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BRITAIN'S Pacific Fleet represented the largest aggregation of naval power the country had assembled during World War II. However, it arrived in U.S. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz's theater at a time when his own command was at the apogee of its strength, so vastly superior to its ally that the Royal Navy (RN) was barely noticed in the roster of available forces. Thus, in most accounts of the naval war against Japan, the British contribution remains a minor footnote or, as one writer comments, "an embarrassing endpiece to the story of more heroic endeavors made elsewhere."1 Indeed, the Royal Navy encountered considerable difficulties in taking what it deemed to be its appropriate role in the war against Japan, a matter that many of the more comprehensive accounts, most of them for obvious reasons British, tend rather simplistically to blame on the prejudices of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Commander in Chief, U.S. Navy. One narrative, for example, refers to the "anglophobic Admiral Ernest King's ... determination to keep the Limeys out of the picture so that the US Navy should have the sole honor and glory of ... avenging Pearl Harbor." The biographer of British Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Bruce Fraser noted that "Fraser needed no reminding that the formidable anglophobe Fleet Admiral 'Ernie' King, US Chief of Naval Operations, would do everything he could to `keep the Limeys from muscling in' on the defeat of Japan."2 Another historian maintained that Admiral King disliked the British, observing however that the reason for his anglophobia was obscure. More recently, an American writer submits that "Admiral King, a notorious Anglophobe, had not wanted Britain to interfere at all in his war and did everything to prevent it."3
King's British contemporaries, it should be noted, do not seem to have subscribed to the simple theory that his prejudices dictated Allied Pacific War dispositions. Field Marshal Sir John Dill's biographer, for example, wrote of King that "There was substance to the unabashed Anglophobia of his public image, but it was not the whole truth. Dill confessed to a `sneaking regard' for him... Yet Dill also identified the quality which, being undisguised, so infuriated the British. `He does not trust us a yard."'...