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Seabee Timeline 1942 to 1950

Their logo was born and more

• March 5, 1942 All Construction Battalion personnel were officially named Seabees by the Navy Department. Rear Admiral Ben Moreell personally furnished them with their motto Construmus Batumius, or We Build, We Fight.
  
  In 1942, at the Naval Air Base in Quonset Point, Frank Iafrate, a native of North Providence, Rhode Island, and a civilian file clerk with a talent for caricature, created the insignia that would make military history.
  
  June, 1942 the Davisville, RI Advanced Base depot became operational.
  
  
• July 1942, the first Naval Construction Battalion landed on Midway Island to begin work on the new airstrip on Sand Island and to start the massive clean up of damage caused by Japanese bombing.
  
  
• December 1945, the Advanced Base Depot and Naval Construction Training Center were closed with only 3,300 Seabees on active duty by June 1950.

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Seabee Timeline 1951 - 1960's

Amazing to say the least!

• August 8, 1951 CBC Davisville was reestablished.
  
  1951 Landing at Inchon, the Seabees provided pontoon causeways within hours of the initial assault. Served side by side with the Marine Corps and the Army, building and defending what they built.
  
  October 02, 1951-1956 During the Korean War the Navy realized they needed a naval air station and Cubi Point in the Philippines was selected. Civilian contractors seeing the forbidding Zambales Mountains and the maze of jungle claimed it could not be done. The Navy's Construction team's were called to the task and cut a mountain in half to make way for a nearly two-mile long runway. Cubi Point turned out to be one of the largest earthmoving projects in the world, equivalent to the construction of the Panama Canal.
• 1955 As part of Operation Deepfreeze in Antarctica, they provided logistic support for the scientific research programs that were conducted by seventy American universities, government agencies, and industrial firms.
  
  July 25, 1956 The $100 million facility at Cubi Point in the Philippines was commissioned and comprised an air station and an adjacent pier that was capable of docking the Navy's largest carriers.
  
  1962 The Navy's builders constructed Antarctica's first nuclear power plant at McMurdo Station.

Seabees Can Do Tees and More

Seabee Timeline 1960's to Present

We Build, We Fight!

• May, 1965 The first Battalions went across the beach at Chu Lai, Republic of Vietnam. They numbered 10,000 men and during the peak of the Vietnam conflict their strength reached 25,000 men in 22 Battalions, two Regiments, two Maintenance Units, and scores of Civic Action Teams.
  
  1968 TET, The Navy Builders from Phu Bai were summoned to rebuild and repair two vitally needed concrete bridges. When enemy snipers drove them from their work, they organized their own combat teams which silenced the snipers and let them complete their important task.
  
  
• 1971 They began their largest peacetime construction project, on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean. The project lasted 11 years and cost $200 million. The base accommodates the Navy's largest ships and biggest military cargo jets, and proved invaluable during Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm.
  
  November, 1983 A 42-man detail from Mobile Construction Battalion ONE was ordered to Beirut to build underground bunkers for the Marines after the October 1983 explosion killed 241 and seriously wounded 80 others.
  
  
• Today Seabee's continue to play a major role in the Global War on Terrorism. In support of Operation Enduring Freedom, they've repaired runway facilities at Camp Rhino and Kandahar in Afghanistan. Twenty-six units deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and 15 were killed. The construction of multiple 20-acre aircraft-parking aprons, munitions storage areas, a 48,000-square-foot concrete pad, bridges, a 1,200-person camp and repaired various roads have been proven invaluable to coalition forces.