Ships
- USS Hunt (DD-674) Captain, 26 August 1957 – 10 July 1958
Samuel Lloyd Collins, a commander in the United States Navy, was captain of the destroyer Hunt (DD-674) from 26 August 1957 until 10 July 1958. She was a Fletcher-class ship, the second Navy vessel named for William Henry Hunt, Secretary of the Navy under President Garfield. The Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company at Kearny, New Jersey, launched her on 1 August 1943, and she entered service on 22 September 1943.
Frank Paull Mitchell, Jr. was her first commanding officer. After a shakedown off Bermuda she sailed from Norfolk in December 1943, reached Pearl Harbor on Christmas Eve, and joined the screen of a fast-carrier task group that included Essex, Intrepid, and Cabot. In the February 1944 strike on Truk she stayed with the carriers while the force’s aircraft and ships destroyed a large number of Japanese warships and merchant vessels. She was still in the western Pacific in the spring of 1945. Before she left the Ryukyus on 30 May for upkeep in Leyte Gulf, her crew had gone to general quarters fifty-four times. Hunt started for the United States on 19 June, arrived at San Francisco on 6 July, and was decommissioned at San Diego on 15 December 1945 under Fred Earle McEntire Jr..
The Navy placed Hunt back in commission at San Diego on 31 October 1951, with Lynn F. Barry in command. After local refresher training she left the West Coast on 14 February 1952 and arrived at Newport, Rhode Island, on 3 March. For more than two years she worked from that port on antisubmarine and plane-guard duty. On 1 June 1954 she sailed for the Far East, reached Yokosuka in July, and exercised with a task force off the Philippines. On 21 October she cleared Sasebo on a voyage that took her through Hong Kong and Singapore, the Suez Canal, and on to Naples, where she arrived on 20 November 1954. Eugene Harrison Farrell commanded her from November 1955 until August 1957.
Collins relieved Albert Louis Stickles II on 26 August 1957. Stickles had taken the ship on 17 August, directly after Farrell. From 22 October 1957, Hunt operated from Newport, and Newport was still her base when Collins’s tour ended. Fiscal year 1957–1958 closed on 30 June 1958, while he was still in command, and for that year Hunt earned the Battle Efficiency Award. He turned the ship over on 10 July 1958 to Robert Kent Rosemont.
On 1 August 1958, with Rosemont in command, Hunt was on a Caribbean cruise and hurried from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to join the attack carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean, where the Sixth Fleet was being strengthened during the Lebanon crisis after Marines landed at Beirut. She afterward worked from Newport again, with cruises in the Caribbean for antisubmarine exercises and battle practice, and she earned the Battle Efficiency Award a second time for fiscal year 1958–1959. George Hand Sharp and Frank Benjamin Guest Jr. were among the commanders who followed Collins. Hunt was decommissioned on 30 December 1963 and berthed with the Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Philadelphia.