United States Naval Academy

The United States Naval Academy is the turning point through which George Krause’s orphaned childhood became a life in the Navy. His admission followed an unusual nomination rather than a search for the most academically qualified candidate, and his years there added formal discipline and self-command to lessons he had already received at home. In the account, the Academy matters both as a place of professional formation and as the result of an improbable act of patronage that redirected a life.

Nomination and Entry

Krause’s father, a pastor, died when Krause was just graduating from high school and the United States was entering a war. A Senator nominated the much-loved pastor’s orphan son to the United States Naval Academy. The nomination was described as unusual for its time: it brought the Senator no political benefit and strengthened no political alliance, and it did not follow the familiar practice of selecting the candidate considered most academically suitable. The account thus locates Krause’s entry in personal regard and circumstance, rather than in a conventional calculation of political advantage or scholastic distinction.

His father left an estate of three hundred dollars after his books and furniture had been sold. That sum paid Krause’s fare to the Academy; he could have managed without the remainder, since a midshipman’s pay would support him. The detail gives his admission a material scale: the passage from his father’s home to naval education rested on a small inheritance and a nomination, not on family wealth. Once there, he entered a new channel of life that he would not have chosen for himself.

Training and Early Record

Krause belonged to the class of 1922, which graduated in 1921 in the aftermath of war. He finished halfway up the list, without being especially noted for anything except an unexpectedly above-average skill in fencing. The account gives no broad survey of the Academy’s curriculum or organization; its emphasis is instead on the particular qualities and contingencies that shaped this graduate. Fencing stands out as a talent he discovered there, while his academic standing is recorded without being made into a claim of exceptional distinction.

The Academy supplemented his childhood formation with discipline, subordination, and self-control. At home, he had learned Bible texts alongside mathematics, and had been taught duty, honour, and charity. His naval training did not replace those convictions. Rather, the narrative describes severe, logical discipline as reinforcing an already undeviating Christian spirit, producing a combination of strict self-command and unrelenting realism. That conjunction would define the way Krause later carried responsibility: human feeling remained present, but it was stiffened by habits of ordered judgment.

Lessons Carried into Command

The Academy’s influence appears not only in retrospect but in the professional habits Krause later applies at sea. At Annapolis he had heard, in more than one lecture, the warning "Order, counter order, disorder." During a convoy’s routine course change, he considers whether to cancel the expected manoeuvre because the formation is already disordered. He decides against intervening: a countermand might confuse the ships now and make the next scheduled change harder to understand. The remembered maxim supports a choice to preserve a known procedure rather than add an unscheduled order in the hope of correcting an immediate difficulty.

That scene links institutional instruction to operational judgment without suggesting that a lecture alone determines the decision. Krause’s choice also rests on his experience of service and on his assessment of the convoy’s circumstances. The remembered phrase supplies a compact principle for a problem involving timing, communication, and the risk that conflicting directions will worsen disorder. In this way, the Academy’s presence in the narrative is practical: a lesson retained from training becomes one resource in a commander's reasoning under pressure.

Chance and Institutional Significance

The narrative explicitly treats Krause’s nomination as a freak of chance capable of changing the fate of nations. Without the Academy, he might have grown into a very similar man, it allows, but perhaps without the unrelenting realism his training added to his humanity. The claim is measured rather than absolute: the institution did not create his earlier faith or moral education, and the text does not say that it remade his character from nothing. Its significance lies in directing existing potential into a profession and imposing disciplines that altered how that potential could be used.

For Krause, the Navy eventually became home, while the family life of his childhood disappeared and the places he remembered changed beyond recognition. The Academy therefore stands at the beginning of a durable institutional belonging: it opened the career through which duty became not merely an inherited principle but the organizing condition of adult life. Its role in the account is at once concrete—fare, nomination, graduation, fencing, and training—and consequential, because an act of apparently uncalculated patronage set Krause on the path toward years of naval responsibility.