05/26/2026
In December 1941, the United States Navy had a problem that nobody had fully solved.
The war in the Pacific was going to require bases — airstrips, harbours, fuel depots, hospitals — built at speed, in remote locations, often under enemy fire.
Civilian construction workers could build.
But under international law, civilians who took up arms to defend themselves from enemy combatants could be shot as irregular fighters.
They couldn't build and fight.
The Navy needed someone who could do both.
One man had already thought about this.
His name was Ben Moreell.
He was born on September 14, 1892, in Salt Lake City, Utah — the son of Jewish immigrant parents who settled in St. Louis, Missouri, when he was a child.
His father worked as a dyer, a deputy sheriff, and a leather merchant.
His mother was a dressmaker.
He earned a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1913.
He was the first person in the Bureau of Yards and Docks' history to lead it without having graduated from the Naval Academy.
He would also become the first person in the history of the United States Navy staff corps to wear four stars.
He got there from a dressmaker's son to a civil engineering degree to a commission as a lieutenant junior grade in 1917.
And his path ran through the Azores.
During World War I, Moreell was stationed in the Azores.
Among the men he came to know during that posting was a young official named Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
He was paying attention.
Twenty years later, he would remember.
In 1937, Roosevelt was President of the United States.
He needed someone to run the Navy's Bureau of Yards and Docks.
He skipped over every Captain on the list.
He reached down to Commander Ben Moreell and promoted him directly to Rear Admiral — skipping an entire rank.
He was not a Naval Academy man.
He was, Roosevelt had concluded, simply the best man for the job.
What Moreell did with that trust reshaped the physical infrastructure of the Second World War.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Navy's construction work in the Pacific was being done by civilian contractors.
Moreell had already been thinking about the problem this created.
Civilian workers could not legally defend themselves without losing their protected status under international law.
And the Pacific was not going to be built in safety.
It was going to be built under fire.
He drafted a solution.
On March 5, 1942, the United States Navy authorized the formation of the Naval Construction Battalions.
The name came from the initials: C.B.
They became the Seabees.
Moreell personally gave them their motto.
Construimus, Batuimus.
We Build, We Fight.
What the Seabees built across the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War staggers the imagination.
111 major airstrips.
441 piers.
Fuel storage for 100 million gallons.
Housing for 1.5 million men.
Hospitals for 70,000 patients.
All of it built under operational conditions — in jungles, on coral atolls, on islands that were still being contested by Japanese forces while the bulldozers were running.
Seabees fought at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Normandy.
They built roads while taking fire.
They repaired runways between air raids.
They were, as Moreell himself later wrote, present in virtually every active combat zone of the war.
The Seabees reached a strength of 258,000 men.
They built approximately $10 billion worth of facilities to support the war effort.
No major operation in the Pacific could proceed without what they had constructed.
The island-hopping campaign that drove toward Japan — Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa — ran along the airstrips, harbours, and fuel dumps that Moreell's men had built, often within artillery range of the enemy.
On June 11, 1946, Vice Admiral Ben Moreell was promoted to Admiral — four stars.
He was the first Naval Academy non-graduate to hold that rank in the Navy.
He was the first and, to this day, only officer from the Navy's staff corps to hold four-star rank.
He retired three months later.
He was not done.
After his Navy career, Moreell became chairman and CEO of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation — one of the largest steel companies in America.
He had been loaned to the government during the war to negotiate an end to a national oil refinery workers' strike.
Later designated Coal Mines Administrator when the government seized the coal industry during a national strike.
In industry as in the Navy, he was sent in when the problem was too large for anyone else.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
He received twelve honorary doctoral degrees.
He was named one of the ten most important figures in American construction across the fifty-year period from 1925 to 1975.
He died on July 30, 1978, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He was 85 years old.
A bronze plaque at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis carries a description of what he was.
"Brilliant engineer, industrialist, and humanitarian; noble in spirit and stature, dedicated to God and country. He was thirty years a naval officer, twelve years an industrial giant, fifteen more years a national spokesman."
The son of immigrant parents in St. Louis.
The engineer who met a future president in the Azores.
The man Roosevelt skipped a rank to promote.
The founder of 258,000 men who built and fought their way across two oceans.
The first four-star admiral the Navy's staff corps ever produced.
The man who gave them a motto.
We Build.
We Fight.
They still do.
