Ex-commander of naval forces from Valley dies

King was considered an expert in nuclear weapons.

STAFF AND WIRE REPORT

Retired Vice Adm. Jerome H. King Jr., 88, a Youngstown native who was commander of naval forces in Vietnam, has died.

King had carried out a plan to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and hand the fight over to the South Vietnamese.

He died Friday at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, Calif., from complications of pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

King was born July 14, 1919, in Youngstown. His father was a teacher at The Rayen School, his mother a homemaker.

At Yale University, King joined the ROTC. In 1941, the year he received his bachelor of engineering degree, King received a naval commission through the Navy ROTC program.

During a 30-year career that began during World War II, King rose to the three-star rank, one of the first Navy ROTC graduates to do so. He held several key positions in the Navy, including director for operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs in the early 1970s.

With a master of science in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, King was considered an expert in nuclear weapons and was commander of a nuclear weapons training center.

In 1969, King was tapped to head a panel investigating the collision of an Australian aircraft carrier and the U.S. destroyer Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea. The incident left 74 U.S. sailors dead.

The inquiry garnered international media attention, said Paul Stillwell, a historian and former director of history of the U.S. Naval Institute.

“King felt he needed to make sure things were done absolutely right and were perceived to be done correctly,” Stillwell said.

During the inquiry, an Australian told the panel that the Evans crew had been warned of the danger by radio.

“American ships are a little slower to react than Commonwealth ships,” the Australian said, according to a 1969 Los Angeles Times article.

King retorted: “Are you intimately familiar with the training of officers of the deck in the U.S. Navy?” The panel found that the U.S. was largely responsible for the collision.

In 1970 King was promoted to vice admiral and sent to Vietnam. Antiwar sentiment in the U.S. and in Congress was high. King was responsible for turning the naval war over to the South Vietnamese, a strategy known as “Vietnamization,” Stillwell said.