Transcription
It is just past midnight on November 15th, 1942. A short, bespectacled man in a sweat-stained khaki shirt stands on the flag bridge of the United States ship Washington, peering through reading glasses at a glowing radar scope. A Philip Morris cigarette hangs from his lips. Out ahead in the dark, two Japanese searchlights have just snapped on and pinned his other battleship, the South Dakota, in a column of white light. 8,400 yd away, a Japanese battleship and two heavy cruisers are about to open fire. He turns to the captain beside him and says, in a Kentucky drawl, flat as old coffee, "Well, stand by, Glenn. Here they come." Nine 16-in rifles swing.
His name is Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee Jr. He has more Olympic gold medals than any commander in the United States Navy. He has the worst eyesight of any flag officer afloat. And in the next 5 minutes and 24 seconds, he is going to fight and win the only one-on-one American battleship duel of the entire Second World War.
This is one of those stories that changes how you see the whole campaign for Guadalcanal, because everyone remembers the Marines and everyone remembers Halsey, and almost nobody remembers the bookish admiral with the thick glasses who actually saved the island. To understand Willis Lee, you have to understand what the United States Navy had been doing in Ironbottom Sound for the previous 3 months, which was losing. From August through early November of 1942, American cruisers and destroyers had steamed into the dark waters between Guadalcanal and Savo Island night after night, and they had been chewed up by the Japanese. The Imperial Navy fought at night the way Americans fought during the day. Better optics, better torpedoes, better doctrine, 15 years of training for exactly this kind of fight. The Americans had something the Japanese did not have, which was radar, but it sat on the masts mostly unused because the senior admirals who had grown up firing by spotlight and rangefinder did not trust the new boxes the engineers had given them. Two nights before Lee arrived, a chaotic point-blank cruiser action killed two American flag officers, sank six ships, and took the five Sullivan brothers down with the cruiser Juno. Halsey was out of cruisers. He was nearly out of destroyers. All he had left were two new fast battleships and a man almost nobody outside the Navy had ever heard of.
Lee had been born in 1888 in Natley, Kentucky, a place so small you could spit across it. He went to Annapolis in 1904 and graduated near the top of the class of 1908. As a midshipman of 19 years old, he became the only American ever to win the national high power rifle and pistol championships in the same year. At the Antwerp Olympics in 1920, he won five gold medals, one silver, and one bronze. All in team. That total of seven medals at a single Olympics was a world record that stood for 60 years. The Navy nearly forced him out three different times because his uncorrected vision was so bad they thought he was blind. With glasses, he was 20/20. Without them, he could not see the men he was talking to. He chain-smoked. He worked the logarithms and firing tables for fun the way other men did crossword puzzles. The Navy called him Ching. He was the man who looked like a librarian and shot like a sniper. And Halsey, who had been his classmate at Annapolis, had just handed him the only two intact American capital ships in the South Pacific and told him to save the Marines.
The Naval War College had a doctrine that battleships were never to be committed to night actions in narrow-minded reef-strewn waters where torpedoes could come from anywhere. Halsey wrote later that the plan flouted that doctrine. He sent Lee anyway. The orders were 16 words long. Proceed north with both battleships and your four destroyers at best speed. Lee took them through the dark. He came around the north side of Savo Island just before 11:00 at night. The four destroyers ahead of him had never operated together. They had been chosen because they had the most fuel left in their tanks. Behind them came Washington with Lee on her flag bridge and South Dakota under Captain Thomas Gatch a few thousand yards astern. The water under Lee's keel was a graveyard. Four American cruisers and a Japanese battleship lay below him on the bottom of the sound.
The first thing that happened was almost a disaster. The PT boat base at Tulagi did not know who Lee was. His task force had been thrown together so fast it did not have a radio call sign. He could hear young American sailors on the voice circuit getting ready to put torpedoes into him. So a vice admiral of the United States Navy picked up a radio handset and shouted his Annapolis nickname into it. "Stand aside. I'm coming through. This is Ching Lee." The PT boats stood off. At 17 minutes past 11:00 Washington's radar picked up a Japanese cruiser at 18,500 yards. Lee opened fire. An ensign on one of the screening destroyers later said the broadside flew toward the enemy like a flight of airplanes. Nine red tracers in a tight bunch. The Japanese force ahead made smoke and ran. But out of the dark to the south a single Japanese destroyer drove into Lee's screening line and a few minutes later the cruiser Nagara opened fire. What followed was murder. The destroyer Walke took a long lance torpedo and her own forward magazine blew the bow off the ship. As she sank, her depth charges detonated and killed her commanding officer in the water along with 75 of his men. The destroyer Preston took a salvo from Nagara that destroyed both her fire rooms in seconds. She went down with 117 of her men. Benham took a torpedo that broke her back. In 10 minutes, three American destroyers were sinking and a fourth was crippled. Lee in his action report wrote one line about them. "It was beyond admiration and it probably saved our bacon."
Then something worse happened. South Dakota's chief engineer had tied down circuit breakers in the engineering plant in violation of every safety procedure in the book because they had been chattering when the main battery fired. Every electric circuit on the ship died at the same moment. Her radar went dead. Her gun directors went dead. Her main turrets froze in train. Captain Gatch wrote later that the men felt as if they had been blindfolded. And then Gatch turned to starboard to clear the burning destroyers and silhouetted his blacked-out ship against the wreckage. From 3 mi away, the cruiser Atago turned on her searchlight and lit South Dakota up like a stage. In the next 8 minutes, five Japanese ships put 27 shells into her. 20 fires, 39 men dead.
Hours of research go into each one of these. If that matters to you, subscribing is the best way to say so. Now, back to Willis Lee. The Japanese searchlight solved Lee's targeting problem for him. He had been holding his 16-in fire because he could not be sure which of the radar pips ahead was the burning South Dakota and which was the enemy. When the searchlights came on, he knew. The pip behind them was the battleship Kirishima, 8,400 yd, point-blank for naval rifles whose armor schemes had been designed against fire from 20,000. A junior officer on Washington's bridge later called it body-punching range. Lee took a long pull on his cigarette and turned to his flag captain, Glenn Davis. "Well, stand by, Glenn. Here they come." The first salvo went over. The second salvo straddled and put a 16-in shell into the base of Kirishima's foremast pagoda. After that, the gunnery was butchery. In 2 minutes and 39 seconds, Washington fired 39 16-in projectiles at Kirishima. She paused on a false report that the Japanese ship had sunk, then resumed and put 36 more shells into her. Modern reconstruction of the wreck suggests around 20 heavy hits. Three of Kirishima's four main turret barbettes were smashed. Her rudder jammed hard to starboard. Fires drove her engineers from the engine rooms. She rolled to port and capsized at 25 minutes past 3:00 in the morning, taking around 300 Japanese sailors with her. 300 men, fathers, sons, conscripted farm boys who had been told they were going to bombard an American airstrip and instead found themselves trapped below a steel deck while seawater rose past their ankles in the dark.
The historian Richard Frank quoted Lee himself afterward. And these are the lines that matter most. "Our entire superiority," Lee wrote, "was due almost entirely to our possession of radar. We have no edge on the Japanese in experience, none in skill, none in training." The radar was the margin of victory. It was the only reason any of his men were going home. A Walke survivor floating in burning oil watched Washington steam past at 26 kn toward Kirishima and shouted at her to get after them. And on the Japanese side, an Atago lookout staring at Kirishima through a long lens shouted a single sentence that the action report preserved. "She is totally obscured by shell splashes." Washington was not hit, not once.
I want to be fair here. Lee did not save Guadalcanal alone. The Marines on the ridge above Henderson Field had been dying for it since August. Vandegrift's 1st Division had held by their fingernails. Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott had given up their lives two nights earlier in a cruiser action that bought the time Lee used. And Halsey had ordered the ride that the War College said could not be ordered. There is no version of November 15th, 1942 that Willis Lee wins by himself. That is the honest counterargument, and it deserves to be acknowledged. But, there is also a difference between holding a perimeter and breaking the enemy's spine, and the spine got broken on the night Washington fired 75 shells in 5 and 1/2 minutes.
Here is where I land on Willis Lee. The man who said it could not be done by doctrine was the man who did it. The librarian shot like a sniper. The Pacific War between November of 1942 and the Japanese surrender almost 3 years later was a campaign of gunnery officers, code breakers, radar engineers, and damage control parties. Lee was the prototype. He won the only one-on-one battleship action in American history with a fire control system he had personally helped design against an enemy whose night fighting tradition was the best in the world, and he did it while his other battleship was on fire. He told the truth about why he won. The Navy gave him the Navy Cross and then mostly forgot him.
I want to name the systemic pattern here, because this is not just about one admiral. The Navy that came out of the Second World War wrote the official history around the men who were good on camera. Halsey is on the postage stamps. Spruance gets the carriers. MacArthur gets the parade. The men who wrote the firing tables and tied the radar repeaters to the plotting room and stood on a flag bridge at midnight and said, "Stand by. Here they come." Those men got destroyer leaders named after them and a paragraph in Morrison. And if that sounds familiar, if you have watched someone in your office do the actual work while a louder colleague gives the presentation that gets the promotion, you already understand why Willis Lee fell out of the public memory of his own war. Excellence that does not court attention is a kind of camouflage. Lee wore it his whole career. He shunned the press. He kept no diary. He did not write a memoir. The only book-length biography of him was published in 2021, 76 years after his death.
His record, five Olympic gold medals, the Navy Cross at 54 years of age for an action he fought through thick glasses, three years commanding every fast battleship in the Pacific Fleet, promoted vice admiral in 1944, sent in May of 1945 to Casco Bay, Maine to develop counter kamikaze tactics for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. He had breakfast with his wife and his aide on the morning of August 25th, 1945 and walked down to the dock at Falmouth and stepped into a motor launch to be ferried out to his flagship. He suffered a heart attack in the boat and was dead before they reached the ship. He was 57. Japan had announced its surrender 10 days earlier. Apparently, nobody thought to invite Ching Lee to the surrender ceremony on the Missouri. He is buried in section 6 of Arlington National Cemetery beside his wife, Mabelle.
James Hornfischer, who reconstructed this action from interviews with the survivors, said Willis Lee took vengeance two nights later in a legendary showdown. Picture the man on the flag bridge again. Cigarette, thick glasses, Kentucky drawl. The first salvo blew the glasses off his face onto the deck. And for a moment, the most decorated marksman in the United States Navy could not see. "Stand by, Glenn. Here they come." That is the record. What you do with it is up to you. If you found this worth your time, please subscribe. It helps us keep making these.