Ships
- USS Washington (BB-56) Captain, 25 July 1942 – 27 April 1943
Glenn Benson Davis, Sr., was born in Norwalk, Ohio, on 2 January 1892. He entered the United States Naval Academy in July 1909, graduated with the class of 1913, and was commissioned an ensign on 7 June 1913. His first sea duty was in the battleship Kansas, and in the summer of 1914 that ship took him to Mexican waters during the occupation of Veracruz. He later served in the battleship Kentucky along the East Coast and in the Caribbean. Promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on 7 June 1916, he went to the tanker Maumee after the United States entered the First World War and helped fuel Allied ships in the North Atlantic.
Between the wars he became an ordnance specialist. After postgraduate study he served in the battleship Tennessee with the Pacific Fleet from 1921 to 1924, then as experimental officer at the Naval Proving Ground at Dahlgren. He was promoted to lieutenant commander on 8 June 1923. In 1927 he stood by the battleship Wyoming during her modernization at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and sailed with her to the Caribbean. From 1932 to 1934 he commanded the destroyer Blakeley in the Atlantic and was promoted to commander on 1 September 1933. He returned to Dahlgren as executive officer, helped fit out the light cruiser Philadelphia, and served as her executive officer under Captain Jules James. In June 1939 he became assistant to the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. He was a captain by the spring of 1940, and he was still in that bureau when the Pacific war began.
Davis had Washington from 25 July 1942 to 27 April 1943. He is not Howard H. J. Benson, who commissioned her and was relieved in July 1942. Under Davis the battleship went to the South Pacific and covered the convoys that carried men and supplies to the Marines on Guadalcanal. She was the flagship of Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee.
On the night of 14–15 November 1942 he was her captain. Rear Admiral Lee's flag was in the ship. Davis was not the admiral. Off Savo Island, Washington fought with the battleship South Dakota and four destroyers against a Japanese force that included the battleship Kirishima. South Dakota was heavily damaged. Her 16-inch gunfire wrecked Kirishima. She was not hit. The Navy Cross recognized his handling of Washington that night.
He turned Washington over on 27 April 1943 to Captain James Edward Maher. Later flag rank is not another command of this ship. As a rear admiral he commanded Battleship Division 8 from that spring into December 1944, with Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and South Dakota among the ships in his force. The division took part in the operations that isolated Rabaul, the Gilberts assault at Tarawa, the Marianas campaign at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, and the landings on Leyte. Two Legions of Merit marked that service.
In the last week of December 1944 he sat with Vice Admirals John H. Hoover and George D. Murray on the court of inquiry into the typhoon that caught Admiral William F. Halsey's Third Fleet. Three destroyers were lost, and nearly 800 men died. The court placed the preponderance of responsibility on Halsey and classed the mistakes as errors of judgment under the stress of war operations. Davis then finished the war in San Francisco as deputy commander and chief of staff of the Western Sea Frontier. From 1946 he was commandant of the Washington Navy Yard and of the Potomac River Naval Command. In July 1951 he became commandant of the Sixth Naval District, responsible for naval installations in the Carolinas and Georgia. He retired on 1 July 1953, after forty years of service, and was advanced to vice admiral on the retired list.
In civilian life he was president of the Isthmian Steamship Company and later chairman of the board of Isthmian Lines. He left that work in 1958 and settled on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Glenn Benson Davis, Sr., died there on 9 September 1984, at the age of 92, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His wife, Ruth Manahan Davis, lies beside him. They had one son, Glenn B. Davis, Jr.