William Bradford Huie - From Omaha to Okinawa: The Story of the Seabees

FROM OMAHA TO OKINAWA

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

THE STORY OF THE SEABEES

WILLIAM BRADFORD HUIE

BLUEJACKET BOOKS

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND

To the memory of my friends,
the Forty-two Seabees of the 133rd Battalion
who died on D-Day at Iwo Jima,
this book is dedicated.

(Names on .)

This book has been brought to publication by the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

1945 by William Bradford Huie

Foreword 1999 by the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Originally published by E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc.

First Bluejacket Books printing, 1999

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Huie, William Bradford, 1910-1986.

From Omaha to Okinawa : the story of the seabees / William Bradford Huie.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : E. P. Dutton, 1945.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61251-281-5

1. United States. Navy. Construction BattalionsHistory. 2. World War, 1939-1945Naval operations, American. 3. World War, 1939-1945CampaignsPacific Area. I. Title.

D769.55H82 1999

From Omaha to Okinawa: The Story of the Seabees was published in the autumn of 1945, just a few weeks after the Emperor of Japan announced surrender on 14 August and only a few days after the Instrument of Surrender was signed on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. This volume is in some ways a continuation, a sequel, to Huies Can Do! The Story of the Seabees, which was published to great acclaim in 1944, going through eight printings in the first two years.

In that first volume, Huie had some very specific goals. Because the Seabees did not exist on 7 December 1941 and had been brought into being in a great rush as the need for military, especially naval, facilities of all kinds became dramatically evident, he needed to explain who the Seabees were, what it was they did, and why they were so crucial to the war effort. Huie told of how the first Seabees were all volunteers, usually experienced men who had left high-paying jobs in the various construction trades; how their average age was thirty-one while the average age of the Marines they landed with at Guadalcanal and elsewhere was only twenty years and six months. In that first volume Huie was dramatizing for his readers the horrific conditions under which the early operations of the war in the Pacific, and to a lesser extent Italy, were being waged. Part of his job was to educate his reader, to explain how complex and how huge the job would be. He was writing of the darkest days of the war, and patience and confidence were needed. Miracles would certainly be achieved; they would just take a little time.

In that first volume Huie laid out the Roads theory. The Seabees would be building five great Highways, three across the Pacific and two across the Atlantic. The war would be won on the battlefields, it is true, but it would also be a production war and then, since the matriel manufactured in America would have to be shipped to the fronts, stored, and distributed, it would be a construction war also. The Seabees would make every landing, build the piers and docks to bring the matriel ashore, and then, often still under enemy fire, build the ammunition dumps, tank farms, airfields, warehouses, water systems, roads, and finally the housing for millions of men.

Huie explained the nearly magical properties of the pontoon, that steel box five by five by seven that could be configured into barges, docks, causewaysnearly anything! He explained the need for and praised the work of the special stevedore battalions who unloaded thousands of American ships in the Pacific, again, sometimes while under enemy attack.

In Omaha to Okinawa, Huie does not feel the need to go into all these issues in much detail, mainly because he is assuming his readers have read Can Do!

Here, in Omaha to Okinawa, Huie picks up the story in the late spring of 1944. The tide has turned. Where the first volume has the tone of explanation and a call for patience, this volume has the tone of accomplishment and celebration. The reader will notice that Omaha to Okinawa is laced with astounding statistics. Huie is proud to relate, for example, that on Guam, the Seabees moved eighteen million cubic yards of earth, constructed a refrigeration system of five hundred thousand cubic feet, and developed a water system that could pump nine million gallons of fresh water a day. On Tinian the Seabees moved enough coral to make five Boulder Dams; in fact, just the building of the B-29 bases in the Marianas Islands represented a construction project larger than the building of all the dams in the United StatesTVA, Boulder, Grand Coulee, Shasta, all of them put together. In his descriptions of Seabee accomplishments, Huie compares the work on Tinian to the construction of the Panama Canal and that on Saipan to the building of the Pyramids.

What would have been the largest construction achievement ever on Okinawa was rudely snatched from Huies narrative when the Japanese surrendered. There is almost a wistful quality to his narration as he discusses what the Seabees would have built had the military needed Okinawa as a staging area for invasion of the Japanese home islands: fourteen hundred miles of paved road, much of it four-lane, twenty-two airdromes, and so on. Huie writes, Our development of Okinawa was to be comparable to the total development of Rhode Island from virgin forest land.

In Huies first volume, the centerpiece was certainly the battle for Guadalcanal, the first major comeback of the Pacific War. In this volume the two main events are the battle for Iwo Jima and the invasion at Normandy. Although vastly different in scale, each was noteworthy for the ferocity of the fighting and for the technical achievements of the Seabees in overcoming daunting natural obstacles.

The battle for Iwo Jima became perhaps the best-known Pacific island conflict because of the famous flag-raising. The fighting on Iwo Jima was especially ferocious and the construction there especially difficult, largely due to the terrain. Because Iwo was a volcanic island, it was laced with caves. Also, because it was volcanic, there was no coral reef, no calm or protected water. The landings had to be made on some narrow stretches of beach with huge swells and surf, where the water became hundreds of feet deep only a few feet from shore. The Japanese artillery and mortars had these small stretches of beach zeroed in. Under concentrated fire, the Seabees rigged floating causeways, blew up wrecked landing craft that were in the way, and drove their bulldozers up over the three terraces that rose from the beach. The sand was thick with the dead. One bulldozer operator reported to Huie: There were so many dead men in front of the ship that there was no way for me to unload and operate without crushing their bodies.... I had no choice but to go over them.

On the first landing strip liberated at Iwo Jima the Seabees showed astounding heroism. As Japanese snipers fired away at them, men of the 31st Battalion lined up at intervals of about two feet and crawled the length of the runway picking up every tiny bit of shrapnel. Huie explains: The smallest sliver of shrapnel can explode a planes tire and wreck it. A runway over which a battle has been fought must be combed between the fingers before it is safe.