Sims’s fixation with a widening circle of projected power may have influenced Nimitz’s fellow classmate—both at Annapolis and now at the Naval War College—Commander Roscoe C. MacFall when he took his own turn at the plotting board. Rather than placing ships in long lines, MacFall arrayed his fleet in concentric circles around his capital ships—admittedly still battleships. The tactical advantage was that with a common pivot point in the center of the circle, all ships could turn together and remain in formation. The circle formation also had the advantage of concentrating antiaircraft fire around the capital ships.
As it turned out, it was Chester Nimitz who would supervise the integration of these two developments—MacFall’s concentric-circle formations and Sims’s concept of the aircraft carrier as capital ship—into fleet operations at sea. After his tour at the Naval War College, Nimitz was picked by his old mentor from his World War I submarine days, Admiral Samuel S. Robison, to become Robison’s assistant chief of staff when he became commander in chief, Battle Fleet, the second-highest operational command in the navy. Nimitz reported aboard Robison’s flagship, the battleship California, and during the fleet’s first round of maneuvers, he convinced both the admiral and his senior captains to try the circle formation. When they did, it worked surprisingly well.
Aligning off the flagship, the entire fleet could pivot together as all the ships kept a constant bearing and distance from the flagship. When the fleet was deploying into battle formation, a battleship led the way out of the circle, and the trailing ships followed accordingly. (Maintaining formation at night became more problematic, but these difficulties lessened when ships were finally equipped with radar.)
As this tactic was refined over a succession of maneuvers, however, there was one obvious exception to the circular formation. Flight operations require aircraft carriers to turn into the wind so that aircraft can take off and land with the benefit of the wind just as they do on land. A carrier with its bow pointed into a twenty-knot wind and steaming ahead at fifteen knots provides a pilot with the advantage of thirty-five knots of wind moving over his plane’s wings even before he shoves the throttle full. Similarly, turning into the wind to land aircraft allows for slower landing speeds. For example, an aircraft with a normal landing speed of sixty-five knots has an effective deck speed of only thirty knots when landing on a carrier surging at fifteen knots into a twenty-knot wind.
When the Langley was required to launch or recover its planes, the carrier left the circular formation and sailed into the wind accompanied by only two destroyers. The ship was easy prey for submarines and frequently ended up some distance from the main force.
To Nimitz, the solution was obvious. Admiral Sims was right: the carrier, not the battleship, was the chief capital ship, and the concentric-circle formation should have the carrier at its center. That way, when the carrier was required to turn into the wind for flight operations, the entire fleet turned with it. Under pressure from Nimitz, Admiral Robison sought permission from the Navy Department to combine Langley with his battle force for maneuvers. The result was that the carrier always had the protection of the surrounding screen of ships, and those ships always had the protection of the carrier’s planes. It was only 1924, but Nimitz later regarded those pioneering maneuvers with carrier-centered, circular task-force formations “as laying the groundwork for the cruising formations that we used in World War II in the carrier air groups and practically every kind of task force that went out.”6
While Ernest J. King was still uncertain about the outcome of the S-51 salvage operation, his conversation with William D. Leahy in the Bureau of Navigation had not offered King much hope for a plum sea-duty assignment. In his anxiety, King went to see Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the chief of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. A native of South Carolina and an 1890 graduate of Annapolis, Moffett had cut his teeth on cruisers and battleships before accepting the appointment as the first chief of aeronautics in 1921. He had become devoted to aviation, and while some—including King—would question his fascination with lighter-than-air craft, Moffett was strongly committed to naval aviation as an integral part of fleet operations and not as a separate service. “Hell, we won’t secede from the Navy,” Moffett admonished his junior officers. “If we are half as good as we think we are, we’ll take it over.”7
Moffett sympathized with King’s plight about a future command and offered an intriguing alternative. Congress was tinkering with navy regulations so that aviation commands would require qualification as naval aviators or at least observers. The problem was that most qualified aviators were far too junior to assume command of a naval air base or one of the two carriers nearing completion. King was almost fifty, but if he was willing to qualify to fly, Moffett promised him command of an aircraft carrier.
An aircraft carrier? That thought got King’s blood racing. Much like the previous promise of a flotilla command if King went to submarine school, Moffett’s offer seemed to be King’s ticket up to the next rung of the career ladder. The offer of command of a capital ship did not come lightly. But typical of King, he pondered the decision for several months while he finished raising S-51 and still hoped that a cruiser command might open up. “I suppose that Bill Leahy has told you of my strenuous desires to get command of one of the scouts [light cruisers],” King wrote Captain Thomas R. Kurtz, an Annapolis classmate now in the Bureau of Navigation. “I hope that you will keep me in mind for that duty.”8
But then King got itchy. “It seemed to me,” King later said, “that aviation was the coming thing in the Navy.” A month before S-51 was raised, he accepted Moffett’s offer and expected to report for flight training at Pensacola after the salvage operation was complete. But Moffett suddenly had a more pressing need, and with S-51 barely in dry dock, King was ordered to take command of the seaplane tender Wright.
Wright’s job was to shuttle seaplanes around and serve as a mobile support base. It had a reputation as “an easy ship,” but that changed immediately when King marched up its gangplank. His bite equaled his bark, and within weeks the Wright was smartening up while its new captain was taking his first flights in the open-air rear cockpit of a two-man seaplane.
King wasn’t a natural, but he learned enough over the next few months that he pressured Moffett to designate him a student aviator. It was King’s usual response: he got a brief introduction, and suddenly he was an expert. Moffett demurred and instead ordered King to report to Pensacola early in 1927 for the complete course in flight training.
The naval air base at Pensacola was a rather down-and-out operation in those days. Funds were tight, the whole idea of naval aviation still had plenty of skeptics, and a batch of newly minted ensigns fresh out of the academy were being lumped together with old fuddy-duddies like King. This all made for an experience where the only rank that really mattered was how well one did in the pilot’s seat.
As he had always done when studying was a means to an end, King threw himself into his course work and spent as much time in the air as permitted. This became one of those times in his life when he abstained from alcohol, preached abstinence to his fellow students, and “badgered the base commander to enforce the prohibition laws.”
Then one Saturday afternoon, King strolled into the officers’ quarters and found a drinking party under way. Knowing well his previous rants, one of the instigators thrust a drink into King’s hands and waited for his reaction. King looked from the glass in his hand to the assembled crowd and back again and then took a sip. That was all he needed. From then on, whether it was drinking or poker, Captain King became “the damnedest party man in the place.” As usual, once he embraced something, he did it full bore.
And none of this reveling, of course, had any negative impact on his flying. Thanks to his lessons aboard the Wright, King soloed soon after arriving in Pensacola, He was very mechanical in his approach, did everything by the book, and seemed to relish flying, but he never became totally comfortable serving as pilot in comman
d. He simply didn’t have the innate seat-of-the-pants mentality that characterized so many pilots of that era. King earned his wings because he was required to do so for advancement, but after they were pinned on his chest on May 26, 1927, he never again flew alone. He delighted in taking the controls on flights, but he also wanted the safety net of another pilot on board (and in fact the navy later mandated this policy for senior officers over fifty).9
His pilot’s license requirement fulfilled and certified as Naval Aviator No. 3368, King was summoned by Admiral Moffett to report back to command of the Wright. After a ten-day leave with Mattie and his family in Annapolis, King did so and then watched expectantly as Lexington and Saratoga were commissioned late in 1927. Patience, Admiral Moffett counseled, but then a call from the chief of naval operations interrupted both of their plans. Another submarine, S-4, was down off Cape Cod after colliding with a Coast Guard cutter. This time, there really might be survivors, and King was ordered to take command of the rescue operations.
In weather too stormy for flying, King raced to New York by train and then sped from Penn Station to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in a police motorcade. There he hopped into a seaplane from the battleship New York, gave the pilot thumbs-up, and endured two frigid hours of flying to Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Arriving on the scene, King found the reliable Falcon over the crash site and tapping coming from the submerged hull. But the weather was worsening, and attempts to blow the sub’s ballast tanks full of air and force it to the surface failed. Similar attempts to rig an air hose and pump fresh air into the boat to sustain the crew also failed. The press corps flocked about Provincetown with its own litany of second-guessing. Finally, the commander of the Atlantic Fleet submarines ordered the Falcon and its support ships into the harbor at Provincetown to ride out a furious gale. It lasted for days, and on Christmas Eve 1927, the navy was forced to announce that everyone aboard S-4 was presumed dead.
Now King faced another difficult salvage operation—one that was once again exacerbated by wintry weather. Then came the letter from Admiral Moffett that he had been expecting. He was offered command of the Langley. It wasn’t the Lexington or Saratoga, but it was an aircraft carrier. And King hesitated. Just as he was during the operations to recover S-51, he was torn between seeing the present operation through to completion and taking the command. Then too, just as he had continued to covet a cruiser command before flight training, he not so secretly still hoped that Fortune might see him on Lexington or Saratoga.
“I hardly know how to reply at this time,” King responded to Moffett. But in the end, he determined to stay with the S-4 salvage operations and take his chances because “developments regarding the Lexington and Saratoga commands, may, in June or thereabouts, be of interest and importance to me.”
As it turned out, King was rewarded on all counts. In mid-March 1928, S-4 bobbed to the surface after the deployment of a series of pontoons similar to those used on S-51. He reported back to the Wright in May with his second Distinguished Service Medal (the peacetime navy was a little more generous with this honor in those days). Then Moffett made good on his pledge and King received his orders to take command not of the proffered “Covered Wagon” Langley, but of the shiny new Lexington. King was walking on air—for about three weeks.10
Quite suddenly, on July 28, 1928, the Bureau of Navigation canceled his coveted orders to the Lexington, and—apparently at Moffett’s request—he was assigned instead to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington as Moffett’s assistant. He reported promptly but was less than pleased. It seems unlikely that Moffett purposely employed a bait and switch but that he instead belatedly caved in to pressure from a recently qualified aviator five years senior to King who desperately wanted the Lexington command. Writing his memoirs twenty years later, King still could not bear to cite the Lexington by name: “He learned to his disgust that he was presently to be shifted from his highly congenial new command at sea.” To him, the whole affair of changed orders was an “annoying period.”11
King was assured that he would “love the job” of Moffett’s assistant. But Moffett was clearly the well-established heavyweight in the bureau, the man who had fought for its creation and nurtured its growth. He was energetic, resourceful, and not afraid to be combative in pursuit of his goals. These were exactly the words that might just as well have been used to describe King, and his sudden proximity to Moffett produced predictable friction.
It wasn’t that Moffett and King didn’t like each other, but rather that each was used to having his own way. King played no favorites—his or anyone else’s—and Moffett was content to coddle certain naval aviators who were bringing in good press, the polar explorer Commander Richard E. Byrd among them. King fretted, too, over Moffett’s direct control of aviation assignments outside the normal channels of the Bureau of Navigation. Without such control, King might well have been strutting the bridge of the Lexington and not haggling with Moffett.
Finally, after King had been on the job about nine months, the friction rose to the boiling point, and Moffett sputtered, “It seems to me you want to be chief of the Bureau.” That was probably true, but King merely replied, “Admiral, I request a change of duty so you can have a different assistant.”
Moffett readily obliged, but far from exiling King to some outpost, he gave him command of the naval air station at Norfolk, then, as now, among the major naval aviation facilities. They might not have gotten along, but Moffett clearly respected King’s talents. And within a year, Moffett promised King that in the summer of 1930 he would at long last have command of a carrier, the Saratoga.
Most captains with an eye toward the stars of a rear admiral would have been ecstatic, but King proved his usual, particular self. Because Saratoga was the flagship of the carrier force, its captain had an admiral on board inevitably looking over his shoulder. King wanted the Lexington and a good measure of freedom. He told Moffett so in no uncertain terms. Moffett might well have put King in his place, but he didn’t. He gave King the Lexington as requested. It had taken twenty-nine years since his Annapolis graduation, but Captain Ernest J. King was at last the master of what he and many others thought was “the finest ship command in the world!”12
Lexington had been commissioned for only two and a half years when King stepped aboard the carrier in June 1930. Much was still being learned about these floating behemoths. Lexington’s crew of around 2,100 officers and enlisted men was twice that aboard the largest battleship of the era. The sheer number of men and the numerous departments tended to decentralize the chain of command. And the air squadrons that rotated duty aboard the vessel presented their own set of problems. Some pilots treated the carrier as a cruise ship and expected to do little duty beyond flying. Others looked to their squadron commander, not the carrier captain, as the ultimate authority. None of this sat very well with Ernest J. King.
First and foremost, King reminded everyone—including the pilots from the air squadrons—that there was only one code of conduct and that was the Navy Regulations. Departmental idiosyncrasies fell by the wayside as “King made it his business to know everything that was happening on the ship.”13 As for the pilots, King ordered them to conduct thorough inspections of their aircraft before and after each flight and to put in their time on watch as naval officers. This was the U.S. Navy, gentlemen, not a barnstorming circus or brunch at the Hotel del Coronado.
King’s approach worked. Lexington went from being a “loose” ship to being a taut one ruled by King’s iron hand. “If a man knew his business,” recalled future admiral J. J. “Jocko” Clark, then the commander of one of Lexington’s air squadrons, “it was easy enough to get along with Ernie King. But God help him if he were wrong; King would crucify him.”14 Along the way King’s penchant for experimentation brought much-needed innovation to the operations and tactics of America’s new carrier fleet.
King’s first chance to show off the Lexington’s snappiness, as well as his own command abilities ab
oard it, took place during fleet maneuvers off Panama early in 1931. After initially being sent on what he considered a wild-goose chase, King ordered Lexington to come about and race at full speed back into the area where he suspected Langley was posing as an “enemy” carrier. As Lexington closed to within the maximum range of its aircraft, established protocol dictated launching scouts to locate the target, to be followed by bombers and torpedo planes.
But King was impatient to score a “kill” before darkness fell, and he launched his bombers and torpedo planes thirty minutes after the scouts. Navigation by aircraft at sea was then still rudimentary at best. Once one’s home carrier receded from view, pilots relied on dead reckoning with a compass and estimates of wind and speed to get back to where the carrier was supposed to be.
An hour or so later, with evening approaching, the scouts returned on schedule to the Lexington and reported no sign of either the “enemy” or the trailing bombers and torpedo planes. King paced the bridge and watched the darkening skies for any sign of the planes. Fleet regulations required all aircraft to be recovered by sunset, for the very good reason that night landings had yet to be attempted.
Lexington’s radio sent out a flurry of dots and dashes, black smoke poured from its stack, and searchlights frantically probed the descending darkness. If ever King doubted himself, now, on the verge of losing thirty-one aircraft on his first major operation, might have been one of those times.
Twilight in the tropics is fleeting, and just before it vanished, the missing aircraft lumbered into view, having found and “attacked” the Langley. The pilots began to make what became for all but the first few aircraft their first night carrier landing. When all were aboard safely, the flight commander hurried to the Lexington’s bridge.
Characteristically, King greeted him with a gruff, “Where the hell have you been?” When the flight commander protested that Lexington was not where he had been briefed it would be, King dressed him down for misunderstanding the briefing. Whatever the fault, it certainly was not King’s. As one of the aviators later recalled, “Everyone was out of step but him!”
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