Ships
- USS Hunter Liggett (AP-27) In command, 7 August 1942, U.S. Coast Guard
Commander Louis W. Perkins of the U.S. Coast Guard was in command of the Navy transport Hunter Liggett on 7 August 1942. That morning the ship was off the southern Solomon Islands as American forces began the landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.
Hunter Liggett (AP-27) was a large passenger ship brought into military service and later taken over by the Navy as a transport. She went to sea with a Coast Guard crew, the manning used on several of the biggest transports then working with the fleet. The ship operated under Navy orders, and her commanding officer and crew remained Coast Guard.
On 7 August she was among the transports that carried the assault force into the Solomons. Perkins, a commander, had charge of Hunter Liggett while troops went into the boats and the first waves moved toward the beaches. Those landings opened a campaign that would hold Guadalcanal and the water around it for months. The transport's work that day was to get men, weapons, and supplies ashore and then keep clear of the fighting ships.
A Coast Guard officer in Perkins's place served inside a Navy amphibious force. The task-force command set the movement. The commanding officer still answered for his own ship, her boats, and the troops she carried. On the first day of the Guadalcanal operation that duty belonged to Perkins in Hunter Liggett.
The ship stayed in the Pacific troop service after the opening landings. In 1943 the Navy reclassified her as an attack transport, APA-14, the same hull under a new designation. Perkins's command is fixed on 7 August 1942, when Hunter Liggett was still AP-27 and her boats were part of the first American landing in the Solomon Islands.