2/8: War end challenges: 2/8: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Craig L. Symonds
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 28 May 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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2/8: War end challenges: 2/8: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Craig L. Symonds
https://www.amazon.com/Nimitz-War-Command-Leadership-Harbor-ebook/dp/B09Y64QMZT
From America's preeminent naval historian, the first full-length portrait in over fifty years of the man who won the war in the Pacific in World War Two.
Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history.
Facing demands from Washington to mount an early offensive, he had first to revive the depressed morale of the thousands of sailors, soldiers, and Marines who served under him. And of course, he also confronted a formidable and implacable enemy in the Imperial Japanese Navy, which, until the Battle of Midway, had the run of the Pacific
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelorette with Professor Craig Simon. |
| 0:09.9 | So, Meredith's Professor of History from the U.S. Naval Academy is new book his |
| 0:13.6 | Nimitz at War Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. This is a book |
| 0:19.6 | that can be used by current officers in the U.S. Navy and retired and future to |
| 0:25.3 | understand the relationships between the men who were given a task without adequate |
| 0:31.2 | resources to restart the United States Navy and the Pacific after the Pearl Harbor |
| 0:36.8 | attack. Immediately Ernest King the Comanche says attack, attack, attack. He |
| 0:42.5 | wants to get out there and punch. Nimitz doesn't have much of a fleet now. The |
| 0:47.0 | battleships who had been regarded as the strength of all navies. The gun club are |
| 0:52.9 | either a four number very badly damaged or sunk including the Arizona four |
| 0:58.2 | badly damaged. So he has aircraft carriers. What is it that King wants him to do? |
| 1:03.6 | And this is a good time to introduce Chester Nimitz's idea of calculated risk |
| 1:09.7 | Professor. Yeah, calculated risk. It's an interesting concept. Nimitz came up with |
| 1:15.2 | it when he was still a student at the U.S. Naval War College in the 1920s and |
| 1:19.5 | it's a relatively simple concept. It is that you don't take a risk that's greater |
| 1:25.8 | than the likely benefit that will result from assuming that risk. And it's not |
| 1:32.9 | something that you can calculate. The word calculation is a bit misleading. There are |
| 1:37.5 | no numbers involved. There's no algorithm that can solve the problem for you. It's a |
| 1:42.8 | matter of thought process of nuance and assessment. But Nimitz is very good at this and he |
| 1:50.8 | sells this concept to his subordinate commanders as well and encourages them to think about |
| 1:57.4 | the possible benefit to be derived from assuming a risk and measuring the value of those |
| 2:04.0 | two things one against another. April 42, following two raids by the carriers in various |
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