The Fighting Seabees

Recently, I fired up Pluto TV, which has a bunch of movie channels and, more specifically, allows you to start watching whatever movie is currently airing from the beginning, unlike the Roku Channel. So I find myself tending to look through Pluto's offerings more. Anyhow, one evening one of the classic channels had the John Wayne movie The Fighting Seabees. Not having seen it before and not personally having it on DVD, I decided to watch it.

Never mind that the timing of events in the movie is all wrong; the movie starts off sometime relatively early in US involvement in World War II, but late enough that the US actually needs to build stuff on the Pacific islands it's taking. John Wayne plays Wedge Donovan, and at the beginning of the movie he's pissed. He runs a construction firm, and he's lost a bunch of workers to Japanese attacks which his men can't really respond to since they're unarmed. Lt. Commander Yarrow (Dennis O'Keefe), also on the ship back with Donovan's men, is the point man, and boy is Donovan going to give him a piece of his mind. This much to the chagrin of Yarrow's girlfriend, reporter Connie Chesley (Susan Hayward).

Now, as you might guess, the three leads are going to wind up in a love triangle, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. While Donovan wants to tell Yarrow off, Yarrow actually has a fair bit of sympathy for Donovan. The problems are practical. One is that if you have men who are armed and in a war zone but out of uniform, the rules of war say such people can be treated as guerrillas or spies, meaning summary execution. There's also the issue of arming the men without training in being soldiers. Sure, many of the men may already be good shots, but do they know how to fight a battle against a Japanese force that's advancing on them? If they don't it could be disastrous if they try to fight. (Again as you might guess, this is foreshadowing.) The other problem, of course, is that the training is going to take time, and Donovan wants his men able to defend themselves now.

The obvious solution is to come up with a unit that will train men specifically for construction and have them armed and in uniform, even if the training is going to take some time. The units get the official name of Construction Batallions, but it's fairly logical that they'd wind up referring to themselves as C.B.s, which gets renamed Seabees. Donovan's men get enlisted en masse, with Donovan being commissioned at the same rank as Yarrow to command his workers.

However, it's not all smooth sailing after that. Donovan still isn't that well-versed in military tactics, so when the Japanese attack his men are going to be in more danger than a normal battalion, and heaven forbid they get in the way of the full-time soldiers. And then Connie gets seriously injured and while delirious, declares her love for Donovan. The fighting goes on and Donovan and his men get another chance to show off their heroism against the Japanese.

The Fighting Seabees was made in late 1943 and released in early 1944, when the US was still a good 18 months away from winning the war in the Pacific. As such, the movie is full of the sort of wartime rah-rah attitude that served as a morale-booster for the audiences in America. From what I've read, the story isn't exactly accurate in terms of how the real Seabees were founded. It's the sort of movie that people who don't like John Wayne's politics would point to as being unthinking and not particularly good, but that is unfair, not even considering that the movie needs to be remembered as a product of its times.

That's not to say that The Fighting Seabees is a great movie; a lot of the movies actually made during the war fall into that pool. But it's certainly entertaining enough, and an interesting look at how Hollywood was doing its part to further the war effort during the war.