Before the publication of this biography, Willis A. Lee tends to arrive in history books out of nowhere, wins a celebrated battleship-on-battleship action at the climax of the Guadalcanal campaign, only to experience professional disappointment in the operational fiasco that was the naval portion of the American retaking of the Philippines. This then is a complete life, as Stillwell takes you from Lee's childhood in Kentucky, his involvement in competitive target shooting, and the general evolution of an officer and a gentlemen who was a master technologist. In as much as Stillwell has been working on this book for a very long time, it has the additional value of being heavily larded with reminisces of the many people who came into contact with Lee.

I really have nothing to mark this book down for, but I suspect that Stillwell could have written more about some of the USN office politics that left tired men in positions of command authority when they were physically and mentally done (a big contributor to the Leyte Gulf debacle). Also, I would have liked to have seen Thomas Hughes' biography of Bill Halsey make it into the bibliography, as it does a good job of putting Halsey's lapses into perspective, and emphasizing that Halsey had his own marching orders that conditioned the failed deployment. ( )