BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: One Year of War

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The first year was ending, and it had been a Navy year. The tall, taut man who is both Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) let his mind go back to the morning of Pearl Harbor, and observed that the Japanese probably had not expected their attack to be so successful. Said Admiral Ernest Joseph King: "If they had it to do over, I think you would probably find them moving in with a tremendous invasion force such as they brought against us at Midway."

He smiled, and his face for a moment was not wholly bleak.

"Of course," he said, "if we had it to do over, we would do differently too."

Had the Japs, then, lost the war by missing their main chance to seize Pearl Harbor and drive the U.S. from the Pacific on the first Dec. 7? Admiral King answered :

"I'd say they started something at Pearl Harbor that they are not going to finish. We are going to win this war."

The Admiral. When the Japanese bombs and torpedoes shattered the peace and sleep of Pearl Harbor, Admiral King was on the Navy's second ocean, directing the Atlantic Fleet's undeclared war of 1941. In mid-December, when he was summoned to Washington to be COMINCH of all the fleets, "Betty" Stark was doing his limited best as OPNAV. The Utah and the Arizona gaped from their graves at Oahu, ships slightly more fortunate were being readied for removal and repair, and bombed planes still made ugly piles on the Army fields. The Japs were closing on Manila, hacking away the last Army air forces in the Philippines; MacArthur was looking to Corregidor and Bataan, and Admiral Hart's Asiatic "Fleet" of cruisers and destroyers was on its way to glory and futility in the Indies. Guam had fallen; Wake had a few days of glory left. The Japs were in Malaya, headed for Singapore. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse—pillars of British and U.S. sea power in the western Pacific—were gone. People at home were saying that the whole U.S. fleet was at the bottom of the Pacific, and profane Admiral King was saying to his colleagues at the Navy Department:

"When they get into trouble, they always send for the sons of bitches."

This remark accurately summarized both Admiral King's reputation in the prewar Navy and the principal reason for his commanding the wartime Navy. Few men in peace or war have known "Rey" King well enough to find the warm self behind his hard, hazel eyes. Well does he know that others in the Navy hold him to be a brutal and forthright man, savage in his judgments and merciless in his expression of them, uncompromising and often extreme in his demands upon his subordinates, a man who can be as forbidding in family crises as he is on a bridge or at a Navy desk.

He takes a certain pride in this reputation. Last year, when he saw a suitably brutal account of himself in print (TIME, June 2, 1941), his curses roared through the Navy Building. But officers who knew him smiled at each other. "I think he rather liked it," one of them said.