Ships
- USS Black (DD-666) Captain, 18 March 1944 – 22 October 1945
Commander Edward Reuben King commanded the destroyer USS Black (DD-666) from 18 March 1944 until 22 October 1945. Those nineteen months covered the last great drive of the Pacific War, and he spent them as captain of a Fletcher-class destroyer in the fast carrier force.
Black had been built for that work: high speed, a main battery of five-inch guns, and a crew trained to stay at sea with the carriers. When King took command in March 1944, the offensive was moving west from the Marshalls toward New Guinea and the Marianas. His duty was the daily business of a screening destroyer. He kept station on the big ships, watched for submarines, prepared the guns for air attack, and made the ship ready to pull a downed pilot out of the water.
Through the rest of 1944 Black ran with the fast carrier task forces in the campaigns that opened the western Pacific. The schedule took the fleet through the Hollandia landings, the Marianas operation, and the great carrier air battle of the Philippine Sea in June. In the fall the same ships covered the return to the Philippines, including the wide fleet actions off Leyte in October. A destroyer in that screen seldom fought a private duel. Her captain earned the cruise by holding formation, breaking up attacks, and leaving the carriers free to keep aircraft in the air.
In 1945 the pattern continued through the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carrier raids on the Japanese home islands. Off Okinawa the air attacks came day after day, and the destroyers of the screen took a full share of that fight while the landings went ahead. King was still in command when Japan surrendered in August and when the instrument of surrender was signed in September. The guns fell quiet, and a destroyer still had watches to keep, passages to make, and a crew to hold together.
He left Black on 22 October 1945, in the seventh week after the signing in Tokyo Bay. The ship he turned over had spent his whole tour in the war zone or on the long passages that held the fleet together. Jack Maginnis and Eugene Howard Simpson were among the officers who served in her. King's command was one destroyer across the campaigns from the Marianas to Japan, the exacting ordinary work of a wartime destroyer captain carried through to the peace.