Ships
- USS Birmingham (CL-62) Captain from 9 August 1945 · Relieved on 10 October 1946
Richard Harold Cruzen was a polar seaman as well as a fleet staff officer. Before the war he took the old barkentine Bear to Antarctica. During the war he planned operations for the Seventh Fleet. He took command of the light cruiser Birmingham (CL-62) in the last weeks of the war and kept her through the first year of the peace. He then led the ships of Operation Highjump, the largest Antarctic expedition of its time.
He was born on 28 April 1897 in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from Gallatin High School in Gallatin, Missouri, then attended the Virginia Military Institute and the Severn School in Maryland before he was appointed to the Naval Academy in 1916.
As a midshipman he sailed in the battleship Mississippi with the Atlantic Fleet in the summer of 1918. He graduated in 1919 and went to the battleship Idaho. Between 1925 and 1937 he served in the battleships Nevada and California, the destroyer tender Rigel, and the destroyers Claxton, Delphy, Sinclair, Shirk, Elliott, Pope and Simpson. He completed the command course at the Naval War College. On 11 September 1939 he took command of Bear, then 65 years old, for Richard E. Byrd's United States Antarctic Service Expedition. His navigator was George J. Dufek. The Navy credited the expedition's ship and air surveys with about 1,000 miles of new coastline. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox commended Cruzen for "superior seamanship, ability, courage, determination, efficiency and good judgment in dangerous emergencies."
He began the war on the staff of the Naval War College. From 18 July to 26 September 1943 he was chief of staff to Vice Admiral Arthur S. Carpender, commanding the Seventh Fleet. Through the Philippine campaign of 1944–45 he was an operations officer on the staff of Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, and he received the Legion of Merit for that service. He took command of Birmingham in the late summer of 1945. She had been repaired at Pearl Harbor after the kamikaze hit off Okinawa. The war ended while she was at sea headed for Wake. Under Cruzen she went to Okinawa and then to Australia as flagship for Rear Admiral Clifford E. Van Hook, and she brought her crew home to San Francisco in March 1946.
He left Birmingham on 10 October 1946 to command Task Force 68 in Operation Highjump, with about 4,700 men, a command ship, a carrier, icebreakers, seaplane tenders, a submarine and support ships. He sailed in the flagship Mount Olympus on 2 December 1946. The aircraft mapped more than 300,000 square miles of Antarctica not yet charted. He appears briefly in the Navy's film The Secret Land, which won the Academy Award for documentary. He had been selected for rear admiral in November 1946. He later commanded Cruiser Division Two in the Mediterranean and retired as a vice admiral. He died on 15 April 1970, aged 72.