Battleship Commander: The Life of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr.

By Paul L Stillwell

This is the first-ever biography of Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr., who served a key role during World War II in the Pacific. Recognizing the achievements and legacy of one of the war's top combat admirals has been long overdue until now.

Battleship Commander explores Lee's life from boyhood in Kentucky through his eventual service as commander of the fast battleships from 1942 to 1945. Paul Stillwell draws on more than 150 first-person accounts from those who knew and served with Lee from boyhood until the time of his death. Said to be down to earth, modest, forgiving, friendly, and with a wry sense of humor, Lee eschewed the media and, to the extent possible, left administrative details to others. Stillwell relates the sequential building of a successful career, illustrating Admiral Lee's focus on operational, tactical, and strategic concerns. During his service in the Navy Department from 1939 to 1942, Lee prepared the U.S. Navy for war at sea, and was involved in inspecting designs for battleships, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and destroyers. He sent observers to Britain to report on Royal Navy operations during the war against Germany and made plans to send an action team to mainland China to observe conditions for possible later Allied landings there. Putting his focus on the need to equip U.S. warships with radar and antiaircraft guns, Lee was one of the few flag officers of his generation who understood the tactical advantage of radar, especially during night battles.

In 1942 Willis Lee became commander of the first division of fast battleships to operate in the Pacific. During that service, he commanded Task Force 64, which achieved a tide-turning victory in a night battle near Guadalcanal in November 1942. Lee missed two major opportunities for surface actions against the Japanese. In June 1944, in the Marianas campaign, he declined to engage because his ships were not trained adequately to operate together in surface battles. In October 1944, Admiral William Halsey's bungled decisions denied Lee's ships an opportunity for combat. Continuing his career of service near the end of the war, Lee, in the summer of 1945, directed anti-kamikaze research efforts in Casco Bay, Maine. While Lee's wartime successes and failures make for compelling reading, what is here in this biography is a balanced look at the man and officer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682475942

Paul L Stillwell

Paul Stillwell is an independent historian and retired naval officer. He worked for thirty years at the U.S. Naval Institute as an oral historian and editor of Naval History magazine. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including four on battleships and an award-winning volume on the Navy's first African American officers, The Golden Thirteen.

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PREFACE

Dr. Scott Mobley, a retired Navy captain who is now on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, has studied naval history extensively. He put forth a convincing rationale for a biography of the largely unsung Admiral Lee: I think Lee loomed larger in his own time than now, but he has much to offer naval officers of today. During his career, Willis Augustus Lee Jr. was highly respected within the naval profession. He had extensive knowledge of the sea, small arms, large-caliber gunnery, tactics, electronics, ship handling, and coordination of ship and aviation actions. Along with that package, he possessed a great deal of common sense and leadership ability; his subordinates enjoyed serving with him. He also had an innate quality of mental brilliance. George Street, who was later awarded the Medal of Honor as a submarine skipper, served under Lee’s command as an ensign in the cruiser Concord in the late 1930s. Street often used an evocative term that aptly fits Lee: bright as new money.

Why then is Lee so little known in the twenty-first century, even though he was skilled operationally and served as administrative type commander of all Pacific Fleet battleships during World War II? Several factors can help explain. His most important distinction was that he had tactical command during one of only two battleship-versus-battleship gunnery duels in the war. As the result of his leadership from the flagship Washington in November 1942, the Japanese lost the battleship Kirishima and were stymied in their efforts to deliver a pummeling bombardment of Guadalcanal. That victory was the turning point that essentially ended Japanese efforts to retake the island.

Then the role of fast battleships in a war that emphasized aviation-based offensive power was diminished as they were usually forced to serve in antiaircraft screens of aircraft carriers. That was instead of operating primarily as a battle line engaged in surface gunnery engagements—the mission intended for battleships up to the beginning of the war. After Guadalcanal, circumstances denied Lee the opportunity for an even greater victory. During the Marianas invasion in June 1944, he declined to engage in a tail chase of Japanese heavy ships because his ships had not operated together tactically, nor did the Japanese pose a threat to the Saipan beachhead. Lee’s ships were unable to participate in the wide-ranging and controversial Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Because Admiral William Halsey refused to permit Lee’s ships to guard San Bernardino Strait in the Philippines, another battleship-versus-battleship encounter was averted. Had Lee fought and won that potential engagement, his reputation would have been more widely known.

In addition, Lee’s modest personality was one that avoided public recognition and acclaim. His goal was to fight and win, but he did not want to be lionized in the public media. He deliberately avoided the spotlight. Then, because he died only ten days after the end of hostilities in August 1945, he was not around to serve in the postwar Navy. Nor was he available to write a memoir, even though it is unlikely that he would have done so had he lived longer. The Navy did recognize his achievements by naming a destroyer leader, the USS Willis A. Lee, for him in the early 1950s. Though the service has often recycled ship names, no successor ship with his name has emerged after the scrapping of the first one. Because Lee was an Olympic medal winner as a marksman, for years members of the Naval Academy rifle team have visited his grave in the Arlington National Cemetery on the Sunday nearest the anniversary of his death.

This book is an effort to counteract Lee’s relative obscurity in naval annals. My journey to this point started in 1969 when I received orders to serve in the crew of the battleship New Jersey as assistant combat information center officer. Coincidentally, Lee was an early proponent of the value of CICs. When the opportunity came to join that ship, I began a project to read naval history because the New Jersey had made so much history herself, including serving as Admiral Halsey’s flagship at Leyte Gulf. Once I reported aboard, I found and perused a copy of the ship’s cruise book from World War II. One page depicted the four officers who had flown their flags on board the ship during the war: Halsey, Admiral Raymond Spruance, Rear Admiral Oscar Badger, and Lee. That awakened a flicker of awareness. Once my tour in the New Jersey ended, I returned to civilian life and made a special trip to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to see the memorial and museum that honored the state’s namesake battleship in which Lee had served. Still later, I visited the museum ship North Carolina, another of his wartime flagships and a sister of the one in which he spent most of his time, the USS Washington. It was an honor to tour the North Carolina, especially the flag quarters in which Lee had lived and worked.

In 1974 I joined the staff of the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis as one of the editors of Proceedings magazine. Annapolis gave me proximity to the wealth of naval history source material in the Washington, DC, area and in the Naval Academy library. Research for this book began in the autumn of 1975 with searches of the records and by engaging in interviews and correspondence with individuals who had served with Lee. The goal here is to provide a narrative portrait of Lee as a human being and as a naval officer—his entire life, not just World War II. Descriptions of how he interacted with people are important in delineating his character and personality. By nearly every account, he was a pleasant man with a sense of humor—sometimes coming across as quiet and relatively unassertive. In all likelihood, the Leyte Gulf fiasco was the most disappointing and frustrating experience of his life. The essence of the man was that he cared deeply about the naval profession; he enjoyed what it offered and what he could offer it.

My research on Lee began more than forty years ago, and I am embarrassed that the completion of the project has only now come to fruition. Many other books, articles, and oral histories intervened on my agenda in the meantime. I am particularly rueful that all but a few of those who provided information for this book are no longer alive to read the result they helped to bring about. On the other hand, I am grateful that the admiral’s story can now revive the reputation he acquired in his lifetime. In addition, as Captain Mobley suggested, the description of Lee’s life can also serve as an inspiration to Navy professionals of this century.

■ 1 ■

MISCHIEVOUS MOSE IN KENTUCKY

1888–1904

For many years, long after he had left Owen County, Kentucky, Willis Augustus Lee Jr. was still known by local residents as Mose. The nickname originated in the spring of 1888. Despite her advanced stage of pregnancy, his mother persisted in her pastime of fishing on Eagle Creek, which ran near the family home at Natlee. On 11 May she stayed at it so long, in fact, that she had to be rushed home from the creek for the birth of what proved to be her second son. She joked afterward that she might name him Moses, because she had taken him away from the water just as Pharaoh’s daughter had rescued the biblical Moses from his hiding place among the bulrushes of the Nile River in ancient Egypt. The baby was named for his father instead, but the nickname stuck.¹

The father was a thirty-five-year-old farmer and schoolteacher whose roots were in Kentucky. The baby’s great-grandfather, Joseph R. Lee, had been born in the state in 1787, as had his grandfather, Nathaniel W. Lee, in 1825. Nathaniel was a farmer and licensed distiller of bourbon whiskey. He operated a mill on Eagle Creek for grinding grain into meal and flour. The rural hamlet in which the family lived was known originally as Lee’s Mill and by 1888 had been renamed Natlee, a contraction of Nathaniel Lee’s name.² Nathaniel died in 1891. Nathaniel Lee’s brother, thus Mose’s great-uncle, was Grandison R. Lee, born in 1827. During the Civil War he served as a Confederate soldier under General John Hunt Morgan of the Second Kentucky Cavalry Regiment and was captured during the war. Grandison later became a physician; he died in 1905. Both brothers were buried in Owen County.³

Grandison’s great-grandson, Allen Meacham, wrote of Mose’s grandfather: Nat was an ardent Confederate but necessarily inactive since it was his job to care for the farms, but at his distillery he maintained a tavern where his daughters liquored up the Union Soldiers to get intelligence as to Union Activities.⁴

Nathaniel Lee’s son, Willis Augustus Sr., was born in Owen County in 1853. He later married Susan Ireland Arnold, daughter of Elijah Arnold, an undertaker and attorney in the nearby village of New Columbus. The census of 1880 listed the population of New Columbus at 84; Natlee was even smaller.⁵ Owen County is an area of rolling farmland in north-central Kentucky, not far from the state capital at Frankfort. Its staple crop during the time young Lee lived there was burley tobacco, and farmers raised corn, alfalfa, and livestock as well.

In 1890 the family moved about fifteen miles north from the Natlee–New Columbus area to the county seat at Owenton when W. A. Lee Sr. became the county judge. In the census of 1890, Owen County had a population of 17,676; Owenton was a town of fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. The town was dependent on the surrounding farmlands for its economy. It had barns for the storage of tobacco and the usual facilities and services that made country towns natural meeting places: courthouse, general stores, blacksmith, hotel, harness shop, barber shop, law offices, churches, and schools.⁶

As a county judge, W. A. Lee was the chief fiscal and administrative officer, handling such diverse matters as road building, probate court, and small claims court. A circuit judge tried civil and criminal cases, so that county court day, held the fourth Monday of each month, was a well-attended social event. It attracted horse-drawn buggies from miles around as their owners gathered to trade horses, meet their friends, and be entertained by gypsies and traveling medicine men.

Judge Lee received a second four-year term in 1894 and then practiced law from 1898 until his death from a heart attack in 1931. He was also president of the People’s Bank and Trust Company in Owenton and served for a time as city attorney. Like the rest of his family, the judge had dark brown hair and eyes. He was of medium height and became portly as he grew older. His personality was much the same as the one his son displayed as an adult: quiet, uncomplaining, shrewd, reliable, and purposeful. He was friendly and got along well with others, but he was not the hail-fellow-well-met type commonly known among career politicians. His wife Susan was a quiet person who, unlike her husband and children, spent much of her time at home. She suffered from heart trouble and died of a heart attack in 1913.⁷

The Lees settled into a two-story frame house at the corner of Roland Avenue and Seminary Street, about one-eighth of a mile from the county courthouse where Judge Lee worked. Out back of the home were a frame buggy house and an outhouse or two. Willis Lee Jr. had two older sisters, Lucy and Roberta, as well as a younger one, Alice. For a time the family also included Mose’s older brother Clarence, who died of appendicitis when he was about eight or ten.⁸ The household also included Mrs. Lee’s brother, John Arnold, and a cook.

The Lees led a comfortable existence and were considered among the better families of Owenton, though they were not social climbers. Certainly they were among the most intelligent people around. All the children had excellent minds and did well in school. But they were not individuals to be bound by convention. They spoke their minds and did as they pleased, paying little heed to the gossip that followed. One subject of such talk was the family’s failure to attend church. They were not attracted by the fire-and-brimstone preaching style of the Baptist Church, the most prominent denomination in Owen County.

Lucy, the oldest sister, married lawyer James Vallandingham; they had a happy marriage that produced three children. Vallandingham was later a circuit judge. By contrast, the two younger sisters lived undisciplined lives and set the gossips to chattering with tales of their behavior. Judge Lee’s tolerant nature expressed itself in a live-and-let-live attitude toward gambling and bootlegging in Owenton. It was also manifested in the loose rein he kept on his children and helps explain why his younger son was allowed to become such a prankster. Mose was indeed mischievous, and generally his pranks involved some cleverness.⁹

Mostly young Lee played with other boys, but Florence Arnold qualified as an exception because she was a tomboy. On one occasion Lee and his friends asked her to join in a scheme involving her horse Bill because she was an accomplished rider. The boys killed some snakes and tied them to Bill’s tail. Then Florence rode her horse through town with a group of boys running along behind. She stood in the stirrups and pretended to be frightened. The boys, young Lee among them, were calling such things as Help! Help! This horse is running away with this girl. He’ll kill her. Help! Help! As it was calculated to do, the stunt brought the women of Owenton out to see what the fuss was about. More than seventy years afterward, the horse’s rider recalled the incident and the reaction of the witnesses: "When they saw the dead snakes, they wanted to kill every one of us and instructed us in no uncertain terms, that we should know better than find our pleasure in such things as running people crazy for nothing, even though it seemed fun to us. Her conclusion, which was probably especially true in the case of Mose Lee: I am doubtful any of us profited by the tongue lashing."¹⁰

On another occasion, Lee and his young male friends were walking along after obtaining a bag of caramel candy squares wrapped in paper. Some acquaintances saw them and asked for candy. They were put off for a time until Mose and his companions were able to get a bar of yellow soap, which they cut into caramel-size pieces and wrapped in the candy paper. After that, they shared the wrapped squares generously, to the consternation of the recipients.¹¹

That was not the only time when Lee allowed something to be taken when it was other than what it seemed. He once was caught in school with a bag of Bull Durham tobacco in his pocket and the tag and drawstring dangling in view. The teacher confiscated the sack of tobacco and threw it into the school stove. Soon afterward, as if in demonstration that he had not learned his lesson, Lee again showed up at school with a tobacco sack in his pocket and the tag in view. The teacher took the second bag and pitched it into the stove, which then exploded. Lee had emptied the bag and refilled it with gunpowder. Afterward, he could claim, in a literal sense, that it was the teacher, not he, who had caused the explosion.¹²

A few black citizens lived in Owenton, and they generally got along well with the whites. The children of both races played together, even though their schools were segregated. None of Lee’s close friends was black. Sometimes he and his chums teased and played tricks on Bill Lewis, a black youth who drove cattle to pasture. To the white boys it was doubtless playful fun, but they sometimes taunted Lewis to such an extent that he got angry enough to throw stones at his tormentors.¹³

W. T. Forsee, who would many years later become president of the First National Bank in Owenton, went to school with young Lee. He remembered him as an uncouth youngster who was apparently oblivious to his personal appearance and what other people thought of him. Mose enjoyed the outdoors in that mostly rural area and took an interest in reptiles, bugs and freaks of mother nature. Lee’s friends learned to be wary of him, because he might pull a snake, frog, or scorpion out of his pocket or some other hiding place and spring it on them. As Forsee put it: In school most of the boys were rather leery of sitting with him in the double seats which we had to occupy in those days, for fear of introducing something of the undesirable species right during school hours.¹⁴

Because he was bright, Lee generally did well in school; it was a family scandal, to use the words of his niece Elizabeth (Lucy Vallandingham’s daughter), when Mose once flunked mathematics. He did so at Smith Classical School, a private institution he attended for a while before switching to the public one. Everyone else in the family excelled in math, so it was probably a case of letting his mind wander to things in which he was more interested. (As an adult, Lee demonstrated the facility for solving complex math problems and a tendency not to spend time on things that did not really interest him.) In any event, his sister worked with him to correct the deficiency.¹⁵

One tale of Mose’s days in Smith Classical School became a classic in the annals of Owen County, for some version of it turned up in nearly every account of Lee’s boyhood. His unkempt appearance (which, incidentally, was to be a lifelong trait, even when wearing naval uniforms) caught up with him one day when schoolteacher Smith reprimanded him for having dirty shoes. He admonished Lee to go home and shine his shoes before he came to class again. The boy did so, but he did not leave it at that. He carefully pulled a paper bag over each shoe and tied the top of it around his ankle. This, he explained to Smith, was his way of making sure that his shoes would stay shined. Alas, the teacher was not amused and proceeded to give the boy a thrashing for his impudence.¹⁶

Lee’s interest in wildlife was not confined to bringing animals to school. Once he was in a store when the storekeeper remarked jokingly that he wished he had a blacksnake as a means of eliminating a population of rats. When Lee showed up three days later, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a blacksnake, which he deposited on the merchant’s counter. The boy also kept a large squirrel cage in his backyard. From his ventures into the surrounding woods, he caught squirrels and kept them in the cage that was six feet high and ten feet across. Sometimes as many as ten squirrels were in it. Many times, though, Mose shot at forest creatures rather than bringing them back alive. One occasion did not turn out so well. Charles Yancey of Owenton recalled the time Lee encountered a skunk. The skunk did what skunks do, and Mose’s clothes had to be burned afterward. (Charles’ brother Evan later served with Lee in the cruiser Concord in the 1930s.)¹⁷

Judge Lee was an excellent shot and passed the knowledge of shooting along to his son. Many years afterward, Allen Cammack, who was a boyhood neighbor of the Lees, recalled that Mose seemed to have both an unlimited amount of ammunition and an unlimited enthusiasm for shooting it. Lee developed remarkable proficiency with small arms and his interest in guns remained with him, both personally and professionally, all his life. While in Owenton, he was sometimes called upon to rid the courthouse grounds of sparrows, and when there were no live targets to shoot at, he aimed at inanimate ones.

Cammack’s sister Louise said of Lee that he was an unusually bright boy [who] was born with a built-in sighting device and a shooting arm. Anything Mose aimed at he hit. Among his targets were the neighbors’ window panes and the cupolas, lightning rods, and weather vanes of the well-to-do. Once he fired through an upstairs window in the Cammack house. Fortunately, Louise’s sister Eleanor was not in the room, because the bullet shattered glass all over Eleanor’s dolls, and her playhouse was near the broken windowpane.¹⁸

The boy’s curiosity and familiarity with guns brought problems of another sort. One of his chums was a boy named Roy Holbrook. Lee’s niece said of the two of them, They were always in trouble together. Once the two of them decided to make a bomb. They took some gunpowder out of shotgun shells and put it under a tin can. Then they ran a trail of powder from the can as a fuse and lit the other end of it. Nothing happened for a while, so they went to investigate. When Mose got close, the bomb exploded in his face, and for a while there was some fear that he would lose his sight. The physician who cared for him was able to save his vision and treat his burned face so well that he had no permanent scars. From then on, however, Lee had damaged eyesight and wore thick glasses much of his life.¹⁹

Given his restlessness and adventurous nature, it was understandable that young Mose would seek something beyond the confines of Owenton. He could not see himself being cooped up with law books, even though his maternal grandfather, father, and brother-in-law were all attorneys. Instead, he sought to go to the Naval Academy. A friend who knew him at that time offered the opinion that he probably sought the opportunity to leave home because nothing in Owenton interested him.²⁰ Judge Lee’s political connections in the overwhelmingly Democratic county were sufficient to gain Mose an appointment to Annapolis through Congressman South Trimble. He headed for the academy in the spring of 1904, when he had just turned sixteen and had not finished high school. Despite his intelligence, some in town questioned whether he would succeed at the rigidly disciplined academy, given his penchant for unconventional behavior. As former neighbor Louise Davis put it many years later, The strict rules and regulations were tough on Mose but he stuck it out. This is the only thing he did which surprised the townspeople [who by then had probably lost nearly all capacity for surprise where he was concerned]. They had kind of expected him back somehow.²¹

■ 2 ■

NAVAL ACADEMY YEARS

1904–1908

Willis A. Lee’s civilian existence ended on 9 July 1904. Up to then he and Oscar Smith, a Pennsylvania teenager, had been temporary boarders in Annapolis. They stayed at Miss Emma Atwell’s house on Prince George Street, opposite Carvel Hall Hotel. (For many years the hotel provided housing for midshipmen’s dates when they came to town for dances and other social events.) Smith and Lee took their oaths as midshipmen together that July day.¹

When Lee arrived at the academy, most midshipmen lived in the New Quarters. New was a relative term in this case, since the structure had been completed in 1869. It was a four-story redbrick building with an illuminated cylindrical clock tower rising above it. In 1901 construction began on a much more modern gray-granite building, Bancroft Hall, in the then-popular Beaux-Arts style. The designer was noted architect Ernest Flagg, who produced a building that had dormers, a mansard roof, a center section with a rotunda, and two wings of rooms for midshipmen. The first occupants, including Lee’s plebe class, moved into a wing of Bancroft in 1904. That original structure, completed in 1906, was designed for subsequent expansion, and now has eight wings. When Lee was there, the student body numbered fewer than one thousand. Now it is more than four thousand.²

One thing Oscar Smith prized about his relationship with the Kentuckian was that the Christmas boxes Lee received from home made his room a popular visiting spot. Years afterward, Smith wrote, I still savor the delicious taste of the country hams that were always found among the gifts…. In those days there was no Christmas leave for Midshipmen and the Christmas boxes were treasured…by many a homesick boy in Bancroft Hall.³

Marc A. Mitscher from Oklahoma was a midshipman who entered the academy as a plebe in 1904. Another mid from that state, Peter Cassius Marcellus Cade Jr., had bilged out the year before for failing academically. The upperclassmen started ragging Mitscher as a surrogate for Cade. Mitscher had to repeat the name of the departed mid whenever asked. The strange upshot was that Mitscher thus acquired the lifetime nickname Pete. Mitscher struggled academically, and he was also held culpable in a hazing scandal. In November 1905, Midshipman James R. Branch died in a fight among classmates. Investigation revealed that two hundred mids had been involved in hazing. Mitscher was compelled to resign, both for his part in the hazing and for the numerous demerits he accumulated. Even so, the young man was permitted to return to Annapolis and graduated in 1910, two years after Lee. Their paths would cross frequently forty years later in the Pacific.⁴

Lloyd C. Stark from Missouri was another plebe classmate. He graduated in 1908 and remained in the Navy until he resigned in 1911. He went home to join the family apple business and later was in combat as an Army major in World War I. He entered politics in 1928 and served as governor of his home state from 1937 to 1941. In 1940 he ran for the U.S. Senate and lost to Harry S. Truman. After his tenure as governor, he returned to work in the family nursery.⁵

Stark’s time as a plebe is of interest because he left behind a diary of September and October 1904. Doubtless he took part in many of the same activities as did Lee. Among them were sailboat drill, steam-launch drill, and time on board the USS Chesapeake, a wooden-hulled, three-masted bark with auxiliary steam power; she was renamed Severn in 1905. According to Stark, the plebes rowed racing cutters and performed infantry drill and bayonet practice in the armory. Naturally, there was small-arms marksmanship practice as well. Further exercise included boxing, gymnastics, fencing, and swimming. All this was prelude to academic studies in the fall. At one point Stark recorded his weight as 137 pounds.⁶ Photos of Lee from the period indicate that he, too, was skinny.

Nicknames were de rigueur at the academy for many years and the Kentucky native soon became Wah Lee, on the basis of his initials, W. A. He also acquired another nickname that stuck for the rest of his life. John Earle, a fellow plebe, explained, Lee was given the name ‘Chink’ by his classmates early in Plebe summer because, vaguely, he looked a bit like a Chinaman. About average in size, he had a round face, eyes that were slightly slanted and a skin yellowish in tone.⁷ As the years passed, the nickname was modified to the less offensive Ching, though many of his confreres stuck with the original version.

Lee spent part of the 1905 summer training cruise on board the Nevada, which he joined on 3 June. She was a shallow-draft, low-freeboard monitor with a main armament of two 12-inch guns. On 15 July he transferred to the Hartford. She was an old sailing vessel, a steam sloop of war. She had been Admiral David G. Farragut’s flagship during the Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. During one stop of the summer, Earle Buckingham and Lee were on liberty together in Rockland, Maine, and they passed a laundry with a sign that said, Wah Lee. Buckingham and another midshipman persuaded Lee to ask the laundryman how to render the name in a Chinese character. Thereafter Lee used the character as an alternate signature.⁸

During three-and-a-half of his four years at the Naval Academy, Lee roomed with Edmund Randall Norton. The roommate marveled at Lee’s ability to get by with little studying. Norton himself worked hard and stood second in the 201-man graduating class of 1908. Even though he had a great mind, Lee applied himself on only those things that really mattered to him. Norton observed that the two main categories that appealed to Lee were rifle shooting and freehand drawing.⁹

John Earle marveled at Lee’s ability for intense concentration. He remembered that Lee could read a lesson assignment once and retain everything of importance. Earle wrote of Lee, He never seemed to be in the least burdened by our studies, as were so many of us. On walking into Chink’s room one seldom found him at his books.… He was particularly good at math, our hardest subject, and spent many hours trying to make dumb classmates see how simple math really was. Earle observed that Lee appeared to have a limited social life. He did not recall Lee being conspicuous at dances, adding, I am sure he was much more interested in firearms than girls.¹⁰

Another classmate, Worrall Carter, was destined to have a substantial role in logistic support for the fleet in World War II. Years later, Carter recalled Lee’s drawings. Even though Lee and his future wife would have no children of their own, Lee was fond of children and drew sketches to entertain them. As Carter remembered, My own children had a great fancy for him.¹¹

Just after the class of 1907 graduated, Lee began his final summer of training. During the cruise, Lee and classmate Walter Heiberg were assigned to the monitor Nevada. Other ships in the training squadron were definitely second line: the monitors Arkansas and Florida and the cruiser Olympia. The latter had been Commodore George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay nine years earlier. The squadron was at Hampton Roads, Virginia, for ten days in June to visit the Jamestown Exposition. The exposition lasted throughout much of the year. This world’s fair commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in what eventually became the United States.

During their ship’s visit, Lee and Heiberg were often on the exposition’s midway. The pair closed down several shooting galleries that hung silver dollars from strings. At a price of ten cents per shot, the marksmen won the dollars whenever their bullets snapped the strings. They were so successful that, according to classmate John E. Meredith, This was long the subject of conversation in the Wardrooms of the fleets. As Meredith pointed out, the feat was mentioned in Heiberg’s entry in the 1908 Naval Academy yearbook.¹²

John E. Iseman, a classmate, wrote, When in company with [classmate Andrew Denney], we were looking over the shooting galleries on the Midway. Whenever we stopped, the proprietor begged ‘Ching’ to help himself to any of the prizes, but refrain from shooting up the place.¹³ At the end of the 1906–1907 academic year, the school awarded prizes for general excellence in target practice. The recipients were Willis Lee, gold medal; his friend Andrew Denney, silver medal; and his exposition partner, Walt Heiberg, bronze medal.¹⁴

From Virginia the Nevada proceeded to New England. While the ship was in New London, Connecticut, Lee received orders to report to the academy rifle team in Annapolis. When he was detached from the ship on 12 July, momentous events lay ahead. After undergoing practice at the Naval Academy, on 5 August he joined other marksmen for the National Rifle Association–sponsored national matches.¹⁵ The site was Camp Perry, named in honor of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who won a signal victory in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The camp was a National Guard training facility in northern Ohio—on the shore of Lake Erie. It was the first year the matches were held there, the result of efforts by the state’s adjutant general, Brigadier General Ammon B. Critchfield, who sought to improve the marksmanship of Ohio soldiers. Shooters fired toward the open water of the lake; in between an earthen berm held the targets.

As he took part in the competition, Midshipman Lee had a ragamuffin appearance, far from the standard he was supposed to display at Annapolis. He was clad in a sailor-type wrinkled white uniform that bore his last name on the chest, a nondescript hat, and a cartridge belt. What he accomplished in one day was astounding: he won individual national championships in both rifle and pistol. Lee was the only American ever to win in both categories the same year. In the individual rifle category—as opposed to team competition—he was one of 684 contestants. He performed rapid fire at two hundred and three hundred yards, and slow fire was at six hundred, eight hundred, and one thousand yards. Even though he missed two targets at the maximum range, he eked out the victory over Lieutenant W. H. Clopton Jr., a cavalry officer, 318 to 316. With the pistol he shot slow fire, timed fire, and rapid fire at ranges that ran from fifteen yards to seventy-five yards. In that case he beat out his nearest competitor, 238 to 237.¹⁶ His classmate Thomas C. Kinkaid talked with Lee after the triumphs at Camp Perry. Lee told him that he had finished the rifle competition early, so he entered the pistol matches just to kill time. Clearly, he accomplished more than that.¹⁷

William Ward Poco Smith was also on the Naval Academy team. Smith wrote of Lee, As an expert rifleman and pistolman, he might have been called a ‘Nut’ on this form of sport. On one occasion when they were shooting together, they were engaged in rapid-fire mode with bolt-action rifles—five shots in twenty seconds. Then Lee pulled what Smith termed a stunt during a match to determine who would make the team the following day. While Lee was shooting at a target two hundred yards away, a dog ran across the field, halfway between the firing line and the target. Smith reported, Ching’s rifle left the target as he sent his five shots at the dog. But nothing could keep him off the team. Because of his vision problems, Lee used different pairs of glasses while firing at different ranges. Once, while firing at one thousand yards at Camp Perry, Lee confided, Poco, at this range I cannot see the bull’s eye. The entire target looks the size of a postage stamp. Smith observed that Lee aimed at the postage stamp and hit the bull’s eye.¹⁸

Classmate Eugene Wilson was also a member of the rifle team. He emphasized that successful shooting by the Navy men was the result of effective teamwork. Members shot in pairs and coached each other. The rifleman firing the shot was responsible for the correct elevation of the piece, while his partner provided help on deflection—that is, coaching on horizontal aiming. He did so by observing the way wind moved the flags on the range, heat waves, clouds, and other factors that would affect the flight of the bullet during its trajectory to the target.¹⁹

Years later, John Earle, a fellow member of the rifle team, wrote to Lee’s widow, Lying prone in the boiling sun on the rifle range, through binoculars I would spot Chink’s shots for him as he fired at long ranges. Then he, in turn, would do the same for me. He recalled that Lee often paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes and polished the lenses of the shooting glasses he wore. He also attested, as have many, that Lee was not flustered. As evidence of Lee’s skill, Earle wrote, I have seen him shoot chippy birds out of a bush with a Colt’s .38—one, two, three, four—just as fast as he could pull the trigger.²⁰

One of Lee’s lifelong traits was his becoming sense of modesty. During his first-class year, he was in the same company with Midshipman William Kurfess, who was a plebe at the time. Kurfess explained that weekly personnel inspections were standard operating procedure. Midshipmen wore their full-dress uniforms, including medals. Lee did not comply, so the inspecting officer asked him where his medals were. Lee made an excuse—that they were being repaired or something else. The inspector finally lost patience and told Lee that if he did not show up with medals at the following week’s event, he would be put on report. The next Sunday, remembered Kurfess, Lee did appear in formation with his chest so covered with medals that it was difficult to see his jacket.²¹

Poor eyesight dogged Lee throughout his naval career. He wore thick glasses and was always concerned about passing the vision portion of the annual physical. His classmate Thomas Kinkaid wrote that Lee memorized two lines of the eye chart that was no closer than twenty feet from a midshipman being tested. More than fifty years after they had been at the Naval Academy together, Kinkaid wrote that he still recalled the sequence of two vital lines: FLOTDEXC and CLVFOTZE. Once, when Lee and Kinkaid were walking together, Lee’s vision was so poor that he was unable to recognize his roommate from across the street. As for personality, Kinkaid remembered Lee as unruffled and imperturbable and added, I don’t ever remember seeing him angry (nor anyone else angry at him).²²

Eugene Wilson of the rifle team knew Lee well. Like Kinkaid, he shared his midshipman recollections more than fifty years after the fact. Wilson recalled that Lee habitually failed the regular eye exam. The procedure called for a retest of those who flunked. By virtue of his name’s place in the alphabet, Wilson took the regular exam near the end of the line. He was thus able to let Lee know which chart was in use that day. Lee could then recite the day’s sequence of letters during the retest that followed right after the regular one. Remarkably, after all the intervening years, Wilson in 1962 recalled one line of letters that matched Kinkaid’s memory: FLOTDEXC. (Reaching ahead to discuss Lee’s 1942 achievement at Guadalcanal, Wilson added, When I heard the news of Chink Lee off Savo Island, I found justification for the little deceit we had perpetrated on the physical exams at Annapolis.)²³

Among Lee’s cartoons in the 1908 yearbook was a self-portrait that showed him with tousled hair, large-rim glasses, a big grin, and a chest full of medals. The latter were for his shooting prowess. Accompanying the sketch was a limerick:

This is a heathen Chinee,

Who is otherwise known as Wa Lee.

Take a look at the Chink,

And you surely will think

How jealous old Zimmy must be.²⁴

The last line was a joking reference to Lieutenant Charles A. Zimmermann, bandmaster at the academy since 1887. In 1906 he composed the music for Anchors Aweigh, the Navy’s unofficial anthem.

In May 1908, not surprisingly, the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery reported that a physical examination of Midshipman Lee revealed that he had defective vision, a potentially disqualifying condition. His right eye tested at 11/20 and his left eye at 10/20. Nonetheless, the Navy’s surgeon general recommended that he be allowed to graduate with his class, subject to re-examination two years hence to determine his physical fitness for the service. The office of the Secretary of the Navy concurred in the decision.²⁵

On 5 June 1908 Lee and his classmates graduated, after four years of study, drills, training cruises, and a generally confined life within the walls of the Naval Academy. Of the 201 graduates, Lee stood a middling 106 and was among the youngest. He had turned twenty less than a month earlier. His only younger classmates were Harry M. Hitchcock, born 7 June 1888 and