Ben Moreell

Admiral Ben Moreell (September 14, 1892 – July 30, 1978) was the chief of the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Yards and Docks and of the Civil Engineer Corps. Best known to the American public as the father of the Navy's Seabees, Moreell's life spanned eight decades, two world wars, a great depression and the evolution of the United States as a superpower. He was a distinguished naval officer, an engineer, an industrial giant and a national spokesman.

Early life

Moreell was born into a Jewish family on September 14, 1892, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His family settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he graduated from St. Louis's Central High School at the top of his class and was awarded a four-year scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis at age 16. After graduating with a civil engineering degree from the McKelvey School of Engineering in 1913, he joined the navy during World War I. In June 1917, he was directly commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps.

First World War

During the First World War, he was stationed in the Azores, where he became acquainted with assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, and afterwards served at navy yards and installations in Massachusetts, Haiti, Virginia, and Washington. In 1933, he returned to the States to supervise what would eventually be called the David W. Taylor Model Basin in Carderock, Maryland. This advanced Moreell to the rank of rear admiral, although he had never been a captain. Moreell proposed the construction of two giant drydocks at Pearl Harbor and initiated naval construction projects on Midway Atoll and Wake Island, long before Japanese bombs began to fall on December 7, 1941. The docks were completed in time to repair battleships damaged at Pearl Harbor, and the facilities at Midway were completed in time to play a strategic role in the navy's first significant victory over Japanese forces. Moreell coined the Seabees motto: Construimus, Batuimus (Latin for "We Build, We Fight").

Moreell's Civil Engineer Corps was given command authority over what would become an organization of 250,000 people that built $10 billion worth of facilities to support the war effort. October 1917 – lieutenant (temporary)

In Moreell's honor the Seabees named their Kuwait facility Camp Moreell, a military compound in Kuwait, Southwest Asia. The facility was home to U.S. Navy Seabees operating in the Persian Gulf region under Task Force Charlie as of early 2003. As of April 2003, Task Force Charlie comprised Seabees from several Naval Construction Force commands.

Moreell Avenue in Quantico, Virginia is named in his honor.

The 68,000-square-foot training facility for the Civil Engineer Corps Officers School (CECOS) in Port Hueneme, California is named Moreell Hall in his honor.

There is a housing area in the Norfolk, Virginia naval complex named for Adm. Moreell.