Meet Chester W. Nimitz, The Seasick Admiral Who Defeated The Japanese Navy In World War II "Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won."
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Chester Nimitz was in Washington, D.C., serving as head of the Navy's Bureau of Navigation. But just 10 days later, President Roosevelt fired the former head of the Pacific Fleet for his failure to prevent the attack and promoted Nimitz, sending him to Hawaii in civilian clothes and carrying classified damage reports hidden in his wife's sewing bag to avoid the detection of potential spies. With most of the Pacific Fleet destroyed and no functional battleships, the Navy was vastly outgunned by Japan. But Nimitz quickly consolidated the remaining fleet including aircraft carriers and pivoted to fighting naval battles in the skies while awaiting the construction of new battleships.
And within just six months, he'd won two decisive battles this way: the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. Both victories effectively stopped Japan in its tracks by preventing their invasion of Australia and New Zealand and then their advance toward Hawaii, permanently turning the tide of the war in favor of the Allies. Learn more about the World War II heroics of Admiral Chester Nimitz: Chester Nimitz joined the U.S. Navy as a last resort but would go on to become one of its greatest admirals after pioneering a new form of naval warfare that won the battle for the Pacific. Admiral Chester Nimitz was not the most senior officer in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, but he was arguably the most important.
Beginning in 1941, just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, his vision and drive in the Pacific Theater led to victory over Japan. As commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet and a Navy fleet admiral, Chester Nimitz pioneered a new way of naval warfare that squeezed Japanese ships into a smaller and smaller region. And when Japan surrendered in 1945, Fleet Admiral Nimitz stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri and signed the treaty that officially ended World War II. How Chester Nimitz Prepared For World War II During the First World War, Chester Nimitz moved into the office of the Chief of Naval Operations and then became the executive officer of the battleship South Carolina. He also attended the Naval War College where he studied War Plan Orange, a theoretical strategy in the event of a war with Japan. This plan, which did not anticipate the technological changes that allowed for air and submarine power, nevertheless formed the basis of Nimitz’s strategy for World War II. He later recounted, “I was asked once how we were able to fight the war in the Pacific, and I said that we fought it just as we had fought it all on paper in the Naval War College. I fought the whole war of the Pacific when I was there in 1923,” according to Ian W. Toll’s history of the Pacific Theater Pacific Crucible. His next notable stint was at the University of California, where he established the first Naval Reserve Officers’ training unit. He headed the unit from 1926 to 1929.
Chester Nimitz certainly had a sense of prescience, at least according to his biographer E.B. Potter, who recorded that in the mid-1930s, in response to Nimitz’s son’s question about his father’s career track, Nimitz said: “I do believe we are going to have a major war, with Japan and Germany, and that the war is going to start by a very serious surprise attack and defeat of U.S. armed forces, and that there is going to be a major revulsion on the part of the political power in Washington against all those in command at sea, and they’re all going to be thrown out, though it won’t be their fault necessarily. And I wish to be in a position of sufficient prominence so that I will then be considered as one to be sent to sea.”
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