Quarterdeck and Bridge

by Lloyd J. Graybar

U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE COLLECTION

RAMROD STRAIGHT AT AGE SIXTY, VICE ADMIRAL ERNEST J. KING EXperienced one of the most painful moments of his career when, on 15 March 1939, he walked over to congratulate his longtime acquaintance, Admiral Harold R. Stark, on Stark’s appointment as the U.S. Navy’s next Chief of Naval Operations. At his age, King did not expect a second opportunity to reach the U.S. Navy’s top position. His fears were confirmed later in 1939 when he was appointed to the General Board, an aggregation of officers, nearing retirement, whose wisdom could be culled for recommendations on such matters as proper characteristics for the next generation of ships or of sites for future base construction. The work was bound to be a disappointment to someone like King who wanted to command, not to advise.¹

Born in Lorain, Ohio, on 23 November 1878, King was the oldest of four surviving children of James Clydesdale King and Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Keam. James King was born in the small town of Bridge-of-Weir, Scotland, and Bessie was raised in Plymouth, England. Both were brought to the United States by their parents. A man of outspoken integrity, James King held several jobs before settling down to work in the maintenance shops of the Cleveland, Lorain and Wheeling Railroad in Lorain. Ernest, who often worked in the shops with his father during summers and for one entire year as well, graduated as valedictorian of his high school class in 1897. He then gained an appointment to the United States Naval Academy.²

Gifted in the classroom, King was also respected for his leadership by both fellow students and administrators of the Naval Academy and was named batallion commander for his first-class year, an auspicious culmination to his career as a cadet. By the time King graduated fourth in his class in 1901, he already had combat experience, for he was one of a handful of lower classmen who had finagled orders for sea duty during the War with Spain. His ship, the protected cruiser San Francisco, came under fire from Spanish fortifications at Havana hours before the war ended.3

Upon completing his studies at the Naval Academy, King went to sea as a passed midshipman in the survey ship Eagle. An eye affliction necessitated his hospitalization; on his release, he reported to the new battleship Illinois, which spent summers in European waters and the winter of 1902–03 on Caribbean maneuvers. Alert for assignments that were considered career enhancing, King accepted a transfer to the cruiser Cincinnati as a division and watch officer. The ship was at Culebra, Puerto Rico, when King joined her, but she was soon ordered to the Asiatic Squadron. King passed his ensign’s examinations while on board the Cincinnati.⁴

During a 1905 leave, King married Martha (“Mattie”) Egerton of Baltimore, his best girl during his cadet days. The couple would have seven children. King returned to sea shortly after the marriage to spend the final year (1905–06) of his initial five-year tour of sea duty in the battleship Alabama. His promotion to lieutenant in 1906 (most officers then skipped the grade of lieutenant junior grade) came as a great relief, for King had previously received four black marks for various infractions and was rightly, if belatedly, concerned whether they would be sufficient to block his promotion. After the fourth, he had resolved never to get another black mark, and he never did. He remained opinionated and abrasive, however, and continued to court the disfavor of superiors, with whom he disagreed, by speaking his mind. After three years as a drillmaster and gunnery instructor at the Naval Academy (for one year, he was co-supervisor of the new Bancroft Hall and its one thousand resident midshipmen), King received a choice assignment in 1909 as flag secretary to Rear Admiral Hugo Osterhaus, who had just been given a division of battleships in the Atlantic. King held the post for a year until Osterhaus went ashore. In 1910, King became chief engineer of the battleship New Hampshire and returned to Osterhaus’s staff as flag secretary the following year when the admiral was named Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet. King then served (1912–14) as executive officer of the Engineering Experiment Station in Annapolis, Maryland. For a year, he also edited the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, a publication to which he contributed several thoughtful essays over the years.⁵

Promoted to lieutenant commander in 1913, King secured his first command, the destroyer Terry, in 1914 when the Navy rushed reinforcements to Mexican waters following a controversial incident at Tampico and President Wilson’s decision to occupy the important port of Vera Cruz. King next commanded the Cassin in the Atlantic Destroyer Flotilla. For a while, he had additional duty as aide to Captain Williams Sims, commander of the flotilla and one of the most able, albeit opinionated, officers in the Navy. When the two men disagreed at a staff conference, Sims criticized King’s views in a way that King thought was unnecessarily derogatory; the next day he requested to be relieved as Sims’s aide. A year later, he was pleasantly surprised when Sims recommended that he be given command of the Sixth Division of Destroyers over several officers senior to King. Sims described King as “one of the ablest officers of his grade of my acquaintance.”6

King recognized, however, that for his own advancement he would do well to have duty on the staff of another respected officer. His inquiries assured him that Admiral Henry Mayo, recently named commander of the Battleship Force, Atlantic Fleet, was just such a man. King, who had benefited from Osterhaus’s patronage, secured appointment to Mayo’s staff as engineering officer but was fortunate to spend much of his time dealing with tactical and strategic matters and became assistant chief of staff in 1915. King was also pleased to find that he could disagree with Mayo and have his own opinions validated if Mayo saw merit in them. Both men disliked excessive centralization and professed belief in the initiative of the subordinate. During King’s subsequent career, however, he sometimes looked more closely over a subordinate’s shoulders than he might have and, when provoked by incompetence or carelessness, flared up into a temper that became legendary in the Navy.⁷

King normally would have been rotated to shore duty in 1917, but war with Germany appeared imminent, and he was retained on Mayo’s staff. Mayo had fleeted up to become commander of the Atlantic Fleet. For a time, King served Mayo as acting chief of staff and was delegated much responsibility that proved invaluable for King’s own education in high command. Although the occasion did not arise for Mayo to take the fleet to sea for combat, King spent considerable time in England and France with Mayo. He met such luminaries as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, U.S. General John J. Pershing, and British Admirals John Jellicoe and David Beatty, with whom Mayo conferred. From his contacts, King developed an enduring skepticism about the fighting capabilities of the Royal Navy and deep suspicion of the political motives of British leaders.⁸

King’s promotion to captain (temporary) came through only weeks before the war ended. After a tour as head of the Postgraduate School of Annapolis (1919–21), King hoped to return to sea in destroyers, but he was too senior to have command of a destroyer group and too junior for command of a flotilla or a cruiser. He accepted command of the refrigerator ship Bridge. No cruisers were available in 1922 when King was made a captain on the permanent list, and he agreed to attend submarine school at New London, Connecticut, in order to qualify for command of a submarine division in the Atlantic. All told, King spent four years with the submarine force, first as a division commander and then as commander of the submarine base at New London, Connecticut. As base commander (1923–26), he lived comfortably with his large family and, as the Navy’s senior officer in the state of Connecticut, represented the Navy on public occasions. For a time, he had detached duty to command the raising of submarine S-51 that had sunk in deep water off Block Island, Rhode Island. The difficult salvage operation went on for several months during the fall of 1925 and resumed in the spring of 1926. It won favorable publicity for the Navy and praise for King, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Two years later, he received another for directing the salvage of S-4.9

Again due for sea duty in 1926, King still could not obtain command of a cruiser. While he was mulling over his future, however, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett asked King if he would care to go into aviation. Moffett, once recognized as one of the surface navy’s most able and aggressive officers, then headed the Bureau of Aeronautics, which was involved in virtually everything having to do with aviation. The linear system of promotion that still kept King from getting command of a cruiser also made it difficult for Moffett to find officers experienced in aviation with sufficient seniority to command naval aviation’s major shore facilities and its ships. Because the new carriers Lexington and Saratoga soon would be completed, Moffett had decided to recruit men such as King. He offered them the chance to attend flight school at Pensacola, Florida, and qualify either as an observer, as he himself had, or take pilot’s training if they preferred and could pass the physical requirements. King accepted Moffett’s offer after careful consideration. His initial assignment was as captain of the seaplane tender Wright, whose attached pilots King badgered for flying lessons. He then interrupted his tour in the Wright to take the student aviator’s course at Pensacola and earned his wings in May 1927. Although he and other officers who first entered aviation during their forties were regarded as Johnny-come-latelies by younger officers who had gone into flying at an earlier stage in their careers but who did not have the seniority in rank required to command carriers and seaplane tenders, King was proud that he had qualified as a pilot.¹⁰

King was now eligible for various appealing billets within Moffett’s empire. He completed his tour in the Wright (1927–28), briefly served as commander of Aircraft Squadrons, Scouting Fleet (Atlantic), and next became assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics (1928–29). He then had a disagreement with Moffett over whether Moffett, as head of the Bureau of Aeronautics, should control the assignment of aviators to billets. King’s belief that the Bureau of Navigation should assign aviators, just as it assigned all other officers, led him to request a transfer. Moffett obliged him with a comfortable and important assignment, command of the Naval Air Station at Hampton Roads, Virginia. In 1930, King received command of the carrier Lexington, based at Coronado Roads, California, with her sister ship Saratoga. Though reputed to be a happy ship, the Lexington did not measure up to King’s exacting standards. Well before his two-year cruise in her was over, King made the carrier into a taut ship. Such ships, he insisted, were the truly happy ones. Most important, King insisted that the personnel of the squadrons assigned to the Lexington were under his command, not just the ship’s crew, as the aviators maintained.11

King left the Lexington in 1932 to take the senior course at the Naval War College. While there, he was notified that he would become a rear admiral as soon as a vacancy in that rank opened. The death of Moffett in an accident in April 1933 spurred King to seek assignment as Moffett’s successor. He got the billet and, during his tour in Washington, presided over many improvements in naval aviation. For instance, he cooperated with Rear Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, to recruit college graduates as naval aviation cadets needed to augment the few Annapolis men who were then entering aviation.¹²

King’s assets, including intelligence and hard work, were partially offset by his liabilities—awkward public speaking and impatience with questions that he thought were elementary or just plain stupid. He never did become a gifted speaker, nor did he develop tactfulness. He did improve as a witness before Congress, however, thanks to the assistance of such able subordinates as Donald Duncan and Arthur Radford, both to become flag officers, and the aid of sympathetic congressmen, such as William Ayres and Carl Vinson, with whom he worked well in private.¹³

In a time of financial austerity, King was able to gain the appropriations to keep naval aviation going forward and made good use of the money. King knew, however, that he needed to complete a three-year tour at sea before turning sixty to have a chance at either of the navy’s two top uniformed positions: Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet, or Chief of Naval Operations. Accordingly, he sought relief from his post in Washington and in 1936 was named Commander, Aircraft, Base Force (Pacific), the so-called patrol plane command.¹⁴

Relying on the new Catalina patrol planes whenever possible, King cruised the Pacific in his flagship, the Wright, to identify atolls and even coral reefs where the tender and her flock of seaplanes could anchor. He drove his subordinates to improve naval aviation’s performance and often shared risks with them. On one memorable occasion when the Wright was at French Frigate Shoals, some six hundred miles west of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, King ordered a squadron of seaplanes to take off in stormy weather from French Frigate Shoals for remote Kingman’s Reef. The squadron commander, Walter F. Boone, later to become a four-star admiral, protested, but King ordered Boone to proceed. En route, Boone realized that the squadron would never reach its destination and secured King’s permission by radio to divert to Honolulu. Despite the near calamity, King was delighted with the results, for it was the first time that a flight far from its base had received instructions by radio to alter its mission. If the timid were to transfer, reasoned King, the Navy would be better prepared for war.15

In 1938, King fleeted up to Commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, a highly coveted position that normally meant command of the navy’s carrier operations. King’s old friend, Admiral Edward Kalbfus, his immediate superior in Battle Force, often gave King a free hand to use the carriers as he wished in the important fleet exercises. King, in common with more experienced but younger aviators, such as Captain John Towers, maintained that the fast carriers needed to steam independently of the slow battle line to operate effectively. In Fleet Problem XIX held in 1938, King was at his best. Often writing his own orders, which were, in Boone’s words, “the ultimate in clarity, brevity, and incisiveness,” King had his squadrons practice night operations. Using a storm front to screen his carriers, King ordered planes from the Saratoga to “bomb” Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack demonstrated what the aviation community long had been arguing: audaciously led carriers could deal powerful blows with their air groups far beyond the reach of the battle line.¹⁶

In Fleet Problem XX, held in the Caribbean in March 1939, King did not perform as well. Although he was ruled successful in his “attack” on the Panama Canal, King bullied Rear Admiral William F. Halsey, who commanded a carrier division consisting of the new Yorktown and Enterprise, into paring his staff, and he antagonized the much admired Captain Marc A. Mitscher when he ruled that Mitscher’s patrol plane mission against King’s carriers had been a failure. Mitscher, who, like Towers, was a widely respected career aviator, believed otherwise. King also caused alarm when, irate at his flag signalman, he took control of the flag hoists himself, only to cause confusion among his ships’ captains. Near collisions ensued.¹⁷

President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended these maneuvers and announced Stark’s appointment as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) at their conclusion. Yet, other factors were uppermost in Roosevelt’s decision to select Stark. Evidence shows that King’s name never reached the final slate of officers from whom Roosevelt selected the CNO. The Navy was not ready to give its top position to an aviator, nor were King’s peers willing to ignore his well-known abrasiveness and his drinking (which he was able to curb when war began). Further, Stark was a longtime friend of Roosevelt’s and King had apparently gone out of his way, while in Washington as a bureau chief, to avoid the appearance of cultivating the President’s friendship. Ambitious as he was, King was still determined not to let it be said that he had “greased” his way to the top, nor, as military analyst Hanson Baldwin later wrote of him, could he “be had.”¹⁸

Passed over for CNO, King was appointed to the consultative General Board when his tour as Commander, Aircraft, Battle Force, ended in the summer of 1939. Service on the General Board did not turn out to be the twilight cruise that King had feared when he was informed of his appointment to it. When war broke out in Europe, the Roosevelt administration no longer could ignore America’s naval forces in the Atlantic. In December 1940, dissatisfied with the performance of the Patrol Force (the name then given to the Atlantic command), Stark and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox persuaded Roosevelt that King was the man to get the most from the motley collection of ships then in the Atlantic. Rescued from the backwaters of the General Board, King would again be at sea as the United States entered one of the most critical periods in its history, not yet at war, but the source of supplies that were vital to Great Britain. Although he transported Roosevelt to Argentia, Newfoundland, for Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter Conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, King had little to do with the deliberations of the political and military leaders who attended the conference other than to listen and to think about what they portended for his command, which had already been upgraded, renamed the Atlantic Fleet, and designated a four-star billet. Despite the receipt of reinforcements, King realized by the summer of 1941 that his command, then responsible for patrolling the Western Atlantic from Brazil to Iceland, still had insufficient resources and that demands on it would probably grow. Three of his destroyers had well-publicized encounters with German U-boats as 1941 advanced, and King expected that more incidents would occur, probably leading to war with Germany.19

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war, King was summoned to Washington for one of his frequent conferences with Stark. He returned to the capital on December 15 to be informed by Stark and Knox that Chester W. Nimitz would assume command of the battered Pacific Fleet and that King was being named Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet (CinCUS). This put him over both Nimitz and Royal Ingersoll, whom he selected as his successor in the Atlantic. King quickly decided to maintain his headquarters in Washington, rather than at sea, as his predecessors had done in peacetime, and to rename his position CominCh; the traditional CinCUS sounded too much like “sink us.” He did have his own flagship, a converted yacht, that served as his floating home when at anchor in the Washington Navy Yard. His family lived in the Naval Observatory, but King had grown apart from his wife and confined his family visits to Sunday afternoons. As CominCh, King would have command authority over all operating forces of the Navy, as well as the responsibility for preparing current war plans. CNO Stark would prepare long-range war plans and have control over logistics. The two men cooperated, but, in March 1942, Stark advised President Roosevelt that he wished to be relieved as CNO and that King should assume the duties of that office in addition to those of CominCh. Roosevelt promptly agreed.²⁰

In exercising his new authority, King had numerous conflicts with Secretary of the Navy Knox and Knox’s successor, James V. Forrestal, as well as with his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), the group that decided strategy for British and American forces. He also tried to get Roosevelt to give him control of the Navy’s powerful bureaus, which reported to the Secretary of the Navy rather than to the uniformed head of the service, but he failed. Roosevelt reasoned that to make such a change might disrupt the usual procedures because the Bureau of Ordnance and the other agencies in question, such as King’s former Bureau of Aeronautics, had responsibilities that required dealing with manufacturers. He therefore denied King’s requests. Despite his failure to gain control of the bureaus, King was able to manage the Navy’s Washington bureaucracy effectively with the aid of three men in particular: Vice Admiral Frederick Home, who had charge of logistical planning and distribution and headed the Navy’s shore establishment and shipbuilding programs; Rear Admiral Charles M. Cooke, Jr., who directed planning; and Admiral Richard Edwards, who served as King’s chief of staff. King and Home did not get along well personally, but King recognized Home’s administrative abilities and made good use of him for most of the war.21

Events in the Pacific during the first weeks of U.S. involvement in the war directed the attention of the CCS to Australia because Allied defenses to the north seemed likely to crumble. Although Australia had never received much attention from prewar American planners, King was obliged to spread his forces in that direction when the British chiefs declined responsibility. King insisted that New Caledonia, nine hundred miles due east of Australia, had to be vigorously defended and prevailed upon a reluctant George C. Marshall, the respected chief of staff of the U.S. Army, to assign a garrison to New Caledonia. King had already ordered Nimitz to defend the supply lines between the United States and Australia, and New Caledonia, along with bases in Samoa, Fiji, and the New Hebrides, would be essential.²²

King’s background in submarines and aviation helped him to put the sunken and disabled battleships at Pearl Harbor out of his mind and plan for the aggressive use of the assets remaining in the Pacific, namely, submarines that would be deployed as commerce raiders and carrier task forces used as mobile units. The latter would threaten enemy lines of communication that stretched ever farther into the South Pacific while they safeguarded the U.S. Navy’s lines of communication then being established in the region.²³

Already in December 1941, while King was winding up his tenure as Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet (CinCLant), the Navy had been driven from the Central Pacific and lost its bases on Guam and Wake Island. King seems to have concurred with Stark’s decision not to chance a major fleet engagement over Wake. Although some American naval units, principally a few cruisers, some destroyers, and patrol planes that had been part of the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines, would soon be engaging enemy forces in the hastily organized joint American-British-Dutch-Australia (ABDA) command, consisting primarily of Malaya, the East Indies, and the northern approaches to Australia, King regarded their efforts as sacrificial in nature. He was not one to accept continued retreat, however, and sought action where the circumstances offered some possibility of success. In March 1942, King explained to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the fleet must fight the enemy “where he is to be found, to seek him out rather than to husband our fighting strength at home and await his coming. . . . The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”24

Accordingly, King prodded Nimitz to use his three single-carrier task forces (all he then had available pending the transfer of the Hornet from the Atlantic) to raid Japanese bases at Rabaul on New Britain; Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea; on Wake Island; and on remote Marcus Island, about one thousand miles southeast of Tokyo. As a result, the Lexington force, which, in early 1942, carried much of the burden of the naval air war along with the Yorktown and Enterprise, was at sea for more than two months while it hit or threatened Japanese bases. Finally, in April 1942, King took his first major gamble by sending two carriers, commanded by Vice Admiral Halsey, on Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle’s Tokyo raid. The unprecedented use of Doolittle’s twin-engine Air Force bombers that were temporarily based on the carrier Hornet allowed the United States, for the first time, to bomb the Japanese homeland, rather than simply sting the enemy on the peripheries of its far-flung empire. Historians disagree on whether these raids from the carriers had any strategic value or whether King unduly risked America’s scant resources simply for the sake of appearing to do something. King’s biographer, Thomas Buell, himself a retired naval officer, takes a dim view of King’s orders, especially the Doolittle raid, but, more recently, historian Clark Reynolds whose knowledge of World War II carrier operations is unsurpassed, has argued that the Tokyo raid and other aerial attacks on Japan’s Pacific bases did accomplish much of value. Not knowing when or where the Americans might strike, the Japanese redeployed ships, ceased sending replacement aircraft to forward areas that had already been hit by U.S. carriers or were exposed to such attacks, and postponed their effort to seize Port Moresby on the southeastern coast of New Guinea. In Japanese hands, Port Moresby could be used to disrupt the supply lines between the United States and Australia. Able to send two carriers into the Coral Sea in May (Halsey’s task force had not yet returned from the raid on Tokyo), Nimitz’s Pacific Fleet rewarded King’s boldness by sinking one small Japanese carrier and decimating the air groups of two large carriers. Although the battle cost American forces the Lexington, the Japanese invasion fleet was recalled from the Coral Sea before it could disembark troops at Port Moresby.²⁵

The question after Coral Sea was where Japanese forces would strike next. Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort’s communications intelligence office in Pearl Harbor convinced Nimitz that Midway was their target, but the Office of Naval Communications in Washington argued that Port Moresby or some other location in the South Pacific, perhaps New Caledonia, would be their objective. Logically, therefore, any move toward Midway Island would be a feint and responding to it might result in a setback in the South Pacific that could be ill afforded. King had doubts about Nimitz’s judgment but decided that, as commander-in-chief in the Pacific, Nimitz had to be allowed to deploy his forces as he saw fit and that concentrating his three carriers to defend one location was sound thinking. It was a difficult decision on King’s part, but one which paid rich dividends, the destruction of four Japanese carriers at Midway. King could now drop what Reynolds calls the “fleet-in-being” strategy that had hitherto characterized his planning in favor of an offensive-defensive strategy, by which American forces began the arduous effort to halt the Japanese advance through seizure of the recently constructed enemy bases on Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the lower Solomon Islands.26

The Guadalcanal campaign brought King some of his most difficult months of the war. To begin with, American strategy emphasized the defeat of Germany, the most formidable of the Axis powers. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff had unanimously agreed that Australia should be saved, the question was hotly debated whether amphibious operations mounted against Tulagi and Guadalcanal were needed to safeguard Australia. King believed that they were; waiting too long to seize them, he later wrote, would only have allowed the enemy “to button up every exact button of their gaiters.” Then, too, the Solomons had been assigned to the Southwest Pacific Theater commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. King and MacArthur saw eye to eye on few matters, and King refused to provide MacArthur the carriers and the Marines that the general wanted to strike directly at Rabaul, the linchpin in Japan’s network of South Pacific bases. Instead, King instructed Nimitz to plan an invasion of Tulagi. MacArthur finally agreed that a campaign in the lower Solomons offered greater prospects of success than an immediate assault on Rabaul, but he demurred at the command arrangements that would give authority to the Navy, even though Tulagi and Guadalcanal were in his theater.²⁷

King and Marshall conferred in person, rather than exchanging memoranda as they normally did, and decided to relocate the theater boundary so that Nimitz would have control of operations in the lower Solomons while MacArthur would have jurisdiction over any subsequent operations to the north. To succeed in the campaign, code-named Operation Watchtower, King also needed material and supplies from the Army. General Marshall and General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps, however, were far more interested in the approaching landings in North Africa that were designed to strengthen the Allied hand in the Mediterranean by landing American and British forces in Morocco and Algeria. Marshall and King both preferred a cross-channel operation against German forces in France to a campaign in what they both considered a peripheral area, but the British would approve only the less risky North African campaign. Although King was committed to providing the naval support needed for these operations and appointed the able Rear Admiral Kent Hewitt to command the Moroccan landings, his colleagues on the CCS saw him as being more interested in undertaking offensives in the Pacific, operations for which Allied strategy had not expressly called.28

Marshall refused to divert men and equipment to the Pacific that might have to be sent to North Africa and that, in any event, were needed for the buildup in England that would eventually enable the Western Allies to overcome Germany. Thus, King launched Watchtower with only the limited resources of the Navy in August 1942. Although the Marines’ landings on Guadalcanal were unopposed, the Japanese augmented their forces already on the ninety-mile-long island and bitterly contested the U.S. foothold throughout September and October. The numerous task forces that were sent to the Solomons to guard American supply lines and to interdict Japan’s Tokyo Express supplying its forces on the island engaged in a series of battles that ultimately cost King two of his four fleet carriers and eight cruisers, as well as many other ships that suffered heavy damage. The press berated King and the Navy for managing the news to obscure the extent of American losses, for displaying poor leadership, and for blocking MacArthur from exercising overall leadership in the South Pacific. Not until October did Arnold and Marshall allow some of their forces to be redirected to Guadalcanal from elsewhere in the Pacific. The decision of King and Nimitz to replace Vice Admiral Robert Lee Ghormley, the Navy’s South Pacific commander, with the aggressive Halsey also contributed to the ultimate U.S. triumph on Guadalcanal. To help strengthen his own position, King himself began to hold behind-the-scenes meetings with several senior Washington correspondents in a successful effort to explain the rationale of the Navy’s operations and to place them in the context of Allied strategy. Never comfortable when speaking in a formal setting, King was at his best when meeting with this small group that called itself the “Arlington County Commandos.”²⁹

At almost the same time that American forces gained the upper hand on Guadalcanal, MacArthur won the first of his many victories on New Guinea. The triumphs of early 1943 provided King and MacArthur a chance to move northward toward Rabaul, and King was quick to seize the chance to maintain momentum in the Pacific. As his memoirs put it, “Japan was not likely to wait to be defeated at a time and place convenient to the Allies.” King also realized that, to maintain the flow of men and supplies to the Pacific, he had to continue using the forces already there. With the Joint Chiefs sanctioning further offensives in the Pacific, Halsey, now operating under MacArthur’s strategic direction, was able to continue moving up the Solomons, while predominantly Army forces under MacArthur moved northwestward along the New Guinea coast.30

As a member of both the Joint Chiefs and the CCS, however, King was also obligated to pursue coalition warfare. The British often found him difficult to deal with and, for that reason, appointed a four-star admiral as head of the British Naval Mission in Washington. This prompted Churchill, in a moment of pique, to complain about the need to “dance attendance” upon King. Despite his interest in the Pacific, King did not try to reverse the Germany-first strategy that his predecessor Stark had helped to formulate. Although he demurred with certain aspects of European strategy and wished to get ahead with a cross-channel operation that would bring maximal Anglo-American power to bear against German forces in western France, the most advantageous location for mobile warfare, he did provide the necessary shipping to make victory possible in the Battle of the Atlantic and to support the Sicilian and Italian campaigns of 1943.³¹

During the war’s early months, King’s conduct of the Battle of the Atlantic resulted in the greatest criticism that he received in World War II. German U-boats wreaked havoc on American coastal shipping during January and February 1942, but King resisted the use of convoys because he believed that he lacked sufficient escort vessels to make them effective and that the formation of convoys with inadequate escort would merely give the enemy larger targets. Not until the spring could King establish a day-and-night interlocking convoy system running from Newport, Rhode Island, to Key West, Florida. In the meantime, he was subject to scathing criticism from the British and several ill-conceived suggestions from President Roosevelt. By the end of 1942, the submarine threat to shipping in U.S. coastal waters was contained, and King was able to give closer attention to the Battle of the Atlantic by appointing himself commander of the newly established Tenth Fleet and turning over details of its operations to his able subordinate, Rear Admiral Francis Low. Although he kept control of the battle near at hand, King did not let its conduct and criticism of his handling of it blind him to the larger strategic picture. He recognized that he needed numerous destroyer escorts and escort carriers in the Atlantic, but there was no particular need in that theater for the many fast carriers that would be joining the fleet from 1943 onward. These could be sent to the Pacific.³²

A student of military history and strategy, King had read in depth about the campaigns of Napoleon’s marshals and of the American Civil War. Like Stephen B. Luce and Alfred Thayer Mahan, he believed that, whether on the ground or on the sea, the art of military operations could be reduced to such principles as the initiative of the subordinate and the economy of force. He was also well versed in the thinking of other American strategists, including former Naval War College President Clarence Williams, who maintained that the most certain way to defeat Japan in the long-anticipated war was to cross the Pacific and seize advance bases in the Marshall and, possibly, the Mariana Islands. Increasingly, King articulated the view that naval air power could be best used to seize bases in the Central Pacific. Although he wanted Halsey to press on in conjunction with MacArthur in the South Pacific until Rabaul was taken (bypassed, as things turned out), he also wished Nimitz to initiate a campaign that would begin in the Marshalls and proceed through the Marianas until Luzon in the Philippines or Formosa could be taken and the Imperial Japanese Navy punished when it sortied to defend such strategically vital areas. King then foresaw additional campaigns to occupy and develop bases along the China coast. To facilitate his operations, he tried in vain to prod the British into reopening land communications with China via Burma. He hoped that, if the Japanese were tied down by a major effort in China, they would be unable to reinforce their Central Pacific garrisons. Rather than attack the Japanese in northern Burma, Churchill wished to mount amphibious operations against the Burma coast or Sumatra with the aim of liberating Malaya instead of linking up with our Chinese allies. Such policy differences revived the reservations about British imperialism first felt by King during World War I.33

Even without cooperation from the British in Burma, King remained convinced that the Japanese were vulnerable in the Central Pacific. Thus, he pushed hard for a new Central Pacific campaign that began at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943. Early in 1944, shortly before Nimitz’s forces were to take the next step and land on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, King journeyed to San Francisco for one of his periodic meetings with his Pacific Ocean commander. When he left San Francisco, King believed that Nimitz concurred with his strategy but was shocked later to learn that both MacArthur and Nimitz were raising objections to his plans to invade the Marianas. MacArthur wished to see the American effort in the Pacific consolidated under his leadership with a single thrust along the New Guinea coast to the Philippines. Nimitz and his own planners were skeptical about the value of the Marianas, for the islands contained no suitable site for the large anchorage that the Pacific Fleet would require as it moved toward the Philippines. Yet, Nimitz agreed to attack the Marianas because the Army Air Force wanted the islands for the construction of air bases from which bombers could strike the Japanese home islands. Not until March 1944 did the Joint Chiefs rule in favor of continuing the dual advance, with one prong led by MacArthur and the other by Nimitz, whose forces would land in the Marianas in June. From there, they would strike westward to support MacArthur’s landings on Mindanao in the southern Philippines in November.34

So formidable had American power become that the U.S. Navy could commit large forces both to the D-Day landings in France and to landings in the Marianas. At the Marianas in June and in October at the Philippine island of Leyte, where MacArthur’s land and air forces proceeded in lieu of Mindanao, American naval forces delivered grievous blows to Japanese seapower. The Japanese use of kamikazes (suicide planes), however, caused King and Nimitz much alarm. Nevertheless, King was sufficiently pleased with the progress of the war in the Pacific that, during Allied summit meetings at Yalta, Crimea, in early 1945 and at Potsdam, Germany, in July, he had almost nothing to say; he knew that the strategy previously determined was bringing victory over Japan closer. He did continue to believe that a large Soviet effort directed against Japanese forces in Manchuria would be helpful. At the conclusion of the Potsdam conference, he continued his habit of sightseeing, viewing not only the scenes of recent battles in and around Berlin but journeying to Bavaria to visit Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. At Potsdam, King had been informed by General Marshall that the atomic bomb had been successfully tested and that President Harry S Truman had decided to use it against Japan. It is doubtful whether King wanted the war to end with the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but when the news of the Japanese surrender reached him, he simply told his flag secretary, “Well, it’s all over. I wonder what I’m going to do tomorrow.”³⁵

King left office in the middle of December, his final weeks as CNO embittered by his inability to get along with James Forrestal, who had been Secretary of the Navy since Knox’s death in 1944. Awarded the five stars of a fleet admiral in December 1944, King never did retire from the Navy. For a time, he maintained an office in the Navy Department, where he began work on his memoirs. After the war, he received many other honors, but the onset of ill health in 1947 made the last decade of his life difficult. To receive the care that he required, he lived alternately in a suite of rooms at the Bethesda (Maryland) Naval Hospital and in the hospital at Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Navy Yard, where he could be more comfortable in the summer. He died in 1956 and was interred at the cemetery of the United States Naval Academy.³⁶

Officially, no American naval officer had ever held more authority than King, and, of course, the prodigious size of American naval forces during World War II in personnel, ships, overseas bases, and shore establishments throughout the United States had never before (or has since) been equaled. King’s greatest contribution to victory was as a strategist, especially in the Pacific, where much of the war effort bore the imprint of his thought. “If I were asked to single out any one thing in which I take deep satisfaction,” he wrote to former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, “I think likely it would be the part I played in urging that the war in the Pacific should receive its due share of attention—and of ‘ways and means.’” The campaigns in the Solomons and subsequently in the Marshalls and Marianas were attributable to King. He was not inflexible, however. Later, for instance, he yielded to the views of Nimitz and most of his ranking planners that the United States had insufficient forces to take Formosa and develop bases there, as King preferred. Rather than remain idle until the defeat of Germany released additional personnel for use in the Pacific, he accepted Nimitz’s advocacy of proceeding to Iwo Jima and Okinawa prior to landing in Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands. King remained hopeful that a combination of blockade and bombing could cause Japan to surrender, but he acknowledged that there was need to plan the invasion of Kyushu. In American hands, Kyushu could be used to tighten the vise on the faltering Japanese economy, but it could also serve as the springboard for the invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu, which Army planners advocated.37

King had entered the Navy midway through the first generation of steel ships. No dreadnought had joined the American battle line, nor did submarines or aircraft carriers yet threaten it. During his first two decades in the Navy, his career profile was that of a conventional line officer, differentiated primarily by his uncommon quest for excellence and by his insistence that an officer’s education must be furthered by continued reading and schooling. During World War I, King met both Beatty and Jellicoe of the Royal Navy and admired his own commander, Admiral Mayo, more than any officer he knew, but he was wise enough to take from Mayo only principles of planning and organization and not any faith in the battleship that had been the backbone of Mayo’s Atlantic Fleet. Beginning in the 1920s, however, King’s restless ambition led him to leave the “Gun Club” of the surface navy and to acquire more firsthand experience, initially with submarines, then with aviation, than any of his peers. His knowledge of strategy and of the widest range of naval capabilities would subsequently serve him and the Navy well. King’s personality was not a pleasing one, but, in his single-minded devotion to duty, he continued to display throughout World War II the professionalism, intelligence, and intensity characteristic of his earlier years and culminated his service by leading the U.S. Navy to victory in its first two-ocean war.

NOTES

1. Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Boston, 1980), 117–119; Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York, 1952), 291–94; B. Mitchell Simpson, III, Admiral Harold R. Stark: Architect of Victory, 1939–1945 (Columbia, S.C., 1989), 1–2.

2. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 3–8; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 9–15.

3. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 8–14; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 16–34.

4. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 15–25; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 38–43.

5. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 26–42; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 46–87.

6. Sims quoted in King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 95.

7. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 43–50; James C. Bradford, “Henry C. Mayo: Last of the Independent Naval Diplomats,” in Bradford, ed., Admirals of the New Steel Navy: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1880–1930 (Annapolis, Md., 1990), 253–281.

8. Bradford, “Mayo,” 268–72; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 50–53; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 97–145.

9. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 54–70; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 146–85.

10. Clark G. Reynolds, “William A. Moffett: Steward of the Air Revolution,” in Bradford, Admirals of New Steel Navy, 374–92; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 71–76; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 188–94.

11. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 78–93; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 206–33; William F. Trimble, Admiral William A. Moffett: Architect of Naval Aviation (Washington, D.C., 1994), 214–15; Eugene Wilson, “The Navy’s First Carrier Task Force,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 76 (February 1950): 159–69; King to Walter Brennan, 3 January 1943, Box 9, King Correspondence, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as King Corr.).

12. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 94–97; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 242–43; Trimble, Moffett, 250–73.

13. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 98–100; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 247–63.

14. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 100–01; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 264–65.

15. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 102–28; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 266–78.

16. Clark G. Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy (Annapolis, Md., 1994), 270–81; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 108–13, Boone quote, 111; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 279–94; J. J. Clark, “Navy Sundowner Par Excellence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 97 (June 1971): 54–59.

17. Reynolds, Towers, 287–89; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 113–17.

18. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 117–19; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 291–94. Baldwin quoted by Robert W. Love, Jr., “Ernest Joseph King,” in Love, ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md., 1980), 179.

19. Simpson, Stark, 61,128; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 123–50; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 310–46; Harry Sanders, “King of Oceans,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 100 (August 1974): 52–59; King to Frank Knox, 17 January 1941; King to Rear Admiral Frank Berrien, 9 February 1941; Commander H. R. Thurber to King, 6 March 1941; King to Thurber, 15 March 1941; General Thomas Holcomb to King, 10 March 1941; King to Rear Admiral D. M. LeBreton, 10 October 1941; and King to Chester Nimitz, 10 November 1941; all in Box 8, King Corr.; King to Walter Lippmann, 25 July 1940, Box 82, Series 3, Lippmann Correspondence, Sterling Library, Yale University (hereafter cited as Lippmann Corr.).

20. Simpson, Stark, 125–32; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 342–59; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 156–61.

21. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 153–55, 232–39, 406–09.

22. Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, Md., 1991), 246–49; Buell, Master of Sea Power, 152–72; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 360–77; E. B. Potter, Nimitz (Annapolis, Md., 1976), 31–35; King to Field Marshal Sir John Dill, 3 April 1942, Box 10, King Corr.

23. Clark G. Reynolds, “The U.S. Fleet-in-Being Strategy of 1942,” The Journal of Military History 58 (January 1994): 103–10.

24. Reynolds, “U.S. Fleet-in-Being Strategy,” 110–18; King quoted in Buell, Master of Sea Power, 193; John F. Wukovits, Devotion to Duty: A Biography of Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague (Annapolis, Md., 1995), 44–72; Grace Person Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War against Japan (Annapolis, Md., 1982), 55–71; Lloyd J. Graybar, “American Pacific Strategy after Pearl Harbor: The Relief of Wake Island,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 12 (Fall 1980): 134–50; King to Wesley Winans Stout, 30 March 1942, copy in Box 82, Lippmann Corr.

25. Buell Master of Sea Power, 172–200; John B. Lundstrom, The First South Pacific Campaign: Pacific Fleet Strategy, December 1941–June 1942 (Annapolis, Md., 1976), 28–34; Potter, Nimitz, 36–47; Reynolds, “U.S. Fleet-in-Being Strategy,” 110–18.

26. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 200–04; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 377–89; Lundstrom, First South Pacific Campaign, 154–64; see also note 23.

27. King to General Merritt Edson, 29 September 1949, copy in Box 4, Correspondence of Adm. Charles N. Cooke, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif. (hereafter cited as Cooke Corr.); King to General George C. Marshall, 10 July 1942, copy in Box 10, Cooke Corr.

28. King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 390–427; Potter, Nimitz, 173–80; King to Marshall, 3 September 1942, copy in Box 10, Cooke Corr.; Vivian Dykes to Lieutenant Colonel W. S. Sterling, 29 August 1942, and Sterling to Dykes, 29 September 1942, both in Cabinet 122/1582, Public Record Office, Kew, London, England (hereafter cited as PRO).

29. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 219–25,258–63; Lundstrom, First South Pacific Campaign, 128–36; Lloyd J. Graybar, “Admiral King’s Toughest Battle,” Naval War College Review 32 (February 1979): 38–47; Roscoe Drummond and Glen Perry, “King of the Seven Seas,” Look (22 December 1944): 42–49; Potter, Nimitz, 181–210.

30. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 278–81; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 428–44, quote, 442.

31. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 53; Sir John Slessor, The Central Blue: Recollections and Reflections (London, 1956), 491–99; Miller, War Plan Orange, 105–21; Captain Donald McIntyre, RN, Fighting Admiral: The Life of Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville (London, 1961), 226–27, 253–57; Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals (New York, 1978), 237–78; Potter, Nimitz, 237–78; King to Nimitz, 8 February 1944, copy in Box 22, Cooke Corr. Also, Sir John Dill to Churchill, 7 March 1942, Prem 3/478/6; First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander to Chancellor of the Exchequer, copy dated 10 April 1943, Prem 3/478/4; Alexander to Churchill, 27 April 1943, Prem 3/478/4; Alexander to Churchill, 3 May 1944, Prem 3/478/5; Churchill to First Lord of the Admiralty, 21 May 1944, Prem 3/478/5; and “dance attendance” in Churchill to First Lord, 27 May 1944, Prem 3/478/5, all in PRO.

32. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 282–99; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 445–75; Ladislas Farago, The Tenth Fleet (New York, 1962), 91–108; Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, II, 1942–1991 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1992), 64–83, 96–119,191–92.

33. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 272–75; Miller, War Plan Orange, 114–21; H. P. Will-mott, “Grave of a Dozen Schemes,” Joint Forces Quarterly 1 (Spring 1994): 82–91. For a concise overview of King’s strategy and the operations that implemented it, see the handsomely illustrated volume, Clark G. Reynolds, War in the Pacific (New York, 1990), 83–159.

34. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 438–47; Reynolds, Towers, 460–67; Winston Churchill, Observations on Chiefs of Staff minutes (44) 123, dated 14 February 1944, Prem 3/160/7, PRO.

35. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 463–79, 495–98, quote, 498; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 556–621; Henry H. Adams, Witness to Power: The Life of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (Annapolis, Md., 1985), 234–74; Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York, 1985), 172; Love, “King,” 178; John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, 1994), 247–57; Love, History of U.S. Navy, 2:253–77, 846; King to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, 31 January 1945, Box 10, King Corr. Although historians are divided about whether President Truman sought King’s concurrence in using the atom bomb against Japan (and evidence on this matter is both scant and contradictory), King recognized that, once it had been used, it was a military fact, and he made it clear during the last months of his watch that he favored testing the effects of the atom bomb against ships. For some of the ramifications of these tests that were held in the summer of 1946, see Lloyd J. Graybar, “The 1946 Atom Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” Journal of American History 72 (March 1986): 888–907, and Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll (Annapolis, Md., 1994), 15–16, 246–316.

36. Buell, Master of Sea Power, 480–97; King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral, 629–38.

37. Hayes, History of Joint Chiefs, 701–10, 722–29; Skates, Invasion of Japan, 36–83; Lundstrom, First South Pacific Campaign, 196–205; quotation in King to Josephus Daniels, 31 August 1945, Box 10, King Corr.

FURTHER READING

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