Ships
- USS The Sullivans (DD-537) Captain from 19 September 1945
Robert Richard Dupzyk (17 March 1917 – date of death not established in the sources examined here) was a United States Navy officer from Sacramento, California, who graduated from the Naval Academy with the class of 1940. He went to sea first as an ensign in the battleship West Virginia, trained at the Packard Marine Engine School with other junior officers destined for motor torpedo boats, and later held command of the high-speed transport Stringham, the destroyer The Sullivans at the war’s end, the Gearing-class destroyer Hamner in the late 1950s, and the dock landing ship Spiegel Grove as a captain. His classmates called him “Pop” and “Pat.” The wartime middle of his career—between a temporary command of a damaged transport in early 1943 and the decommissioning of The Sullivans in January 1946—is thinly documented in the published sources examined here. What can be fixed with confidence is the arc from Sacramento Valley boy and fleet sailor, through Annapolis, into a long surface career that reached captain’s rank and repeated independent command.
He was born on 17 March 1917. The Navy registers of commissioned officers, read across several editions from the early 1940s into the 1960s, give that date of birth without variation. The 1940 Lucky Bag, the Academy yearbook of his graduating class, places him at Sacramento, California, and says he was “nurtured in California’s Sacramento Valley.” The Annual Register of the Naval Academy for 1936–1937 records that he was appointed from California and admitted on 13 July 1936. His parents’ names, his exact place of birth within the Sacramento region, and the circumstances of his childhood do not appear in the sources examined here.
The yearbook is clear that he did not come straight from school to Annapolis. “The Navy brought us our ‘Pop,’ when he decided to take time out from the fleet in order to attend the Naval Academy.” He had already served in the fleet before he became a midshipman. The ship or rating of that early enlistment, and the dates of it, are not recovered here. By the summer of 1936 he was nineteen and entering the Academy from California.
He entered on 13 July 1936. The Class of 1940 was the last Academy class to complete a full four-year course before wartime acceleration shortened later classes. His class graduated and was commissioned on 6 June 1940.
The Lucky Bag sketch of him, under the nicknames “Pop” and “Pat,” describes a strong, practical young man who made academics look easy. “Nurtured in California’s Sacramento Valley, ‘Pat’ was endowed by nature with more than a strong, rugged body. ‘Pop’s’ remarkable ability to grasp and digest the meat of a thing has kept him in good stead academically and allowed time for handball, swimming, and a goodly amount of cultural reading.” What his classmates remembered as characteristic was not brilliance for display but usefulness: “Most characteristic of him is his agreeableness in any situation and his desire to help out wherever needed. Some ship is going to be exceedingly lucky when ‘Pop’ returns to duty.” He worked on the midshipmen’s magazine Log for three years and was its feature editor as a first classman; he was on the Trident staff for two years, worked on the Lucky Bag itself, belonged to the Language Club, and played water polo as a plebe. The registers later marked him with the special qualification “5-b,” which in the Navy’s explanatory notes of that period meant Spanish interpreter or translator—consistent with language-club work, though the yearbook does not say how much Spanish he actually used.
He was commissioned an ensign on 6 June 1940. The Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers for 1940 lists him with that date of rank and places him in the battleship West Virginia. The Navy Directory of 1940 and of 1941 both show “Dupzyk, Robert R, ens, uss West Virginia.” Those directories fix his first commissioned ship. They do not by themselves prove that he was still aboard her on 7 December 1941. In June 1941—six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—he appeared in a photograph caption as one of the ensigns of Packard Marine Engine School Class USN-13 in Detroit, a course that familiarized officers and men with the Packard twelve-cylinder engines then going into motor torpedo boats. Several men in that same class later became known PT-boat officers. Whether Dupzyk himself went on to MTB squadron duty after the engine course is not established in the sources examined here. What is established is that by mid-1941 he had left the ordinary path of a new battleship ensign long enough to sit through PT-engine school, and that he may no longer have been aboard the West Virginia when she was sunk and burned at her Pearl Harbor berth that December.
The published record of his war is uneven. Firm dates exist at the beginning and the end. The middle years are largely blank in the sources examined here.
By early 1943 he was a lieutenant. On 11 February 1943, according to the commanding-officer list compiled for NavSource’s page on the high-speed transport Stringham (APD-6), he assumed temporary command of that ship. Stringham was an old Wickes-class destroyer converted to a high-speed transport, a type the Pacific war used hard to run Marines and supplies into contested beaches. Her official history records that she had already made Guadalcanal resupply runs in 1942, returned to Mare Island for overhaul, gone back to the Solomons, and then, on 26 February 1943, been forced aground in a squall in Pepasala Bay in the Russell Islands. In clearing the reef she damaged a propeller. After emergency repairs at Tulagi she was ordered back to Mare Island, where she arrived on 16 April 1943. NavSource lists Dupzyk’s temporary command from 11 February to 15 May 1943 and notes the command as temporary; the same page also lists Lieutenant Commander J. A. McGoldrick from 4 March to 15 May 1943. The independent wartime commander compilation on uboat.net omits Dupzyk entirely and shows McGoldrick alone for that March–May interval. The safest reading of the conflicting lists is that Dupzyk held a temporary command beginning when Commander Adolphe Wildner left on 11 February—an interval that includes the Russell Islands grounding of 26 February—and that McGoldrick’s arrival in March overlapped or succeeded that temporary tenure during the Mare Island repair period. Photographs of Stringham at Mare Island in April and May 1943 document the yard stay. No action report signed by Dupzyk from those months has been found here. He left the ship, on the NavSource dating, in mid-May 1943.
What he did for the next two years is not recovered in the published sources examined here. The registers show the ordinary wartime promotions of his Academy class: lieutenant (junior grade) by the 1942 register, lieutenant in the 1944 register, and lieutenant commander with date of rank 17 October 1944. No ship assignment for those years appears in the Navy directories available for this research (the Directory itself ceased wartime publication after 1941). No decoration citation in his name was found in the Military Times Hall of Valor searches conducted here. The Class of 1940 Archive at the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library holds an undated biographical file for “Dupzyk, Robert R.” tagged to the West Virginia; that file was not examined for this account.
On 19 September 1945, according to NavSource’s commanding-officer list for the Fletcher-class destroyer The Sullivans (DD-537), Lieutenant Commander Dupzyk relieved Commander Ralph Jacob Baum and took command. The Sullivans had spent 1944 and the spring of 1945 screening the fast carriers—Marshalls, Truk, Hollandia, the Marianas, Formosa, Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—and had taken Bunker Hill survivors aboard after the kamikaze strikes of 11 May 1945. By the time Dupzyk assumed command the Japanese surrender had already been announced. The ship was finishing an overhaul at Mare Island that had begun in July. Her official history records that she was decommissioned at San Diego on 10 January 1946 and placed in the Pacific Reserve Fleet. NavSource dates Dupzyk’s command to that decommissioning. It was not a combat command. It was the quieter, still necessary work of bringing a hard-used destroyer out of commission after a war that had already ended—paying off a crew, securing a ship, closing a chapter. uboat.net’s wartime commander list for The Sullivans does not extend to him. The Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships narrative of the ship does not name her captains of late 1945. The decommissioning command therefore rests, in the sources examined here, on the NavSource compilation.
In the Annual Register of the United States Naval Academy for 1946–1947 his name appears in the roster of officers and civilian instructors, in a block of classmates whose ranks are not legible in the copy examined here. The listing places him on the Academy staff in the first year after the war. The following year’s register, as searched here, does not repeat the name. What department he taught, and how long the tour lasted, are not settled by those pages alone.
He remained a career surface officer. The registers give his promotion to commander as of 1 July 1953 and to captain as of 1 July 1960. On 5 December 1957, according to NavSource, he took command of the Gearing-class destroyer Hamner (DD-718), based on the West Coast and rotating to the Western Pacific. He held that command until 26 January 1959. During those fourteen months Hamner made a WestPac deployment covered by a 1958–1959 cruise book; the ship’s published history places her on Taiwan patrol at the end of 1958, just after another Quemoy-Matsu crisis, and records the pattern of WestPac cruises, Formosa patrol, and San Diego training that defined destroyer life in those years. How much of that cruise narrative coincides exactly with his months in command is a matter of aligning NavSource’s dates with the ship’s chronology; the command itself is attested only in the NavSource list among the sources examined here.
On 12 April 1964 he took command of the dock landing ship Spiegel Grove (LSD-32), a Thomaston-class amphibious ship homeported on the East Coast. NavSource styles him “CAPT. Dupzyk, Robert Richard (Pat), USN (USNA 1940)” for that tour, which ran until 8 May 1965. The ship’s published career places a Sixth Fleet Mediterranean deployment from January to June 1964 and participation in Operation Steel Pike I off Spain in October 1964—large amphibious exercises with Spanish forces—so that his year in command covered the latter part of a Mediterranean tour and a major amphibious exercise on the Spanish coast. He was relieved by Captain Lawrence D. Cummins.
He is listed as a captain, designator 1100 (unrestricted line), in the Navy register as late as 1968. The date of his retirement, and whether that 1968 entry is active or retired, are not clarified in the copies examined here. No obituary, Social Security death index entry, or grave record for Robert Richard Dupzyk was found in the searches conducted for this account. The date and place of his death therefore remain unknown here. No wife or children are named in the sources examined.
What the record does show, even with its gaps, is a recognizable type of Academy officer of his generation: a California fleet sailor who used the Academy as a second start, a junior battleship officer who sampled the new PT world in 1941, a lieutenant given temporary charge of a battered high-speed transport in the Solomons pipeline, a lieutenant commander who closed out a famous destroyer’s first commission, and a postwar captain who ran a destroyer on the Formosa patrol and an amphibious ship in the Mediterranean. The Lucky Bag’s hope that “some ship” would be lucky to have him back is the nearest thing the sources leave to a judgment on his character. The ships that the record can name—West Virginia, Stringham, The Sullivans, Hamner, Spiegel Grove—are the ones that had him.