Fearless Ferris
Official Caption: Fearless Ferris and Forces Fighting Raiders from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 121’s Alpha Company protect their road crew with a truck-mounted M60, pictured here in September 1967.
U.S. Navy Seabee Museum, Collections Department, Port Hueneme, CA
NMCB 121 left Gulfport, Mississippi on 28 July 1967, for Phu Bai, Vietnam just five months after it was stood up. While deployed, Alpha Company upgraded streets, built storage areas, reconstructed the Hue Causeway, and upgraded and widened a 29-mile stretch of QL-1.
A-Bomb Legacy
Formed in May 1943 as the 121st NCB, the unit shipped out some 80 years ago today on 8 January 1944 and soon went in with the Marines in the Marshall Islands and immediately built several 500-foot wide by 8,500-foot long runways for B-29 bombers on Tinan, putting most of the Japanese home islands inside the range of the big Superfortress, a feat that earned the construction unit a Presidential Unit Citation.
The American bombers that carried the A-bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki lifted off from these fields.
USAAF flight crew posing beside the 5th Seabee Brigade logo on a B-29, Tinian, 1945, note the M1911s and survival knives. U.S. Navy Seabee Museum, Collections Department, Port Hueneme, CA
Recommissioned in 1967, 121 installed the mast of the scrapped cruiser USS Biloxi just off Biloxi beach and spent much of the next three years in Vietnam before it was decommissioned in 1970.
Via NMCB 121’s 1967-68 cruise book.
While the battalion has long faded into history, the mast has withstood numerous hurricanes, a testament to the work of the Seabees that installed it.
(Photo: Chris Eger)