Admiral King was right about (Almost) everything

Fleet Admiral Ernest King was Commander-in-Chief Fleet, or COMINCH, during most of World War II, and in 1942 assigned to also serve as Chief of Naval Operations or CNO.  As CNO he managed the Navy Staff, called OPNAV then (and still is), which allowed him to manage, among other things, all Navy investments in ships and aircraft, as well as all senior Navy officer assignments. 

A funny aside before we jump in.  For some inexplicable reason, prior to King’s appointment, the Commander-in-Chief, US Fleet acronym was CinC-US, pronounced “sink-us.”  When King was appointed he thought the sink-us title was stupid, so he changed the acronym to COMINCH for Commander-in-Chief.   Although that acronym was better, President Franklin Roosevelt actually tried to talk King out of calling himself a “commander-in-chief,” saying the constitution only provided for one commander-in-chief and that was the president.  King said if he was ordered to change the title he would, but Roosevelt was reluctant to make a change like this as we were just entering the war.  So the commander-in-chief title stuck for Navy commanders, that is until Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld finally killed it in 2002 during the George W. Bush administration.  

But getting back to World War II, it was King’s CNO job, not his COMINCH job, that gave him the authority, for example, over Navy administrative matters, such as the assignment of Admirals Spruance and Halsey to command 5th and 3rd Fleets respectively.  The CNO job also gave him a seat at the table with the Joint Chiefs of Staff or JCS, along with Generals Marshall, Arnold, and Admiral Stark, as well as the Combined Chiefs of Staff with our British allies.   The JCS was the body that approved the initiation of campaigns such as Guadalcanal.

But it was the COMINCH job and not the CNO job that allowed King to actually command Navy and Marine forces during campaigns in the Atlantic and Pacific, with Admiral Chester Nimitz as his surrogate as Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas.

King was noteworthy for some personality traits as well.  One he was famous for was his legendary temper.

General Eisenhower, for example, mostly known as an even-tempered man, once said, “Admiral King is an arbitrary, stubborn type with too much brain and a tendency toward bullying his juniors! But I think he wants to fight, which is vastly encouraging.”  

But King was also known as someone who was not a fan of Great Britain.  Once President Roosevelt adopted a “Europe-First” policy, it was King’s job to divert naval forces preferentially to Eisenhower’s theater of operations.  But as King perceived the United Kingdom as dragging its feet in offensive operations in Europe, King took every opportunity to divert naval forces to the Pacific theater.  After all, in King’s mind it was Japan that attacked the US, and he realized that the longer we waited to neutralize the Japanese threat in the Pacific, the more entrenched and difficult to defeat they would become.  And so, the very first major amphibious landing in World War II was not North Africa as many people think, but Guadalcanal in the Pacific.  And that campaign was King’s idea.

But King’s intransigence when it came to Europe led to another famous Eisenhower quote, where he says: “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.”

Even King’s own daughter joined the chorus of opinion about her father.  When asked about King’s unpredictable personality, she said, “He is the most even tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.”

But personality foibles aside, in my view King gets a bad rap.  He was the main strategist for the Pacific war, and with Nimitz, for the island-hopping campaign that eventually won the war against Japan.  In that regard, at least when it comes to the Pacific theater of Operations, as we say in the title of this episode, history has shown that King was right about almost everything.

Seth, we don’t want to do a biography here, but maybe a few things about King’s background:

• As did everyone, went to Annapolis
• Was a surface officer
• Inauspicious career early on
• Part of the Asiatic fleet as a Lieutenant
• Returned to his ship the Cincinnati one day drunk & disorderly, his captain recorded it in his personnel record.  The Asiatic fleet commander at one time was Admiral Charles B. McVay, Jr, the father of the man who would become the skipper of USS Indianapolis cruiser during World War II.  But King’s behavior problems in the Asiatic are what led to the untrue rumor that King had a vendetta against Admiral McVay, that would cause him decades later to want to court-martial Captain McVay after the Indy was sunk, all despite the fact that when King got in trouble it was actually Admiral Henry Wilson in command of the fleet.  
• He went to submarine school as a captain in a class full of ensigns.  Nevertheless, unlike Chester Nimitz, King never finished his submarine qualification hence was never eligible to wear the highly sought after submarine dolphin insignia.
• At the age of 49, King later goes to flight training because he wants to understand this new device the airplane.  “Aviation is the coming thing in Navy.”  Pilots who went through late career flight training were referred to as “Johnny come lately’s” by aviators who spent their entire career in aviation.  Earned his wings, but then never again piloted an airplane alone.  But King does eventually command an aircraft carrier, the Lexington.
• “The damnest party man in the place.”

Jumping to the war:

• Had been Atlantic fleet
• Named COMINCH right after Pearl Harbor attack
• Named CNO in March 1942
• With Nimitz, author of the island-hopping campaign
• When Briton dragged feet on North Africa landing, diverted naval forces to land in Guadalcanal, first major amphibious landing of the war
• Coral Sea and Guadalcanal personally selected by him to neutralize Japan’s thrust south
• King would select strategic objectives, and initially King would get involved at the operational level “how to do it.”  
• Nimitz was selected by Roosevelt not King.  King didn’t trust him—referred to him as a “fixer”—until after Midway.
• After Midway, he would generally leave Nimitz to do the campaign and battle plans.  Nimitz would often bound the plan off of King before the plan was putting into effect. 
• King’s responsibility spanned both Atlantic and Pacific, so it was a good thing when he decided he could trust Nimitz
• King had the notion that each successive thrust need to move the US closer and closer to mainland Japan, with engagements aimed at Japanese centers of gravity.  To that end, he supported an attack against Japanese forces in Formosa (Taiwan), not Philippines, because Taiwan enabled more direct strikes at the Japanese mainland and would shorten the path to victory.  The only reason to go back to Philippines was emotional—MacArthur’s “I shall return” declaration.
• MacArthur won the argument partly through a veiled threat that Roosevelt’s electability might suffer if he failed to retake the Philippines.  In any case, history has likely proven King to be right.
• Triple objectives: neutralize Japanese Navy through carrier warfare, isolate and strangle mainland Japan through submarine warfare, and seize islands that would enable the strategic bombing campaign to put pressure on mainland Japan.
• The island-hopping campaign eventually worked.  

• What was King wrong about?
• He supported Forrestal’s decision to court-martial Charles B. McVay.  This was a grave error that would haunt the Navy for 50+ years.