50 Years Ago Today - Mullinnix Leaves Norfolk for UNITAS III

On 16 August, only after the shore patrol returned RD3 L. A. “Larry” Morton to the ship, Mullinnix steamed out of Norfolk to participate in UNITAS III - a multi-national anti-submarine warfare exercise and circumnavigation of South America. She would travel more than 18,000 miles during UNITAS III and received thousands of visitors during goodwill ports of call. She couldn’t have headed south without her trusty Radarmen like Morton, nor her steaming companion USS Lester, DE-1022.

The Situation: Somewhere off the coast of South America, the Mullinnix (Rear Admiral John A. Tyree, Jr., USN, Commander of the South Atlantic Force of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, flagship) sonar gear detected the presence of a submarine. A Uruguayan captain was immediately notified and he in turn detailed a Brazilian as well as an Argentine destroyer to form a search and attack unit to seek out the intruder hiding deep below the surface of the ocean. Working smoothly together the two destroyers located the submarine and forced it to the surface.

It was USS Picuda SS-382, the gadfly of Operation Unitas III, a series of combined antisubmarine exercises involving the navies of the United States and the maritime nations of South America.

Designed to stimulate the development of common ASW doctrine and techniques, as well as a unified system of communications, Unitas exercises were designed to link the navies of South America into an able and skilled ASW force capable of immediate action in case of a submarine threat to the sea lanes of the continent.

The product of combined planning, Unitas provided an opportunity for the navies of South America to work with each other, as well as with U.S. ships in the development of increasingly advanced ASW tactics. Though only three years old, Unitas had established itself as the high point of the South American navies’ annual training schedules, and their ships train throughout the year to reach peak effectiveness during the operation.

The outgrowth of limited bi-lateral ASW exercises along the east and west coasts of South America during the spring of 1959, Unitas developed into an annual continent-wide exercise involving as many as four countries at once.

Under the command of Admiral Tyree, the 1962 edition of Unitas included Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru. Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela were also scheduled to participate, but the Cuban crisis would force cancellation of the last phases of the operation.

To be continued... Woody