REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR AND THE FIGHT BACK: 2/8: Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Craig L. Symonds
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
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.
Craig Symonds's Nimitz at War captures Nimitz's composure, discipline, homespun wisdom, and most of all his uncanny sense of when to assert authority and when to pull back. As Symonds's absorbing, dynamic, and authoritative portrait reveals, it required qualities of leadership exhibited by few other commanders in history, qualities that are enduringly and even poignantly relevant to our own moment
1941 HICKAM FIELD PEARL HARBOR
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. |
| 0:07.4 | I'm John Batchel with Professor Craig Simons, Emeritus Professor of History from the U.S. Naval Academy. |
| 0:13.0 | His new book is Nimitz at War, Command Leadership, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. |
| 0:18.5 | This is a book that can be used by current officers in the U.S. Navy and |
| 0:23.5 | retired and future to understand the relationships between the men who were given a task |
| 0:29.4 | without adequate resources to restart the United States Navy in the Pacific after the Pearl Harbor |
| 0:36.6 | attack. Immediately, Ernest King, |
| 0:39.1 | the Comanche, says, attack, attack, attack. He wants to get out there and punch. Nimitz doesn't have |
| 0:45.6 | much of a fleet now. The battleships who had been regarded as the strength of all navies, the |
| 0:51.5 | gun club, are either a four of the number of very badly damaged or sunk, |
| 0:56.8 | including the Arizona, four are badly damaged. So he has aircraft carriers. What is it that |
| 1:02.6 | King wants him to do? And this is a good time to introduce Chester Nimitz's idea of calculated risk, |
| 1:09.8 | Professor. Yeah, calculated risk. That's an interesting concept. Nimitz's idea of calculated risk, professor. |
| 1:12.7 | Yeah, calculated risk. |
| 1:14.1 | That's an interesting concept. |
| 1:18.9 | Nimitz came up with it when he was still a student at the U.S. Naval War College in the 1920s. And it's a relatively simple concept. |
| 1:21.6 | It is that you don't take a risk that's greater than the likely benefit that will result from assuming that risk. |
| 1:32.0 | And it's not something that you can calculate. The word calculation is a bit misleading. |
| 1:37.3 | There are no numbers involved. There's no algorithm that can solve the problem for you. |
| 1:41.6 | It's a matter of thought process, of nuance and assessment. |
| 1:47.5 | But Nimitz is very good at this, and he sells this concept to his subordinate commanders as well, |
| 1:54.4 | and encourages them to think about the possible benefit to be derived from assuming a risk and measuring the value of those |
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