Inspired by Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet’s (Ret.) recent discussions on USOs, I thought I would relate the following. Just over 70 years ago, an interesting incident occurred on board the USS Curtis – the U.S. Navy vessel tasked with delivery of the Shrimp device to the Pacific Proving Ground in 1954 for the notorious Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test. This particular test, which scientists from Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories had calculated to have a yield of 4,8 megatons actually went far above this calculation to achieve nearly 16 megatons of TNT equivalent yield. This miscalculation exposed many U.S. military personnel to dangerous levels of radiation and, more importantly, post traumatic stress disorder from being exposed to the close-range effects of such a large blast. Was the USO incident related to the yield miscalculation event?
USS Curtiss (AV-4)
The Curtiss class were the first seaplane tenders built from the keel up for the US Navy, the previous tenders had been converted from cargo ships. They were designed to provide command facilities for forward operating long-range patrol seaplane squadrons. To accomplish this, they were heavily armed with four 5-inch (130 mm)/38 caliber dual-purpose guns, and contained repair and maintenance facilities, along with supplies for operating in forward areas for many months.
The ships had a large seaplane deck located at the stern with the maintenance shops located in the superstructure just forward of it. They were built with three large cranes, one located at the starboard extreme of the stern, the second was at the aft of the superstructure on the port side, with the remaining crane located midship on the starboard side. The starboard crane at midship was removed from both ships during WWII and replaced with a 20-millimeter (0.79 in) Oerlikon cannon gun tub. Two of the 5-in guns were staggered on opposite sides of the rear superstructure, with the remaining two in a superfiring configuration at the bow of the ships.
From 23 February to 13 June 1951, Curtiss served as flagship for "Operation Greenhouse" and was the base for civilian and military technicians during the atomic tests at Eniwetok. She also provided meteorological information and operated a boat pool. Curtiss served at San Diego, in local operations until 29 September 1952, when she again sailed to Eniwetok, as flagship during the atomic tests of "Operation Ivy", during which the first hydrogen bomb was detonated. Returning to San Diego, on 4 December, she cruised the west coast, and visited Acapulco, Mexico, in 1953. From 10 January to 28 May 1954, she participated in "Operation Castle".
Rather than write about the USO event, I will post verbatim the eyewitness accounts of two U.S. Marines onboard the USS Curtiss – Robert Mackenzie and G. Nicholas Stuparich.
First, a little background from Mackenzie and Stuparich regarding their duties on the Curtiss:
Mackenzie: So all the guys that got a clearance, we went as a group on the Curtiss. Now we knew where it was going but we really didn’t know what we were going to do.
Interviewer : OK, so after the fact, at some point you know that you’ve gotten a clearance.
Mackenzie: We didn’t know that until we were already halfway on the cruise. And the way we found out is that some of the men were called in and they were told they didn’t get a Queen Clearance. They got top secret but they didn’t get Queen. And it was no fault of theirs, Mary. Some of them, if they had one relative that was born in another country and something, they just couldn’t get one.
Interviewer: Correct. Correct. So “Q” stands for “Queen.” Yes. Or is “Queen” something you make from “Q”? I wonder. I’ve never—
Mackenzie: Well, “Q” must be “Queen,” I guess. Yes. It must be.
Interviewer: You guys said “Queen,” though, when you said clearance.
Mackenzie: Yes. Yes. And it’s a Queen Clearance, yes. And they’re still around, I understand.
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Mackenzie: And I tell you why, is that when I went aboard ship, they made me an orderly, which was a great honor. And so I was the admiral’s orderly, and before that I was the captain’s orderly. In fact, by the time I was aboard the Curtiss for eighteen months, I worked as an orderly for three admirals and two ship’s captains and the executive officer, which was a great background for a young man. And I have the highest regard for naval officers. I watched them talk to their men, I watched them talk to their fellow officers, I saw how they solved problems, and just what a great example for a young man, to be around people of that caliber. It was wonderful.
Interviewer: Let me ask you a question here because I don’t know that much about the armed forces. The Curtiss is obviously a Navy ship.
Mackenzie: Yes.
Interviewer: And you’re a Marine serving on it. Is that common?
Mackenzie: No. It’s only in capital ships, normally, which would be battleships— Interviewer: “Capital ships.”
Mackenzie: Capital ships, which would be—the terminology has changed today, Mary, but in my day it was battleships, cruisers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, aircraft carriers, would have Marine detachments. Now originally the Marine detachments were almost the police force of the ship. And they were called MAs, which would be Master-of-Arms. Very unpopular with the Navy. And the brig is, of course, run by the Marines. But on our ship, we didn’t have those duties, not on the Curtiss. The Curtiss, we were a special force with top secret clearances. People only didn’t talk to us because they would say, Hey, you don’t talk to those guys. It was that kind of thing. So anyway, but we ended up being very close with the Navy, but our duties, we didn’t talk to each other about our duties.
Stuparich: So, I remember signing the clearance papers and they didn’t tell us what we were going to do or where we were going. We went aboard ship as supposedly just a Marine detachment, but then it ended up being as nuclear security. We were well briefed and well trained on what our jobs were aboard ship. I did security with the devices, once they were delivered to the vessel. We did perimeter security when the devices were being delivered, which meant we were out on the pier and out in the area when the trucks arrived, delivering units. Once the canisters were brought aboard, then we were assigned to security aboard the ship, which meant working in the hole. In other words, the devices were put in a particular compartment. We were responsible for the security of that department, the corridor that led to it, and I can’t remember if we were reading the temperature. We had to take a reading, I believe, once an hour and record it. I do not remember whether it was temperature or radiation, but it had to be recorded; I remember that if there was something wrong, and I don’t know the standard, but if it went over that standard or under that standard, we had to notify the science officer, who was also the engineering officer. That was Commander Hart, I believe.
Interviewer: Now, let me back up just a tiny bit with the security piece. So there’s a point at which you’re informed, I assume after you’re cleared, of what your mission actually is?
Stuparich: Correct.
Interviewer: Give me a sense of how much detail they give you there, and how much that is connected to what you already might know about nuclear weapons.
Stuparich: That’s a little bit confusing because I know so much more now than I did then. I do not believe they gave us that much information. They definitely didn’t give us a detailed description of our duties, other than that what we were doing was actually guarding a nuclear device, and that’s all they would say. We and I think about a half-a-dozen sailors were the only ones that actually saw the canisters being brought aboard. There were not very many people. That was secured. The whole aft deck was secured when that occurred.
Interviewer: And how many of there were you, when you say “we”?
Stuparich: There were probably six Marines on the dock, one or two on the trucks, then I think there were a couple in the different corridors—what they did was they dogged the hatches so people couldn’t come in when we were loading this particular material. Then it went down into the hole and then there was a special rack because the canisters had to be triced up in these racks. I can’t remember whether there was—I think there were six to a rack. And they were triced up like you would trice up nitroglycerine, you know, with like Bungee cords but I think they were springs.
Interviewer: Say that word again. I don’t know that word “trice.”
Stuparich: Tricing means to tie, and what it does is it keeps something in balance so that if it’s hanging, it’s free-hanging, but it’s in a rack, and this keeps the canister in line, and it’s called trice, you trice it up.
Interviewer: “Trice it up.” I see.
Stuparich: We didn’t do that. That was done by their people.
Stuparich: We embarked out of San Diego, went up to San Francisco. That’s it. We went to San Francisco, went to Hunters Point for something, some sort of refurbishing. Then from Hunters Point we went over to Port Chicago, picked up our merchandise, if you will, and then when we were through with that, when we pulled out, we went down and then into the bay. At that time we picked up some escorts, and then we went under the Golden Gate Bridge, at which time the Secret Service or FBI, whoever they were, had the bridge closed, and they were waving at us as we went underneath.
Interviewer: Wow, they closed the bridge.
Stuparich: They closed the Golden Gate Bridge. It was kind of cool because being from the Bay Area I kind of remembered that. I think I was aft at the time and I was looking up and yeah, sure enough, they did. And that was kind of interesting. So then we headed out to the Pacific. I think we refueled and resupplied once or twice, a ship came alongside, I think they came out of Hawaii. They used the high line and brought the stuff across, and then they brought the refueler up and then they refueled us. And that’s why they call us the Ghost Ship, because almost everything that we did, the replenishing and the refueling, was all done at sea.
Now, the USO incident – which many people denied having happened. The "Russian sub" somehow penetrated the flotilla protecting the Curtiss and was completely undetected until it appeared underneath the Curtiss. This event occurred a full 6 years before the Soviet's first nuclear submarine set sail - so for a diesel powered submarine in the middle of the Pacific without logistic support this feat would have been incredibly difficult to accomplish.
Stuparich Account:
Stuparich : The other thing that really upset me was the submarine.
Interviewer: Yes, talk to me about that a little bit.
Stuparich : Well, Robert Mackenzie was the admiral’s orderly that night, and I was the orderly on the next deck down, and my job was to protect the crypto room which was, if you were looking down the hall, was to the left, and then the CIC which was straight ahead.
Interviewer: CIC is?
Stuparich : Is Central Intelligence Control or something like that. It’s an area where they plot everything. [Note: on board U.S. Navy ships, the CIC is the Combat Information Center] Anyway, I was standing there and all of a sudden Commander Hart came running around the corner and said, “Come with me”, with that I was on alert. So we went into CIC and then there was—I stood at the door. He said, “Block the door”, and I blocked the door. And it was one of those combination doors in those days. And I saw him talking with an officer, with the officer in command of the CIC at the time, or duty officer, I guess is what you call him, and then they were really—I could tell they were really stressed about something. Then a chief electronics mate had taken the young man off of the board and they were looking at the board and plotting on the board something, and he got on the phone to the bridge. I immediately felt the ship changing course, and we immediately started into a zigzag situation. And then I could tell, this man was stressed, and I’d never seen him stressed like that before. This way, that way. Everything was very staccato. So went back up to the bridge and Mackenzie and the Admiral were already there. And as a young man, you’re looking at their body language and their facial features and we knew that there was something wrong. Well then, I heard the conversation, and they wanted to know, in profanity, how the son-of-a-b*tch got there. How did it get there? How did it get through the perimeter? So then they were communicating with the vessels that were on the perimeter, there were destroyers out there and everything else, and they couldn’t figure it out. Admiral Wellings said, I believe that’s he’s probably been sitting here waiting for us. He probably plotted our course and just dropped to the bottom and waited till we came by, and then he came up underneath us. And he just followed us, and it was just a Russian sub, is what we anticipated. And they figured that they knew it was a Russian sub. Yeah. And it did. It stayed with us. And then what really became scary is that I remember the admiral telling the captain, We don’t have to worry if he’s directly under us. If he drops back into firing range, then we have to worry. By then, the other ships were doing crisscrosses in front and in back of us. These are the little destroyers. And sure enough, he did, he dropped back, I don’t know how far, I remember they had it plotted, and he was within firing range. And so then I just, I don’t know, something really bothered me and really happened to me mentally, because I just said [to myself], this whole thing’s over now, we’re through, we’re done with. And I guess I kind of convinced myself that that was going to happen.
Interviewer: And this is prior to arriving in the Pacific.
Stuparich: Yeah, we were on our way.
Interviewer: So, just to get a sense of it, you’re well aware of what you’ve got on board?
Stuparich : Oh yeah, because I’d already been down in the hole and they’d told us what it was. Yeah, and then you’ve got a— Got this sub, and believe it or not, not very many people knew about it. I mean surprisingly, people were telling Bob [Robert W. Mackenzie] he was crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no submarine. Well, I know there was. And when I mentioned it to Bob last year he said, Thank God somebody else knows. And what we’re trying to do is find a third Marine who was on the bridge, but there may not have been a Marine on the bridge.

Mackenzie account:
Interviewer: So explain to me how much you knew about the mission or what you thought or what’s that like?
Mackenzie : We didn’t know anything about it, frankly. You know, I realized that it was more than just a mission. Now by that time, Mary, the Korean War was over with. We were steaming out in ’54? Yes, January of ’54 is when we left San Diego. And Korea had been over for about six months, but the Cold War was extremely hot then. And when I first realized that there was more going on than we realized is when we had full wartime conditions on the ship. And I’d thought, Well, what are we doing here? The ship’s all blacked out at night. We’ve got all these red lights on you see in the movies, like those submarine movies, everybody running and all those red lights on at night. And heavy, heavy drapes in front of every hatch. And you don’t go outside, or as they say, out on the decks without closing that, and then you open the hatch and a red light comes on, then you close the hatch. And they were conscious of sound, of lights. And I said, What’s going on here? You know. And so when I really realized there was more going on is when I was on orderly duty for the admiral. And I was on duty and on duty and on duty and I just couldn’t stand up anymore. So I called somebody in the Marine detachment and said, Well, when is my relief going to be here? It was real late at night, it was like eleven or twelve o’clock, I’d gone on that morning at 6:30, and I’d been standing all day long. That’s what you do. And I just got so I couldn’t stand anymore. So I called down and I was told that the admiral only wanted me and there would be no relief, So just stick it out, Mackenzie. I wasn’t real happy about that. But anyway, so—and I’ll put this right on tape—so a Marine never sits down on duty, but I did. I couldn’t stand up anymore. So I found a chair in an empty officer’s stateroom and I wedged that chair in a real narrow hallway that went into the admiral’s quarters, and I put my feet against the bulkhead and I rocked back and I just kind of rocked with the ship. At least I was off my feet, and I figured nobody could get by me. So I guess, I don’t know if I dozed off or what, but all I know is this sailor was shaking my arm. It was about 2:30, three o’clock in the morning. And he says, “Wake up the admiral! Wake up the admiral!” And I said,”Well, who are you? What do you mean, wake up the admiral? It’s three o’clock in the morning.” [And he said], “Oh, they want him on the bridge right now”. And I said, “Who wants him on the bridge?” [And he said], “Well, the officers, blah, blah, and all that”. I said, “Well, what is your name?” And he gave me his name, and I said, “What’s the officer’s name?” I really realized we were very, very conscious and were trained to be suspicious of everything. I don’t know who this guy is. He wants to go in and see the admiral? That’s my job. Nobody goes in to see the admiral. And so anyway I said, “Well, I’ll go wake up the admiral and you go back and report to the bridge, and I’m sure the admiral will be right there”. I didn’t want him to go in with me. And so anyway, he left. So now I’m saying, How do you wake up an admiral? You know. I wanted to do it maybe like I was back in back in boot camp and scream, say, “Hit the deck”! I says, well, no, I didn’t want to go to the brig, so I didn’t do that. So anyway I said, Well, how do you wake up an admiral? So anyway, I woke him up. And I remember he said, “What is it, Mackenzie?” And he was startled. And I said, “Sir, the admiral’s presence is requested on the bridge immediately”. You don’t want to say “immediately” to an admiral, but I did. Anyway, he looked at me, and he had a phone right next to his bunk. And I always wondered, if he had phone, why didn’t they just call him? I don’t know. You know, you would wonder. And so anyway, he picked up his phone. And like I said, the respect from the naval officers, they’re just really something, Mary, they really are. And so he went up on the deck with his blue terrycloth bathrobe on.
Interviewer: He picks up the phone and confirms?
Mackenzie: Right. And then he puts on his blue bathrobe— He doesn’t even get dressed. Oh no. They want him right now [sound of fingers snapping]. So I thought, Whoo, something’s going on. So I go up there, and it was like an old World War II movie. At my age, I grew up with those World War II movies, you know. And on the bridge, all the lights are out because we’re running at wartime conditions at night, and you can just see the shadows, you know, and those were from the glowing of the instruments and the people moving around the bridge and all that. And right away, the officer in charge of the bridge came up, and everybody was whispering. I thought, What is all this whispering about? You know. And he was talking to the admiral. And that’s part of the job of being an orderly. You’re there but you don’t get too close because if you do—
Interviewer: You’ll hear?
Mackenzie: You don’t want to hear. And the admirals will let you know, and so will the captains. If you’re a little too close to them, they’ll give you one of those, turn their head around, you kind of back up. You realize you’re a little too close. They want to be guarded. They don’t want anybody to get them. That’s your job is to protect them, help them in any way you can, so forth. But anyway, and you’ll kind of back up. But I wanted to hear what was going on, you know. So then all I heard was “submarine.” I thought, Well, so what? You know. But anyway, it turns out that we were being shadowed by a Russian sub.
Interviewer: For real?
Mackenzie: For real. And the sub was directly under us [slaps hands together] like this. And they picked it up. Because I thought, well, how did it get through our screen? We were in a complete convoy, and we had carriers, we had destroyers, we had everything. And I thought, How did this guy get through all that? And they tell me what they do is they know where you’re going. They just sit down at the bottom and wait till you get there and just [slapping hands together] pop up. They don’t have to go through any screens. And I said, Oh.
Interviewer: Oh. So they know from –
Mackenzie: Sure, they know. Yes. They probably knew, with all the spies and all that.
But anyway, the admiral asked several questions, and I guess before, he asked them if they had contact with somebody. And they said,”No, sir, we thought we’d wait for the admiral”, and all that. And he said, “Well, you should’ve. Did you contact anybody to tell them what the situation was? How have you tried to contact the sub?” Evidently they have an international language they use. Then of course they used Russian and they used everything, and no response. And so I always was kidding Kari because this was dramatic, you know. I always said, Whooo, thirty seconds from World War III. Well,
that’s the way you think of it later, but it’s very true. But the thing that I still remember today is when the admiral walked on the bridge, you get almost like this, your daddy had come home to save you or something. That man had a presence about him. He wasn’t tall in stature. And his name was [RADM H.C.] Bruton. I’m sure he’s gone now. But he walked on that bridge and all of a sudden, you could just—everybody, like, The admiral’s here, we’re going to be all right. You know. And you could feel that. And he asked just a few questions. And the sub, and they were waiting for the reply to come back, Do we take action? Do we take evasive action? Now it’s pretty hard to blow up a submarine when it’s right under you. What do you do, when you think about it? How do you get a sub from under us? But we had submarines with us, too, our subs. And so it came back, they were waiting for the reply to come back, and I thought, My God, this is more serious than I realized. You know, it was kind of like a game until then, you know, it was just wartime conditions. I mean we didn’t think anything about this kind of stuff. And so we knew security was extremely tight. Only certain people could go by us, then go into certain compartments, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute. But anyway, back to the sub. And so it broke away. And you know you say “broke away,” where’d it go? It just broke away. And the admiral, they said—sonar reported or whatever and said, The sub has broken away. They must’ve known how many seconds they had. Later I saw a Tom Clancy movie about that, where they were checking and there were seconds and all, and I said, My golly, I saw the same thing in 1954, except for real, you know. So they said it broke away, and the admiral just calm as could be and he says, Carry on, men, you did a good job. If you need me, call, and he went back and went to bed. And I said [to myself], My gosh, it was almost—it was like nothing to him. He was so in command, just knew what he was doing, asked the right questions, congratulated everybody for the job they did, and went back to bed. Now I’m wide awake. I didn’t sit down anymore for the rest of the night. But I never told any of the guys about it. I just told that guy, one of our fellow Marines, November the tenth. It was the Marine Corps birthday. We all got together here at Dana Point. And I told him the submarine story and he says, “What submarine?” I said, “The submarine”. He said,” Well, I didn’t know anything about any submarine.” And I remembered, I’d thought about it, “Well, why should I worry the guys?” And not only that, if something happened when I was on orderly duty, you don’t pass that around the ship. That’s a confidence between you and the admiral. And so I didn’t pass it on.
Interviewer: I have a couple of questions about this. You’re aware in real time, then, that it is a submarine.
Mackenzie: Absolutely. Because you’re hearing the conversation.
Interviewer: Right. It makes me wonder, as I’m listening to the story, if they had you on duty for all this time, would there have been some knowledge of some kind of danger, that they didn’t let you leave orderly duty? Do you make a connection between the fact that the sub was there and the fact that you had to be on duty for so long? That makes you wonder.
Mackenzie: Well, I don’t know. It does, Mary. I never thought about it that way. I don’t think so. I just really think the reason I was left on duty so long is that we were new at our jobs, and they just didn’t realize that when you’re on orderly duty, you’re attached [slapping hands together], you know, at the hip. And not only that, is the admiral doesn’t want to walk out and say, What’s your name? You know, he wants somebody that he can trust and could read him before he says it. I could tell what he wanted. He was looking around and so I call somebody and say, Hey, the skipper’s out of coffee. You better get some in there. See? So you’re his confidant. He’ll say, Well, how are the men thinking? Because he’s some concerned about the morale, or whatever. So you’re his sounding board. Every admiral’s different. Some really use their orderlies. I’ve had admirals when I reported, they’d say, “Well, I’m a little low on cigars, Mackenzie. Why don’t you go down and get me cigars?” Well, I don’t say, ”What kind do you smoke?” So I’d go down and ask the guy to open up the place where you buy the cigars, what’d we call that? Commissary, I think. And they used to question it. And they’d just say, “Well, you sure these are the kind of cigars you smoke, Mackenzie?” And I said, “These are for the skipper.” And he said, “I don’t think so”. And I said, “Really? Why don’t you call and ask him?” [And he’d say], “Oh, OK”. And so that kind of a thing. So, interesting. But anyway, I never did pass that submarine story on to the troops.
Interviewer: That’s so interesting. That’s interesting.
Mackenzie: And so then, now, as time goes by, Mary, as I watch the History Channel and Discovery Times Channel, all these things are coming back to me. And our main concern was frogmen. We were very afraid of frogmen. And so we figured if they came aboard the ship, how they’d come aboard the ship, what we would do, you know, if one did come on. But I never thought about mines or bombs attached to the ship, and now I think about it. Can you imagine if they could’ve got to our ship, and we had people on their like [J. Robert] Oppenheimer and had all those scientists on there? We had fifty-eight scientists on the ship. We had all the bombs on the ship. I mean what a coup that’d meant for the Russians if our ship accidentally sunk, hit a reef or something, or something went off. You know, you can just see it all right now. It’d be another Cold War incident.
Interviewer: But you don’t know that you’re carrying bombs at this point, or do you?
Mackenzie: Yes, we did. We knew we were carrying pieces of the bombs.
Interviewer: You did.
Mackenzie: Yes. Yes. Because security was so tight, it had to be something like that, when only the admiral and two or three people could go in there. And then we timed them, how long they were in, who they were with, they signed in, they signed out. They had a badge with their photograph on it. The badges were made by, at that time, the Atomic Energy Commission [AEC], and they were watermarked with all the same intensity and security as our money. And the admiral would have his picture on there. And I didn’t just look on his shirt. I had to take it off his shirt, which you don’t like to touch an admiral or a captain. It’s just this—you’ve got that—this little [feeling] like, “Hi, God”- that feeling. And you’d take off his badge like that and hold it up right next to his face, make sure you got a really good look at it, and you’d flip it over and check the watermarks, check the number on it. And when I was on, I’d have a check-off list, and his name better be on there. In fact, our own commanding officer forgot to put his name on there and our guys wouldn’t let him in the post. He said, ”What do you mean?” They said, “You’re not on the list, sir.” [And he said], “Well, you know who I am. I’m Captain [James] Brannaman, your commanding officer.” [They] say, “Sir, we been instructed, if your name isn’t on the list, you don’t get on this post”. And the guys loved doing it to him. He wasn’t real happy but.
Interviewer: Oh, I’m sure. Who was this captain again?
Mackenzie: Captain Brannaman. He’s still alive. Stanford graduate. Super sharp guy. About six-five or so, something like that. Nice man.
Interviewer: I’m not well-versed in military things. Is it usual for an admiral to be on the ship?
Mackenzie: No. Now the admiral on any operation, the admiral has what he calls his flagship, and he can change his flag when he wants. The Curtiss was an unusual ship, Mary, because it was designed as a seaplane tender, 1939, something like that. It was hit at Pearl Harbor, went all the way through World War II, ended up with seven battle stars. Then after that, the Atomic Energy Commission grabbed it and then converted it for all the testing. So the Marine captain isn’t like a Navy captain. What’s confusing to everybody, and it was to me, too, the captain of the ship, the Navy ship, doesn’t have to be a captain. That’s his job title. OK, and now the Marine captain is a captain and he’s in charge of the Marines.
Interviewer: So this is the Marine captain you’re talking about.
Mackenzie: The Marine captain, right.
Interviewer: Got it. Not the captain of the ship.
Mackenzie: Not the ship captain—that’s right.

The full transcripts of the two interviews can be found here:
Interview with Robert William Mackenzie, January 1, 2005 UNLV Special Collections Portal

Interview with G. Nicholas Stuparich, Jr., October 18, 2006 UNLV Special Collections Portal