Ships
- HMS Black Prince (81) Captain from 21 August 1943 · Relieved on 29 April 1945
Captain Dennis Marescaux Lees of the Royal Navy commanded the light cruiser Black Prince from 21 August 1943 until he was relieved on 29 April 1945. The appointment covered her first wartime commission and took him from the Home Fleet to the Mediterranean and then to the Pacific.
He joined Black Prince while she was still completing. She was a modified Dido-class cruiser, pennant number 81, built as a fleet anti-aircraft escort. Twin 5.25-inch guns, able to fire at ships or at aircraft, made up her main battery, with a heavy outfit of lighter automatic weapons around them. Lees took her through trials and brought her into service in the autumn of 1943. Gerald Vaughan Gladstone served with him in the ship.
Through the winter of 1943-44 and the following spring, Black Prince worked with the Home Fleet. She helped cover convoys running to north Russia and kept watch on German forces based in Norway. On 3 April 1944 Lees took her to sea with the screen for Operation Tungsten, the carrier strike against the battleship Tirpitz in Altenfjord. Her task was to guard the carriers while the aircraft made the attack.
In the summer of 1944 Black Prince transferred to the Mediterranean. That August she supported the Allied landing in the south of France. She afterwards operated in the Aegean as German garrisons on the Greek islands were cut off and Allied forces moved into Greece.
Late in 1944 Lees brought Black Prince out to join the British Pacific Fleet. In March and April 1945 she screened the fleet carriers during their strikes on the Sakishima Islands, flown in support of the American landing on Okinawa. The days at sea ran together in refuelling underway, radar watch, and anti-aircraft action when Japanese aircraft came out against the force. He was relieved on 29 April 1945, twenty months after his appointment, and the cruiser stayed on with the Pacific Fleet.