Ships
- USS Massachusetts (BB-59) Captain from 8 April 1944 · Relieved on 2 May 1945
William Walter Warlick was born on 25 May 1895, with his home given as West Medford, Massachusetts. He was a member of the United States Naval Academy class of 1918 and remained in the Navy through the years between the world wars. He was promoted to commander on 1 January 1938.
On 22 June 1940 he took command of the destroyer McDougal (DD-358) and stayed in her until 18 April 1941, in the last stretch of peace before the United States entered the Second World War. He became a temporary captain on 1 January 1942 and a captain on 30 June 1942.
Warlick assumed command of the battleship Massachusetts (BB-59) on 8 April 1944. The South Dakota-class ship, armed with nine 16-inch guns, was already a veteran of the Atlantic fight off Casablanca in 1942. Under Warlick she went back out with the fast carrier forces for the last year of the Pacific war.
In the summer of 1944 Massachusetts was at sea for the Marianas campaign and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, when carrier aircraft broke the Japanese naval air arm. Through the rest of that year she screened the carriers and used her heavy guns in support of the landings in the Palaus and the Philippines. In the opening months of 1945 she continued that work for the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
On 23 April 1945, while he was still in Massachusetts, Warlick was advanced to temporary commodore. He was relieved on 2 May 1945. For his tour as commanding officer of the battleship from April 1944 to May 1945, the Navy awarded him the Legion of Merit, recorded in the rank of commodore.
He retired as a rear admiral. He and Mary Barchet had a son, William Walter Warlick Jr., born in Annapolis, Maryland, on 29 December 1926, who later served in the Navy himself.