Ships
- USS Washington (BB-56) Captain, 16 November 1944 – 5 June 1945
Roscoe Fletcher Good was born in Fostoria, Ohio, on 13 March 1897. He graduated from Fostoria High School in 1914 and spent the next two years as a reporter and advertising solicitor for the Fostoria Daily Times. Appointed to the United States Naval Academy in 1916, he went to sea with the Atlantic Fleet before the course was finished, serving about six months in the battleships Wyoming and New Jersey. He returned to Annapolis, edited the class yearbook, the Lucky Bag, and graduated with the Class of 1920, fourth in a class of 452.
He became a commander on 1 July 1939. In the years just before the Pacific war he served a year in the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa and then went to staff duty. In February 1941 he joined the staff of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, in Hawaii, as assistant operations officer. He was in that billet when the war began and remained on the Pacific Fleet staff until August 1943. The Legion of Merit recognized that work. He had been made a temporary captain on 18 June 1942. In August 1943 he reported to the staff of the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations.
In October 1944 Good was ordered to the fast battleship Washington. He took command on 16 November 1944 as captain. Washington (BB-56), a North Carolina-class ship with nine 16-inch guns, was already a veteran of the Arctic and of the Pacific war, and she was running with the fast carrier forces against Japan.
Those forces gave a battleship captain two kinds of work. The ship guarded the carriers, and she turned her heavy guns on shore when the landings called for it. From November 1944 into the early summer of 1945, Washington did both: the Philippines campaign, the January 1945 sweep into the South China Sea, the support of Iwo Jima, and the long operation off Okinawa. On 17 and 18 December 1944 she was with the Third Fleet when a typhoon struck east of the Philippines, and she came through it. A Gold Star in lieu of a second Legion of Merit covered his command from 16 November 1944 through 30 May 1945.
His tour is dated from 16 November 1944 to 5 June 1945, and it is also dated to 3 June 1945. The day is the disagreement. Francis Xavier McInerney took Washington. Later flag rank was not another command of this ship.
In July 1945, a rear admiral, he became commander of Cruiser Division Six. That November he went to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations as head of fleet operations for logistics, with his post in Germany. He was promoted to vice admiral on 23 March 1953. In 1956 he became Commander, Naval Forces Far East, the command later called Naval Forces Japan. He retired an admiral. Roscoe Fletcher Good died on 26 February 1973.