Ships
- USS Washington (BB-56) Captain, 27 April 1943 – 23 April 1944
James Edward Maher was born in Cortland, New York, on 27 October 1892. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1915 and completed submarine school in 1917. From 1924 to 1926 he attended the Navy's graduate school. In the years that followed he commanded four submarines and a submarine tender. He was promoted to commander on 30 June 1936.
On 1 December 1937 Maher took command of the destroyer leader Somers and remained in her until late 1939. He became a captain on 1 July 1941. In February 1942 he placed the anti-aircraft cruiser San Juan in commission and took her to the South Pacific. During the opening of the Guadalcanal campaign, Rear Admiral Norman Scott commended the way he handled the ship off Tulagi.
The sharpest test of that cruise came on 26 October 1942, north of the Santa Cruz Islands. Japanese carrier aircraft kept up a heavy attack on the task force. Maher held San Juan in her assigned station so her guns could cover an aircraft carrier. Admiral William F. Halsey later presented him the Navy Cross for that day's work. He also received the Legion of Merit for his service in the war. He left San Juan on 24 April 1943. In his own later account the cruiser had come through those months practically undamaged.
On 27 April 1943 Maher became captain of the battleship Washington. Howard H. J. Benson had brought her into commission in 1941, and Glenn Benson Davis, Sr. had commanded her in the night battle off Guadalcanal in November 1942. Maher took over a ship already proven in combat. She sailed from Noumea at the end of April, reached Pearl Harbor on 8 May, exercised in Hawaiian waters into late May, and then entered the navy yard for overhaul.
With that work finished, Washington left Hawaii on 27 July 1943 in a convoy for the South Pacific and anchored at Havannah Harbor, Efate, on 7 August. For much of the next half year she wore the flag of Admiral Willis Augustus Lee, who led the Pacific Fleet's battleships, while Maher remained her captain. She went through the Gilbert Islands operation and the Marshalls campaign. Her main battery bombarded Nauru on 8 December 1943 and Kwajalein at the end of January 1944. A flag staff of about 150 officers rode with a ship's company of more than 2,000 men.
On the night of 1 February 1944, in darkness near the Marshalls, the battleship Indiana turned out of formation to fuel destroyers and crossed Washington's bow. Washington struck her. The collision crushed the battleship's bow and sent her out of the forward area for a long repair. Maher stayed in command through that aftermath and was detached on 23 April 1944.
By the autumn of 1944 he headed the East Coast central commissioning detail from an office in New York, responsible for the final inspection of new ships before they entered service. On 24 May 1945 he was appointed a temporary commodore. He retired from the Navy as a vice admiral. James Edward Maher died on 17 September 1967.