Comments by "Kenneth Dean Miller" (@kennethdeanmiller7324) on "Mark Felton Productions" channel.

@uncletimo6059 I think your wrong. Plain & simple. King had a lot of major things on his plate. They had just lost the entire Pacific fleet of battleships. And King had demonstrated 2 years previously that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to attack. And at the time he was trying to organize & plan 2 wars on opposite sides of the planet. And he simply didn't have enough destroyers to escort convoys. He didn't have enough destroyers to escort his capital ships either. I also believe that King was arguing that the US also had a Coast Guard & that our Coast Guard should be used along with air units to search & destroy U-boats on the Eastern Seaboard. And I also think King didn't realize how big the Battle of the Atlantic was going to be. Just like a lot of others, he had been asked to decide on plans for fighting 2 wars that the US Navy didn't have the ships to fight in the first place & then also losing the entire Pacific fleet of battleships at Pearl Harbor. I personally believe that if the US Navy had had enough ships to implement convoy escorts it would have happened. And now the man is dead ya'll can try to bad mouth him & he can't defend himself or his actions. But ANYBODY that knows the first thing about the United States of America KNOWS that those decisions are NOT going to rest on one man alone. Just like everyone else he had a job to do. That job was dictated by what those above him asked him to do. And I'm sure he had no shortages of superiors asking for things to be done. Why are ya'll NOT blaming Eisenhower and the Coast Guard as well? I'm sure he had a multitude of things he was asking King to do. And the Coast Guard had been involved during WW1 & they were supposed to be patroling our shores. And convoys were already a thing too. Convoys were being done before the US even entered the war. It was the lone ships around the Eastern Seaboard that were being targeted before the convoys were to assemble. So you can TRY to blame King all you want but if he had been asked to take care of it you can bet he would have! But I'm fairly certain that he was doing his job to the best of his abilities & knowledge & was probably told to not worry about that, that he needed to do this, that & the other thing. Yes, King didn't like the Royal Navy. Just like Patton didn't like General Montgomery. And even Patton had good reason. Monty had this thing, similarly like Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, a thing about making plans that were over-complicated. And had a tendency to NOT work because the plan was too ambitious to start with and getting 4 or 5 different outfits doing different things at the same time when you have to consider each outfit has different things causing delays and all of a sudden you have these commandos behind enemy lines trying to secure a bridge crossing for armored units that aren't going to show up because they ran into stiff resistance. And so the commando unit basically lose all its men because of a over complicated plan. Or they order a bombing to soften up enemy targets before an attack the next morning & the bombers miss the target area & bomb their own troops that were massing for the attack. You can't say it never happened cuz it did.
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@djquinn11 I really do concur. Drachinifel poses some really good reasons why King didn't like the British. And it is totally understandable that he would shy away from British "advice". However, they were our Allies and they had already been at war for 3 years prior to the US getting bombed at Pearl Harbor. Meaning they already knew that heavily protected convoys were the safest way for merchant shipping to haul there goods. And hunter/killer groups didn't really work in the beginning years of the war.
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@uncletimo6059 It wasn't that Admiral King totally dropped the ball on the issue of convoys. At the beginning of the war they had a massive shortage of smaller warships that were suitable for convoy escorts. It wasn't that he totally ignored it because of the British he literally didn't have enough destroyers to escort the battleships & carriers that the US possessed much less enough to ALSO do convoy escort. Later in the war, as soon as newer ships were coming off the slip ways they would not only implement massive convoy escorts & protection but would also have hunter/killer groups around the convoys that were not part of the escorting vessels that could move to attack & kill U-boats leaving the escort ships to stay with the merchant vessels of the convoy. Lots of times if an escort vessel could force a U-boat to dive & keep it from attacking the convoy then that was a win whether the U-boat was sunk or not. Cuz the escorts were there to make sure the convoy got there in tact. So the escorts were judged by how many merchant ships it lost. Not by how many U-boats they sank.
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