Ships
- USS Terry (DD-513) Captain, 1944 – 28 November 1944
John Marshall Lee was born in San Francisco on 14 October 1914. He entered the United States Naval Academy in 1931, graduated in 1935, and went to sea with the fleet. Friends called him Squidge. In 1942 he was a lieutenant in the light cruiser Boise.
On the night of 11–12 October 1942, off Cape Esperance at Guadalcanal, he was navigator and officer of the deck when Boise met a Japanese force in the dark. From the open bridge he kept the cruiser in column astern of San Francisco through the gun action. He received the Navy Cross for that night.
In January 1944 Lee, then a lieutenant commander, became captain of the destroyer Terry (DD-513). He relieved George Richardson Phelan, who had commanded the Fletcher-class ship since her commissioning in January 1943. Terry was working the Solomon Islands. In mid-February Lee took her out of Purvis Bay with Braine and Warrington to cover the landings in the Green Islands. Before the month ended she bombarded Rabaul, and in March she supported the landing at Emirau.
In June 1944 the destroyer shifted to the central Pacific. She left Efate on 2 June with Task Group 53.14, joined Admiral Raymond A. Spruance’s Fifth Fleet in the Marshall Islands, and through the summer gave gunfire support and escort for the assaults on Saipan and Guam. During the Battle of the Philippine Sea in mid-June she helped screen the fleet’s aircraft carriers.
That autumn Terry returned to the West Coast of the United States for overhaul. On 28 November 1944 Lee turned command over to William Brigham Moore, who took the ship back into combat, including the assault on Iwo Jima the following year. Irving Doremus Dewey commanded Terry from September 1945 until she was decommissioned in August 1946.
After Terry, Lee served as secretary to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. In the postwar fleet he commanded the destroyer Benner, the attack transport Chilton, and the cruiser Northampton. While he had Chilton in 1958, the ship took part in the American intervention in Lebanon.
He completed the National War College in 1957 and moved into policy work in Washington. From 1959 to 1961 he directed the Politico-Military Policy Division for the Chief of Naval Operations, and from 1961 to 1963 he directed the policy planning staff in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense. As a rear admiral he commanded Amphibious Group One and the Amphibious Force of the Seventh Fleet from August 1963 to January 1965, as the war in Vietnam widened, and received the Legion of Merit. From 17 May to 9 June 1965 he was executive officer of the United States and Organization of American States emergency relief mission to the Dominican Republic, for which he received a Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit.
Further duty took him to the directorship of naval warfare analysis, then to NATO as a deputy United States representative. From April 1969 to February 1970, by then a vice admiral, he commanded the Eastern Sea Frontier and served as vice chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee. The Navy Distinguished Service Medal followed that assignment. From 1970 until his retirement in 1973 he was deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Gerard Smith and worked on the negotiations for the first strategic arms limitation agreement.
Lee left active duty as a vice admiral and settled in St. Petersburg, Florida. He spent his later years writing and speaking against nuclear weapons, drawing on what he had seen at NATO and in arms control. He died in Montana in 2003.