REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR AND THE FIGHT BACK: 3/8: 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
⏱️ 11 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 PEARL HARBOR
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI on the world. |
| 0:06.4 | I'm John Batchel with Professor Craig Simons, |
| 0:08.8 | Emeritus Professor of History from the U.S. Naval Academy. |
| 0:11.9 | Nimitz at War command leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, |
| 0:15.1 | the relationships of the flag officers and the generals, |
| 0:19.0 | as they prosecute the Pacific War, which it was secondary in the minds of the |
| 0:24.0 | Joint Chiefs of Staff, the British and American working together. Europe first, Europe first. |
| 0:30.4 | Ernest King, however, had other ideas. And Ernest King has sent Chester Nimitz to Pearl Harbor |
| 0:36.2 | to command this rotating story of ships and men and aircraft. |
| 0:42.2 | Now, King says, Coral Sea and Midway are such a success. We need to go on the offensive somewhere. |
| 0:50.5 | They do not have adequate what is called sea lift. They do not have adequate what are called forces, divisions. |
| 0:56.7 | However, they're going to get out there even though they're short, |
| 1:01.1 | what Nimitz says repeatedly in the professor's book, |
| 1:04.2 | do the best we can with what we've got. |
| 1:05.8 | So we go to Tulagi, which we know is Guadalcanal, the Marines land, |
| 1:17.4 | and the fleet that accompanies them, the ships that accompany them, cannot stay all the time. |
| 1:21.8 | They have other duties and they don't want to be tied to ashore to make themselves vulnerable. |
| 1:24.7 | These are very risky moments again, Professor. |
| 1:29.2 | What was Nimitz is that thinking of Guadalcanal? Did he want to wait or was he okay with the idea of going now, even though we have inadequate resources? |
| 1:35.0 | Nimitz did indeed plan on taking the offensive as soon after the Battle of Midway as possible. |
| 1:40.1 | What he had in mind was an attack on the Santa Cruz Islands, which are a little bit to the southeast of Guadalcanal and Toulagi. |
| 1:48.6 | Touloggi is a tiny little island, but it's where the Japanese headquarters were. |
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