Books: Old Crustacean

FLEET ADMIRAL KING (674 pp.)—Ernesf J. King and Walter M. Whitehill—Norton ($6.75).

As the dust was settling over the ruin at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt decided that the U.S. Fleet needed a new commander. He chose a man who was tall, straight as the spruce spar of an old ship-of-the-line, and as hard as the chrome-steel armor around his own battleships. His name was Ernest Joseph King. Nobody has ever offered a better explanation for his selection than King himself gave when he arrived in Washington to take over: “When they get into trouble, they send for the sons of bitches.”

For four years, less two days (which he still begrudges), King commanded “the fleet”—which actually grew into a dozen fleets, the mightiest assemblage of sea power, afloat and on the wing, that the world has ever seen.* No service commander had more to do with the winning of World War II. None showed keener strategic vision, or made fewer spectacular mistakes. None is so little known, and for that, King himself is mostly to blame. Now 74, weakened by a stroke five years ago, he is anxious to find his niche in history, and so has collaborated with Walter M. Whitehill, librarian of Boston’s Athenaeum, in what is accurately called “a naval record.”

Taut & Happy? In this deadweight volume, the character and personality of King show through only accidentally, like a guilty glimmer of light from a ship darkened for war. Most of the book is obviously a lightly edited version of King’s own autobiographical notes (they should have been edited drastically), though King refers to himself aloofly in the third person. The effect is like the royal “we.” Only in an epilogue and incidental notes does Collaborator Whitehill manage to chip off the dapple paint and reveal the metal beneath.

Whether by design or not, King reveals himself in his choice of heroes. Heading his list of the world’s great naval commanders is John Jervis, Lord St. Vincent, whom Mahan, in heartfelt admiration, could only call “a man of adamant.” In these pages, King is exposed as a man of obsidian, consciously modeling himself on Jervis. He was flattered when friends said he was so tough that he must shave with a blowtorch, and gave him a four-foot crowbar to use as a toothpick.

Much of the toughness was picked up from his Scottish immigrant father, James Clydesdale King, who was as dour and granitic as the foggy vale for which he was named. He drove hard bargains with his son, and forced him to keep them. Ever since, Ernest King has driven hard bargains and resolutely kept his promises. Because he made it a point of honor to be fair to subordinates, Sundowner King cannot understand why they seldom warmed to him. Neither can he understand why a taut ship is not automatically a happy ship.

“So What, Old Top?” The amazing thing is that this “formidable old crustacean,” as John Gunther dubbed him, survived the war in Washington. King started by disliking General George Marshall, his opposite number in the Army, though he later found much to admire in him. He bucked Secretary Frank Knox. He distrusted and openly fought Secretary Forrestal. He was proud to find himself a minority of one at an allied conference—”King contra mundum.”

King was irritated by what he considered the President’s dilettante interest in the Navy, and refused to yield to Roosevelt’s blandishments. With retirement age in mind, he wrote F.D.R. in 1942: “I should bring to your notice the fact that the record shows that I shall attain the age of 64 years on November 23rd.” The scrawled notation he got back shivered his steely timbers: “So what, old top? I may even send you a birthday present!—F.D.R.”

A year later, crossing the Atlantic in the battleship Iowa on the way to Teheran, King and the President were nearly blown up when a destroyer accidentally loosed a live torpedo. “King wished to relieve the commanding officer of the destroyer at once,” writes King, “but, to his great amazement, the President told him to forget it. Consequently, no steps were taken.” In King’s report of Roosevelt’s death, there is no word of sorrow or compassion. He complains: “There was such a press of mourners that the Joint Chiefs could not even see the grave.”

For Navy buffs, refighting old battles, there are a few glimpses into King’s once-secret mental files:

¶ King thought that Admiral Spruance was absolutely right in refusing to be drawn away from Saipan in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, even if (though King does not say this) the decision reduced the scope of his victory.

¶ King held Admirals Halsey and Kinkaid both at fault in the Battle for Leyte Gulf—Halsey for letting himself be drawn off base by a Japanese decoy force, Kinkaid for not making dawn air searches.

Ernie King was human, after all. He could not bring himself to take blame for things that went wrong (like the wholesale sinking of allied ships off the East Coast early in 1942). He was a typical tourist, delighting in side trips to the antiquities of Egypt and Jerusalem, and flights over Bagdad and Damascus, even in the darkest days of war. And he had the G.I.’s souvenir-hunting spirit: at Teheran, he tried to “liberate” one of Stalin’s desk-pad doodles, and was miffed when a Briton beat him to it.

But Fleet Admiral King, like its subject, is heavy weather nearly all the way.

*Today, though more than one-third of its 4,000 ships are in mothballs and in reserve, the U.S. Navy still ranks first. According to the new edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, it is “the largest peacetime fleet ever maintained by any country and is as large as all the other navies of the world put together.”