Ships
- USS Hunt (DD-674) Captain, 20 November 1953 – 23 November 1955
Commander Robert Hoitt Alexander took command of the destroyer Hunt (DD-674) on 20 November 1953. He relieved Lynn F. Barry, who had returned the Fletcher-class ship to service at San Diego on 31 October 1951 and then brought her to the Atlantic. By the time Alexander assumed command, Hunt was working from Newport, Rhode Island, in the ordinary round of an Atlantic Fleet destroyer: antisubmarine training and plane-guard duty with carriers.
That Newport duty carried through the winter and spring. On 1 June 1954 Alexander took Hunt toward the western Pacific. She reached Yokosuka, Japan, on 7 July, and on 16 July she was underway again for task-force maneuvers off the Philippine Islands. The cruise was the first long deployment of his tour and put the wartime destroyer back into fleet exercises in Asian waters.
In the autumn the voyage became the long way home. Hunt cleared Sasebo, Japan, on 21 October 1954 on the second leg of a world cruise, called at Hong Kong and Singapore, passed through the Suez Canal, and reached Naples on 20 November. She was through the Strait of Gibraltar on 12 December and back at Newport on 18 December, a passage from the western Pacific to New England of less than two months.
The following year held the ship to the training that filled Atlantic destroyer time in the mid-1950s. From Newport, Hunt spent 1955 in intensive antisubmarine warfare and convoy exercises. Alexander stayed in command through that work. On 23 November 1955 he turned the ship over to Eugene Harrison Farrell.
The destroyer he left had first been commissioned on 22 September 1943, with Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr. as her commanding officer. She went out of commission at San Diego on 15 December 1945 and returned to sea on 31 October 1951. Alexander’s two years sat in the middle of that second commission, from the Newport duty of late 1953 through a cruise around the world and a final year of fleet exercises.