Adm. Lewis B. Combs; Created Navy’s Seabees

Adm. Lewis B. Combs, 101, a creator and director of the Seabees who dodged enemy fire to build floating dry docks and airstrips in World War II. When Pearl Harbor was bombed Dec. 7, 1941, Combs was assistant chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks and his superior, Adm. Ben Moreell, had only a plan for organizing civil engineers. Within weeks, they established the Seabees, a name derived from the initials for “construction battalions.” The mobile force of civil engineers gave the name of their original base, Quonset Point, R.I., to the Quonset huts they spread across the Pacific to house 1.5 million U.S. servicemen. With an average age of 37, the island-hopping Seabees also built warehouses, storage tanks, hospitals, airstrips and docks. Combs, who supervised the vast undertaking, later served as advisor on two John Wayne war films, “The Fighting Seabees” and “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” Educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Combs became a Navy engineer in 1917, and after his retirement 40 years later, headed Rensselaer’s civil engineering department for 15 years. On Monday in Red Hook, N.Y.