The US Navy Admiral Most Historians Love to Hate

Photo courtesy of U. S. Naval Institute Photo Archives.

About the author:

"Jim" Pennington is an electrical engineer and writer. Jim enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in February 1951, and that summer graduated from Reserve Bootcamp at Newport, Rhode Island. Later that summer he trained aboard PCE(R) 853, fitted for minesweeping, and carrying antisubmarine "hedgehogs" and a 20 mm anti-aircraft cannon. Jim and the other Seaman Apprentices aboard found it surprisingly difficult to bring down a black balloon with this weapon, even with every fifth round a tracer. It put us in awe of the men in the Pacific Theater who had to bring down Kamikazes. On the USS INTREPID they show combat footage of a Japanese plane headed straight for the ship, one wing already shot off, and the gunner on a dual 20 mm trying to slice the other wing and drop the fuselage into the sea before it hits the ship.

Jim graduated from Regular Bootcamp at Bainbridge, Maryland in February 1952. He was Company Clerk, and winner of the American Legion Spirit award. He graduated from ET "A" School in Class 18-52, Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, Illinois in November 1952. Jim reported aboard his duty station, the Firing Pier, Gould Island ("The Rock"), U.S. Naval Underwater Ordnance Station (USNUOS), Newport, Rhode Island later in November, and served until he was released from active duty in December 1953. At the USNUOS he served at sea aboard YFRT 287 off Cape Cod, where the bottom conditions are similar to those off the Korean Peninsula, testing the Mk. 32, the world's first active acoustic homing torpedo.

Jim is a Life Member of the Korean War Veterans Association, Inc., The Navy League of the U.S., The U.S. Naval Institute, The Naval Submarine League, and Sharkhunters International, Inc.

EDITOR NOTE

This research was all done by JIM and we applaud his hard work to bring this piece to us. We encourage all Members to do similar research projects.

From The New York Times, Monday, September 4, 1939:

"BRITISH LINER ATHENIA TORPEDOED, SUNK; 1400 PASSENGERS ABOARD, 292 AMERICANS; ALL EXCEPT A FEW ARE REPORTED SAVED. CAPITAL IS SHOCKED"

WAR! In the mysterious Atlantic off New Jersey - I was 6 then, but definitely going on 7. In the Summers of the thirties, the Depression Summers, my Dad, my Mom, and me rented little weather-beaten cottages at Sea Bright, at the Jersey shore, now the front line of the war. I was a First Grader at Columbian Grammar School, East Orange, a huge redbrick building on the corner of Grove St. and Springdale Ave., the corner with a cop named Tom.

With my little-kid mind I wondered - "Would we see Germans soon?" Us kids played war every afternoon after school, up, down, and across the blocks, over the backyard fences, with fierce housewives tapping on windows and yelling at us. The alley behind Newman's Drug Store was known as "The Stinky," a great place for ambushes - "You mus' be an American, and I mus' be a German." "No, I wanta be a German." (We all wanted to be Germans for some reason.)

All of us on the block - Dougie Calhoun, Ronnie Wilson, and Teddy Moon would be in the war soon. So would our pals at school - Dave Dawson, Bob Irving, Bob Bailey, and Chris Johnson, and even Georgie Reinhart and Burkie Runser. My best friend, Ovid Lewis would drop his violin and get in it. And our class heroes, Eddie Jennings and Georgie Woods (later an All-American football star for Iowa State) would be great warriors.

Out in the Atlantic twenty six year old Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, skipper of U-30 was under direct orders from Hitler and Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boot Waffen, not to attack allied commercial shipping. Hitler still thought he might be able to reach an accommodation with Britain and certainly didn't want America in the war at that time.

Like something out of a History Channel program, it turned out that the Master of the Athenia remembered the U-boats from The Great War (later known as WWI) and decided to sail a zig-zag course with darkened ship, leading Lemp to think that the Athenia was a British warship, probably a cruiser, and to attack, successfully.

My friend Georg Högel [Member (240-LIFE-1987)] was aboard U-30 as Radioman and he told me all about it at a Sharkhunter’s dinner in Munich back in September 2000. (“Yesterday’s Enemies are Today’s Friends”). On Halloween 1941, Erich Topp [ERICH TOPP (118-LIFE-1985)], another Sharkhunters friend of recent years, in U-552, sank a destroyer, the USS Reuben James. “One of the two torpedoes hit the ‘Rube” on the port side, splitting her in half. The bow blew up and sank instantly; the stern remained afloat about five minutes.” (Blair, pg. 375 [CLAY BLAIR (500-+-1988)] )

We (the USA) were not at war, but the ‘Rube” was escorting a British convoy. Only 45 of her ship’s company of 160 Americans survived. America remained at peace.

On the afternoon of December 6, 1941, Admiral Ernest J. King, age 63, Atlantic Fleet Commander, went ashore from his specially appointed flagship, the USS Augusta, swinging on a buoy off Jamestown, Rhode Island, to spend some pleasant hours at an establishment known as the “Rhode Island Reading Room”

Mom and Dad had a legendary party that night, an East Orange version of the wild Lowell, Massachusetts parties of the 20’s Jack Kerouac described in On The Road as beginning of beat.

I remember the woman in the red dress – she chased me around our apartment in the two-family house at 398 North Maple Avenue, in the Ampere Section of East Orange, New Jersey, our neighborhood. I was then 8, but I’d be 9 in just 12 more days.

A few days later Germany declared war on the United States.

"Dönitz asked Hitler for permission to begin attacking all shipping from U.S. East Coast ports, and called his plan Operation Paukenschlag ("Drumbeat"). Hitler approved on December 12, 1941. Paukenschlag was a massacre. Merchantmen were torpedoed within sight of shore, and resort beaches were covered with oil, debris, and occasionally bodies of seamen." (Buell, pg. 283.)

Me and the other kids in East Orange didn't see any bodies, but we followed the war on the radio, and in the New York Times, and later heard stories from Dave Dawson's Dad, a dentist, who sent home a bullet that had bent on entering a German prisoner's jaw, and Jerry Jennings whose older brother invaded the islands of the Pacific ("First wave, second wave, third wave," was all he said - we had to imagine the rest).

"In 1939; 147 allied ships were sunk, over 500,000 tons. In 1940, 520 ships, almost 2.5 million tons, in 1941 457 ships, almost 2.3 million tons." (Blair, Appendix 18)

U-boats were sinking shipping bound for Britain and Russia, and also U.S. coastal shipping, including oil transports from Texas to the East Coast. Convoys? There weren't enough escorts, and without escorts a convoy is just a happy meal for a wolfpack. The German U-boat crews called this period "Die Gluckliche Zeit"--- "The Happy Time."

The men aboard those ships were like you and I--- they wanted to live. Many did live, thanks to German crews who, following the traditions of the sea, removed merchant seamen before sinking their ships with gunfire. Soon the U.S. Navy's "Armed Guards" went aboard merchantmen, and sported 5 inch, 40 mm, and 20 mm guns which made this practice unwise from the point of view of the U-boat Fahrer.

King had impressed both President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and as Atlantic Fleet Commander, was untainted by Pearl Harbor, and soon became the most powerful naval commander the world has ever known; Commander in Chief (COMINCH) of the U.S. fleet and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), reporting directly to President Roosevelt. He was a true "Master of Seapower" (Buell, book title) directing over eight thousand ships and three million men and women.

In March 1942 King assessed the Atlantic battle as follows:

"The submarine situation on the east coast approaches is 'desperate.' All in all we have to do the best we can with what we've got." (Buell, pg. 287)

King was known as a gifted, but unpopular, naval officer in peacetime. He was "opinionated," and "stubborn," according to his biographer, Tom Buell. He said once, "When they get in trouble they call for a real son-of-bitch.” Our nation was as unprepared for U-boat war as it was for the other wars it now faced. The public and the press were frustrated, and hated King personally. He replied as follows:

"I have been urged to make some reply – or at least some acknowledgement, regarding the volume of criticism of the conduct of the anti-submarine campaign. It must be obvious that we of the Navy are even more concerned than are any of the critics or any of the other citizens of the U.S. because we have the responsibility and the critics have not. The submarine menace will, in time, be brought under control. I say 'in time' because only time will bring into service the adequate numbers of sea-going escort vessels which are essential to the use of convoys." (Buell, pg. 290.)

Meanwhile, King persisted in "doing the best you can with what you've got" calling on every available craft. Those without military value against submarines were used for rescue at sea.

"The moment of truth came in July, 1942. Shipping losses that month were so terribly appalling that nothing seemed left for a convoy to Russia. Groping for some way to provide better protection, King even proposed stationing Allied aircraft near Murmansk. Eisenhower, then in London, warned that such a plan 'would not work' and it was dropped." (Buell, pg. 287)

So much for visionary thinking and inter-service cooperation. An earlier skirmish in the inter-service war had ended with the agreement that only the Army would fly from land, and only the Navy from sea. Thus, the Navy could use only its relatively ineffective seaplanes against subs. King begged General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, and Major General Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding the Army Air Corps for medium bombers on Atlantic anti-submarine duty, and the Army ultimately provided a tremendous victory and contribution for King.

The Casablanca Conference among the allied powers in 1943 failed to address the U-boat problem, so King, at the suggestion of Royal Navy VAdm Nelles, immediately organized & held the Washington Convoy Congress. In his keynote address King said: "The United Kingdom must be kept supplied as the citadel of war effort against Germany." (Buell, pg. 292)

Without the continuing supply-line to the U.S. Britain would starve and/or be occupied by Germany. There could be no Normandy invasion, no need for Germany's Atlantic Wall, troops could be diverted to the Eastern Front to fight a Red Army weakened by the lack of allied shipping into Murmansk and Archangel. The USSR would have collapsed at Stalingrad, possibly amid another revolution, then a victorious Germany could support her great ally, Japan, in the Pacific.

King knew all this, and so did anyone who studied the facts. After the war Churchill said that he had been afraid of only one thing; the U-boats. Peter Padfield and other authors suggest that King did not do the best he could with what he had against the U-boats.

Padfield reads King's mind as follows:

"Suspicions King harboured about the British: they would exploit the United States to defeat Hitler, then leave them [the US] to fight Japan alone while they rebuilt their empire, impervious to argument and as suspicious of his army colleagues as of his wily, imperialist allies, he lacked the understanding or perhaps the generosity of spirit to broaden his perspective." (Padfield, pg. 328)

Convoys, sufficiently protected to deter and destroy U-boats, were, according to King, not just as "a way" of protecting shipping, but "the only way." Too lightly protected convoys early in the war had been badly mauled, causing King to emphasize the need for strong escorts.

The historian Mike Gannon [Member (101-1985)] stated in a television interview that King "held 21 destroyers for a 1942 invasion plan," and suggested that they could have served as the convoy escorts which King advocated. The invasion was Operation Torch in North Africa. Holding King personally and exclusively responsible for allocating assets to Torch is similar to the widely repeated claim that King "starved" the Atlantic to benefit the Pacific Theatre, and that he was "too busy" with the Pacific war to prosecute the Battle for the Atlantic. This is pure devil theory history - ignore facts, ignore conditions, and attack the hero, attributing the basest possible motives to him.

In time the Allies built many new vessels including Patrol Craft (PCs), Destroyer Escorts (DEs), and developed sonar (ASDIC), "Huff-Duff" (high frequency radio direction finding), radar, decrypted (often enough) the German Naval Enigma code, and developed hunter-killer groups, centered on small ("jeep") aircraft carriers.

German U-boat losses were unsupportable by May 1943 - 41 boats were lost in that month alone and Admiral Dönitz recalled the wolf packs. Individual U-boats continued to tie down allied resources. Just a month before Dönitz' recall, on April 22, 1943, The New York Times ran a story: "Navy Called Slow in Submarine War"

Truman Report Says Tardiness Caused Tonnage Loss Equal to New Ships. The Truman Committee, reporting to the Senate (said) The Navy was slow to realize the menace of the submarines while lost time was being made Germans were taking 1,000,000 tons/month.

This is a very thorough piece, and a long one. We are forced to continue it in KTB #164 next month. You’ll love it! Thanks, JIM.

Part 2