(See Cover)
Last week, from the mists of the North Atlantic, naval guns roared a message to the U.S. The guns belonged to the ill-fated German battle cruiser Bismarck, and hapless H.M.S. Hood (see p. 21).
Their simple, terrible message was that one set of the guns might almost as well have belonged to a warship of the U.S. Navy. For on that day, as for many a day past, U.S. naval headquarters in Washington was both surprised and relieved when another 24 hours went by with no news that a U.S. ship had fatally brushed with a Nazi surface raider, submarine or patrolling warplane.
It was altogether possible that U.S. naval vessels were within hearing of the Hood's last blast. The U.S. Atlantic Fleet keeps a regular (although, in those northern waters, a scattered) patrol on behalf of the British. It was even possible (though unlikely) that some patrolling U.S. ship tipped off the British to the Nazi rovers' whereabouts. Certainly, if the U.S. patrol had spotted the Bismarck and her escorts beforehand, the tip-off would have been quickly given—that is what the U.S. patrol is for.
In any event, once the U.S. Navy had heard of the Hood's destruction, certainly one of the first men to be advised was Admiral Ernest Joseph King, Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet.
Wherever he was, Admiral King was in dangerous waters. If there was any doubt about the danger, the Nazis' Grand Admiral Erich Raeder in Berlin removed it when he defied Ernie King's fleet to pass from patrol to all-out convoy, and said: "Nobody can expect a German warship to look on while an American warship communicates the position of a German man-of-war to the British Admiralty. Such procedure must be regarded as an act of war. . . ."
Nitroglycerin. In the Navy, there are only two opinions of Ernest Joseph King.
One: that he is a great fellow and a great sailorman. The other: that he is a no-good, ring-tailed son-of-the-bilge. Some of his colleagues take a bit of both judgments, granting that he would probably be at least as unpleasant to an enemy in war as he seems to be to people who dislike him. If that estimate did not now prevail, he would not be commander of the Atlantic Fleet.
"Temper? Don't fool with nitroglycerin," the Naval Academy's Lucky Bag recorded of Ernie King when he graduated in 1901 (after a mid-school interlude of active duty during the Spanish-American War, on patrol off the Atlantic Coast). That temper subsequently hindered his Navy career, made enemies, often saddened friends who had the utmost faith in his capacities. Testifying before Congressional committeemen, he has been known to fly into ugly, inarticulate rage. Such incidents did him no good, either with Congress or with the Navy command.
Yet on occasion he can be graceful and charming: there is a Navy saying that 62-year-old, egg-bald Admiral King can outdance any young ensign at night, outwork him next day.
There is a storm within him, and at sea he is at his best. For his staff service in the Atlantic during World War I, he won the Navy Cross. For his brilliant salvage of the sunken submarine S-51 (lost with 33 lives) in 1925, he got the Distinguished Service Medal. When the S-4 was rammed and lost with 40 men in 1927, he was again called to salvage duty, had the rare Gold Star added to his D.S.M.