville and the CB motto: We Build, We Fight!
Naval Construction Battalions were conceived of as a replacement for civilian construction companies working for the US Navy after the United States was drawn into World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. International law made it illegal for civilians to resist enemy attack, doing so would classify them as guerrillas, for which they could be executed. The Seabees would consist of skilled workers that would be trained to drop their tools if necessary and take up their weapons at a moments notice to defend themselves. The concept model: A USMC trained Battalion of construction tradesmen (a military equivalent of those civilian Companies) that would be capable of: any type of construction, anywhere needed, under any conditions or circumstance. It was quickly realized that this model could be utilized in every Theater of operations as it was seen to be flexible and adaptable. The use of USMC organization allowed for smooth co-ordination, integration or interface of both the NCF and the Marine Corps elements. In addition, Seabee Battalions could be deployed individually or in multiples as the project scope and scale dictated. What distingushes Seabees from Combat Engineers are the skill sets. Combat Engineering is but a sub-set in the Seabee toolbox. They have a storied legacy of creative field ingenuity stretching from Normandy and Okinawa to Iraq and Afganistan. Seabees believe that anything they are tasked with they “Can Do” (the CB motto). They were unique at conception and remain so today. In 2017, the Seabees celebrated 75 years of service and have not changed from Admiral Ben Moreell’s conceptual model.
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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
