Ships
- USS Washington (BB-56) Flag, not her captain, 15 November 1942
Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee commanded Task Force 64 on the night of 14-15 November 1942. His flag was in the battleship Washington. He was not her captain. Glenn Davis had the ship. Her 16-inch gunfire wrecked Kirishima. Washington was not hit.
Lee was born in Kentucky in 1888 and entered the Naval Academy in 1904. He graduated in 1908 and served in the Atlantic Fleet before the First World War. During the war he commanded destroyers in European waters and later served on the staff of the commander of the Atlantic Fleet. After the war he held a series of gunnery and staff assignments that built his reputation as a marksman and a student of naval gunfire.
In the interwar years Lee commanded the destroyer Lardner and later the cruiser Concord. He attended the Naval War College and served in the Bureau of Ordnance, where he worked on fire-control problems that would matter in night battle. By 1941 he was a rear admiral and chief of staff to the commander of the Scouting Force. When war came he went to the Pacific as commander of Battleship Division Six, with his flag in Washington.
On the night of 14-15 November 1942 Lee led Task Force 64 into Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal. The force included Washington and South Dakota and four destroyers. Japanese ships under Admiral Kondo had come down the Slot to bombard Henderson Field. In the confused night action the American destroyers were badly hit and South Dakota lost electrical power and took heavy fire. Lee, using Washington's radar, closed the Japanese battleship Kirishima and opened with 16-inch guns. The concentrated fire wrecked Kirishima, which sank the next day. Washington was not hit. The Japanese bombardment force turned away, and the Marine airfield remained in American hands.
Lee stayed in the Pacific for the rest of the war. He commanded battleships in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas, and he directed the fast battleship screen that covered the carriers. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 his ships formed the anti-aircraft and surface guard for Task Force 58. He was known among officers for a dry manner and a precise interest in gunnery rather than ceremony. Shipmates who served with him in those years included Glenn Benson Davis, Sr., who had Washington on the night off Guadalcanal, and Francis Xavier McInerney, Thomas Ross Cooley, Jr., Roscoe Fletcher Good, Henry Effingham Eccles, Howard H. J. Benson, James Edward Maher, and Archie Taylor Wright, Jr..
Late in the war Lee left the battleship command to head a research and development section concerned with anti-aircraft and guided weapons. He died of a heart attack at sea in August 1945, aboard a ship bound for the United States, a few days after the Japanese surrender. He was buried at sea.