Ships
- USS Alabama (BB-60) Captain from 26 November 1945 · Relieved on 12 August 1946
Edward Harris Pierce was born in Ashtabula, Ohio, on 3 March 1899. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922 and later earned a master's degree in engineering from Yale. On 23 June 1938 the Navy promoted him to lieutenant commander.
He became commanding officer of the destroyer Gleaves when she was commissioned on 14 June 1940, and he remained in that ship until 26 May 1942. The tour covered Atlantic patrol in the last years of American neutrality and the first convoy season after the United States entered the war. On 1 January 1942, while he still had Gleaves, he was made a temporary commander. His substantive promotion to commander was dated 30 June 1942.
In the years between his two sea commands he served on senior staffs. He was operations officer on the staff of the commander of the Atlantic Fleet. Attached to the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King, he took part in planning the Allied landings in North Africa, and for that work he received the Legion of Merit. On 1 April 1943 he was appointed a temporary captain.
Pierce assumed command of the battleship Alabama on 26 November 1945, relieving William Bernard Goggins. The South Dakota-class ship had been commissioned on 16 August 1942 under George Barry Wilson. Through the fighting she also served under Fred Durrel Kirtland and Vincent Raphael Murphy, with a turn of only a few days in March 1943 under Neil Kittrell Dietrich, before Goggins had her for the last months of the Pacific war. Pierce came aboard after Japan had surrendered, and his duty was to command a veteran battleship while the wartime fleet was being reduced.
He was relieved on 12 August 1946. Claude Fenn Bailey succeeded him, and on 20 August 1946 Charles B. Phillips took Alabama. Phillips remained in command until the ship was decommissioned on 9 January 1947 at the Naval Station in Seattle and assigned to the Bremerton group of the Pacific Reserve Fleet. She stayed in reserve until she was struck in 1962, and she is preserved at Mobile.
Pierce died on 5 August 1962, at the age of sixty-three. He had married Emily Luce of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and they had four daughters. He and his wife were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.