Kemp Tolley, 92, a retired Navy rear admiral who wrote scores of articles and three books concerning history and naval affairs, died Oct. 28 at his home in Baltimore County, Md., after a stroke.
During the 1930s, he served aboard battleships, cruisers and a submarine tender. He also served on the exotic China station, becoming executive officer of the river gunboat Tutuila on the upper Yangtze.
He became fluent in Russian, German, French and Spanish. During World War II, he spent two years as an assistant naval attache in the Soviet Union and saw combat in the Pacific as navigator of the battleship North Carolina. He was wounded in the fight for Okinawa.
After the war, his assignments included a tour from 1949 to 1952 as intelligence division director at the Armed Forces Staff College. His last assignment before retiring from active duty in 1959 was as commander of a Western Pacific amphibious group.
In retirement, he wrote for such authoritative publications as the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. He also wrote four books, including "Yangtze Patrol," "Cruise of the Lanikai" and "Caviar and Commissars."
Adm. Tolley wrote and lectured about his secret adventures during the early hours of World War II. He maintained that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave orders in late 1941, before the United States entered the war, that a wooden schooner be lightly armed and sent into harm's way. It was to sail south from the Philippines, attempt to locate a Japanese fleet that U.S. officials thought was at sea, draw fire and thus bring the United States and Japan into war.
Adm. Tolley was given command of a 76-foot wooden schooner, the Lanikai, which was armed with one gun (last used in the Spanish-American War) and had last seen action as a prop in a John Ford-directed movie, "The Hurricane." But before the then-lieutenant commander could put to sea, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They also attacked the Philippines, from which Adm. Tolley and his craft, with 25 men, managed to run the Japanese gantlet to Java, then after the fall of the Dutch East Indies miraculously sailed the ship to safety in Australia, completing a journey of 4,000 miles.
Survivors include his wife, the former Vlada Gritzenko of Baltimore County; and a son.
