CAPT. Jim 'Hooker' Hobbs, BJU1, 1953-56

    

I joined the Navy in 1952 and thought I would learn to fly like a bird. However, after a while at Pensacola I found out that was not for me. On to OCS at Newport and Class 11. A few weeks before graduation we had an opportunity to request our first duty assignment. I was still feeling guilty about flight school and wanted to get into a front line outfit (the Korean War was still around). Somehow I heard about the Beach Jumpers and the name got to me. I did my best to find out about them and got nowhere. Nobody officially knew anything.

Then I heard the rumor -“You know those UDT guys that put up signs on the beach welcoming the Marines ashore in an invasion—well, the Beach Jumpers go in before UDT!” That did it. I requested Beach Jumpers and got orders that said, “Report to the port in which the CO of Beach Jumper Unit One may be.” These were pretty ex­otic orders for a young Ensign and I had visions of Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Inchon. BJU One happened to be in Coronado, but that was OK because I had never been west of the Mississippi.

I reported in August 1953 to BJU One at the Amphib Base in Coronado. The CO was LCDR R. J. Reilly. I remember hearing that he was with the PT Boats in WWII.  I also remember that I was appalled that Top Secret pubs were all over the place, on everyone’s desk with no armed guard (re­member I just got out of OCS). A few months later, I was appointed Assistant Registered Publications Officer and even now, thinking about it gives me the chills.

 

It seems to me the complement of the Unit was about 20 officers and 100 enlisted. My department, Navigation, had about 5 or 6 QM’s. We had a whole bunch of ET’s for the black boxes, BM’s and EN’s for the boats, a couple GM’s, and others. After a few months, we had a change of command with LCDR Al Sears taking over as CO. I really don’t remember any­one saying that he was UDT qualified but now I wonder after reading “Spike” Fields letter on page 13 of 3rd Quarter 99 “The Blast” referring to UDT-l CO, Al Sears. The same name seems to be too much of a coincidence. After a number of schools, I was assigned as Navigator for the Unit and also qualified as a Boat Commander. We operated six 63 foot boats and one 104 footer. The 63’ boats were former AVR’s (Aviation Rescue Boats) with two Hall Scott marine gasoline engines of 1350 HP each (that’s 2700 HP folks), which would get us 32 knots on a good day. Our boats were docked at the east end of the Phib Base at Pier 13. The engineering remained the same but with extensive modifications, they were redesignated Beach Jumper Boats (BJBs). Each boat was outfitted with numerous elec­tronics packages (the basic reason for our being), twin 50 cal. machine guns, 5-inch rocket launchers, sonar, radar, loran and other stuff. As a business major and Navi­gator, I was involved in running my boat and getting the boats to the right place. The science majors were in charge of all those black boxes that made up 75% of our mis­sion. We also towed small blimps that dropped chafe (sp) to enlarge our radar im­age. We even had big sound amplifiers with tapes of gunfire. We had at least one UDT qualified officer assigned, Jim Hickman, who would attach 1/2 pound TNT blocks to small floating buoys to simulate naval gun­fire. The whole idea was tactical deception so that the enemy would think we were the invasion force and come in and waste time, people and assets wiping us out rather than the actual landing force at another location.

 

We operated frequently off San Clemente Island and the nearby coastline and participated in all the Amphib opera­tions off the Silver Strand and Camp Pendleton. During my tour, our most dis­tant operation was off San Simeon, CA about 400 miles north of San Diego. While up there, we docked at Morro Bay. Our ob­jective was to screw things up the best we could and among other much more important stuff, we caused a thee day delay in mail delivery to the ships which did not endear us to the fleet. We also played like PT boats on many occasions to give the CIC guys on the ships practice in plotting our runs and prepare counter measures. They never really gave us a chance, of course. because they knew when we were coming within an hour or so.

  View video on BJ Boats