Aviators From The United States

"By the end of 1943, King had largely succeeded in not only making the United States the principal arbiter of Pacific strategy but in making American strategy synonymous with navy strategy."

"I expect the officers of the Atlantic Fleet to be the leaders of what may be called the pioneering spirit- to lead in the determination that the difficulties and discomforts- personnel, materiel, operations, waiting- shall be dealt with as "enemies" to be overcome by our own efforts."

"No fighter ever won his fight by covering up- by merely fending off the other fellow's blows. 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."

"He was a seadog who, despite his age (he was sixty-three, two years older than Marshall) had teeth and knew how to use them. Ashamed of the Navy's errors in Hawaii, he stormed into his new office under full sail, having been appointed by the President not only as Navy Chief of Staff but also as Commander in Chief of U.S. Navy Operations. The acronym for that had previously been CINCUS, but it is indicative of King's frame of mind that he thought it sounded too much like "Sink Us" with its Pearl Harbor connotations, and therefore had it changed to COMINCH. By presidential decree, he became the most powerful sailor in the history of the U.S. Navy, able to make operational and policy decisions over the head of the Secretary of the Navy himself, Colonel Frank Knox."

"King never forgot a grudge. Now, he's used you to get back at me."

"Anyone who won't take a chance now and then isn't worth a damn."

"King brought great operational experience, a powerful mind, and an eccentric and unbending personality."

"I don't care how good they are. Unless they get a kick in the ass every six weeks, they'll slack off."

"Admiral King claimed the Pacific as the rightful domain of the Navy; he seemed to regard the operations there as almost his own private war; he apparently felt that the only way to remove the blot on the Navy disaster at Pearl Harbor was to have the Navy command a great victory over Japan; he was adamant in his refusal to allow any major fleet to be under other command than that of naval officers although maintaining that naval officers were competent to command ground or air forces; he resented the prominent part I had in the Pacific War; he was vehement in his personal criticism of me and encouraged Navy propaganda to that end; he had the complete support of President Roosevelt and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, and in many cases of General Arnold, the head of the Air Force."

"King was a brilliant naval officer and exceptionally capable seaman. But he had a willful, mean, and brittle side to his nature that limited his effectiveness as a leader charged with bringing new people and new ideas to bear on problems of developing untraditional and unanticipated ways of waging warfare."

"Ever since General Billy Mitchell had demonstrated twenty years before that warships could be bombed successfully from the air, the US Navy had been alive to the significance of naval aviation. In the 1920s the Navy commissioned the carriers Lexington and Saratoga, the largest ships afloat until the war. Under Admiral King's leadership in the 1930s naval aviation made great strides in tactics and training. King's own career was linked with naval aviation. He had taught himself to fly when he was well over forty, and was commander of the carrier forces in the late 1930s. He was not a big battleship sailor; certainly not the man to pick up Yamamoto's challenge to a fleet duel."

"Machines are as nothing without men. Men are as nothing without morale."

"Throughout the war, the four of us- Marshall, King, Arnold, and myself- worked in the closest possible harmony. In the postwar period, General Marshall and I disagreed sharply on some aspects of our foreign political policy. However, as a soldier, he was in my opinion one of the best, and his drive, courage, and imagination transformed America's citizen army into the most magnificent fighting force ever assembled. In number of men and logistical requirements, his army operations were by far the largest. This meant that more time of the Joint Chiefs were spent on his problems than on any others- and he invariably presented them with skill and clarity. King had an equally difficult task. His fleets had to hold Japan at bay while convoying millions of tons of supplies for the second front. He was an exceptionally able sea commander. He was also explosive and there were times when it was just as well that the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs were a well-kept secret. The President had a high opinion of King's ability but he was a very undiplomatic person, especially when the Admiral's low boiling point would be reached in some altercation with the British. King would have preferred to put more power into the Asiatic war earlier. He supported loyally the general strategy of beating Germany first, but this often required concessions of ships which he did not like to make. He could not spare much, since, until the last months of the war, he was working with a deficit of ships. America was fighting a two-ocean war for the first time in its history."

"Partial to Baltimore. Won fame in Massachusetts in Spanish war. The Saturday Night Club during youngster year. Then Stein and he reformed. Noon-walks. Spoons occasionally. Hops,- Well, yes! Temper? Don't fool with nitroglycerin. Court beauty No. 2. Rooms with the "Full Dinner Pail". Laugh as rosy as his cheeks."

"It must be the key idea of all hands that we will make the best of what we have."

"Roosevelt, who had been assistant secretary of the navy during World War I and maintained a proprietary interest in the service, had a hand in the choice of the sixty-three-year-old King as CINCLANT. Tough, brilliant, and short-tempered- Roosevelt said "he shaved with a blow torch"- King was an aviator, a submariner, and a staff officer, and the president's idea of a fighting sailor. Only a short time before, the admiral had been passed over for a top command and was headed for retirement, because, it was said, he drank too much, chased other men's wives, and had too many enemies. "When they get into trouble they send for the sons-of-bitches," was his explanation for this reversal of fortune."

"With Forrestal as Navy secretary, King knew retirement would follow quickly. He had gotten along with Knox only because the Chicago newsman knew nothing about the Navy, admitted it, and stayed out of King's way. Forrestal would not. During the war, King had cursed Forrestal out in the halls of the Navy Department, and had browbeaten him into staying out of naval operations. "I didn't like him, and he didn't like me," King said."

"Every naval officer has a job to do. He should do that job out of a sense of duty and should not get recognition for having done what he has been trained to do. His only reward should be the satisfaction of knowing that he has done the job well and to the best of his ability."

"King's oaken hull began to split in 1947, when he suffered a stroke. His mind remained alert, but his iron-plated timbers began to creak and sag. He moved into a suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital for full-time care, and at one point he shared a floor with the acutely depressed James Forrestal, who ended his life by jumping from the sixteenth-floor window in 1949. King spent the next seven summers at the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He slipped his moorings and sailed over the bar on June 25, 1956, at the age of seventy-eight. He was buried at Annapolis, home of the United States Naval Academy. The only hymn sung at his funeral was a Navy anthem, an old favorite of Roosevelt's: "Eternal Father, Strong to Save.""

"Initiative means freedom to act, but it does not mean freedom to act in an offhand or casual manner."

"The admiral who shaved with a blowtorch had given no thought to life after the war. Like Patton, Grant, Sherman and other men who stare transfixed into the bonfires of Mars, King settled into the realization on the day Japan's emissaries signed the surrender documents, he had accomplished his life's work. "King was a lost soul when the war was over," said one friend. "He had served his purpose. He had done what he had set out to do. He had won his part of the war." There would be a massive demobilization as the Navy returned its men to civilian life. The Pearl Harbor inquiry would become public, Congress would slash the Navy's budget, and old salts like himself would be put out to pasture, to make way for younger admirals."

"King, sixty-three years old in 1942, was as gruff a man as Nimitz was a serene one. Hard-drinking and legendarily ill-tempered, he once confessed that he had not actually uttered the self-descriptive epithet "when they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches" but that he would have if he had thought of it. Yet King's choleric manner masked an incisive strategic intelligence, possessed of qualities that perfectly fitted him for senior command: the ability to anticipate, the capacity for penetrating analysis of his adversary's predicaments, an unerring grasp of the reach and limits of his own forces, and a pit bull's determination to seize the initiative and attack, attack, attack."

"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 had devoted the study of a lifetime, and he resented the idea of American resources being used for any other purpose than to destroy the Japanese. He mistrusted Churchill's powers of advocacy, and was apprehensive that he would wheedle President Roosevelt into neglecting the war in the Pacific."

"Our Chiefs felt that they knew so little of what was really going on in the Pacific, of what the U.S. Navy planned to do, and of the amount of resources that these plans would absorb, that some enlightenment would be valuable. They also felt that 'Uncle Ernie' would take a less jaundiced view of the rest of the world if he had been able to shoot his line about the Pacific and get it off his chest."

"Don't tell them anything. When it's over, tell them who won."

"I don't know much about this thing called logistics. All I know is that I want some."

"While Ernie King loved history, there was one story from ancient times that may have escaped his notice. As a boy, the Greek admiral Themistocles was said to have been taken by his father to a deserted beach, where his father showed him the carcasses of old war galleys lying sun-baked, prostrate, and neglected. That, his father told him, is how a democracy treats its leaders when they no longer have use for them. King had once objected to a wartime pay raise for soldiers, sailors, and officers. When the shooting stopped, he said, a grateful nation would distribute just rewards to the men who had brought them safely through the fire. When asked if he would write a book about the war, King replied that while he would do it, the book would have only two words: "We won.""

"King had grown up alone with his father in an Ohio household from which his chronically ailing mother had been removed. He was ever after a loner, a brusque man who fathered seven children but seemed to love only the Navy."

"Admiral King's role in the development of strategy for defeating Japan is very difficult to evaluate in detail. Officially he approved or disapproved recommendations that came to him as Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations and as one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from his own naval planners, and from the joint planners in Washington. Frequently these recommendations had already been influenced by his own views. Still many of the objectives he preferred, most notably Formosa, were bypassed, and much of the time his recommendations were only in terms of areas or island groups. He accepted without question the specific objectives deemed by the operating commands most suitable. The one who came closest to Admiral King in his basic view that the Japanese should be kept under constant pressure was not a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific Area, General MacArthur. Although his role was to recommend and then accept a decision from the JCS, and many of his views on strategy differed sharply from those endorsed by the JCS, his repeated efforts to get more support for his area of command and to push ahead as rapidly and with as much force as possible helped to insure that the war against Japan did not become a forgotten war and were largely responsible for the development of the advance on two axes."

"The military leadership styles of these two naval officers are contrasting in several ways. King was an immoral, self-serving leader who was notably brutal to subordinates and abrasive with Allied military leaders and politicians alike. Nimitz, however, was a moral leader who served is country selflessly, and he was engaging and supportive of his staff as well as sister service members and Allied military leaders and politicians. Really, both men serve as dissimilar examples of naval leadership during World War II and Nimitz's style more closely aligns with the leadership style of Marshall and Eisenhower than it does with King."

"Once the decision to build up the Navy was taken, strong men of clear vision quickly rose to the top of the service hierarchy. Chief among these were Adm Ernest King and VAdm Chester Nimitz, men of such consummate skill that the ennui of the prewar years had virtually no impact upon their abilities and sensibilities as commanders or as men. Others slightly less senior were pulled forward by the enormous suction created by King's and Nimitz's rise to the top."

"The belief that King was well versed in naval surface and aerial warfare and that he was technically competent in the use of naval warfare is widely accepted by authors assessing King as a naval leader and is not in question in this monograph. What is examined in this monograph is King's leadership abilities absent his technical naval skills. This analysis will demonstrate that King was perceived as a toxic leader who was known to be petulant, overly emotional, stubborn, egotistical, and immoral. These leadership traits, more than anything else define King, and these negative traits affected how he engaged those he led, US and Allied leaders, and even his own family."

"Discipline is willing obedience to attain the greatest good by the greatest number. It means [the] laying aside, for the time being, of ordinary everyday go-as-you-please and do-what-you-like. It means one for all and all for one- teamwork. It means a machine- not of inert metal, but one of living men- an integrated human machine in which each does his part and contributes his full share."

"CINCUS to Vandegrift for his flyers- Many happy returns Sunday and congratulations- Keep knocking them off."

"Despite his efforts to win over his subordinates, King did not mind overworking his staff. When he was a flag officer, King preferred a small staff of eleven officers who were skilled and competent. He believed that this was the most efficient way to conduct naval planning and the right way to best utilize manpower. Smaller staffs, however, mean greater work for less people, and that is true as much today as it was then. Buell notes that staffers for King worked long hours and frequently on weekends, knew what King expected of them, but always received few comments for or against a submitted plan. In short, King was a difficult leader to develop plans for. He was extremely general and vague in his initial guidance, and the staff therefore had to try and figure out what he really wanted. Buell notes that even after numerous drafts, if King did not like a plan he would rip it up in front of the officer presenting it and write it himself on the spot."

""When they get in trouble they send for the sonsabitches." Asked whether he had said said this, Admiral King replied no, he had not, but he would have if he had thought of it. They were indeed in trouble when they sent for King, bringing him from the brink of retirement to be Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and King would have been ready to admit that he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and ill temper that had few equals in the upper ranks of the U.S. Navy. He took charge of that navy at the depths of its despair and lifted it to the heights of triumph. He was a hard man in a hard time, well suited to lead a fighting fleet, but he was also a thoughtful man of a breadth and incisiveness that gave him an early and enduring grip on Allied strategy. Much of the war went the way he wished it to. The strongest mind within the American Joint Chiefs of Staff was the mind of Ernest J. King."

"Whether or not the British would in the end have baulked at Overlord remains an open question. By late 1943 a great deal of planning and force preparation had already been carried out, and they risked a serious breach with a watchful ally, growing more confident of its power month by month. But in the end the decision was taken out of their hands. At the end of November the three Allied leaders agreed to meet at Teheran. Rather than argue any more with the British, American leaders planned to outmaneuver them. The two western Allies met first at Cairo to discuss issues from the Far East and, so the British expected, the Mediterranean. Relations between the two military staffs were poorer than ever. Brooke became uncharacteristically intemperate; Admiral King, commander of the American navy, came close on one occasion to striking him. But on issues to do with Overlord and the Mediterranean the Americans remained silent, leaving the floor to their ally. When pressed they replied that the issues would be discussed when they met Stalin."

"One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King. He's the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he's a mental bully. He became Commander in Chief of the fleet some time ago. Today he takes over, also, Stark's job as Chief of Naval Operations. It's a good thing to get rid of the double head of the Navy, and of course Stark was just a nice old lady, but this fellow is going to cause a blow-up sooner or later, I'll bet a cookie."

"Lest I look back at this book sometime and find that I've expressed a distaste for some person, and have put down no reason for my aversion, I record this one story of Admiral King. One day this week General Arnold sent a very important note to King. Through inadvertence, the stenographer in Arnold's office addressed it, on the outside, to "Rear Admiral King". Twenty-four hours later the letter came back, unopened, with an arrow pointing to the "Rear," thus: [Here a long, heavy arrow has been drawn in a diagonal line underneath and pointing to the word "Rear."] And that's the size of man the Navy has at its head. He ought to be a big help winning this war."

"King had the brains, all right, but I hated his guts."

"King's role in the war was indispensable. He not only oversaw the expansion of the Navy, but he was also involved in plotting military strategy, directing the antisubmarine effort (he created the Tenth Fleet, a paper organization with himself at its head, to coordinate the antisubmarine war in the Atlantic), and helping coordinate American strategy and operations with those of the Allies. King retired in late 1945, shortly after promotion to five-star rank. For several years thereafter he served as an adviser to the Secretary of the Navy and to the President."

"The campaigns in the South Pacific, however, may not be regarded as simply the inevitable products of inexorable political and military logic. Events created a milieu, and others, notably President Franklin D. Roosevelt, made important contributions, but the South Pacific strategy was forged principally by one man, Admiral Ernest Joseph King. Here the strategy and command changes resulting from Pearl Harbor intersected, for the Japanese attack completed the remarkable resurrection of King's career. In 1942, King attained his sixty-fourth birthday and completed his forty-first year as a naval officer. His father was a seaman, a bridge builder, and finally a foreman in a railroad repair shop. Drawn to his father's workplace, young Ernest absorbed the complexities of gears and lathes and the simple unpretentiousness of the workmen. After graduating fourth in a class of eighty-seven from the Naval Academy, King pursued a career remarkable for its versatility, with important work in surface ships, submarines, and naval aviation. He completed all his assignments with distinction, for the brain beneath his balding pate was agile with technical matters and he possessed a prodigious memory."

"King's attitude was a paradox. He griped about too many people getting decorations, but he refused to establish a policy that would end the confusion. Nimitz was his voice of conscience, besieging King to approve the Purple Heart or to define different grades for the Legion of Merit. But it was futile. King did nothing. Nimitz tried to force the issue at their January 1944 meeting in San Francisco by demanding a formal board to standardize the awarding of decorations. All the services had different rules, argued Nimitz, and the Army Air Force was notably generous. If the services could not agree on a common policy, then the President should act. King stalled with a promise to study the problem. King's thinking began to change in June 1944. Just before King had left to watch the Normandy landings, Abby Dunlap had warned him that when the war was over the Army Air Force would get all the credit and the Navy would be forgotten. King thought she was too pessimistic. But when he next saw Abby and Betsy Matter following the invasion, he told Abby she had been right."

"King's bluntness went to extremes, because of his sense of self-righteousness and an undisciplined temper. Tact and discretion too often lost out to emotional excesses, especially in his early career. Together with his intellectual arrogance and lack of humility, King simply considered that he had more brains than anyone else in the Navy and acted accordingly."

"Besides intelligence and dedication, one other pillar supported King's professional reputation: his toughness. He regarded exceptional performance of duty as the norm and evinced insensitivity or even callousness to his subordinates, upon whom he also frequently exercised his ferocious temper. But if King proved harsh with subordinates, he was no toady to superiors. Those who fell short of King's standards found he could be hostile, tactless, arrogant, and sometimes disrespectful or even insubordinate. As a junior officer this conduct earned him more than a healthy share of disciplinary action. He defined the span of his concerns beyond his career when he once commented, "You ought to be very suspicious of anyone who won't take a drink or doesn't like women. King, the father of seven, was deficient in neither category."

"Paradoxically, King resented anyone who treated him the way he treated others, yet there is little evidence that he tried very hard to be more considerate or patient with other people. Throughout his life King would be a harsh and often intolerant judge of character, but his memoirs are mute on his own self-appraisal- other than when as an ensign he vowed to shed his softness and become a tough naval officer."

"In a caravan of recon cars we serpentined through traffic that churned the Normandy roads into a trail of choking white dust. It parched our throats, watered our eyes, and chalked King's neat blues. From Omaha we turned toward Isigny, past the dry, malodorous tidal basin at Grandcamp-les-Bains where the enemy had destroyed a dozen fishing craft and damaged the tidal gates. From offshore a salvo echoed across the beach as the battleship Texas lobbed its broadsides into the Carentan flats where the enemy had withdrawn behind that city. After having so persistently badgered the Navy for capital ships in the bombardment, I was anxious that King see the effects of his big guns in the streets of Isigny. Hansen had parked two armored cars in the village square to cover our party with their guns. With General Marshall, King, Arnold, and Eisenhower bunched together in three open cars, an enemy sniper could have won immortality as a hero of the Reich."

"King on the other hand is a shrewd and somewhat swollen headed individual. His vision is mainly limited to the Pacific, and any operation calculated to distract from the force available in the Pacific does not meet with his support or approval. He does not approach the problems from a worldwide war point of view, but instead with one biased entirely in favour of the Pacific. Although he pays lip service to the fundamental policy that we must defeat Germany and then turn on Japan, he fails to apply it in any problems connected with the war."

"Ironically, during four years of war, MacArthur may have owed the most to the very people he was certain were out to discredit and disparage him. While never among his fans, Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall nonetheless consistently supported MacArthur within the framework of their global priorities, from the first efforts to resupply the Philippines to MacArthur's appointment as Allied supreme commander. Even then, where would MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area have been had not Ernie King urged the Joint Chiefs to pour resources into the Pacific and wage a two-front war?"

"Betty Stark, known to the more junior officers of the Joint Staff Mission as "Tugboat Annie," was an easy man to get on with. Ernie King on the other hand was a difficult man to like. He had recently become Commander-in-Chief US Fleet and was effectively in charge of the day to day running of the US Navy, leaving the grand strategy to stark. This arrangement did not really work, and in March Stark moved to London as Commander-in-Chief US Naval Forces Europe, while King became both C-in-CUS and CNO. Nobody ever found King an easy man. He appeared prejudiced against all things British, but was probably better described as a ferocious Americanophile. He considered that any deployment of American forces in Europe, or, worse, North Africa was wasted as it detracted from the main theatre of the US Navy, the Pacific. His biggest dislikes were mixing US and Royal Navy ships in a combined force, or allowing US Navy ships to serve under foreign, especially British, command."