Ships
- USS Intrepid (CV-11) Captain from 31 January 1946 · Relieved on 11 April 1946
Captain Robert Edwin Blick, Jr., of the United States Navy, commanded the aircraft carrier Intrepid in the early months of 1946. He took command on 31 January and was relieved on 11 April, a tour of a little more than two months aboard a ship whose Pacific fighting was already finished.
Intrepid (CV-11) was an Essex-class fast carrier, commissioned in August 1943 and sent out with the fast carrier striking forces. Her aircraft worked over Japanese positions from the Marianas and the Philippines through Iwo Jima and Okinawa. An aerial torpedo during the February 1944 strike on Truk, and kamikaze hits later in the war, put her into the yard for long repairs. She returned to combat after the 1944 damage and was still in commission when the war ended.
Blick assumed command months after the surrender, when a carrier captain's day was no longer built around the dawn launch of a strike. He answered for the hull and the engineering plant, for whatever aviation routine the ship still kept, and for a crew that the Navy was steadily sending home. Across the Essex class that spring, ships were collecting on the West Coast while the service decided which carriers would remain active and which would be laid up. For the ten weeks of his orders, that responsibility on Intrepid was his.
His relief came on 11 April 1946. Intrepid stayed in commission into the next year and was decommissioned on 22 March 1947. The Navy later brought her back for Cold War service, and after her final retirement she went on public display in New York. Blick's captaincy falls in the interval between her Pacific combat and that first decommissioning.
Earlier, the same command had been held by Thomas Lamison Sprague, who had Intrepid at her commissioning, and by Joseph Francis Bolger during heavy action in 1944. Giles Elza Short served in her in the months bordering Blick's orders. Those successive captains carried the ship from her first Pacific deployment into the peace in which Robert Edwin Blick, Jr. had her for one short season.