REMEMBERING PEARL HARBOR AND THE FIGHT BACK: 7/8: 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
⏱️ 13 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 USS HONOLULU
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchler. |
| 0:06.3 | This is CBSI on the world. |
| 0:08.8 | Craig Simons is the author of the new book Nimitz at War, command leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. |
| 0:16.2 | A dramatic moment that is replayed again and again in debate at the U.S. Naval Academy. |
| 0:23.9 | And everywhere you read the book about the Pacific War. |
| 0:29.9 | It holds these decision-making at the Battle of Lady Gulf, but it doesn't stop there. This is a war. |
| 0:36.4 | And in that war, the Fifth Fleet is going to again take over, and they're going to be landings at Guam. |
| 0:43.1 | They're going to be landings at Iwojima and Okinawa coming up in the new year. |
| 0:46.3 | We're going to turn into the new, we're going to turn into 45. |
| 0:49.2 | But before that, there's something that isn't about the Japanese, |
| 0:51.8 | that isn't about the Americans, it's about nature. |
| 0:54.2 | There's a typhoon in the middle of December, |
| 1:00.1 | 1944. And Bill Halsey again, who's given a chance again and again by Chester Nimitz to explain his excesses, again makes a decision that leads to the deaths of 800 sailors, |
| 1:08.6 | the loss of three ships, damage to the fleet, this invincible task force 58, |
| 1:15.5 | and the review board faults Halsey afterwards, and Nimitz travels out to meet Halsey and |
| 1:24.2 | to talk about this at the time. Again, this gets complicated, Professor. It becomes almost as if |
| 1:30.5 | Nimitz doesn't have a way of disciplining Halsey. Did Halsey take advantage of that? |
| 1:36.0 | I don't know that Halsey took advantage of it. In a way, Nimitz's attitude was let Halsey be |
| 1:42.1 | Halsey. I mean, one of the things Nimitz liked about Halsey was his |
| 1:46.1 | aggressive attitude. He could be counted on to push the envelope, to go after the enemy as ferociously as he |
| 1:52.2 | possibly could. That's not always the right decision in every operational circumstance, but often it is. |
| 1:58.9 | And for those circumstances, Nimitz wanted to be able to give |
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