Builders for Battle

Behind the story of victory over Japan lies the story of the Pacific Naval Air Bases – one of the mightiest construction feats in history. Builders for Battle is that story, from its beginnings, when isolationism was opposed to the fortification of our Pacific Islands, through a detailed description of the magnificent jobs done by some of the country’s largest construction outfits.

It was from these bases in the Hawaiians, at Midway, Johnson, Palmyra, Wake and Samoa that the Seabees were able later to build the life-lines for the battles in the Far East; through them uncounted millions of tons of supplies and armies of men flowed to the newer bases at Guam, in the Philippines, at Okinawa, and elsewhere. It cost the Navy many hundreds of millions of dollars to build these fundamental bases from which all the others grew. Far more than the money, however, the PNAB projects exacted a high toll in human courage and skill and persistence. The building of them was a desperate race against oncoming war.

The work at Samoa, Wake, Guam and Cavite was done in the teeth of increasing Japanese pressure, and with the knowledge that all might be in vain. But it was done, nonetheless, and in the end, many of the men who worked frantically against time lost the race, were captured by the Japs, and endured imprisonment for years. On Wake alone, 96 civilians were brutally murdered. There is, too, the account of the vast projects of the contractors carried out at Pearl Harbor.

The story Woodbury tells in Builders for Battle is an epic of American engineering genius, and of man’s unyielding courage in the face of disaster. It is a narrative to be read with pride, and with thankfulness for what these men accomplished.