Coming off of the long Independence Day weekend (I hope you got four days of downtime, my friends!) I thought this view of how the “Eight Ballers” of the 8th Special Naval Construction (Seabee) Battalion kicked back on their July 4th celebration 80 years ago while stationed at Women’s Bay on Kodiak Island in the Alaska Territory.
From the 8th Special’s 201-page WWII cruise book:
For the record, the “Special” designation for the 8th SNCB comes from the fact that they were formed in April 1943 largely from professional East Coast longshoremen whose expertise in rapidly loading and unloading cargo was desperately needed.
They deployed to Alaska– after a modicum (14 days) of military training under Marine Corps DIs followed by a three-week A school to make sure they were all on the same page– first to Kodiak (“Island X”) in August 1943 and then to Attu (“Island Y”) where their specialized skillset was put to hard use in extreme conditions. Smaller dets went further west in the Aleutans including Adak and Shemya, often having to build the docks while they worked them.
Don’t think of these guys as “cargo apes” as the work they did was often very technical, for instance, take a look at this balance chart for a liberty ship:
Those guys no doubt earned their day off on Kodiak’s bear-prone beach.
Shipped back to the West Coast post-war, the 8th SNCB was inactivated at Port Hueneme, California on 29 October 1945 and has never been reformed.
