Cazier, Edward

LT EDWARD C. CAZIER October 1952 – September 1953

“Edward C. Cazier, USNR, was the GQ OOD. He was a practicing attorney when recalled to active duty, Captain Salmon’s probably most trusted officer, and one of the brightest people I ever met. A persistent rumor on the ship was that Anna Mae Wong, the ChineseAmerican movie actress, was his “friend.” He broke me into bridge watch standing, and he took part of his GI Bill from WWII at the University of Paris.”

-LTJG Doug Legg

“In September ‘52, shortly after the Tanchon firefight, I was again standing the JOOD watch. Due to the heavy volume of encrypted radio traffic, JOODs frequently spent half their time on the bridge, and half in the crypto shack. About 1600, I went to the shack to ‘break’ four messages. The first three ‘broke’ with no trouble. The fourth came out gibberish. I reset the controls and ran the message three more times with the same result. At dinner, two hours later, I sat across from the coding officer (Homer Gauldin) and explained the problem. He tried to break the message right after dinner with the same result, and then contacted CUNNINGHAM to discover they’d had no luck in breaking the same message.

The next day, FRANK E. EVANS was steaming by herself, when the word was passed for LT Cazier to lay down to the sonar shack. About 5 minutes of great activity and confusion followed. It turned out that FRANK E. EVANS unknowingly had approached a string of Soviet-supplied mines which the North Koreans laid at right angles to the coastline. One of the sonarmen recognized what he saw on the sonar scope and had the bridge call the ASW officer (Cazier) down to sonar, The gear was shifted to the high power short range mine detection setting, and Ed gave the bridge a course to steer which took FRANK E. EVANS between two of the mines, all of which were swept up in the next couple of days.

Two days after FRANK E. EVANS’ encounter with the uncharted mines, we received a coded re-encryption of the message neither Homer Gauldin nor I had been able to break. The second message noted the existence of an uncharted line of mines running at right angles to the North Korean coast, gave the latitude and longitude, and stated that mine sweepers were on their way. Ed Cazier’s coaching FRANK E. EVANS through that mine field hardly surprised anyone, as that was the caliver of performance we’d all come to expect of him.”

-LTJG Doug Legg