Ships
- USS Dolphin (SS-169) Captain from 1 June 1932
Lieutenant J. B. Griggs became the first commanding officer of the submarine Dolphin on 1 June 1932, the day she was commissioned at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. She was the sixth United States ship to carry that name. While building, the boat had been called V-7 and had been classed first as a fleet submarine and then as a cruiser submarine. Those earlier designations were behind her when Griggs took command. She entered service as Dolphin, SS-169.
The yard had laid her keel in June 1930, and the hull was launched on 6 March 1932 with Mrs. E. D. Toland as sponsor. Dolphin was a single ship, built to a size between the very large cruiser submarines of the 1920s and the smaller S-class boats that had served as coastal craft. She was 319 feet long, mounted a 4-inch deck gun and six 21-inch torpedo tubes, and was designed for 17 knots on the surface, with a complement of 57. In Griggs's hands she was a working trial of what a medium fleet submarine could be.
His first passage in command took the new boat to the Pacific. Dolphin left Portsmouth on 24 October 1932 and arrived at San Diego on 3 December to join Submarine Division 12. Through the winter the crew drilled tactically off the California coast and fired torpedoes to prove the tubes, the weapons, and the fire-control arrangements of a submarine still fresh from the builders.
That opening cruise closed early in the next year. On 4 March 1933 Dolphin started back toward the Atlantic and reached the Portsmouth Navy Yard on 23 March for final trials and formal acceptance. She stayed at the yard until 1 August, then returned to San Diego on 25 August and rejoined Submarine Division 12. The lieutenant who had read himself in on commissioning day had brought an experimental submarine from the fitting-out berth into the Pacific submarine force and through the trials that completed her acceptance.