Ships
- USS Mississippi (BB-41) Captain from 16 November 1942 · Relieved on 26 April 1944
Lunsford Lomax Hunter was born on 27 August 1888 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1912. He made his career in the United States Navy and held the rank of captain from 1 July 1939. On 16 November 1942 he became commanding officer of the battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41), relieving Walden Lee Ainsworth. The ship was one of the three New Mexico-class battleships, completed in the First World War and rebuilt between the wars, with a main battery of twelve 14-inch guns. By the time Hunter came aboard she was in the Pacific, after patrol duty in the Atlantic during 1941 and the move west that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.
His first extended cruise in command was an escort job. Mississippi left Pearl Harbor on 6 December 1942 with troop transports bound for Fiji and returned to Pearl Harbor on 2 March 1943. For those months the battleship’s work was to see soldiers across an ocean where Japanese submarines were still a standing threat.
In May 1943 Hunter took Mississippi north for the Aleutian campaign. On 22 July she bombarded Japanese positions on Kiska. Before dawn on 26 July she reported unidentified radar contacts and, with other ships of the force, opened fire. The pips were false returns. No Japanese ships were on the bearing, and the main-battery shells fell into empty water. The Kiska garrison left by sea in fog on 28 July. When American troops went ashore on 15 August, the island was deserted.
After a West Coast overhaul, Mississippi returned to the Central Pacific for the Gilbert Islands operation. On 20 November 1943, while she was shelling Makin in support of the Army landing there, a powder explosion in Turret Two killed forty-three of her crew. The rest of the battery kept firing, and the ship remained in the bombardment line until the fire support was done.
She went on to the Marshall Islands. Late in January and early in February 1944 she bombarded Japanese defenses in Kwajalein Atoll as the assault forces landed, then took part in the bombardment for the capture of Eniwetok in the middle of February. From there she steamed to the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Hunter was relieved on 26 April 1944 by Heman Judd Redfield, Jr..
Hunter later served as a rear admiral. Mississippi stayed in the Pacific war under the officers who followed him, and John Francis Crowe, Jr. commanded her from July 1945.