Ships
- USS Wilkes-Barre (CL-103) Lieutenant Commander from 8 October 1947 · Relieved on 9 October 1947
Lewis Edwin Davis, Jr., is the last officer on the NavSource list for Wilkes-Barre (CL-103). The list gives him one day, 8 to 9 October 1947, as a lieutenant commander. The ship was decommissioned at Philadelphia on 9 October. An obituary of a Captain Lewis E. Davis, Jr., describes a cruiser tour after 1946 and does not name the ship. The full name is distinctive enough to use the obituary, with that gap stated.
The obituary says he was born on 28 June 1918 in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, and lived there until he finished high school in 1936. He then went to Alaska and worked in the maritime industry. Nothing fetched names his parents.
He came back from Alaska with an appointment to the Pennsylvania State Nautical School in Philadelphia as an engineer cadet. He graduated in the fall of 1940, became a licensed marine engineer, and worked for the Sun Oil Company of Philadelphia on company tankers. In September 1941 he activated a Naval Reserve commission as an ensign, E-M, USNR, and was assigned to a naval transport in North Atlantic convoys. The obituary does not name that ship. In 1944 he was reassigned to an attack transport in the Pacific, also unnamed, and stayed with that duty until the end of the war. In 1946 he transferred to the regular Navy.
He was not her captain during the fighting. NavSource puts him aboard, as lieutenant commander, only for 8 and 9 October 1947, after Lieutenant Commander Charles Henry Johnson, Jr. DANFS does not name him. The obituary says that from the 1946 transfer until he retired in 1972 he served aboard a cruiser and then commanded an escort destroyer, several destroyers, a destroyer tender, and a destroyer squadron. It does not say he commanded the cruiser. The NavSource line is the only place the cruiser is named.
Between sea tours he specialized in antisubmarine warfare at Key West and at the Pentagon. He graduated from the Naval War College at Newport in 1964. He was chief of staff of a fleet command based in Japan for two years during the Vietnam War, then returned to the Pentagon and retired on 1 July 1972, after what the obituary counts as thirty-one years of naval service. For the next decade he was a naval maritime consultant in the Washington area. He married Harriett Edna Flach of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, on 15 June 1942. She died in 1980. In 1982 he married Audrey Welsch Godshall of Lansdale. He died on 23 May 2016 at Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree, Colorado, aged 97. The obituary styles him Captain, U.S. Navy, retired. NavSource, for the one day on Wilkes-Barre, styles him lieutenant commander.