BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: One Year of War

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Commanders, weapons, many of the Navy's pre-war plans and conceptions failed to meet the test of war and had to be changed in the first year. Admiral King and his quality of inward hardness neither failed nor changed. The Navy's judgment of him, of what he could do and of how he would do it, was one judgment that withstood the fires.

The Admiral Speaks. To Admiral King of "the silent service," loquacity is a vice, and in public he has said very little. The Marshall and Gilbert Island raids had briefly lifted American spirits, Singapore and Java had fallen, Bataan was falling, and Admiral King had become both OPNAV and COMINCH when he said in March: "Our days of victory are in the making."

The battles of the Coral Sea had been fought, the Lexington had been lost and Midway had been won at the cost of the York town when he told the war class of Annapolis midshipmen in June: "War is force—force to the utmost—force to make the enemy yield to our own will—to yield because their own will to fight is broken. War is men against men—mechanized war is still men against men."

The Navy and the Marines had attacked in the Solomons, and the Navy had tragically lost the first rounds at sea when Admiral King said in Ohio at Lorain (where he was born 64 years ago), and at Cleveland: "It's going to be a long war. We will really hit our stride in about a year's time. . . . Our two-ocean Navy is not yet in service. The smaller ships for it will begin to come into service around Thanksgiving or Christmas. The plain fact is we haven't the tools. Some of our critics would have us do everything everywhere all at once. It can't be done with what we have to work with."

The Wasp and a fourth carrier had gone down, but along with its offensive spirit the Navy had regained the seas around the Solomons, and across the world the Atlantic Fleet had assisted in the invasion of North Africa, when Admiral King again broke his rule of silence last week. His remarks were memorable because they were: 1) his first such interview since he took command; 2) the most thorough official review to date of the Navy's strategy, record and policy in the first year of war.

King on Strategy: "When the Japs struck at Pearl Harbor, we were not ready. You might say we were in the process of getting ready. The only thing we had set up in the Pacific was the fleet organization at Pearl Harbor. We had to get more bases, we had to get troops to those bases and to Australia, and we didn't have enough tools for the job. General Marshall was being hamstrung by demands for anti-aircraft batteries at every crossroads and the Lord knows what. Some of that is still going on, and it's got to stop."

To illustrate the degree of unreadiness in the Pacific last December, Admiral King strode to a map in his Washington office and pointed to a position conveniently near but safely out of the combat zones. At this logical point he had to establish a fleet-fueling base after the fighting began ("one of the first things I caused to be done").