REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR AND THE FIGHT BACK: 5/8: 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
🧾️ Download transcript
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 CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:08.4 | Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:10.9 | Craig Simon's new book is Nimitz at War, command leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. |
| 0:17.4 | He is a meritorist professor of history from the U.S. Naval Academy, and we're speaking of |
| 0:22.7 | Chester Nimitz at war in the Pacific. It is now the point where the Central Pacific campaign, |
| 0:31.9 | starting in the Gilbert Islands, driving towards the Japanese islands, is underway with the landing at Tarawa, |
| 0:39.9 | a small island, a series of atolls. |
| 0:43.0 | And this is where the Marines have to practice their amphibious landing that will get better |
| 0:48.9 | and stronger throughout the war. |
| 0:50.9 | In fact, amphibious landings in general are now being invented by the Marines and the |
| 0:55.2 | army, and they require specialized ships that don't exist at this point. You all think of the landing |
| 1:01.8 | craft from D-Day, the drop of the front, and the men piling out. Well, that didn't exist as they |
| 1:07.9 | land at Tarawa. This is November of 1943. The professor's book concentrates on |
| 1:13.5 | relationships, however. So we begin with Chester Nimitz's relationship with the U.S. Marine Corps. |
| 1:19.5 | He worked very well through Halsey with Vandergrift at Guadalcanal. But now we introduce a man |
| 1:24.9 | named Holland Smith. What is that relationship, Professor? Thank you. |
| 1:29.6 | Well, Holland Smith was the man who was in charge of Marine Corps training. And in the previous |
| 1:34.8 | decade, the Marines had made amphibious operations their particular area of expertise. |
| 1:41.1 | This derived in part from the fact that in World War I, the Marines had fought in France as if they were a regular Army division, and they realized that in order to maintain their unique character and personality, they needed to develop a particular expertise and aware that Japan was a likely foe, they developed throughout the 19, late 20s and the 30s, |
| 2:02.6 | this expertise in amphibious operations. |
| 2:05.6 | We now associate the Marines with amphibious operations from the start, but that really is a relatively new thing here. |
| 2:12.8 | And the training for this was supervised by Holland Smith. Holland Smith was not a patient man. His nickname. |
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