SONS OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER: 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
🗓️ 26 May 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.
1912 USS WYOMING
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is |
| 0:05.0 | CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Craig Simons, |
| 0:10.0 | emeritus Professor of History from the U.S. Naval Academy. |
| 0:12.0 | His new book is Nimitz at War, |
| 0:14.4 | command leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. This is a book that can be used by current |
| 0:21.8 | officers in the US Navy and retired and future |
| 0:25.0 | to understand the relationships between the men who were given a task without adequate |
| 0:31.0 | resources to restart the United States Navy in the Pacific after the |
| 0:36.0 | Pearl Harbor attack. Immediately Ernest King, the Cominch, says attack, attack, attack. |
| 0:42.4 | He wants to get out there and punch. Nimitz doesn't have much of a fleet now. |
| 0:46.8 | The battleships who had been regarded as the strength of all navies, the gun club, are either a four of the number of very badly damaged |
| 0:56.2 | or sunk, including the Arizona, four are badly damaged. |
| 0:59.6 | So he has aircraft carriers. |
| 1:02.1 | What is it that King wants him to do and this is a good |
| 1:05.1 | time to introduce Chester Nimitz's idea of calculated risk, Professor? |
| 1:10.3 | Yeah, calculated risk. |
| 1:13.0 | That's an interesting concept. |
| 1:14.3 | Nimitz came up with it when it was still a student at the U.S. Naval War College in the 1920s, and |
| 1:19.4 | it's a relatively simple concept. |
| 1:21.6 | It is that you don't take a risk that's greater than the |
| 1:26.7 | likely benefit that will result from assuming that risk and and it's not something that you can calculate. |
| 1:34.7 | The word calculation is a bit misleading. |
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