Hi Rainer,

I too concur.

1. Eisenhower said: “The war would have been over sooner if someone had shot Admiral King”.

2. King was an jerk all the time. His daughter when someone accused King of occasionally having a bad temper said “that’s nonsense, my father has a perfectly even temper – he is angry all the time”.

3. The Brits told King the U-boats were coming and confirmed again when Cyclops was sunk but King did absolutely nothing. He was totally occupied with the war in the Pacific and had little interest in using his warships to herd a bunch of merchant ships around the ocean.

4. King hated the Brits and wasn’t interested in their opinion, their advice or learning from their years of experience fighting the U-boats.

5. When the Brits insisted that he initiate the convoy system he flatly refused claiming he didn’t have enough destroyers and in his personal opinion not having enough escorts was worse than forcing the merchant ships to sail independently. The Brits told him that was completely wrong that any escort was better than none and simply collecting the ships into a convoy meant that instead of one ship passing by a waiting U-boat every few minutes there would be just an escorted convoy once a day or so but King ignored them.

The fact that all an escort (or even an unarmed Piper Cub) had to do was head in the direction of a U-boat to force the U-boat to submerge and once submerged it couldn’t catch a convoy just went in one ear and out the other. Just Brit BS – he knew better.

Rather that use the warships he did have to escort convoys he sent them out during the day to hunt the U-boats and of course they failed completely because the U-boats sat on the bottom during the day and attacked at night.

He fought against the convoy system tooth and nail until he was forced by Roosevelt and Churchill to institute it.

Once instituted the convoy system had immediate success and he jumped on the convoy bandwagon and claimed that he was for it all the time.

He wasn’t solely responsible though. Roosevelt could have forced him to do it much earlier but he didn’t.

King also lied about the availability of escorts. He had them and either they were sitting in port without orders or they were being sent to the Pacific or used to escort troop convoys – just not merchant ships.

To May during the 2nd Happy Time: Over 300 ships lost, 129 of them tankers – plus 5,000 lives.

Regards,

Ken Dunn