Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 4 April 1953 – 1 April 1954
Robert Brodie, Jr., was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, on 2 December 1904. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1927 and was commissioned in the Navy.
In the Second World War he commanded the destroyer Dallas. On 10 November 1942, then a lieutenant commander, he took her into the Sebou River during the Allied landing at Port Lyautey in French Morocco. A detachment of raiders was embarked. Before daylight he crossed the bar, held his course under artillery, machine-gun, and sniper fire, broke a steel cable boom with the bow, and worked the ship about ten miles upstream through water shallow enough that the hull at times pushed through mud. He landed the raiders at the airfield, which they captured, and brought Dallas through with no serious damage to the ship and no one lost. He received the Navy Cross for the action.
By the spring of 1953 he was a captain and was ordered to the battleship Missouri, then in Japan at the close of her second Korean War cruise. Her last shore bombardment, against targets in the Kojo area, had been fired on 25 March. The next day, while she was being conned through the submarine net at Sasebo, Captain Warner R. Edsall suffered a fatal heart attack on the bridge. Commander James R. North served as acting commanding officer until a permanent relief arrived.
Brodie read his orders aboard Missouri at Yokosuka on 4 April 1953 and took command that day, with Vice Admiral Joseph J. Clark, Commander, Seventh Fleet, present. On 5 April the battleship New Jersey moored alongside and the Seventh Fleet commander shifted his flag to her. On 7 April Missouri sailed from Yokosuka for Pearl Harbor and her home port of Norfolk. Brodie remained her commanding officer until 1 April 1954.
The ship reached Norfolk on 4 May 1953. On 14 May she became flagship for the commander of Battleships-Cruisers, Atlantic Fleet. Brodie took her to sea on 8 June on a midshipman training cruise. The Korean armistice was signed at Panmunjom on 27 July, while that cruise was still underway. Missouri returned to Norfolk on 4 August and then entered the Norfolk Naval Shipyard for overhaul. Captain Robert T. S. Keith relieved Brodie on 1 April 1954. The battleship was decommissioned in February 1955.
Missouri already carried a long public record when Brodie brought her home. William M. Callaghan had been her first commanding officer, from commissioning in June 1944 into May 1945. Stuart S. Murray was in command when Japan signed the surrender on board in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, with Chester William Nimitz and William Frederick Halsey, Jr. among the senior officers there. Brodie retired as a rear admiral. He died on 14 March 1977.