Still others serve the Navy and the nation—sometimes the well-being of all mankind—by stepping outside the bounds of routine; their actions are noncombatant in nature but are nonetheless bold or daring. These are Sailors who have gone where others had feared to go or simply had not thought of going. It was Sailors who first went to the North Pole in 1909 and later made the first flight over it in 1926. The Wilkes expedition was a nineteenth-century Navy-sponsored exploration of the Pacific that traveled more than eighty thousand miles, surveyed 280 islands, made the first sighting of the continent of Antarctica, and brought back huge amounts of data that advanced the world’s knowledge in the fields of hydrography, geology, meteorology, botany, zoology, and ethnography. Sailors explored the Dead Sea, the Amazon River, the Isthmus of Panama, and many other parts of the world. As of this writing, the number of Sailors who have gone into outer space approaches one hundred, a point of great pride within the Navy. And every one of the astronauts who flew the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions that led to the landing on the Moon was retrieved from the sea upon their return to Earth by naval task forces manned by thousands of Sailors.
All Sailors, whether they do the usual or the unusual, whether they labor ashore, ply the world’s seas, penetrate an ocean’s depths, soar the blue skies, or venture into the blackness of space, serve the nation with every watch they stand, every duty they carry out, every moment they stand ready to do what is required. And even though danger, boredom, exhaustion, and sacrifice are often their shipmates, Sailors have the satisfaction of knowing that their “job” is more than an occupation. They know that they do more than simply earn a paycheck. They also serve.
Circumnavigations
Most schoolchildren know that Ferdinand Magellan was the commander of the first voyage to go around the world. Like Columbus, this Portuguese mariner believed he could get to the lucrative Spice Islands to the east by sailing west and circling the globe. Like Columbus, he believed the world was much smaller than it actually is. Also like Columbus, he sailed under a Spanish flag, setting out in September 1519 with five ships (Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago) and 270 men under his command.
The fleet made its way across the Atlantic and then southward along the coast of South America until they eventually found the straits that led to the Pacific Ocean and today bear his name. The passage through these treacherous Straits of Magellan took thirty-eight days, during which the crews saw many fires from Indian camps burning on the nearby shores and so named the land Tierra del Fuego (“Land of Fire”).
Emerging from the straits, Magellan thought the Spice Islands were just a few days’ sail away. He soon learned what every Sailor who has crossed the Pacific knows—it is one big ocean! Four months later, suffering from starvation, thirst, and disease, the explorers reached the Philippines. Unfortunately for Magellan, his voyage ended there; on 27 April 1521, he was killed by the natives in the midst of a tribal war.
Sebastian del Cano took command of what was left of the expedition; he eventually made it back to Spain with one ship (Victoria) and eighteen crew members. It was a momentous achievement, but accomplished at great cost.
More than four hundred years later, the feat was repeated, but this time under different circumstances. In February 1960, USS Triton put to sea for her shakedown cruise. She was the fifth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name of the Greek demigod of the sea who was the son of Poseidon and who used his conch-shell trumpet alternately to summon storms and to still the sea. It was an appropriate name for a ship who, like her namesake, had harnessed the forces of nature: powering this modern warship was a nuclear reactor that gave her great speed and virtually unlimited sea-keeping ability.
USS Triton, one of the Navy’s earliest nuclear submarines, was destined to make history on her shakedown cruise. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
To prove her capabilities, Triton sailed completely around the world, following the same track that Magellan had used. What was markedly different this time, however, was that she made the voyage nonstop in sixty days and twenty-one hours, and she made it under the water!
Triton was one of the first generation of nuclear-powered submarines. Her epic circumnavigation proved the great capabilities of this new kind of ship and greatly enhanced the nation’s prestige at a time when image was one of the weapons of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Her crew received the Presidential Unit Citation and her skipper, Captain Edward L. Beach, was awarded the Legion of Merit. Today, Triton’s dive stick resides in the lobby of the Naval Academy’s Beach Hall, headquarters of the U.S. Naval Institute.
Triton’s track as she made her historic underwater circumnavigation. U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive
Amazing Grace
As a young girl, Grace Brewster Murray had an unusually inquisitive mind. When she was seven years old and wondered how her alarm clock worked, she disassembled it. When she was unable to get it back together, she got another and took it apart to see if she could figure it out. When that failed, she got another, and another. By the time she finished her quest, all seven of the household alarm clocks lay in pieces.
But Grace Murray Hopper (she married Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930) put her inquisitiveness to good use. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Vassar College and went on to earn both a master’s degree and a PhD in mathematics from Yale University (she was the first woman to earn the latter). When she joined the Navy in 1943 in the midst of World War II, a wise detailer decided she might be a good person to assign to the Bureau of Ordnance in a special program known as the Computation Project. In those days, computers were just beginning to make their debut, and this made Hopper one of the pioneers.
The Computation Project was a joint effort of the Navy, the IBM Corporation, and Harvard University. Grace Hopper became one of the programmers of the world’s first large-scale computer, the Mark I. This early machine was no desktop personal computer. Describing it as “an impressive beast,” Hopper remembered it as “51 feet long, 8 feet high, and 5 feet deep.” She mastered the Mark I and its improved versions, the Mark II and Mark III.
One day while diagnosing a problem in one of these temperamental machines, she found that the cause was a moth trapped in one of the relays. Extracting it with a pair of tweezers, she then taped the expired moth into the computer’s logbook, with an explanation that the problem had been a “bug” and told her supervisor that the computer had been “debugged.” To this day, Grace Hopper is credited with coining the term that has endured as part of the computer lexicon.
After the war, she remained in the Naval Reserve while continuing her career in computing. Graduating from the highly mechanized Mark series computers, she began work on a newcomer called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). With its arrays of vacuum tubes and magnetic drums, this was the first computer that could rightfully be called “electronic.”
In the years that followed, Hopper’s reputation grew as she worked to make computers better and better. Among her many achievements was her contribution to creating the first language that allowed programmers to speak to computers with words rather than numbers.
In 1966 Grace Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve, but the Navy soon realized the importance of computers and recalled her to active duty for six months. That half-year turned into nearly two decades of additional service!
While serving in the Naval Automation Data Command, she also traveled the world, speaking to thousands about the future of computers. Sometimes these speaking engagements earned her honoraria, which she turned over to Navy Relief (more than thirty-four thousand dollars). One of her constant themes was that change could be good. She was often frustrated when she would hear yet another Sailor say, “But that’s how we’ve always done it.” With a wry smile on her wizened face she was heard to reply, “Someday I’m going to shoot somebody for saying that.” To prove her point that convention is not always necessary, she kept a clock on her wall that kept perfect time b
ut ran counterclockwise. She also always carried a one-foot piece of wire with her—because one foot is the distance light travels in a nanosecond. She would brandish it before listeners and explain why programmers should not waste time, not even a nanosecond.
Grace Hopper at her second retirement ceremony with Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. U.S. Navy
Grace Hopper, then a rear admiral, eventually retired from the Navy a second time—this time for good—in 1986. She had earned an array of awards, both military and civilian, too numerous to list. Her retirement ceremony was held onboard USS Constitution; thus the oldest active duty naval officer in service ended her long career on the decks of the Navy’s oldest commissioned warship.
Grace Murray Hopper died on New Year’s Day 1992. Just five years later, an Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer was commissioned bearing her name. Officially USS Hopper, the ship is better known throughout the fleet by the nickname Rear Admiral Hopper had earned during her long and extraordinary career: “Amazing Grace.”
Can Do
On 10 June 1965, a reinforced Vietcong regiment attacked the compound of Detachment A-432, 5th Special Forces Group, at Dong Xoai, fifty-five miles northeast of Saigon in South Vietnam. Facing the enemy onslaught along with the eleven Army Green Berets were nine Sailors.
One of the Sailors was Construction Mechanic Third Class Marvin Shields. The young petty officer had joined the Navy primarily to build things, but on this particular day, he and his shipmates were going to have to fight alongside the Army commandos.
Early in the battle Shields was wounded, but he continued to supply his fellow Americans with needed ammunition for the next three hours. When the enemy forces launched a massive attack at close range with flamethrowers, hand grenades, and small-arms fire, Shields stood his ground alongside his shipmates and the Soldiers. Wounded a second time in this assault, Shields nevertheless ignored the mortal danger and helped a more critically injured Soldier to safety while under intense enemy fire.
For four more hours, Shields and the others maintained a barrage of fire that kept the enemy at bay. When the compound commander, Second Lieutenant Charles Q. Williams, asked for a volunteer to help him take out an enemy machine-gun emplacement that was endangering the lives of all the Army and Navy personnel in the compound, Shields volunteered. Armed with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher, Shields and the Green Beret commander advanced on the enemy emplacement despite heavy fire from several enemy positions. The two men succeeded in taking out the enemy machine-gun nest and then attempted to return to the relative safety of the compound. The young Sailor’s luck had at last run out. Struck a third time, this wound would prove fatal.
Construction Mechanic Third Class Marvin Shields had joined the Navy to build things, but in Vietnam he stood alongside Army Green Berets in a vicious firefight. Naval Historical Center
For his courageous actions, Marvin Shields was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Sailor to win the nation’s highest honor for action in Vietnam.
In April 1971, to further honor this intrepid Sailor who fought so ferociously alongside some of the Army’s fiercest Soldiers, the fifteenth Knox-class destroyer escort was commissioned into the Navy as USS Marvin Shields.
This seemingly strange situation, with Sailors fighting ashore like soldiers, was actually not so unusual. Marvin Shields and the other Sailors were part of a special Navy unit: SeaBee Team 1104. They were there in the jungles of Southeast Asia to build a base, just as they had in many other parts of the world during earlier wars.
The “SeaBees” came into existence shortly after the beginning of World War II, when the use of civilian workers to build naval bases in war zones proved impractical. Under international law, civilians were not permitted to resist enemy military attack; participating in combat actions, even defensive ones, could result in summary execution as guerrillas. To counter this problem, skilled workers were recruited into the Navy directly from the construction trades to form “Construction Battalions.” In typical Navy fashion, these were soon referred to as “CBs,” and that evolved into the now-famous term SeaBees.
During World War II, the SeaBees performed now-legendary deeds in both the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters of operation. Earning thirty-three Silver Stars and five Navy Crosses, they built more than a hundred major airstrips, nearly five hundred piers, several thousand ammunition magazines, hundreds of square blocks of warehouses, hospitals to serve more than seventy thousand patients, tanks for the storage of a hundred million gallons of gasoline, and housing for one and a half million people. They suffered more than two hundred combat deaths, earned more than two thousand Purple Hearts, and served on four continents and on more than three hundred islands.
When the Marines invaded Guadalcanal early in the war, the men of the 6th Naval Construction Battalion followed them ashore and thus became the first SeaBees to build under combat conditions. The airfield there was vital, and the SeaBees kept it open by continuously repairing the damage despite almost constant bombardment by the enemy. The first decorated SeaBee hero of the war, Seaman Second Class Lawrence C. “Bucky” Meyer, was among the SeaBees working on that airfield. In those precious few hours of off time, when others were grabbing catnaps or dashing off a quick letter home, Seaman Meyer worked on an abandoned machine gun until he had it in working order. On 3 October 1942, during an air attack, he used his salvaged machine gun to do battle with a Japanese Zero fighter that was strafing the field. His courage in facing and defeating the enemy aircraft earned him the Silver Star.
During the landing on Treasury Island in the Solomons in late 1943, Fireman First Class Aurelio Tassone of the 87th Naval Construction Battalion was driving his bulldozer ashore when it became evident that a Japanese pillbox was holding up the advance from the beach. Tassone headed straight for the pillbox, using the bulldozer blade as a shield against the enemy fire, while Lieutenant Charles Turnbull provided covering fire with his carbine. Despite the continuous heavy fire, Tassone crushed the pillbox with the bulldozer, killing all twelve of its occupants. Tassone’s courageous action earned him a Silver Star and inspired the now legendary image of the SeaBee astride his bulldozer rolling over enemy positions.
Yet another milestone in SeaBee history occurred in Hollywood rather than in the South Pacific. The release of the motion picture The Fighting SeaBees in 1944, starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, made SeaBee a household word. (Interestingly, John Wayne’s last motion picture was Home for the SeaBees, a Navy documentary filmed in 1977.)
During the Normandy invasion, 6 June 1944—known more popularly as “D-Day”—the SeaBees were among the first to go ashore as members of naval combat demolition units. Working with U.S. Army Engineers, their crucial task was to destroy the steel and concrete barriers that the Germans had built in the water and on the beaches to forestall amphibious landings. When dawn betrayed their presence, they came under murderous German fire. Whole teams were wiped out when shells prematurely detonated their explosives, but the survivors pressed on, planting their explosive charges to blow huge holes in the enemy’s defenses.
The SeaBees remained with the armies battling their way into Europe, providing vital assistance in overcoming natural and man-made obstacles as the great invasion continued. The final great SeaBee effort in the European Theater took place during the crossing of the Rhine River in March 1945. The U.S. Army, concerned about the river’s swift and tricky currents, called upon the SeaBees to help transport General George Patton’s armored forces across the Rhine at Oppenheim in a frontal assault that swept away the German defenders. The SeaBees operated more than three hundred craft to shuttle thousands of troops into the heart of Germany, playing a major role in the defeat of Hitler’s forces and the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny.
Following the victories in Europe and Asia, the SeaBees helped warravaged nations to rebuild while also building and maintaining advanced bases important to the Cold War. Cubi Point Naval Air Station in the Philippines and
a huge floating dock at Holy Loch, Scotland, for the repair and service of the Polaris missile submarines are both SeaBee projects.
At the landing in Inchon that changed the course of the Korean War, the SeaBees positioned vitally needed causeways while battling enormous thirty-foot tides, swift currents, and continuous enemy fire. In an incident that came to be known as the “Great SeaBee Train Robbery,” the need to break the equipment bottleneck at the harbor inspired a group of SeaBees to go behind enemy lines and capture some abandoned locomotives. Despite enemy mortar fire, they succeeded in bringing back the engines and turning them over to the Army Transportation Corps. For the rest of the Korean War, the SeaBees built and maintained air bases, aided in evacuations, and helped keep vital seaports functioning.
In Vietnam, the SeaBees built remote bases, roads, airfields, cantonments, warehouses, hospitals, storage facilities, bunkers, and other facilities that were critically needed to support the combatant forces. In addition to the many SeaBee team activities in remote locations, such as when Marvin Shields fought alongside the Green Berets in Dong Xoai, construction battalions built large coastal strongholds in the northernmost provinces and huge port facilities at Da Nang, Chu Lai, and Phu Bai.
Since the Vietnam War, the SeaBees have carried on their unique naval functions in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Haiti, and the Saudi Arabian desert. Virtual miracle workers when it comes to quickly building naval bases and airfields in remote locations, they are unlike most other construction workers because these men and women must sometimes take a break from pouring concrete and laying cables to pick up their weapons and do battle. For more than half a century these largely landlocked Sailors have upheld the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy, providing vital services without which the operating fleets could not function, often under difficult and dangerous circumstances, and always guided by the principle embodied in their simple but meaningful motto: “Can do.”
A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy Page 27