What do you think?
Rate this book
King's Navy: Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and the Rise of American Sea Power, 1897–1947
An authoritative account of the rise and fall of American sea power between 1897 and 1947 and the definitive biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King.
Between 1897 and 1945 the US Navy rose to lofty heights, with huge manpower, a lavish roster of ships, and a hard-earned reputation for professionalism and potency. By 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, the Navy, although still powerful, had been significantly scaled down; much of the senior leadership retired and the wartime edge gradually dulled.
This period from 1897 to 1947 was witnessed and to a large degree driven and determined by two admirals, Ernest J. King and King's mentor William S. Sims. These admirals were empowered by two giants of American political and military history, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Through the lives of King, Sims, and the Roosevelts, Naval War College historian David Kohnen has crafted a sweeping history of American sea power from 1897 to 1947. This epic work was made possible through 20 years of research and writing.
By accessing undiscovered and recently declassified source material, along with the full cooperation of the King and Sims families, the author has been able to tell new stories and draw fresh conclusions, making this volume a must-have for scholars of naval history.
Between 1897 and 1945 the US Navy rose to lofty heights, with huge manpower, a lavish roster of ships, and a hard-earned reputation for professionalism and potency. By 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, the Navy, although still powerful, had been significantly scaled down; much of the senior leadership retired and the wartime edge gradually dulled.
This period from 1897 to 1947 was witnessed and to a large degree driven and determined by two admirals, Ernest J. King and King's mentor William S. Sims. These admirals were empowered by two giants of American political and military history, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Through the lives of King, Sims, and the Roosevelts, Naval War College historian David Kohnen has crafted a sweeping history of American sea power from 1897 to 1947. This epic work was made possible through 20 years of research and writing.
By accessing undiscovered and recently declassified source material, along with the full cooperation of the King and Sims families, the author has been able to tell new stories and draw fresh conclusions, making this volume a must-have for scholars of naval history.
- GenresWorld War II
656 pages, Hardcover
Published November 23, 2024
8 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
About the author
David Kohnen
4 books2 followersHaving served in the seagoing ranks, David Kohnen transferred to the retired list and presently serves as the Captain Tracy Barrett Kittredge Historian at the Naval War College.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 9, 2025
This book is a magisterial attempt to view the development of the modern via the life and career of Fleet Admiral Ernest King, the brilliant leader of the United States Navy in the Second World War. It is thus both a biography of an individual, but also an institutional view of the progress of the US Navy in the first half of the 20th century. In short, he presents the man within the cultural & institutional context of the Navy.
It is particularly noteworthy in that it is based on archival evidence not found anywhere else in the secondary literature. For example, one of the most common flawed narratives about King claims he was a foul mouthed, womanizing, alcoholic. Kohnen’s evidence completely undermines this view. Based on what is available King was mild compared to his contemporary flag officers like Halsey, Towers, Eisenhower and Patton, for example. His reputation for a foul mouth is a result of his extreme competence and often curt dismissals of people he considered foolish or incompetent, mostly in language that had neither expletives nor was abusive.
The family side of King reveals a father of children who was extremely considerate and generous in meeting their goals & needs.
Caveat, I have read the book three times now, the first two times for pre-publication manuscripts that were much larger (if you can believe it) than this book. Take your time with this…by the end you will have a new appreciation for King and for the US Navy that helped win World War II.
It is particularly noteworthy in that it is based on archival evidence not found anywhere else in the secondary literature. For example, one of the most common flawed narratives about King claims he was a foul mouthed, womanizing, alcoholic. Kohnen’s evidence completely undermines this view. Based on what is available King was mild compared to his contemporary flag officers like Halsey, Towers, Eisenhower and Patton, for example. His reputation for a foul mouth is a result of his extreme competence and often curt dismissals of people he considered foolish or incompetent, mostly in language that had neither expletives nor was abusive.
The family side of King reveals a father of children who was extremely considerate and generous in meeting their goals & needs.
Caveat, I have read the book three times now, the first two times for pre-publication manuscripts that were much larger (if you can believe it) than this book. Take your time with this…by the end you will have a new appreciation for King and for the US Navy that helped win World War II.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 18, 2025
Great Book and perspective. Very well put together and I actually learned something!
June 26, 2025
This is one of the best books of this generation about a wartime leader. Beautifully wrote and crafted, a joy to read, a tour de force that goes lightyears beyond the norm drivel found in so much contemporary accounts of individuals that shaped our world and century.
April 16, 2025
There is no question that Admiral Ernest J. King is an underappreciated historical figure, a man whose singular influence upon the Navy and the course of World War II was significant, arguably essential. Had it not been for King, the war in the Pacific likely would have been backburnered and thus drawn out for additional years. King was the driving impetus behind the strategy that promoted offensive defense against Japan in the early years, rather than simply preserving status quo until Germany was defeated.
Thus the US won Midway, initiated Guadalcanal and the Solomons campaign, and fought WWII as a uniform worldwide conflict, deploying limited, critical assets where useful instead of simply stockpiling them for use against Germany, sooner or later. King was the gadfly who refused to go along with the conventional wisdom and in doing so, he shortened the war. That said, he has been somewhat ignored in post-war histories and analyses. I think this book is an effort to redress that shortcoming. Unfortunately, it fails in almost every aspect.
The book is repetitive, in content, in phraseology, in points made. Even within sentences, on occasion (“...peacetime battles in peacetime Washington...” Favored phrases such as “global maritime arena” and “synthesizing intelligence with operations“ appear more than you can imagine possible. The author makes declaratory statements about King and about events, but seldom offers enlargement, judgement, analysis or elucidation. He ignores context, and focusses on process – much of the book is essentially an organizational history of King’s Navy Department, textual flow charts, organizational structures developed, names of officers assigned... but little of what they actually did, why and what the effects were. Germany and Japan have no agency – just scenic backdrops to the changing evolution of Navy Department organization under King. It is a shallow, superficial, hagiographic work that presents an admiring, but skin deep, perspective of King and those who worked for him, and to lesser extent, those for whom he worked.
As an example, Kohnen tells us that in the 1930s Electric Boat Company was the subject of a criminal investigation and King was assigned supervision of it, and apparently it ended. The reader never learns what the basis of the investigation was, or what King did, or how that changed anything.
As another, Admiral Stark at some point presumably in early WWII (dates are in short supply throughout Kohnen’s text, and he tends to jump back and forth in time without alerting the reader – sometimes in the same paragraph) produced four strategic plans for consideration, designated Plans A, B, C, and D. Plan D (Dog) was adopted – Germany first. But the reader never learns anything about Plans A, B, or C - or what the particulars of Plan D were, or how the decision process unfolded, or who decided, why or any other aspect of the adoption of Plan D.
Kohnen routinely drops names into his narrative without any contextual association or explanation. Sometimes they reappear later in explanatory context, sometimes they never appear again at all. He minimalizes most other historical figures – FDR, Stimson, Marshall, MacArthur, the British are constant annoyances, hindrances to King’s vision. He really doesn’t like Nimitz, Arnold, Truman, Forrestal or, to a lesser extent, Churchill. You can only wonder what they were doing. He even complains that unnamed nuclear aircraft carriers were named for one of King's subordinates – it’s petty, and ignorant, as is most of his demeaning treatment of those King worked with, and for. He does exonerate Halsey for his actions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and later sailing into a typhoon that sank ships and drowned 790 sailors – the former the fault of Kincaid and the latter the failings of Nimitz’ CincPac staff. Oddly, in his discourse on Leyte he excoriates one Ensign Carl Solberg, out of the blue. I had to look him up – he wrote a memoir of his service on Halsey’s staff (Decision and Dissent: With Halsey at Leyte Gulf) in which said he and his roommate tried to present intel to Halsey about Japanese intentions but were stopped because he had retired for the night. This apparently outraged Kohnen, but not enough for him to explain who Solberg is or why he is such an affront.
His personal investment in King is further manifested in a closing chapter he devotes to denigrating Thomas Buell who wrote the only other biography of King in 1980 (Master of Seapower: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King). Buell’s offence was to suggest King was had involvements with various women not his wife, and that is original sin to Kohnen that cannot be tolerated. By the way, he does not even allude to any other aspect of Buell’s book, at all... he belittles Buell. It’s unseemly, and petty. But then he attempts to refute criticisms, large and small, of King throughout his book, seldom persuasively.
Kohnen has a proclivity for hyperbolic prose that is often as meaningless as it is bombastic, pretentious and affected.
“The epic tales of Nelsonial [sic] triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar officially coincided with the mythology found in American stories of glory at the Battle of Midway. Fifty years after the fact, the US Navy directed all hands to cut cakes and celebrate the mythology of Midway. Among the greatest myths, the failures of intelligence before Pearl Harbor appeared between the lines of equally mythologized tales of victory after the Battle of Midway in 1942.“
“Looking outward from the past, historians shall still find new discoveries by examining the once-classified details of intelligence. For example, British narratives about the Battle of the Atlantic often appeared somehow disconnected from such battles as those at Coral Sea and Midway, North Africa and Guadalcanal, or Normandy and Saipan. Taking the popular narratives into consideration, the facts frequently appeared just beneath the surface of history. The intangible truth often went to the graves of those most directly involved with the actual decisions, which shaped events on the battlefields of the global maritime arena. Intelligence has always existed in the cluttered minds of politicians and strategic commanders, whether in peace or war. The sources and methods used in the production of intelligence are frequently obscure for the uninitiated. On the other hand, popular media accounts and official histories still provide the proverbial breadcrumbs required for navigating the densely packed forests or the carefully pruned fields that define the challenges of researching original documentary sources.“
“King seized strategic control over the transatlantic intelligence relationship in the solution of German naval codes and ciphers. After 1943, epic cryptologic battles quietly unfolded behind closed doors in the pastoral solitude on the campuses of Bletchley Park and Nebraska Avenue. Academics worked within the impatient atmosphere of the wartime bureaucracy. The information provided by these faceless heroes established the transatlantic “special relationship." Intelligence collaboration served as the keystone in transatlantic collaboration in the global maritime arena-through both world wars and beyond into the uncertain waters of unsettled peace. Past British intelligence triumphs received due attention as the Americans progressively assumed full control of the helm in setting course for the future United Nations after 1943.”
Kohnen would have seriously benefited from the services of a knowledgeable editor - the book could have been reduced by a third, at least. A meticulous proof-reader would also have been invaluable – the text is full of errors, misspellings, missing spaces, wrong words, repeated words, contradictions... it is a constant annoyance for the reader. On top of it all, the book weighs 4.5 pounds... it almost unmanageable to hold and read it. That is not to say that there is nothing new, interesting , or preceptive about Ernest J. King in the book, but you have work hard to find it. Anyway, bottom line, I cannot recommend it. Interested in King? Read Buell’s book.
Thus the US won Midway, initiated Guadalcanal and the Solomons campaign, and fought WWII as a uniform worldwide conflict, deploying limited, critical assets where useful instead of simply stockpiling them for use against Germany, sooner or later. King was the gadfly who refused to go along with the conventional wisdom and in doing so, he shortened the war. That said, he has been somewhat ignored in post-war histories and analyses. I think this book is an effort to redress that shortcoming. Unfortunately, it fails in almost every aspect.
The book is repetitive, in content, in phraseology, in points made. Even within sentences, on occasion (“...peacetime battles in peacetime Washington...” Favored phrases such as “global maritime arena” and “synthesizing intelligence with operations“ appear more than you can imagine possible. The author makes declaratory statements about King and about events, but seldom offers enlargement, judgement, analysis or elucidation. He ignores context, and focusses on process – much of the book is essentially an organizational history of King’s Navy Department, textual flow charts, organizational structures developed, names of officers assigned... but little of what they actually did, why and what the effects were. Germany and Japan have no agency – just scenic backdrops to the changing evolution of Navy Department organization under King. It is a shallow, superficial, hagiographic work that presents an admiring, but skin deep, perspective of King and those who worked for him, and to lesser extent, those for whom he worked.
As an example, Kohnen tells us that in the 1930s Electric Boat Company was the subject of a criminal investigation and King was assigned supervision of it, and apparently it ended. The reader never learns what the basis of the investigation was, or what King did, or how that changed anything.
As another, Admiral Stark at some point presumably in early WWII (dates are in short supply throughout Kohnen’s text, and he tends to jump back and forth in time without alerting the reader – sometimes in the same paragraph) produced four strategic plans for consideration, designated Plans A, B, C, and D. Plan D (Dog) was adopted – Germany first. But the reader never learns anything about Plans A, B, or C - or what the particulars of Plan D were, or how the decision process unfolded, or who decided, why or any other aspect of the adoption of Plan D.
Kohnen routinely drops names into his narrative without any contextual association or explanation. Sometimes they reappear later in explanatory context, sometimes they never appear again at all. He minimalizes most other historical figures – FDR, Stimson, Marshall, MacArthur, the British are constant annoyances, hindrances to King’s vision. He really doesn’t like Nimitz, Arnold, Truman, Forrestal or, to a lesser extent, Churchill. You can only wonder what they were doing. He even complains that unnamed nuclear aircraft carriers were named for one of King's subordinates – it’s petty, and ignorant, as is most of his demeaning treatment of those King worked with, and for. He does exonerate Halsey for his actions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and later sailing into a typhoon that sank ships and drowned 790 sailors – the former the fault of Kincaid and the latter the failings of Nimitz’ CincPac staff. Oddly, in his discourse on Leyte he excoriates one Ensign Carl Solberg, out of the blue. I had to look him up – he wrote a memoir of his service on Halsey’s staff (Decision and Dissent: With Halsey at Leyte Gulf) in which said he and his roommate tried to present intel to Halsey about Japanese intentions but were stopped because he had retired for the night. This apparently outraged Kohnen, but not enough for him to explain who Solberg is or why he is such an affront.
His personal investment in King is further manifested in a closing chapter he devotes to denigrating Thomas Buell who wrote the only other biography of King in 1980 (Master of Seapower: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King). Buell’s offence was to suggest King was had involvements with various women not his wife, and that is original sin to Kohnen that cannot be tolerated. By the way, he does not even allude to any other aspect of Buell’s book, at all... he belittles Buell. It’s unseemly, and petty. But then he attempts to refute criticisms, large and small, of King throughout his book, seldom persuasively.
Kohnen has a proclivity for hyperbolic prose that is often as meaningless as it is bombastic, pretentious and affected.
“The epic tales of Nelsonial [sic] triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar officially coincided with the mythology found in American stories of glory at the Battle of Midway. Fifty years after the fact, the US Navy directed all hands to cut cakes and celebrate the mythology of Midway. Among the greatest myths, the failures of intelligence before Pearl Harbor appeared between the lines of equally mythologized tales of victory after the Battle of Midway in 1942.“
“Looking outward from the past, historians shall still find new discoveries by examining the once-classified details of intelligence. For example, British narratives about the Battle of the Atlantic often appeared somehow disconnected from such battles as those at Coral Sea and Midway, North Africa and Guadalcanal, or Normandy and Saipan. Taking the popular narratives into consideration, the facts frequently appeared just beneath the surface of history. The intangible truth often went to the graves of those most directly involved with the actual decisions, which shaped events on the battlefields of the global maritime arena. Intelligence has always existed in the cluttered minds of politicians and strategic commanders, whether in peace or war. The sources and methods used in the production of intelligence are frequently obscure for the uninitiated. On the other hand, popular media accounts and official histories still provide the proverbial breadcrumbs required for navigating the densely packed forests or the carefully pruned fields that define the challenges of researching original documentary sources.“
“King seized strategic control over the transatlantic intelligence relationship in the solution of German naval codes and ciphers. After 1943, epic cryptologic battles quietly unfolded behind closed doors in the pastoral solitude on the campuses of Bletchley Park and Nebraska Avenue. Academics worked within the impatient atmosphere of the wartime bureaucracy. The information provided by these faceless heroes established the transatlantic “special relationship." Intelligence collaboration served as the keystone in transatlantic collaboration in the global maritime arena-through both world wars and beyond into the uncertain waters of unsettled peace. Past British intelligence triumphs received due attention as the Americans progressively assumed full control of the helm in setting course for the future United Nations after 1943.”
Kohnen would have seriously benefited from the services of a knowledgeable editor - the book could have been reduced by a third, at least. A meticulous proof-reader would also have been invaluable – the text is full of errors, misspellings, missing spaces, wrong words, repeated words, contradictions... it is a constant annoyance for the reader. On top of it all, the book weighs 4.5 pounds... it almost unmanageable to hold and read it. That is not to say that there is nothing new, interesting , or preceptive about Ernest J. King in the book, but you have work hard to find it. Anyway, bottom line, I cannot recommend it. Interested in King? Read Buell’s book.
August 29, 2025
I should have known better when I saw that the publisher was Schiffer, an outfit located near me that has an uncomfortable fascination with bringing out memoirs of SS officers and German militaria.
This is a very thick book and exquisitely researched, but it is neither history nor biography, only chronology. It's a 500 page breathless recitation of facts with no theme, except that King was absolutely right in everything he did and that anyone who points out his myriad failings is wrong. The book contains numerous errors large and small. As a random example, the author says that the Lexington was sunk by a submarine. Are you going to trust this guy? His account of the events leading up to the Battle of Midway utterly discounts the key events, that Nimitz was right in insisting that we concentrate at Midway and he did it over King's objection. Reading this book, you would think that King got along wonderfully with the Brits. You would be dead wrong. And it's a shame this author is so far off the beam. There are plenty of recent books that tell the story. Read one of them and save your money.
This is a very thick book and exquisitely researched, but it is neither history nor biography, only chronology. It's a 500 page breathless recitation of facts with no theme, except that King was absolutely right in everything he did and that anyone who points out his myriad failings is wrong. The book contains numerous errors large and small. As a random example, the author says that the Lexington was sunk by a submarine. Are you going to trust this guy? His account of the events leading up to the Battle of Midway utterly discounts the key events, that Nimitz was right in insisting that we concentrate at Midway and he did it over King's objection. Reading this book, you would think that King got along wonderfully with the Brits. You would be dead wrong. And it's a shame this author is so far off the beam. There are plenty of recent books that tell the story. Read one of them and save your money.
August 31, 2025
This is a very thick and well researched book, not just on Admiral King, but the creation of the modern bureaucratic Navy as we know it. Those who think it is a simple biography are mistaken. However, as far as the information on King himself, I would say that it is a much needed corrective to a man who has been left out of a lot of histories. In part, a lot of people who enjoy writing about naval history focus on battle-centric pieces and the well-known admirals who took their orders from King. The author undoubtedly has a great appreciation for King and seeks to provide this much needed corrective. I think this book will become a very important text that those researching the Navy of the 1930s will all need to read.
July 30, 2025
This is a beautiful, well written and researched book on King.
A long read, but well worth the time.
I learned much more about King than I anticipated.
A must read for any military historian or anyone with interest in the Interwar period and Second World War.
A long read, but well worth the time.
I learned much more about King than I anticipated.
A must read for any military historian or anyone with interest in the Interwar period and Second World War.
December 8, 2025
JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY 89, 3 (pp 755-56)
Extract:
"It is difficult to do this book justice in such a short review. Exhaustively researched and the product of many years of scholarship, Kohnen’s book seems des tined to be the standard work on Fleet Admiral King for a long time. General and specialist readers will come away with a better understanding of who King really was, and with a deeper appreciation of his strategic acumen and worldly perspective."
Lewis Patterson
THE NORTHERN MARINER / LE MARIN du NORD (online: https://tnm.journals.yorku.ca/index.p...)
“King's Navy by David Kohnen represents a landmark achievement in the historiography of twentieth-century naval affairs. Written with the insight of both a professional naval officer and a seasoned historian, Kohnen's monumental biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King is the most comprehensive re-evaluation of one of the United States Navy's most influential figures in a generation. It is a work of scholarship that repositions King squarely within the central arc of American and Allied naval ascendancy from the Spanish-American War through to the Second World War.”
Christopher Perry
THE NAVAL REVIEW (online: https://www.naval-review.com/book-rev...)
Extract:
"The author has not just sought to explore the life and career of King but to explain why King matters from a historical point of view to today and tomorrow. King’s life is explained usefully to the reader, emphasising making the material accessible to military personnel, the public, and policymakers. He does this by taking King beyond a mere matter in the annuals of US Navy leadership and history and into the broader debate of American defence and foreign policy in the period and how it resonated, or not, in the decades that have followed. In the annals of naval history scholarship, addressing the gap in understanding of CNO King––a gap that should never have occurred––goes a long way to understanding the personalities, decisions, policies and past character of American sea power, one that has become disconnected from Ernest J. King…which this title seeks to educate about and the man, one it subsequently heals."
James W.E. Smith
Extract:
"It is difficult to do this book justice in such a short review. Exhaustively researched and the product of many years of scholarship, Kohnen’s book seems des tined to be the standard work on Fleet Admiral King for a long time. General and specialist readers will come away with a better understanding of who King really was, and with a deeper appreciation of his strategic acumen and worldly perspective."
Lewis Patterson
THE NORTHERN MARINER / LE MARIN du NORD (online: https://tnm.journals.yorku.ca/index.p...)
“King's Navy by David Kohnen represents a landmark achievement in the historiography of twentieth-century naval affairs. Written with the insight of both a professional naval officer and a seasoned historian, Kohnen's monumental biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King is the most comprehensive re-evaluation of one of the United States Navy's most influential figures in a generation. It is a work of scholarship that repositions King squarely within the central arc of American and Allied naval ascendancy from the Spanish-American War through to the Second World War.”
Christopher Perry
THE NAVAL REVIEW (online: https://www.naval-review.com/book-rev...)
Extract:
"The author has not just sought to explore the life and career of King but to explain why King matters from a historical point of view to today and tomorrow. King’s life is explained usefully to the reader, emphasising making the material accessible to military personnel, the public, and policymakers. He does this by taking King beyond a mere matter in the annuals of US Navy leadership and history and into the broader debate of American defence and foreign policy in the period and how it resonated, or not, in the decades that have followed. In the annals of naval history scholarship, addressing the gap in understanding of CNO King––a gap that should never have occurred––goes a long way to understanding the personalities, decisions, policies and past character of American sea power, one that has become disconnected from Ernest J. King…which this title seeks to educate about and the man, one it subsequently heals."
James W.E. Smith
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews