Sundown

The time was a stark one for the U.S. -mid-December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor. Frosty-eyed Admiral Ernest Joseph King had been called back to Washington to run the U.S. fleet, was soon to be appointed (the first man in history) to the double-gaited job of Fleet Commander and Chief of Naval Operations. Growled Sailorman King to his colleagues at the Navy Department: "When they get into trouble, they always send for the sons of bitches."

Stern Resistance. Ernie King's reputation as a "sundowner" (seagoing for martinet) was legendary in the service. In the prewar Navy, where the work was sometimes slack, shore leaves plentiful, he ran a taut command from sunrise to sundown, often ordered gunnery practice on weekends. His drive -like his temper -was merciless. In 1926, while directing the salvage of the submarine 8-51, sunk with 34 dead in the Atlantic off Block Island, Captain King was advised by an admiral that he would never be able to get the submarine into a relatively shallow drydock. "Sir," replied Ernie King, "we've raised her 130 feet in the open sea. We've brought her 130 miles, and I guess we can raise her a couple of feet more." King did raise the sub, and for the salvage won the first of his four Distinguished Service Medals.

A harsh but just advocate of discipline, he imposed an iron discipline on himself. A drinker of strong spirits, he swore off hard liquor when war came, would sometimes stretch a glass of beer through a whole evening. In Washington, he lived aboard a ship in the Anacostia River instead of in comfortable quarters with his family, worked hard, savage hours in a small, Spartan office in the Navy Building. He took nonsense from no one, not even his commander in chief, became known as one of the few men in the Government who would resist the charms of Franklin Roosevelt and press relentlessly for the things he wanted.

Cold Will. For Admiral King, the call to greatness came almost too late. Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1878, of British-immigrant parents (his father was a railroad mechanic), he was a top Annapolis graduate, class of 1901, who spent the next 40 years learning all there was to know about surface ships, submarines and naval aviation. (He qualified as a pilot at 48.) Approaching retirement age (64) in 1941, he was saved from the shelf by the Navy's need for a boss as tough as the five-ocean, six-front war it was about to fight.

King fulfilled that need. From the wreckage of Pearl Harbor he built the greatest sea-air armada in history, and with cold will and intelligence led it to win the Battle of the Atlantic, break the back of the Japanese in the Pacific. Said his opposite number, Army Chief of Staff General George Catlett Marshall: "A master strategist."

Anticipated Fate. After the war, in semi-retirement as an adviser to the Navy Department, Ernie King, five-star admiral of the fleet, remained a power in Washington, fighting the Navy's war against integration of the services, never retreating from his belief that despite the A-bomb the Navy as a fighting and landing team should be the nation's first force. Then, in 1947, came a brain hemorrhage from which he recovered enough to write, with a collaborator, Fleet Admiral King, a third-person account in which, with typical reticence, little of his inner self was revealed. Its most poignant sentence (in the introduction): "It was only by the unanticipated timing of fate that any use was made of my experience."

Last week, in the fullness of years, fate overtook Fleet Admiral Ernie King. At the Portsmouth, N.H. naval hospital, where he had been spending the summer, Sundowner King, aged 77, died of a heart ailment. After funeral services at Washington's National Cathedral, with Old Comrades General Marshall, Admirals William D. Leahy and Chester Nimitz among the honorary pallbearers, Staunch Mariner King, who never saw the sea until he was 18 but made its mastery his life, was buried at Annapolis.

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