7/8: War end challenges: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 12 minutes
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7/8: War end challenges: 7/8: 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 | I'm John Bachelors. This is CBSI on the world. Craig Simons is the author of the new book |
| 0:11.6 | Nimitz at War, Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor, to Tokyo Bay. A dramatic moment that |
| 0:17.4 | is replayed again and again in debate at the US Naval Academy and everywhere you read |
| 0:21.6 | the book about the Pacific War. It haulses decision-making at the Battle of Lady Golf, but |
| 0:28.2 | it doesn't stop there. This is a war. And in that war, the fifth lead is going to again |
| 0:33.8 | take over and there are going to be landings at Guam. They're going to be land, they're |
| 0:37.6 | going to not Guam. They're going to be landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa coming up in the |
| 0:42.3 | new year. We turn into the, we're going to turn into 45, but before that there's something |
| 0:47.8 | that isn't about the Japanese. It isn't about the Americans. It's about nature. There's |
| 0:52.3 | a typhoon in the middle of December 1944 and Bill Halsey again, who's given a chance |
| 0:58.3 | again and again by Chester Nimitz to explain his excesses. Again makes a decision that |
| 1:04.7 | leads to the deaths of 800 assailors. The loss of three ships damage to the fleet is |
| 1:12.5 | an invincible task force 58 and the review board vaults Halsey afterwards. And Nimitz |
| 1:22.0 | travels out to meet Halsey and to talk about this at the time. Again, this gets complicated |
| 1:28.0 | professor. It becomes almost as if Nimitz doesn't have a way of disciplining Halsey. Did |
| 1:33.8 | Halsey take advantage of that? I don't know that Halsey took advantage of it. In a way, |
| 1:39.6 | Nimitz's attitude was let Halsey be Halsey. I mean, one of the things Nimitz liked about |
| 1:45.3 | Halsey was his aggressive attitude. He could be counted on to push the envelope to go |
| 1:49.2 | after the enemy as ferociously as he possibly could. That's not always the right decision |
| 1:55.2 | in every operational circumstance, but often it is. And for those circumstances Nimitz |
| 2:01.0 | wanted to be able to give Halsey his leash. So when Halsey is ordered to support MacArthur's |
| 2:08.7 | landing on the island of Mendoro in the Philippines, he says, well, yes, I'm going to do that. |
... |
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