"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."
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Military leaders from the United StatesLegion of Honour recipientsPeople from ClevelandAviators from the United StatesNavy Cross recipients
Original Language: English
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Sources
David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999), p. 544
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_King
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Ernest King
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