Ernest King

1. Lead

Ernest Joseph King (23 November 1878 – 25 June 1956) was the most powerful American naval officer of the Second World War. As Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) from March 1942 until the end of the war, he directed the United States Navy in both oceans at once: the Battle of the Atlantic against the German U-boats, and the great offensive across the Pacific that carried American forces from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Okinawa in 1945.

He was promoted to Fleet Admiral in December 1944, one of only four men to hold the five-star rank in the United States Navy, and he sat with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where he argued, often abrasively, for the resources the Navy needed.

His contemporaries described him as the most formidable personality in the American high command: brilliant, ruthless, and almost impossible to work with.

King’s place in history is contested, and the argument about him has never been settled. His admirers point to the results: under his direction the United States Navy grew from a fleet shattered at Pearl Harbor into the largest navy in the world, and it won the two-ocean war that he had planned for.

His critics point to the cost: his refusal to adopt the convoy system on the American East Coast in early 1942 allowed German U-boats to sink hundreds of ships in what the Germans called the “Second Happy Time”, and his determination to give the Pacific the largest possible share of American resources strained the alliance with Britain and delayed the invasion of Europe.

Both judgements are supported by the record, and this article presents both, distinguishing between what King achieved and what his decisions cost.

2. Key Facts

Born	23 November 1878, Lorain, Ohio, United States
Died	25 June 1956 (aged 77), Portsmouth Naval Hospital, New Hampshire, United States
Nationality	American
Role / Office	Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), 1942–1945
Known for	Directing the U.S. Navy in the Second World War; the Pacific offensive from Guadalcanal to Okinawa; the Battle of the Atlantic; the “Second Happy Time” controversy
Spouse / Family	Married Martha Rankin Egerton in 1905; seven children, including two daughters who married naval officers
Military rank	Fleet Admiral (five-star), from 17 December 1944

3. Early Life and Education

Ohio childhood and Annapolis

Ernest King was born on 23 November 1878 in Lorain, Ohio, a steel and shipbuilding town on Lake Erie, the son of James C. King, a railway worker and later a foreman in a shipyard, and his wife Elizabeth. He grew up in a working-class household where discipline and self-reliance were prized, and he was a serious, unsociable boy who did well at school and read widely.

In 1897 he won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he graduated fourth in his class in 1901. The Spanish-American War had ended before he reached the fleet, so his first service was in the peacetime navy, but he served in the Philippines and in the Caribbean during the years when the United States was building its overseas empire, and he learned the practical business of seamanship, gunnery and command.

He was, from the start, a demanding officer: his juniors feared him, his superiors respected him, and he made enemies easily and forgot them slowly.

Submarines, aviation and the inter-war Navy

King’s inter-war career was unusually broad, and it gave him a grasp of naval warfare that few of his contemporaries possessed. He served in submarines in the First World War, commanding a submarine division and the submarine base at New London, and he became one of the Navy’s leading submarine officers.

In the 1920s he turned to naval aviation: he learned to fly at the age of 47, earned his wings as a naval aviator in 1927, and commanded the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in the early 1930s. From 1933 to 1939 he was Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, where he fought for the development of carrier aviation and for the aircraft that would fight the Pacific war.

He was a difficult subordinate and a demanding superior, and he was passed over for promotion more than once; but by 1941 he was Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, and he was the obvious choice to lead the Navy when the United States entered the war.

4. Rise to Prominence

Commander of the Atlantic Fleet

In February 1941, ten months before Pearl Harbor, King was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, with the task of protecting American shipping in the western Atlantic while the United States was still formally neutral. He organised the Neutrality Patrol, which escorted British convoys part of the way across the Atlantic, and he fought a series of engagements with German U-boats in the autumn of 1941, months before the declaration of war.

The destroyer USS Reuben James was sunk by a U-boat in October 1941 with the loss of more than 100 men, and King used the incident to argue for a more aggressive policy. His experience in the Atlantic convinced him of two things that shaped his conduct of the war: that the U-boat was the greatest threat to the Allied war effort, and that the British, for all their experience, could not be allowed to dictate American naval strategy.

Chief of Naval Operations

After the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, King was the natural choice to lead the Navy. In December 1941 he became Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, and in March 1942 he also became Chief of Naval Operations, combining the two most senior naval posts in a single pair of hands — a concentration of power that no American naval officer had held before or has held since.

The appointment reflected President Roosevelt’s confidence in him, and it reflected the scale of the task: the Navy had to be rebuilt, expanded and deployed in two oceans at once, and it needed a single directing mind. King’s first months in the post were the darkest of the war: the Japanese were advancing across the Pacific, the U-boats were sinking ships off the American coast, and the Navy was short of everything.

He met the crisis with a ruthlessness that became legendary, relieving officers who failed, demanding results, and working eighteen-hour days.

5. Ernest King’s Role in World War II

The Battle of the Atlantic

King’s first great test as Chief of Naval Operations was the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest battle of the Second World War, fought from 1939 to 1945 for control of the sea routes between North America and Britain. The battle was, in the judgement of historians, the most important battle of the war at sea: if the U-boats had cut Britain’s lifeline, Britain would have been starved into submission, and the Allied invasion of Europe would have been impossible.

King inherited the battle in March 1942, at its darkest moment, when German U-boats were sinking ships off the American coast almost at will, and when the Navy was short of escorts, of aircraft and of experience. The story of the next year — the disaster of the first half of 1942, the adoption of the convoy system, the creation of the Tenth Fleet, and the victory of the spring of 1943 — is the story of King’s conduct of the Atlantic war, and it contains both his greatest failure and one of his greatest achievements.

The Second Happy Time / “Second Happy Time”

King’s first great test as CNO was the Battle of the Atlantic, and it began with a failure for which he has never been forgiven by some historians. In the first half of 1942, German U-boats operated off the American East Coast and in the Caribbean against almost no opposition: American merchant ships sailed alone, without escort, with their lights on, along a coast that was brightly lit at night, and the U-boats sank them at will.

The Germans called the period the “Second Happy Time”, and in the first six months of 1942 they sank more than 400 ships in American waters, with the loss of thousands of lives and millions of tons of shipping. King resisted the introduction of the convoy system, which the British had used successfully for two years, on the grounds that the Navy did not have enough escorts to protect convoys, and that the ships would be safer sailing alone than in convoys that could not be defended.

The argument was wrong, and King eventually adopted the convoy system in the spring of 1942, after pressure from the British and from his own staff, but the delay cost the Allies dearly, and it remains the most serious criticism of his conduct of the war.

Winning the Atlantic

After the convoy system was adopted, and after the Navy acquired the escorts, aircraft and intelligence it needed, the Battle of the Atlantic turned in the Allies’ favour. King organised the Tenth Fleet, a command dedicated to anti-submarine warfare, and he supported the development of escort carriers, long-range patrol aircraft, and the breaking of the German naval codes.

By the spring of 1943, the month the Germans called “Black May”, the U-boats were losing more boats than they were sinking ships, and the Atlantic was, for practical purposes, won. King deserves a large share of the credit for that victory: he built the organisation that won it, and he insisted, against British pressure, that American resources should be used to protect American shipping.

But the victory came after the disaster of the first half of 1942, and the two facts must be held together.

The Pacific offensive

King’s second great responsibility was the Pacific, and it was the theatre he cared about most. At the Arcadia Conference in December 1941, the Allies had agreed on the strategy of “Germany first” — that the defeat of Germany should take priority over the defeat of Japan — but King believed, and argued throughout the war, that the Pacific should receive a much larger share of American resources than the “Germany first” policy allowed.

He won the argument in practice, if not in principle: the Navy’s building programme, the Marine Corps, and the Army’s Pacific forces all grew rapidly, and by 1943 the United States was fighting a major offensive in the Pacific at the same time as it was building up for the invasion of Europe.

The offensive began at Guadalcanal in August 1942, the first American offensive of the war, and it continued through the Central Pacific drive — Tarawa, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Leyte, Iwo Jima and Okinawa — to the gates of Japan itself.

King directed the strategy from Washington, choosing the objectives, allocating the forces, and settling the disputes between the Navy’s commanders, above all between Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific and General Douglas MacArthur in the South-West Pacific.

6. Key Decisions

The convoy decision

Delaying the convoy system (January–April 1942). King’s decision to delay the introduction of convoys on the East Coast was the most consequential mistake of his career. He argued that the Navy lacked escorts, and that unescorted ships were safer than convoys that could not be defended. The British, who had learned the lesson in 1917 and again in 1939–1941, disagreed, and the U-boats proved them right. More than 400 ships were sunk in American waters in the first six months of 1942, and the lesson — that a convoy, even a weakly escorted one, is safer than a ship sailing alone — was learned at a terrible cost.

Creating the Tenth Fleet (1943). King’s response to the U-boat crisis was to create a dedicated anti-submarine command, the Tenth Fleet, under his own direct control. The Tenth Fleet coordinated the work of escorts, aircraft, intelligence and code-breaking, and it played a central role in the victory in the Atlantic in 1943. The decision showed King at his best: when he recognised a problem, he built an organisation to solve it, and he gave it the resources it needed.

The Pacific-first argument

Insisting on the Pacific offensive. King argued throughout the war that the United States should fight a major offensive in the Pacific even while the “Germany first” policy was in force, and he secured the ships, men and aircraft to do it. The decision meant that the United States fought a two-ocean war, and it meant that the invasion of Europe was delayed; but it also meant that Japan was defeated by 1945, and that the Pacific war did not drag on into 1946. Historians still debate whether King took too much for the Pacific, but few dispute that the offensive he directed was one of the great achievements of the war.

The Central Pacific drive. King chose the Central Pacific as the main axis of the American advance, over the objections of General MacArthur, who favoured the South-West Pacific route through New Guinea and the Philippines. The Central Pacific drive — through the Gilberts, the Marshalls and the Marianas — brought American forces within bombing range of Japan by the end of 1944, and it set the stage for the final battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The choice was King’s, and it was vindicated by the results.

7. Controversies

The Second Happy Time Controversy

The controversy over the first half of 1942 has never gone away, and it is the first thing that historians mention when they discuss King’s failings. The facts are not in dispute: more than 400 ships were sunk in American waters, the Navy resisted the convoy system, and the British had offered advice that was not taken.

King’s defenders argue that he had no escorts to spare, that the Navy was stretched to breaking point, and that the convoy system would have been useless without the escorts to protect it. His critics reply that the British had faced the same problem in 1939 and had solved it by forming convoys with whatever escorts were available, and that King’s refusal was a matter of pride — he did not want to be told how to run his Navy by the British.

The truth probably lies between the two positions, but the scale of the losses makes the episode impossible to dismiss.

King and the British

King’s relations with the British were notoriously bad, and they were a source of friction throughout the war. He distrusted the British, he resented their attempts to influence American strategy, and he was determined that the United States Navy should not be subordinated to British direction. The British, for their part, regarded King as Anglophobic, obstinate and difficult, and they complained about him to Roosevelt.

The friction had real consequences: it delayed cooperation in the Atlantic, it complicated the planning of the invasion of Europe, and it poisoned the atmosphere of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. King’s defenders argue that his suspicion of the British was justified, because British strategy was designed to serve British interests, and that an American admiral was right to put American interests first.

His critics argue that the alliance required cooperation, and that King’s attitude made cooperation harder than it needed to be.

8. Later Life and Death

Retirement and the memoirs

King retired in December 1945, a few months after the end of the war, and he was succeeded as CNO by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. He spent his retirement in Washington, where he worked on his memoirs with the naval historian Walter Muir Whitehill.

The memoirs, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record, were published in 1952, and they are a formidable but forbidding book: King gives a detailed account of his decisions, defends them all, and admits no mistakes. He remained a controversial figure in retirement, and he was not, in the words of one biographer, a man who mellowed with age.

He was, however, widely respected as the admiral who had directed the Navy through the greatest war in its history.

Death in Portsmouth

King died on 25 June 1956 at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in New Hampshire, at the age of 77, after a long illness. He was buried at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, beside the officers he had served with.

His death was reported in newspapers around the world, and the obituaries reflected the divided judgement of his career: the admiral who had won the two-ocean war, and the admiral whose temper and whose mistakes had cost the Allies dearly. His wife Martha, whom he had married in 1905, survived him, as did their seven children.

The Navy he had led was, by 1956, the largest and most powerful in the world, and it remained so for the rest of the century.

9. Legacy

The two-ocean Navy

King’s legacy is the United States Navy itself. When he took command in March 1942, the Navy was a peacetime force that had been shattered at Pearl Harbor; when he retired in December 1945, it was the largest navy in the history of the world, with more than 6,000 ships, including 28 aircraft carriers and more than 70,000 aircraft.

The Navy that King built fought the war in two oceans at once, and it won both. The organisation he created — the system of fleet commands, the Tenth Fleet, the building programme, the training system — survived the war and shaped the Navy of the Cold War.

His strategic legacy is the Pacific offensive, which remains a model of naval strategy: the use of sea power to advance across an ocean, island by island, until the enemy’s home islands were within reach.

The admiral’s reputation

King’s reputation has never been simple, and it is unlikely to become so. He is remembered as the most powerful and the most difficult admiral in American history, a man whose brilliance was matched only by his temper. Naval officers study his campaigns as models of strategy, and they study his character as a warning: King shows what a commander can achieve when he is given absolute authority, and what he can cost when he uses that authority without listening to others. The Navy’s official history describes him as “the architect of victory in the Pacific”, and that judgement, for all the controversies, has endured.

10. Assessment by Historians

The strategic assessment

Historians rate King as one of the great strategists of the Second World War. His direction of the Pacific offensive, his building of the Navy, and his organisation of the Battle of the Atlantic were achievements of the first order, and they were achieved against opposition from the British, from the Army, and from his own staff.

The American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who wrote the official history of the Navy in the war, described King as the most important American naval officer since Alfred Thayer Mahan, and later historians have generally agreed. His strategic vision — that sea power could be used to advance across the Pacific, island by island, until Japan was within reach — was vindicated by the events of 1943–1945, and it remains the foundation of American naval strategy in the Pacific.

The human assessment

The human assessment is harsher. King was, by all accounts, a man of extraordinary ability and extraordinary difficulty: he was rude to his subordinates, he held grudges, he refused to admit mistakes, and he made enemies of men whose cooperation he needed. His daughter later said that he was “the most even-tempered man in the Navy — he was always in a rage”.

Historians have asked whether a commander of his temper could have achieved more if he had been easier to work with, and whether the delay in adopting convoys, and the friction with the British, were the price of his character.

The question has no certain answer, but it is the question that makes King a more interesting figure than a simple hero or a simple villain: he was a great admiral whose greatest enemy, at times, was himself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Ernest King?
Ernest King (1878–1956) was Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations from 1942 to 1945, the admiral who directed the United States Navy in the Second World War. He was promoted to Fleet Admiral in December 1944.

What was the Second Happy Time?
It was the name the Germans gave to the first half of 1942, when U-boats sank more than 400 ships in American waters because American merchant ships sailed without escort and the convoy system had not yet been adopted on the East Coast.

What was King’s role in the Pacific?
King directed the American offensive across the Pacific, from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Okinawa in 1945. He chose the Central Pacific as the main axis of advance, over the objections of General MacArthur, and he secured the ships, men and aircraft the offensive needed.

Did King support the Germany-first strategy?
In principle he accepted it, but in practice he argued throughout the war that the Pacific should receive a much larger share of American resources than the policy allowed, and he won the argument in practice: the United States fought a major offensive in the Pacific at the same time as it prepared for the invasion of Europe.

Was Ernest King difficult to work with?
Yes, by all accounts. He was brilliant, demanding and abrasive, and he made enemies easily. His daughter said he was “the most even-tempered man in the Navy — he was always in a rage”. His temper strained his relations with the British and with his own staff.

Where is Ernest King buried?
He is buried at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland. He died on 25 June 1956 at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in New Hampshire, at the age of 77.

Related articles

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• Douglas Bader
• Erich Raeder

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Ernest King” — birth 23 November 1878, death 25 June 1956, COMINCH and CNO 1942–1945, Fleet Admiral December 1944, the Second Happy Time, the Pacific offensive.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernest J. King” (britannica.com) — biography, Chief of Naval Operations, Second World War.
3. Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (W. W. Norton, 1952) — King’s memoirs; the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
4. Thomas B. Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Little, Brown, 1980) — the standard biography; the convoy controversy, relations with the British.
5. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, 15 vols. (Little, Brown, 1947–1962) — the official history; the Battle of the Atlantic, the Pacific offensive.
6. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (W. W. Norton, 1995) — the Battle of the Atlantic, the two-ocean war, King’s strategy.