@seancb:
My grandfather wasn’t on the Lexington but he was a Sea Bee.
In case you’ve never seen it, you might enjoy watching the 1944 John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees”. It’s a highly romanticized version of the origin of the US Navy’s Construction Battalions; not accurate historically, but fun nonetheless. One of my favourite parts is the one in which the staff captain played by Addison Richards (who often portrays businesslike, non-nonsense military officers, and thus can serve as his own straight man when the occasion demands it) is on the phone with his superior, who asks him what the new construction battalions will be called. Richards, puzzled by the question, answers a bit blankly, “What’s wrong with ‘construction battalions’? What? No ‘oompf’?” As he says this, he’s doodling on a notepad and he happens to write “C.B.” – at which point he brightens up and tells his superior that he’s just thought of a good name.
There are modern-day echoes, by the way, of the SeaBee name in the fictional Star Trek universe. Various designs have been used for the emblem of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and many of them feature a stylized bee (sometimes carrying six tools, one per arm), and some of the small spaceships that serve as work pods in orbital shipyards have been referred to as Work Bees.
