Ships
- USS Aulick (DD-569) Captain from 24 March 1945
William Reese Hunnicutt Jr. (27 August 1914 – 18 November 2005) was a United States Navy officer from Atlanta, Georgia, a graduate of the Naval Academy in the class of 1938 who retired as a captain. As a lieutenant he was the evaluator in the combat information center of the destroyer Burns on the night of 30 January 1944, when she came upon a four-ship Japanese convoy in the Marshall Islands and sank all of it in thirty-four minutes. He received the Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V" for the work. In 1945, as a lieutenant commander, he commanded the destroyer Aulick through the Okinawa campaign, including twenty-two days on the radar picket line, and received the Silver Star for bringing her through without casualties or damage. He died in Atlanta at the age of ninety-one.
He was born on 27 August 1914 and lived in Atlanta; the Military Times Hall of Valor gives the date and his home, and the 1938 Lucky Bag names Atlanta as his home town. He was a junior, bearing his father's name, and his parents are not otherwise identified in the sources examined here. Nothing was found of his boyhood or schooling before the university.
According to the Lucky Bag, he went "farther South to begin a promising law career at the University of Florida, but sea lawyering had too great an appeal." The class of 1938 knew him as "Colonel" and "Bill." The sketch opens: "Just get the Colonel in a bull session and you'll find he didn't get all of his sea legs on Youngster Cruise." It credits him with "the charm of a true Southern gentleman," says his pledge to remain a "Red Mike" (a man who avoided women) had soon "gone with the wind." He was "a gridder among the best," the writers said, and "only his small size keeps him off the varsity"; any winter afternoon found him "under the tutelage of Spike Webb." "Although he has had his academic troubles," they added, "the Colonel still finds time to read Emily Post. His generosity is genuine down to his last stamp." The activities line under his name records football and boxing in all four years, track in the first two, and the presidency of the "NACA Council."
He graduated in 1938 at twenty-three. His first ships and duties, and the course of his career up to 1944, were not found in the sources examined here.
The first detailed record of his war is a citation. The Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V," awarded to him as a lieutenant, is "for meritorious service as Evaluator of the U.S.S. BURNS (DD-588), during operations against an enemy Japanese convoy in the Pacific Ocean Areas, on the night of 30 January 1944." The evaluator was the officer in the ship's combat information center, the new radar plotting room, who weighed what the radar operators were reporting and told the captain what it meant. The citation says that Hunnicutt "supplied his Commanding Officer and the Gunnery Officer with correct information concerning the composition, bearing, course and speed of an enemy force with which his ship had made contact, thereby enabling his ship to sink the entire convoy of four hostile ships without damage to his own vessel."
Another officer of the Burns, then a junior-grade lieutenant, described the night many years later in the Naval Institute's Naval History magazine, without naming Hunnicutt. The Burns, a unit of Destroyer Squadron 46 in the screen of Task Group 58.3, had been sent on the afternoon of 29 January to pick up the three-man crew of a torpedo plane shot down during the first carrier strikes on Kwajalein, and had recovered them. Just after midnight on 30 January her radar picked up a contact at 20,800 yards. The combat information center tracked it, "initially thought it might be a rain cloud, since several similar echoes had been tracked earlier that evening," and then, "after several minutes with the contact remaining on a steady course and speed, CIC evaluated it as a legitimate target." That was the evaluator's judgment, and it is the moment the Bronze Star citation singles out. The commanding officer, Commander Donald T. Eller, was called to the bridge; the narrator quotes him as saying, "I've been waiting for a chance like this for 20 years." General quarters sounded at 0042. The Burns closed at 25 knots and put herself across the head of the enemy column. At about 0050 she was 9,000 yards away; she challenged by radio and received no answer. The first five-inch salvo hit a tanker. She then sank the two escorts, and left the tanker and a cargo ship burning from stem to stern. The action lasted thirty-four minutes. When another task group asked by radio if the Burns needed help, the captain's answer was, "No thanks. This is our picnic." The ship returned with a broom at her masthead for a "clean sweep," and the press called her the "Battlin' Burns." Hunnicutt, who was twenty-nine, spent that half hour in the information center, and none of the published accounts examined here records anything he said or did there beyond the citation.
In the spring of 1945 he had a ship of his own. The Aulick (DD-569) was a Fletcher-class destroyer; she began sea trials in February 1945 at Mare Island, trained out of San Diego, and left the West Coast on 7 March. According to uboat.net, Lieutenant Commander Hunnicutt took command of her on 24 March 1945, at thirty. From Leyte she went to Morotai and, on 22 April, put troops of the 31st Infantry Division ashore on Mindanao. She anchored off the Hagushi beaches of Okinawa on 16 May and joined the antiaircraft and radar picket screen around the transports. The radar pickets were the outlying destroyers stationed on the approaches to Okinawa to give warning of kamikaze aircraft, and they took the brunt of the attacks. The Aulick remained on this duty to the end of the war.
The Silver Star citation, which Commander Destroyers Pacific issued as serial 222 on 8 January 1946, covers the period from 16 May to 30 June 1945. "Serving with distinction during this period, twenty-two days of which were spent on radar picket station," it says, "Commander Hunnicutt skillfully evaded or drove off numerous enemy air attacks and assisted in destroying three enemy planes. By his leadership and determination, he succeeded in bringing his vessel safely through a period of hazardous duty without casualties or damage to materiel." The citation does not describe an individual attack, name the days, or say which planes the ship shot down. The ship's history says that from 24 August to 2 September she served on air-sea rescue duty on the air lane between Okinawa and Tokyo. She left Okinawa on 10 September, reached New York on 17 October, took part in the Navy Day fleet review on 27 October, and was decommissioned at New York on 18 April 1946. According to uboat.net, his command ended on the same day.
The Hall of Valor says he retired as a captain. The date of his retirement, his postwar ships and duties, his marriage and children were not found in the sources examined here. He died on 18 November 2005, in Atlanta, at the age of ninety-one, and an obituary appeared in an Atlanta paper on 23 November; its text could not be retrieved, and the place of burial is not recorded.