Ships
- USS Saratoga (CV-3) Captain from 7 April 1943 · Relieved on 22 August 1943
Henry Maston Mullinix was born in Spencer, Indiana, on 4 July 1892. He graduated first among the 177 midshipmen of the Naval Academy class of 1916 and served as the regiment's senior midshipman. His first ship was the destroyer Balch, which joined the force based at Queenstown, Ireland, late in 1917. Through the rest of the First World War he did patrol and escort duty in those waters. He afterward served in the destroyers Gridley and Brooks.
He moved from destroyers into naval aviation. Postgraduate work in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Academy and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brought him a master of science degree in 1923. He trained at Pensacola and was designated a naval aviator on 11 January 1924. In the Bureau of Aeronautics he took a leading part in fitting air-cooled engines to naval aircraft. In the late 1920s he joined the air department of the fleet carrier Saratoga, serving in assembly and repair, as an assistant air officer, and as commanding officer of one of her bombing squadrons. He also served in the seaplane tender Wright.
On 20 December 1940, then a commander, he became the first commanding officer of the seaplane tender Albemarle. Promoted to captain on 1 July 1941, he took command of Patrol Wing 7 and directed long air patrols from Newfoundland over the North Atlantic approaches. From March 1942 to March 1943 he was air officer on the staff of the Eastern Sea Frontier. A letter of commendation recognized the judgment he brought to antisubmarine air operations in that command.
On 7 April 1943 Mullinix became captain of Saratoga, the carrier where he had learned her air department years earlier. Earlier captains of the ship included John Halligan, Jr., who had commissioned her, and William Frederick Halsey, Jr., who had commanded her in the 1930s. Through the early summer of 1943 she operated in the South Pacific, for part of that time in company with the British carrier Victorious, covering the central Solomons campaign and the fight for New Georgia. He remained her captain until he was relieved on 22 August 1943.
He left Saratoga for command of Carrier Division 24 as a rear admiral. The division's escort carriers formed Task Group 52.3 and provided the air support for the assault on Makin in the Gilbert Islands. Mullinix flew his flag in the escort carrier Liscome Bay. Captain Irving D. Wiltsie had command of that ship. From the opening days of November 1943 the group flew combat air patrols and antisubmarine searches over the landing force.
Before dawn on 24 November 1943, about twenty miles southwest of Makin, a torpedo from the Japanese submarine I-175 struck Liscome Bay and set off her bomb magazine. The after part of the ship was destroyed, and she sank in about twenty-three minutes. Henry Maston Mullinix was lost with Captain Wiltsie and most of the crew. Two hundred seventy-two men were rescued. He was fifty-one. The Navy carried him as missing and declared him dead a year later, and his name is recorded on the Courts of the Missing at Honolulu. For the Makin air-support operation he received the Legion of Merit after his death, together with the Purple Heart.