Reminiscences of Cdr. Paul H. Backus, USN (Ret.)

Commander Paul Backus was a direct, forthright person--so much so that his directness may have cost him promotion to the higher ranks that many felt he deserved. He was the type of officer who was impatient to achieve results. He achieved a great many results but in the process rubbed a number of individuals the wrong way. In his oral memoir he discussed those situations candidly, particularly in the portion on the Polaris program. The success of that program is certainly to the credit of Commander Backus and his uncompromising demand for excellence. On the road to Polaris, Paul Backus was president of the Naval Academy's class of 1941, then had a brief tour of duty in the destroyer Jarvis. Next he was in the crew of the battleship Oklahoma when she was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in De cem ber 1941. His descriptions of that event captured the human cost of being less than well prepared for war. During much of the war that followed, Backus served in the battleship South Dakota, including duty as turret officer during a celebrated night surface action off Guadalcanal in November 1942. At war's end, Backus was taking postgraduate education in ordnance engineering, leading to several subsequent billets. Among other things, he was the gunnery officer in the USS Mississippi as she was converted from a battleship to an experimental ship for development of new weapons. Then he was gunnery officer in the light cruiser Huntington, which was the last ship command for Captain Arleigh Burke, future Chief of Naval Operations. In the years that followed, Backus served in the research division of the Bureau of Ordnance and then commanded the destroyer Isherwood. Th e latter was a particular source of satisfaction to him because he had had virtually no destroyer duty up to that point. Still later, he was a representative of the Bureau of Ordnance while serving as an assistant naval attache in London. The capstone of Commander Backus's career was the long period --1956 to 1961--when he was on Admiral Burke's OpNav staff during the development of Polaris. In his interviews, Backus said that the Office of Special Projects, including Rear Admiral William Raborn and Captain Levering Smith, deserved a great deal of credit for the success of Polaris. But he als o contended that the ballistic missile section in OpNav also deserved credit--far more than it has gotten. In his oral history Backus set out to redress that shortage with a detailed recitation of the many aspects of the program in which his office was involved. Commander Backus's oral history is thus an essential source for anyone who is doing a serious study of the early years of Polaris.

Paul Stillwell is an independent historian and retired naval officer. He worked for thirty years at the U.S. Naval Institute as an oral historian and editor of Naval History magazine. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including four on battleships and an award-winning volume on the Navy’s first African American officers, The Golden Thirteen. His 2021 book Battleship Commander: The Life of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr. also received acclaim. He lives in Arnold, Maryland.