C. B. Martin and His Painting

“Well, one sunny morning, I was sitting at the stop light in Lubbock in my Model A Ford waiting for the green light when a friend drove up beside me. He yelled over asking me what I was doing. I yelled back that I had just received a notice from the Draft Board that I was now 1-A and I was wondering what I should do. He yelled back that with my educational classes in college in construction that I should join the Seabees. I asked him, what are the Seabees? He said they are a new part of the Navy that does construction projects.”

About a dozen of us in the Geriatric Art Society were sitting in the courtyard of the St. Francisville Inn in Louisiana last month having Happy Hour after a hard day of watercolor painting. There were several conversations in progress, but this one from C. B. Martin from Lubbock got my attention and I started listening to him.

C B. continued “After thinking about what he had just said, I made a U-turn in that intersection and drove a few blocks back to the Navy recruiting office. By noon, I was in the Seabees. After some training, I was on a big ship out in the Pacific going to a battle somewhere.”

“They put us and our equipment on an island called Guam, where all hell was going on and we started trying to construct some airfields.”

I said “I remember as a kid a movie called The Fighting Seabees” He said “Yes, John Wayne starred in that movie. When those movie people heard the story of my buddy that chased a Japanese soldier down the mountain side with a bulldozer, they put that in the movie too, ha ha”.

When I returned to Houston, I looked up the story of the Battle of Guam in World War II. It lasted just eighteen days, from July 21 to August 8, 1944. During those eighteen days, a soldier, either Japanese or American, would be wounded or would be killed on average every thirty seconds, for twenty four hours a day for eighteen days. Four American soldiers would win the Medal of Honor there. From what I read, for those that were there, enduring the continued rain, mud, noise and bloodshed, it was about as close as a human being could get to being in a hell on earth.

The Seabees started their construction work while the battle raged on around them. They would construct five airfields on this little island for our new long-range B-29 bombers. From this island these bombers were within range of mainland Japan.

For one Japanese soldier, Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, this battle lasted twenty eight years. He was found in 1972 hiding in a cave in the jungle high up on the side of a mountain.

It is the custom for our Geriatric Art Society on our painting trips to have a critique session at the end of each day. I took a photograph of C. B. waiting for his turn to have his painting critiqued, which I used to paint this portrait of him.