Ships
- USS Neosho (AO-23) Captain from 7 August 1939
William Evans Anthony Mullan, who appears in Navy records as W. E. A. Mullan, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 2 May 1898. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the class of 1920 and spent his career in the United States Navy, rising from the prewar fleet to flag rank. He retired as a rear admiral.
On 7 August 1939, as a commander, he became the first commanding officer of the fleet oiler Neosho (AO-23) and took her into commission that day. The ship belonged to the Cimarron class. Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Kearny, New Jersey, had laid her keel on 22 June 1938 under a Maritime Commission contract and launched her on 29 April 1939. Mrs. Emory S. Land, wife of the chairman of the Maritime Commission, sponsored the ship. She entered service already numbered as a naval oiler.
Mullan's tour was the long conversion of a new tanker hull into a fleet oiler. In October 1939 Neosho began preliminary conversion at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and the remaining work was done at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. He left the ship on 19 June 1941. The yard finished the conversion on 7 July 1941, and Commander John S. Phillips was captain when Neosho began carrying aviation gasoline from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor. Phillips was still in command when the oiler got clear of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and when she was lost in the Coral Sea in May 1942.
In August 1942 Mullan, still a commander, was executive officer of the heavy cruiser Vincennes. On the night of 9 August, off Savo Island, a Japanese force struck the Allied cruisers covering the landings on Guadalcanal, and Vincennes was sunk. He received the Silver Star for gallantry and intrepidity as executive officer in that action.
By the fall of 1944 he was a captain, commanding the light cruiser San Diego and the antisubmarine screen of a fast carrier task group. The group struck Palau on 6 September, Mindanao and the Visayas from 9 to 14 September, Luzon on 21 September, and the Ryukyu Islands and Formosa from 6 to 14 October. Enemy aircraft attacked the task group on three separate occasions. San Diego and the screen put up a heavy volume of antiaircraft fire, and the attacks were turned back with the group undamaged. A second Silver Star recognized that service. Mullan closed his career as a rear admiral. He died on 14 June 1979.