Pacific ships

USN · Commander

Mitchell, Frank Paull Jr.

All captains

U.S. Naval Academy Lucky Bag, class of 1929, page 220. Midshipman Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr., of Binghamton, New York. Public domain. This photograph is not from the war.

Ships

Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr., was born on 8 February 1906. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1929. The face recorded for him is the midshipman in the Lucky Bag of that year. It is not a photograph from the war.

On 30 June 1937 he was a lieutenant. Wartime rank came in short steps. He became a temporary lieutenant commander on 1 January 1942, a lieutenant commander on 30 June 1942, and a temporary commander on 1 October 1942.

From 20 March 1942 to 16 June 1943 he commanded Boggs, a flush-deck destroyer the Navy had fitted out as a high-speed minesweeper. He opened that tour as a temporary lieutenant commander and closed it as a temporary commander. When he left Boggs, his next ship was still under construction at Kearny, New Jersey.

Hunt was a Fletcher-class destroyer built by the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. She was launched on 1 August 1943. Mrs. Henry Kent Hewitt, wife of Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt and a granddaughter of Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt, sponsored the ship that carried her grandfather's name. Commander Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr., commissioned Hunt on 22 September 1943. He stayed in command until 8 December 1943.

Those eleven weeks were the new destroyer's first cruise. Hunt shook down off Bermuda and then went into the New York Navy Yard for final alterations. On 2 December 1943 she sailed from Norfolk for the Pacific, Mitchell still her captain. He was relieved on 8 December 1943, and the ship entered Pearl Harbor on 24 December. His cruise was the shakedown and the departure from the East Coast. The carrier raids, the duty with Franklin, and the battle off Okinawa came after he had been relieved.

Hunt then joined the fast carriers. In 1944 and 1945 she screened strike groups across the Central Pacific, stood by Franklin when that carrier was badly hit, and fought in the Okinawa campaign. William Kittridge Rogers, Halford A. Knoertzer, and Lynn F. Barry were among the officers who served in her. The Navy advanced Mitchell to the temporary rank of captain on 1 June 1948. He died in 1992.