ARMY & NAVY: King for Moffett

Not one flyer could President Roosevelt last week find on the list of fleet officers from which the Navy’s General Board had asked him to choose a successor to the late Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett as Chief of its Bureau of Aeronautics. He delighted Navy airmen by brushing the list aside, naming a man who has more than 400 hours at airplane controls to his credit. Tall, spare, keen-jawed Captain Ernest J. King, 54. father of six daughters and a son, qualified as a Naval Aviator (pilot) in 1927, has since successively commanded the Scouting Fleet’s Aircraft Squadrons, been assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, commanded the Hampton Roads Naval Air Station, the aircraft carrier Lexington. His appointment was doubly important to Naval aviation in view of the President’s determination to dispense with the services of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air. But flying Captain Kingachieved fame on the bottom of the sea. When the S-51 went down in 132ft. of water off Block Island in 1925 most Navy men thought it was there to stay. There were no precedents, no equipment for raising a 1,000-ton submarine from deep water in the open sea. Nonetheless a salvaging expedition under Captain King, then commander of the Submarine Base at New London, went out to try. Commander Edward Ellsberg, who directed the divers and occasionally went down himself, has told in his On the Bottom the story of the months of perseverance, courage and mechanical in genuity by which the expedition succeeded. Captain King did his administration job so well that the Navy gave him, as well as Commander Ellsberg, a Distinguished Service Medal. When the S-4 sank off Provincetown in 1927 he again led a successful salvaging expedition, got an other D. S. M., this time with a gold star.