USS Unimak
1942 Barnegat-class seaplane tender
USS Unimak (AVP-31) was a United States Navy Barnegat-class small seaplane tender in commission from 1943 to 1946 that saw service in World War II. After the war, she was in commission in the United States Coast Guard as the cutter USCGC Unimak (WAVP-379), later WHEC-379, WTR-379, and again WHEC-379, from 1949 to 1975 and from 1977 to 1988.
Construction and commissioning
Construction began on Unimak on 15 February 1942 at Harbor Island, Seattle by Associated Shipbuilders, Inc. She was launched on 27 May 1942, sponsored by Mrs. H. B. Berry, the wife of Captain H. B. Berry, the personnel officer of the 13th Naval District, and commissioned on 31 December 1943.
United States Navy service
World War II
Operations in Central America, the Galápagos Islands, and the Caribbean
Unimak was tested into late January 1944. When tests were completed, she departed San Diego on 20 March 1944, bound for the Panama Canal Zone. Arriving at Balboa, Panama, on 28 March 1944, Unimak operated on the Pacific coast of Central America into April 1944, providing logistics support to advanced seaplane bases at Santa Elena Bay, Ecuador, and at Aeolian Bay, Baltra Island, in the Galápagos Islands. She soon shifted to Coco Solo on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal and transported men and materiel to Barranquilla, Colombia, arriving there on 25 April 1944.
After escorting the merchant ship SS Genevieve Lykes back to Coco Solo on 23 and 24 June 1944, Unimak conducted routine exercises with patrol planes into July 1944. On 4 July 1944 she received reports that a tanker near her position had been torpedoed, and headed for the damaged ship.
The public source identifies “USS Unimak” as 1942 Barnegat-class seaplane tender. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Unimak, Barnegat-class and seaplane.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7874975. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1946, 1949 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Unimak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.