Reminiscences of Capt. Harry A. Jackson, USN (Ret.)

After enlisting in the Naval Reserve in 1935 and being educated at the University of Michigan, Jackson went on active duty with the Navy in 1941 as an engineering duty officer. During World War II he was at the Boston Navy Yard, did ship design work in the Bureau of Ships, and was assigned to ABSD-3, a floating dry dock in the Western Pacific. After involvement in the 1946 tests of nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll, he was one of the earliest officers in the Navy’s nuclear power program. While at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in the 1950s and 1960s he contributed to submarine designs, particularly the teardrop hull of the USS Albacore (AGSS-569), the first Polaris submarines, and the Thresher class. He later served at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and was supervisor of shipbuilding in Groton, Connecticut. In the late 1960s he was a technical adviser in the examination of the remains of the lost submarine Scorpion and in the 1970s rode the Hughes Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193) in Project Jennifer, the attempt to raise a lost Soviet submarine.