The Fighting Seabees

My father, who was a Seabee in the Pacific during World War II, always considered this film to be 99% absolute rubbish. He insisted that the only aspects of this movie that had any basis in fact were that the Seabees actually did recruit professional engineers and construction workers, that many of them were considerably older than other service men, that they were occasionally called upon to defend themselves, and that they really could build anything. In his day the Seabees did not yet have their own training facilities, so they did their basic military training not with the Navy but with the Marines. The way to tell the difference between a Marine base and a Seabase base was that the Marines were all 18 years old and lived in pup tents, while the Seabees were mostly in their forties and fifties and their encampments always had heat, hot and cold running water, washing machines, shower facilities, stills, and all the other comforts of home, all of which the Seabees manufactured themselves in their spare time.