Ships
- USS Louisville (CA-28) Captain from 15 January 1931 · Relieved on 4 December 1932
Edward John Marquart was born in Valparaiso, Indiana, on 11 March 1880. He was a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy by the summer of 1899, when he sailed in the training ship Monongahela on a Caribbean cruise that a hurricane held up, and he graduated with the class of 1902. Graduates of that time went to sea as passed midshipmen before they received commissions. His first fleet duty was in the Asiatic Fleet, in the battleship Oregon. By 1904 he was an ensign, still in Philippine waters, serving in the patrol yacht Frolic on operations with the Army and on target practice off China. Late in 1905 he returned to Oregon, and in June 1906 he transferred to the battleship Illinois.
In the summer of 1907 he came home for temporary duty at Newport with the Board of Inspection and Survey, then took command of the submarine Cuttlefish, fitting out at the Fore River yard. She commissioned on 18 October 1907, joined the Second Submarine Flotilla of the Atlantic Fleet, and under Marquart spent the next two years on trials, machinery tests, and training along the Atlantic coast. He later served in the battleships Ohio and Arkansas. In September 1913, as gunnery officer of Arkansas, he was aboard when her 12-inch guns put six shots into a target off the Virginia Capes. The next April Arkansas went to the Mexican coast, and Marquart was in her during the occupation of Veracruz. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in December 1914. In June 1916 he married Marie Teresa Scannell. After the United States entered the First World War he was advanced to the temporary rank of commander, in August 1917. The 1920 census places him and his wife at the submarine base at Cristobal, in the Canal Zone.
Shore duty and another turn in the Far East filled the 1920s. The couple lived for a time in Newport, and in 1927 they came back from China, sailing from Shanghai to Seattle in the liner President Cleveland. By 1930 they were in Washington. On 15 January 1931, a captain, Marquart placed the new Northampton-class cruiser Louisville in commission at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton. She had been launched there on 1 September 1930 and entered service numbered CL-28. On 1 July 1931, under the terms of the London Naval Treaty, she was reclassified CA-28, a heavy cruiser, on the strength of her 8-inch battery. Marquart took her on a shakedown that ran through the summer, fall, and winter of 1931, from Bremerton to New York by way of the Panama Canal. After she returned to the Pacific she took part in the 1932 fleet problems and then worked gunnery in the San Pedro–San Diego area. He was relieved on 4 December 1932 by Bruce Livingston Canaga.
Marquart was a rear admiral by the time Japan opened a full war in China. In 1937 he commanded the United States Yangtze Patrol. From Nanking he reported the Japanese bombing of the city to the Chief of Naval Operations, kept the gunboats Luzon and Guam on the river while Americans were being taken out, and followed the withdrawal upriver as the capital emptied. On 12 December 1937 Japanese aircraft sank the patrol gunboat Panay above Nanking. Marquart, then at Hankow, sent on the early accounts of the attack and of the men who got ashore. His wife Marie had died on 9 March 1937. In January 1938 the Navy ordered him from the Yangtze Patrol to instruction at the Naval War College in Newport.
In the spring of 1939 he was named to relieve Rear Admiral Wilhelm L. Friedell in command of Minecraft, Battle Force, based at Pearl Harbor. He left Hawaii in April 1941. On 2 June 1941 he became commandant of the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn, and he also took command of the Third Naval District. The yard was already a major building plant, and its workforce grew fast under him. In June 1942 he reported about 42,000 people at work there. The battleship Iowa was launched at the yard in August 1942, while he was commandant. For his conduct as commandant of the yard and of the Third Naval District from June 1941 to May 1943 he received the Legion of Merit. He stayed in the district command until 1 April 1944, when he read his retirement orders at the receiving station on Pier 92 and turned the district over to Rear Admiral William R. Munroe.
His second wife was Helen Holbert, who had come east from Pearl Harbor with him in 1941. In retirement his home was Pasadena, California. Edward J. Marquart died on 4 November 1954, at the age of 74, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.