Ships
- USS Saratoga (CV-3) Captain from 24 July 1944 · Temporary command, until 1 August 1944
Commander Louis Henry Hunte was born in Illinois on 12 August 1905. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1927 and was commissioned in the United States Navy. He became a lieutenant on 30 June 1936 and a lieutenant commander on 1 January 1942. By the summer of 1944 he was a commander.
On 24 July 1944 he took temporary command of Saratoga (CV-3). The Lexington-class ship, completed as a carrier after she had been laid down as a battle cruiser, was then in overhaul at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton. She had returned that June from the Indian Ocean, where she had worked with the British Eastern Fleet. Hunte kept the temporary command until 1 August 1944, when Captain Lucian Ancel Moebus relieved him.
Saratoga had been in commission since November 1927, and a long succession of officers had already commanded her. Harry Ervin Yarnell was her first commanding officer. In the years before the war the ship also passed through the hands of Kenneth Whiting, William Frederick Halsey, Jr., John Henry Towers, and Albert Cushing Read. Archibald Hugh Douglas had held her for a short time in 1932 and again from June 1940, into the first months of the Pacific war.
Hunte remained on Saratoga after the temporary command ended. From August 1944 to March 1945 he was executive officer while she finished the yard work, trained, and returned to the western Pacific. In February 1945 she supported the landing on Iwo Jima. On 21 February, off the island, Japanese aircraft hit her in a series of suicide crashes. Fire and blast wrecked a long part of the flight deck, more than a hundred of her crew were killed, and many others were wounded. She left the operation for repair. For his conduct as executive officer across those months he received the Legion of Merit. He was a commander during the tour, and a captain by the time the decoration was awarded.
On 6 May 1945 he took command of the escort carrier Tripoli (CVE-64). He remained her commanding officer until 30 April 1946, through the last months of the war against Japan and the first months after the surrender.