The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  Cervera’s flagship, the black-hulled Infanta Maria Teresa, led the way with his admiral’s pennant flying. Leahy later claimed that the Oregon fired the first shot at the flagship as it cleared the harbor and made a run to the west, followed by the rest of the Spanish fleet. The American ships steamed toward the coast to pin the Spaniards against the shore. Oregon was instrumental in forcing Maria Teresa to run aground as it began to burn. Texas and Iowa took hits from the remaining Spanish ships but successfully fought off the Spanish torpedo-boat destroyers. Meanwhile, the Cristóbal Colón, arguably the fastest ship on either side, spied an opening to escape west and surged past Oregon as Leahy’s ship finished off the Maria Teresa.

  Oregon and Commodore Schley’s cruiser, Brooklyn, quickly gave chase, and with thick black smoke pouring from their stacks, the three ships churned westward. After several hours and some sixty miles, two shells from Leahy’s forward turret neatly straddled the Cristóbal Colón. Its captain turned toward shore, ran his ship aground, and struck his flag. By the time Admiral Sampson arrived off Santiago in the New York, the battle was over. The Spanish fleet had been destroyed with only two American casualties, one man killed and one wounded. At least six hundred Spanish sailors perished.20

  In his typical fashion, Leahy described the Battle of Santiago in his journal in crisp, factual language—almost as though he had been a detached observer. Others painted a far different picture of Leahy “standing by his turret, jumping up and down, slapping his leg with his cap, and yelling his head off.”21 Quiet, reserved Bill Leahy was human after all. What’s more, even though he would spend the next forty years championing the might of battleships, he had just fought his one and only naval battle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  King

  “Rey”

  —Annapolis, Class of 1901

  Shortly before midnight on the evening of February 8, 1904, ten sleek Japanese destroyers slipped quietly into the Russian naval base at Port Arthur (now Lüshun), China. Relying on recently developed Whitehead torpedoes, they unleashed a devastating attack on seven battleships and seven cruisers of the Imperial Russian Fleet. It was a stunning Japanese victory. It was also the result of a surprise attack. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were strained and in the process of being terminated, but no state of war yet existed.

  To Japan’s displeasure, Russia had begun flexing its muscles in this part of the world during the 1890s. As Japan jousted with China over Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, Russia used the disputes as a cover to seize Port Arthur. Its protected harbor sat at the tip of a small peninsula jutting out from the Chinese coast just west of Korea, strategically near the sea-lanes linking Korea, China, and Japan. When Russia demanded a formal lease from China that included the right to connect Port Arthur to the Trans-Siberian Railway, Japan’s displeasure deepened. Tsar Nicholas II already had his port on the Pacific at Vladivostok, some twelve hundred miles to the north, and Japan viewed Russia’s presence at Port Arthur as an unacceptable intrusion into its sphere of influence.

  The destroyers that attacked Port Arthur showed Japan’s resolve to do something about it. All had been built in England between 1899 and 1902. Japan, as yet, had no major shipyards of its own capable of building steel warships, and Admiral Heihachiro Togo justified the surprise attack by citing the need to conserve limited naval resources. Head-to-head combat or a lengthy blockade would quickly sap his strength.

  The Russians suffered a terrible setback—three of the tsar’s biggest ships were badly damaged. The battleship Retvizan had a gaping hole in its side. The cruiser Pallada glowed red from fires in its coal bunkers. And the battleship Tsarevitch, arguably the most powerful in the Russian fleet, sat ignominiously in the mud at the entrance to the inner harbor, its bulkheads shattered and steering compartment flooded. Perhaps most important, the tsar’s swagger in the Far East had been seriously humbled.1

  Fifteen hundred miles to the south at Cavite in the Philippines—now an American naval base thanks to Admiral Dewey—the U.S. cruiser Cincinnati was effectively a neutral, but hardly a disinterested, party to what had just happened. Cincinnati was only ten years old, but at 306 feet in length and with a displacement of 3,200 tons, it was already inferior to the newer cruisers coming down the ways. Nonetheless, the ship was immediately ordered to run north to Shanghai and then cross the Yellow Sea to the Korean port of Chemulpo (now Inchon) to assess the situation.

  Entering the harbor at Chemulpo, the Cincinnati found ample evidence that the Japanese had also attacked Russian ships at anchor there. A Japanese torpedo boat menacingly watched the Cincinnati’s arrival, but the American cruiser anchored among the warships of other neutral nations without incident. Standing his watch on the Cincinnati’s bridge was a recently commissioned ensign named Ernest J. King. For a young officer determined to make his mark, this was a ringside seat to the start of the Russo-Japanese War.2

  Ernest Joseph King came from a line of builders. His father, James Clydesdale King, was born in Scotland in 1848. James’s father died when he was nine, and his mother, a destitute widow with five sons and a daughter, immigrated to the United States to join her brother in Cleveland. James grew up on the shores of Lake Erie. He worked the schooners that plied the Great Lakes, but such employment was seasonal due to the icebound winters and he soon switched to bridge building as a more stable occupation.

  Joseph Keam was a master woodworker for the Royal Navy on the docks of Plymouth, England, before iron-hulled steamships cut into his livelihood. He, too, sought brighter prospects in America and took his wife and four eligible daughters to Cleveland in 1872. There he found refinery work with the Standard Oil Company. Their daughter Elizabeth, “Bessie” as she was known, married James King in Cleveland in 1876. The newlyweds traveled by rail to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia for their honeymoon.

  For several years James followed bridge construction wherever it was available, but such itinerant work made Bessie uneasy. After their first son died in infancy, Bessie urged James to find permanent work closer to home. He took a job in a railroad repair shop in Lorain, Ohio, about twenty miles west of Cleveland. There, in a small cottage near Lake Erie, Ernest Joseph King was born on November 23, 1878. The family moved about some, but Lorain would always be home.

  There was never any doubt that young Ernest was his father’s son. The boy grew up surrounded by the greasy smells and clanging iron of his father’s workplace. Engineers would boost the lad into their cabs as they shuttled locomotives around the yards, and rough-cut workers gladly shared the intricacies of pistons, gears, and steam-driven machinery with him. Whatever inborn qualities of forthrightness and obstinacy Ernest may have inherited from his father and grandfather Keam, they were no doubt accentuated by exposure to this straightforward, no-nonsense group of workingmen.

  Diplomacy, tact, and forbearance were not words to be associated with Ernest King, even at a young age. When his mother once scolded him for expressing his dislike of a neighbor’s pumpkin pie in front of the hostess, seven-year-old Ernest held his ground. “It’s true,” he insisted, “I don’t like it.” Absolute candor, no matter how rude or insulting, became his trademark. “If I didn’t agree,” King later reminisced, “I said so.”

  His father could be just as stubborn. When Ernest grandly announced that he was quitting school after eighth grade to get a job, James King relented, but with the stipulation that the boy work at least a year without changing his mind. Ernest found work in a shop making typesetting equipment, but when fall came and his friends trudged back to school, he had second thoughts. His father held firm. They had an agreement and Ernest would complete his year of employment. By the following autumn, Ernest was all too glad to enroll in high school in Lorain.

  During his sophomore year, Ernest almost died of typhoid fever. His mother was ill herself and had taken her younger children to live with a sister in Cleveland. An elderly German woman nursed Ernest back to health—calling him “Yonny”—and he woul
d visit her in later years when he returned to Lorain. His mother died the following spring, but by then Ernest was content living alone with his father and he seems to have taken her passing with little pause.

  Instead, he began to focus on a career beyond the machine shop. From a local Civil War veteran, King borrowed book after book about the men and battles of that relatively recent conflict. It was exciting reading and it added to his interest in the military, which had been piqued by a magazine article about the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. At some point—never mind that he had once been horribly seasick on Lake Erie—Ernest confided to his father his ambition to attend.

  James King talked with his congressman, Winfield Scott Kerr of Ohio’s 14th District, when Kerr came to Lorain to campaign for reelection in the summer of 1896. Each congressman handled his academy appointments differently, some handing them out to sons of favored supporters, others insisting on a strict competitive process. Since James King certainly had no political clout, father and son were pleased when Kerr invited Ernest to take competitive exams the following year.

  Ernest spent his senior year preparing for the exams, and after delivering the valedictory address to his Lorain graduating class of thirteen, he embarked on the first journey of his life away from home—fifty miles to Congressman Kerr’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio—to vie for the appointment to Annapolis. By now six feet one-half inches tall and a lean 135 pounds, King passed the physical evaluation with no trouble, and when the results of the academic tests were announced, he stood first among the thirty applicants. Ernest J. King was headed for Annapolis.

  If young King had reservations, he could hardly let them show among the Lorain townspeople, to whom he had become somewhat of a hero simply by applying for such a far-off adventure. (There was also a girl, Leona Doane, and they parted with an understanding.) James King, however, was not so certain of the outcome. He bought his son a round-trip ticket to Annapolis—just in case.3

  Ernest J. King arrived at the Naval Academy on August 15, 1897—ten weeks after William D. Leahy had graduated and departed to serve on the Oregon. He took the usual entrance exams to validate his appointment and joined eighty-seven classmates in the class of 1901.

  As he would always do, King established his personal goals for Annapolis early. When an overbearing upperclassman accused him of bragging that he would be first in his class, King denied it. Another member of King’s class, future admiral Adolphus Andrews, overheard this and promptly asserted that he intended to be first. The upperclassman then proceeded to berate Andrews for his presumptuousness and the incident gave King pause. If he graduated first in his class, King reasoned, he might become too visible for comfort during his career. Superiors’ expectations might be too high. But if he graduated third or fourth, he would still have the prestige without as much of the scrutiny. It was a typical King rationalization, and he would take similar positions in similar situations throughout his career.

  There were no Christmas leaves that first year. King’s first two roommates “bilged” and dropped out. Then came the war with Spain. First classmen were graduated immediately with no more ceremony than the usual dinner formation and dispatched to ships throughout the fleet. The junior class was ordered to sea after completing annual exams. But the third and fourth classmen were judged to be still in the nuisance category and were ordered home on leave until fall.

  King initially took this in stride, but while en route to Lorain, he stopped off with a classmate at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. Quite by accident, the two cadets learned that somehow one of their other classmates had wrangled orders to go to sea. Sea duty in wartime for a fourth-class cadet? If that was true, King certainly was not going to be left out. He and his friend put on their dress uniforms and presented themselves in downtown Washington at the Navy Department, then occupying a building adjacent to the White House.

  War creates confusion, and out of it King and four classmates were assigned to the cruiser San Francisco, then serving as flagship of the Northern Patrol Squadron. (One might well thank Theodore Roosevelt for conferring this opportunity on young men determined to get into the war, but Roosevelt himself had already resigned as assistant secretary.) The San Francisco proved a heady learning experience for all concerned, especially when unknowing cadets were ordered to perform seemingly routine naval maneuvers. It didn’t help that cadets like King were quickly certain that they knew all there was to know about seamanship.

  At anchor off Provincetown, Massachusetts, King was sent ashore in a small oar-driven boat to fetch foodstuffs. Returning, he was ordered to stop at the cruiser Dixie. In typical King fashion, he decided that he could save time if he came alongside the Dixie bow to stern rather than turning about and coming alongside bow to bow as was established procedure. The coxswain in the boat with him expressed his disapproval, but King was certain that he knew best. Naturally, when King climbed the ladder to board Dixie, the executive officer, Lieutenant Hugo Osterhaus, greeted him with a sharp rebuke: “Don’t you know how to come alongside a ship?” King replied that he didn’t want to turn around twice in getting to the San Francisco, but Osterhaus wasn’t persuaded. One way or the other, he would remember this brash cadet. To King’s credit, there were other occasions when he gratefully deferred to experienced seamen for advice.4

  Initially, the San Francisco and its squadron were assigned the task of guarding New England against attacks by a rumored Spanish fleet. When it became clear that this threat was illusory, San Francisco and its consorts sailed south for Key West. By the time they were ready for action off Cuba, the main Atlantic fleet had won its smashing victory at Santiago, and there was little to do but blockade the island’s northern coast, including Havana.

  On August 12, King was the junior officer of the deck when the San Francisco was ordered close to the entrance of Havana harbor in anticipation of ships attempting to escape the blockade. The cruiser came under fire from Spanish shore batteries and replied in kind. Thoughts of another Santiago quickly evaporated as no ships appeared, but King had seen his first action. By nightfall, an armistice was in place and the short little war was over.

  Back in Key West, the San Francisco’s naval cadets were suddenly deadweight. They were granted immediate leave before reporting back to Annapolis to start their second year. King hurried home to Lorain and found himself even more of a local hero. Lorain’s own Company A of the Fifth Ohio Regiment had made it only as far as Tampa before the war ended, but Ernest King had been in the “action off Havana.” He and his shipmates were given the same medal as the victors at Santiago. King returned to Annapolis that fall with two other mementos of the experience—an anchor tattooed on his left arm and a small dagger on his right.5

  After such an adventure, the ensuing academic year and the practice cruise of the following summer were rather mundane, even if the latter took him across the Atlantic to Plymouth, England, on the sailing ship Monongahela. While there, King visited cousins from his mother’s family and was still raving years later about high tea with strawberries and Devonshire cream.

  Monongahela was becalmed en route back to Annapolis and arrived barely in time for the start of the academic year. It hardly mattered to King, as his encyclopedic mind was well suited to the heavily rote teaching methods. As for the engineering courses, he easily absorbed them after his apprentice-like experiences in the Ohio railroad shops.

  Not much of an athlete, King nonetheless played B-squad football for four years (the team was called the “Hustlers”) and delighted in ice-skating on his own when the river froze. He gained thirty pounds, and by the end of his third year, he had set his sights on his final objective, to wear the four stripes of a cadet lieutenant commander and command the battalion. To accomplish it, King needed to win the respect and confidence of both his subordinates and his superiors. Such leadership is sometimes a fine line, but King demonstrated it and became the top cadet commander in his class.

  But that is not to say that King was without vice
s. Chasing women and smoking cigarettes almost did him in. His “understanding” with Leona Doane from Lorain was terminated sometime during his third year when Leona wrote that she intended to marry another man. King replied with the utmost grace and good thoughts toward her and may have been secretly relieved. By that time, there was another young woman who had caught his eye.

  Mattie Egerton was described as “the most beautiful, the most sought-after young woman at Annapolis,” and King determined to be first among the seekers. They both loved to dance and delighted in each other’s physical presence. They soon made plans to marry once King completed his two years of sea duty and won his commission.

  His smoking violations were another matter. Smoking was strictly forbidden at the academy, although many sneaked habitual cigarettes—a practice that in time would fill the wardrooms of navy ships throughout the world with a blue haze. On report twice for smoking, King was in danger of being expelled—battalion commander though he might be—when an academy officer caught him smoking a third time in an Annapolis café. The officer settled for a sharp dressing-down, and King, who once again showed little regard for sound advice, would spend a lifetime being photographed with a cigarette in his hand.

  In addition to his final-year responsibilities as battalion commander, King was one of the editors of the Lucky Bag yearbook. How much input King had into the quote chosen for his own biography is debatable, but it fit: “A man so various that he seems to be,/ Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.” Even more telling were the assertions “Hops,—well, yes!” and “Temper—don’t fool with nitroglycerin.”