Everything about Ernest J King totally explained
Fleet Admiral Ernest Joseph King GCB (
November 23,
1878 –
June 25,
1956) was Commander in Chief,
United States Fleet and
Chief of Naval Operations (COMINCH-CNO) during
World War II. As COMINCH, he directed the
United States Navy's operations, planning, and administration and was a member of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the U.S. Navy's second most senior officer after
Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, and the second admiral to be promoted to five star rank. As COMINCH, he served under
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and later under
James Forrestal.
Early life
King was born in
Lorain, Ohio on
23 November 1878, the son of James Clydesdale King and Elizabath Keam King. He attended the
U.S. Naval Academy from
1897 until
1901, graduating fourth in his class. During his senior year at the Academy, he attained the rank of Cadet Lieutenant Commander, the highest possible cadet ranking at that time.
Surface Ships
While still at the Academy, he served on the
USS San Francisco during the
Spanish American War. After graduation, he served a junior officer on the
survey ship USS Eagle, the
battleships
USS Illinois,
USS Alabama and
USS New Hampshire, and the
cruiser USS Cincinnati.
While still at the Naval Academy, he met Martha Rankin ("Mattie") Egerton, a
Baltimore socialite, whom he married in a ceremony at the Naval Academy Chapel on
10 October 1905. They had six daughters, Claire, Elizabeth, Florence, Martha, Eleanor, and Mildred; and then a son, Ernest Joseph King, Jr. (Commander, USN Ret.)
King returned to shore duty at Annapolis in
1912. He received his first command, the destroyer
USS Terry in 1914, participating in the
United States occupation of Veracruz. He then moved on to a more modern ship,
USS Cassin.
During
World War I he served on the staff of
Vice Admiral Henry T. Mayo, the
Commander in Chief,
Atlantic Fleet. As such, he was a frequent visitor to the
Royal Navy and occasionally saw action as an observer on board British ships. It appears that his
anglophobia developed during this period, although the reasons are unclear. He was awarded the
Navy Cross "for distinguished service in the line of his profession as assistant chief of staff of the Atlantic Fleet".
After the war, King, now a
captain, became head of the
Naval Postgraduate School. Along with Captains
Dudley Wright Knox and
William S. Pye, King prepared a report on naval training that recommended changes to naval training and career paths. Most of the report's recommendations were accepted and became policy.
Submarines
Before
World War I he served in the surface fleet. From
1923 to
1925, he held several posts associated with
submarines. As a junior
captain , the best sea command he was able to secure in
1921 was the store ship
USS Bridge. The relatively new submarine force offered the prospect of advancement.
King attended a short training course at the
Naval Submarine Base New London before taking command of a submarine division, flying his
commodore's pennant from
USS S-20. He never earned his
Submarine Warfare insignia, although he did propose and design the now-familiar dolphin insignia. In 1923, he took over command of Submarine Base itself. During this period, he directed the salvage of the submarine S-51, earning the first of his three Distinguished Service Medals.
Aviation
In
1926, Rear Admiral
William A. Moffett, Chief of the
Bureau of Aeronautics, asked King if he'd consider a transfer to naval aviation. King accepted the offer and took command of the aircraft tender
USS Wright with additional duties as Senior Aide on the Staff of Commander Air Squadrons, Atlantic Fleet.
That year, the
United States Congress passed a law requiring that the commanders of all
aircraft carriers,
seaplane tenders, and aviation shore establishments be qualified
naval aviators. King therefore reported to
Naval Air Station Pensacola for aviator training in January
1927. He was the only captain in his class of twenty, which also included Commander
Richmond K. Turner. King received his
wings as Naval Aviator No. 3368 on
26 May 1927 and resumed command of
Wright. For a time, he frequently flew solo, flying down to Annapolis for weekend visits to his family, but his solo flying was cut short by a naval regulation that prohibited solo flights for aviators aged 50 or over. Between 1926 and 1936 he flew an average of 150 hours per annum.
King commanded
Wright until
1929, except for the brief interlude commanding the salvage operations of USS
S-4. He then became Assistant Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics under Moffett. The two fell out over certain elements of Bureau policy, and he was replaced by Commander
John Henry Towers and transferred to command of
Naval Station Norfolk.
On
20 June 1930, King became captain of the carrier
USS Lexington - then one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world - which he commanded for the next two years.
In
1932 he attended the
Naval War College. In a war college thesis entitled "The Influence of National Policy on Strategy", King expounded on the theory that America's weakness was
Representative democracy:
Following the death of Admiral Moffet in the crash of the airship
Akron on
4 April 1933, King became Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and was promoted to Rear Admiral on
26 April 1933. As Bureau chief, King worked closely with the chief of the
Bureau of Navigation, Rear Admiral
William D. Leahy to increase the number of naval aviators.
At the conclusion of his term as Bureau Chief in
1936, King became Commander, Aircraft, Base Force at
Naval Air Station North Island. He was promoted to Vice Admiral on
29 January 1938 on becoming Commander, Aircraft, Battle Force - at the time one of only three vice admiral billets in the US Navy.
King hoped to be appointed as either CNO or Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, but on
15 June 1939, he was posted to the General Board, an
elephant's graveyard where senior officers sat out the time remaining before retirement. A series of extraordinary events would alter this outcome.
Second World War
His career was resurrected by one of his few friends in the Navy, CNO Admiral
Harold "Betty" Stark, who realized that King's talent for command was being wasted on the General Board.[1] Stark appointed King as Commander-in-Chief,
Atlantic Fleet in the fall of 1940, and he was promoted to Admiral in February 1941. On
30 December 1941 he became Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet. On
18 March 1942, he was appointed Chief of Naval Operations, relieving Admiral Stark. He is the only person to hold this combined command. On
17 December 1944 he was promoted to the newly created rank of
Fleet Admiral. He retired on
December 15,
1945 but was recalled as an advisor to the
Secretary of the Navy in
1950.
After retiring, King lived in
Washington DC. He was active in his early post-retirement, but suffered a debilitating stroke in 1947, and subsequent ill-health ultimately forced him to stay in Naval Hospitals at Bethesda, Maryland, and at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. He died of a heart-attack in Kittery on
June 26, 1956 and was buried in the
United States Naval Academy Cemetery at
Annapolis, Maryland.
Analysis
King was highly intelligent and extremely capable, but controversial. Some consider him to have been one of the greatest admirals of the
20th century; others, however, point out that he never commanded ships or fleets at sea in war time, and that his
anglophobia led him to make decisions which cost many Allied lives. He was considered rude and abrasive; as a result, King was loathed by many officers with whom he served.
He was... perhaps the most disliked Allied leader of World War II. Only British Field Marshal Montgomery may have had more enemies... King also loved parties and often drank to excess. Apparently, he reserved his charm for the wives of fellow naval officers. On the job, he "seemed always to be angry or annoyed."
There was a
tongue-in-cheek remark about King, made by one of his daughters, carried about by Naval personnel at the time that
"he is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage." Roosevelt once described King as "...
a man who shaves with a blow torch".
King is famous for stating to a reporter, when the United States entered World War II: “When the shooting starts, they call for the sons-of-bitches”.
Response to Operation Drumbeat
At the start of US involvement in
World War II, King decided not to request blackouts on the U.S. eastern seaboard and not to
convoy ships. His critics attribute these decisions to King's Anglophobia, as the convoys and seaboard blackouts were British proposals, and he was loath to have his much-beloved U.S. Navy adopt any ideas from the
Royal Navy. He also refused, until March 1942, the loan of British convoy escorts when the USN had only a handful of suitable vessels. He was, however, aggressive in driving his destroyer captains to attack U-boats in defense of convoys and in planning counter-measures against German surface raiders, even before the formal declaration of war by Germany.
Instead of convoys, King had the U.S. Navy and
Coast Guard perform regular anti-submarine patrols, but these patrols followed a regular schedule.
U-boat commanders learned the schedule, and cooordinated their attacks to these schedules. Leaving the lights on in coastal towns back-lit merchant ships to the U-Boats. As a result, there were
disastrous shipping losses — two million tons lost in January and February 1942 alone, and urgent pressure applied from both sides of the Atlantic. However, King resisted the use of convoys because he believed, against the available evidence, that he lacked sufficient escort vessels to make them effective and that the formation of convoys with inadequate escort would give the enemy larger targets. Furthermore, blackouts were a politically-sensitive issue (coastal cities resisted, citing the loss of tourism revenue), and in any event would have been of limited value, due to the sheer numbers of "targets" available to the enemy.
In January 1942, King allowed troop convoy AT-10 to Iceland to take priority over anti-submarine work (it wasn't urgent) and some of his limited number of escort craft were reassigned to escort it. Despite this, a credible destroyer force was allowed to remain idle in New York when the first U-boats were known to be near and ships were being sunk off Long Island. It wasn't until May 1942 that King marshalled resources — small cutters and private vessels that he'd previously scorned — to establish a day-and-night interlocking convoy system running from Newport, Rhode Island, to Key West, Florida.
By August, 1942, the submarine threat to shipping in U.S. coastal waters had been contained. The U-boats' "second happy time" ended, with the loss of seven U-boats and a dramatic reduction in shipping losses. The same effect occurred when convoys were extended to the Caribbean. Despite the ultimate defeat of the U-boat, some of King's initial decisions in this theater had been flawed.
Noted naval historian Professor Robert W. Love stated that "Operation
Drumbeat (or
Paukenschlag) off the Atlantic Coast in early 1942 succeeded largely because the U.S. Navy was already committed to other tasks: transatlantic escort-of-convoy operations, defending troop transports, and maintaining powerful, forward-deployed Atlantic Fleet striking forces to prevent a breakout of heavy German surface forces. Navy leaders, especially Admiral King, were unwilling to risk troop shipping to provide escorts for coastal merchant shipping. Unscheduled, emergency deployments of Army units also created disruptions to navy plans, as did other occasional unexpected tasks. Contrary to the traditional historiography, neither Admiral King’s unproven yet widely alleged Anglophobia, an equally undocumented navy reluctance to accept British advice, nor a preference for another strategy caused the delay in the inauguration of costal escort-of-convoy operations … The delay was due to a shortage of escorts, and that resulted from understandably conflicting priorities, a state of affairs that dictated all Allied strategy until 1944."
Other decisions
Other decisions perceived as questionable were his resistance to employ long-range
Liberators on Atlantic maritime patrols (thus allowing the U-boats a safe area in the middle of the Atlantic — the "Atlantic Gap"), the denial of adequate numbers of landing craft to the Allied invasion of Europe, and the reluctance to permit the Royal Navy's
Pacific Fleet any role in the Pacific. In all of these instances, circumstances forced a re-evaluation or he was over-ruled. It has also been pointed out that King did not, in his post-war report to the Secretary of the Navy, accurately describe the slowness of the American response to the off-shore U-boat threat in early 1942.
It should be noted, however, that the employment of long-range maritime patrol aircraft in the Atlantic was complicated by inter-service squabbling over command and control (the aircraft belonged to the
Army Air Forces; the mission was the Navy's;
Stimson and
Arnold refused to release the aircraft.) Although King had certainly used the allocation of ships to the European Theater as leverage to get the necessary resources for his Pacific objectives, he provided (at General Marshall's request) an additional month's production of landing craft to support
Operation Overlord.
The employment of British and Empire forces in the Pacific was a political matter. The measure was forced on Churchill by the British Chiefs of Staff, not only to re-establish British presence in the region, but to mitigate any perception in the U.S. that the British were doing nothing to help defeat Japan. King was adamant that naval operations against Japan remain 100% American, and angrily resisted the idea of a British naval presence in the Pacific at the
Quadrant Conference in late 1944, citing (among other things) the difficulty of supplying additional naval forces in the theater. In addition, he (along with Marshall) had continually resisted operations that would assist the British agenda in reclaiming or maintaining any part of her pre-war colonial holdings in the Pacific or the eastern Mediterranean.[1,19] Roosevelt, however, overruled him and, despite King's reservations, the
British Pacific Fleet accounted itself well against Japan in the last months of the war.
As a consequence of these, and other decisions, the United States Navy under King's command grew to be the dominant naval force in the world, with a superb
fleet train, capable of operating for long periods away from its permanent bases.
General
Hastings Ismay, chief of staff to
Winston Churchill, described King as:
tough as nails and carried himself as stiffly as a poker. He was blunt and stand-offish, almost to the point of rudeness. At the start, he was intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy; but he was almost equally intolerant and suspicious of the American Army. War against Japan was the problem to which he'd devoted the study of a lifetime, and he resented the idea of American resources being used for any other purpose than to destroy Japanese. He mistrusted Churchill's powers of advocacy, and was apprehensive that he'd wheedle President Roosevelt into neglecting the war in the Pacific.
Despite British perceptions, King was a strong believer in the
Germany first strategy.[1] However, his natural aggression didn't permit him to leave resources idle in the Atlantic that could be utilized in the Pacific, especially when "it was doubtful when — if ever — the British would consent to a cross-Channel operation". King once complained that the Pacific deserved 30% of Allied resources but was getting only 15%. When he was accused by General
Alan Brooke of favoring the Pacific war, the argument became heated. The combative General
Joseph Stilwell wrote: "Brooke got nasty, and King got good and sore. King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God, he was mad. I wished he'd socked him."
Following Japan's defeat at the
Battle of Midway, King advocated (with Roosevelt's tacit approval) the
invasion of Guadalcanal. When General Marshall resisted this line of action, King stated that the Navy (and the Marines) would then carry out the operation by themselves, and instructed Admiral Nimitz to proceed with the preliminary planning.[1] King eventually won the argument, and the invasion went ahead with the backing of the Joint Chiefs. It was ultimately successful, and was the first time the Japanese lost ground during the War. For his attention to the Pacific Theatre he's highly regarded by some Australian war historians.
In spite of (or perhaps partly because of) the fact that the two men didn't get along, the combined influence of King and General
Douglas MacArthur increased the allocation of resources to the Pacific War.
Other controversies involving Admiral Ernest King include:
Dates of rank
Midshipman - June 1901
King never held the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade although, for administrative reasons, his service record annotates his promotion to Lieutenant, and Lieutenant J.G., on the same day.
» All DOR referenced from Buell's "Master of Sea Power", pp. xii-xv.
Awards and decorations
King was also the recipient of several foreign awards and decorations:
Croix de guerre (Belgium) 1948
Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown (Belgium) 1948
Order of Merit, Grande Official (Brazil) 1943
Order of Pao-Ting (China) 1945
Naval Order of Merit (Cuba) 1943
Estrella Abdon Calderon (Ecuador) 1943
Croix de guerre (France) 1944
Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur (France) 1944
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (United Kingdom) 1945
Grand Cross of the Order of George I (Greece) 1946
Officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy 1933
Knight of the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Italy 1948
Order of Orange-Nassau (Netherlands) 1948
Commander of the Order of Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Panama) 1929
Namesakes
The guided missile destroyer USS King was named in his honor. A major high school in his hometown of Lorain, Ohio also bears his name — Admiral King High School. Also named after him is the Department of Defense high school on Sasebo Naval Base, in Japan. In 1956, schools located on the U.S. Naval Bases and Air Stations were given names of U.S. heroes of the past. The Sasebo Dependents School was named after the famed World War II Hero, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. Thus, the official name of Ernest J. King School, Navy 3912, FPO San Francisco, California became effective School Year 1956/57. Recognizing King's great personal and professional interest in maritime history, the Secretary of the Navy named in his honor an academic chair at the Naval War College to be held with the title of the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History.
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