Ships
- USS Edsall (DD-219) Captain, 29 August 1921 – 10 October 1921
Harry Robert Bogusch was born in 1887 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the Class of 1911. He began in submarines, served in destroyers after the First World War, and in the mid-1920s became a naval aviator. As a lieutenant commander he flew from California stations and then served in the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, where he died in 1934.
His early commands were the submarines F-1 and H-3. By 1916 he had F-1, and he had H-3 by the following year. That service included two disasters. On 25 March 1915 the submarine F-4 sank off Honolulu with her entire crew, and Bogusch was involved in the loss. In December 1916 H-3 ran aground in fog on Samoa Beach, near Eureka, California, while making for Humboldt Bay, and he was involved in that grounding as well. In January 1917 the cruiser Milwaukee was wrecked during the attempt to pull H-3 off the beach. The submarine was later hauled across the sand spit and put back into the water inside the bay.
On 29 August 1921 he took command of the destroyer Edsall (DD-219). A. H. Rice had commissioned the new Clemson-class ship at Philadelphia on 26 November 1920. She reached San Diego in January 1921 and spent the year on the West Coast in battle practice and gunnery drills. Bogusch's command lasted until 10 October 1921. Edsall later served for years with the Asiatic Fleet and was lost on 1 March 1942 in the Indian Ocean south of Java, overwhelmed by a Japanese force.
In 1926 he was selected for flight training at Pensacola. He then flew with naval aviation units at Long Beach and at San Diego. On the morning of 23 September 1927 he landed at Tucson in a Consolidated NY-2 trainer, bureau number A-7498, with a passenger named Burns, one of five Navy pilots sent from San Diego to meet Charles Lindbergh on the national tour that followed the Atlantic flight. The party stayed the night. Bogusch departed at 6:45 the next morning and recorded that the field was excellent.
On 14 August 1928 he stopped at Tucson again, westbound from El Paso to San Diego, ferrying a Martin T4M-1, bureau number A-6310, with Aviation Machinist's Mate Coulson. About a month later he was with the Navy aircraft assembled for the National Air Races at Mines Field in Los Angeles. In June 1929 he flew with officers taking eighteen Martin bombers from San Diego to Oakland on a training movement. He served that year in the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington, and in December he flew from Anacostia down to Hampton Roads to test a new compass.
He returned to sea with fleet aviation in the early 1930s. In March 1934 he came back to Washington, and that July he was assigned to the Maintenance Division of the Bureau of Aeronautics. On the evening of 7 September 1934 he died there of a heart attack.