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Chester William Nimitz. Watercolor, gouache,
and graphite pencil on paperfaced illustraiton
board, by Boris Chaliapin.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution; gift of Joseph and Rosalyn
Newman.
Nimitz, Chester William (24 Feb. 1885-20 Feb. 1966),
admiral, was born in Fredericksburg, Texas, the son of Chester
Bernard Nimitz, a cattle drover, and Anna Henke. Born nearly
five months after his father died from a rheumatic heart, Nimitz
was brought up by his mother, assisted in various ways by
several relatives. In 1890 Anna Nimitz married her late
husband's brother William. Despite a move to nearby Kerrville
where the Nimitzes managed a small hotel, the family struggled
financially. From the age of eight Chester Nimitz began
working after school and on weekends as a delivery boy for a
meat market and later as a desk clerk and handyman at the hotel.
He hoped to attend the U.S. Military Academy, but when
informed that no appointment would soon be available he
entered the Naval Academy instead. He graduated seventh in the
class of 1905.
After two years of service in East Asian waters on the battleship Ohio and on various small craft,
Nimitz was commissioned an ensign and remained in the Far East until late 1908 when he
returned to the United States and began duty in submarines. He became a lieutenant in 1910.
While stationed in the Boston area in 1913 Nimitz married Catherine Freeman; the couple had
four children.
During his four years with the Submarine Force, Nimitz gained extensive knowledge of the
diesel engines that the navy had recently adopted for surface propulsion for submarines and in
1913 was selected to head a small mission to further study diesel technology in Germany. Nimitz
was then ordered to the navy yard in Brooklyn, New York, to supervise the building and
installation of large diesels in the new fleet oiler Maumee. He went to sea in the Maumee as
executive officer and chief engineer. Nimitz was on board when the United States entered World
War I and helped devise plans that allowed the Maumee to refuel destroyers while underway at
sea, a procedure never before used by the U.S. Navy.
In August 1917 Nimitz was promoted to lieutenant commander and named engineering aide and
then chief of staff to Captain Samuel Robison, commander Submarine Force, Atlantic Fleet.
Nimitz's expertise in diesels had been recognized in the navy (and by business where he turned
down a financially rewarding career), but being stereotyped as an engineering specialist could be
detrimental for a line officer who aspired to high command. In the words of his most informed
biographer, Nimitz became "concerned less with machinery than with people, less with
construction and maintenance than with organization, and thus he found his true vocation"
(Potter, Nimitz, p. 130).
Between 1918 and 1922 Nimitz had short tours in the office of the chief of naval operations and
as executive officer of the battleship South Carolina. He spent two years at Pearl Harbor where
he supervised the construction of the first submarine base there. Following a rewarding year as a
student at the Naval War College, he rejoined Robison (now an admiral and commander in chief,
Battle Fleet) as aide and assistant chief of staff.
In 1926 Nimitz reported to the University of California at Berkeley to organize and direct its first
Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program. He was promoted to captain in 1927. Nimitz
then spent four years at San Diego (1929-1933) where his principal duty was to command the
tender Rigel and the deactivated destroyers whose maintenance was carried out by personnel
from the Rigel. Next he commanded the cruiser Augusta in Far Eastern waters (1934-1935)
before serving as assistant chief of the Bureau of Navigation, the agency that handled personnel
matters, including promotion, assignment, recruiting, and training.
With his promotion to rear admiral in 1938, Nimitz spent a year in command of Battleship
Division One based at Long Beach, California. His flagship was the Arizona. He was then
ordered to Washington as chief of the Bureau of Navigation where the effects of a new program
of ship construction necessitated accelerated recruitment and training. The V-7 program, which
brought college graduates into the naval reserves as ensigns after a seven-week training course,
was instituted during Nimitz's tenure as bureau head.
On 16 December 1941 Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox advised Nimitz that he would become
commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CinCPac). President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had
had frequent conferences with Nimitz about personnel questions during the previous three years,
had already come to recognize Nimitz's qualifications for a major fleet command and had in fact
asked Nimitz if he wished to command the Pacific Fleet (then named United States Fleet) when
Admiral James O. Richardson was relieved in January 1941. Nimitz declined, believing it would
be inappropriate to move ahead of some four dozen more senior officers to accept this prized
command. Admiral Husband Kimmel, whom Nimitz had long known and respected, received the
appointment. However, after Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt and Knox decided to replace
Kimmel and agreed to offer Nimitz the position a second time, he accepted it as his wartime
duty.
When Nimitz began his tenure as CinCPac on 31 December 1941, his principal assets were three
aircraft carriers and the various cruisers and destroyers that had come through the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor unscathed. He also had under his command many submarines, but
defective torpedoes would hamper their effectiveness for over a year. Since the Japanese had
neglected to attack the oil storage depot and other shore installations, Pacific Fleet warships
could continue to use Pearl Harbor as their operating base.
Nimitz's major strategic responsibilities were to guard the supply lines between the United States
and the Hawaiian Islands (including the outpost of Midway Island) as well as the South Pacific
route between the United States and Australia, whose defense was considered an American
priority. The only offensive actions Nimitz's command could undertake were hit-and-run raids on
scattered Japanese bases. (None was more heartening than the raid on Tokyo carried out by air
force bombers operating from the carrier Hornet in April 1942.)
At the end of March 1942 Nimitz was given the additional title of commander in chief Pacific
Ocean Area. In a decision many historians later criticized, the Combined Chiefs of Staff divided
the Pacific into two areas: the Southwest Pacific, which included Australia, New Guinea, and the
Philippine Islands (then almost entirely in Japanese control); and the Pacific Ocean Area, which
included everything else save for the coastal waters of Central and South America. Within the
Pacific Ocean Area Nimitz had command of the Pacific Fleet as well as all Allied ground and air
forces based in the region. If the situation required, he could order units of the Pacific Fleet to
operate in the Southwest Pacific, which was under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington decided overall matters of policy and communicated
with Nimitz through the chief of naval operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, who represented the
navy on the JCS. King and Nimitz conferred several times a year, ordinarily in San Francisco.
With the exception of the Tokyo raid, Japanese forces retained the initiative in the Pacific
throughout 1942. Relying on timely information provided by his intelligence experts, Nimitz
ordered carrier task forces to the Coral Sea in May and to the vicinity of Midway in June to
thwart Japanese plans to occupy Port Moresby, New Guinea, and Midway Island. Beginning in
August 1942, the struggle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands dominated events in the
Pacific.
Nimitz's responsibilities required that he command from shore where he would have available
appropriate communications facilities and immediate access to intelligence analysts. Effective
senior commanders, Nimitz believed, needed to choose competent subordinates, define their
objectives, and provide them with the means necessary to meet these goals. They should not
interfere with the conduct of any individual operation since the commander on the scene would
know best what tactical measures to take. At Midway, as historian Dean Allard has pointed out,
Nimitz did just that. He gave his chief task force commanders the strongest forces he could
muster and told them to engage the enemy under the principle of calculated risk, defined as
avoiding "exposure of your force to attack . . . without good prospect of inflicting . . . greater
damage on the enemy."
Nimitz did believe in seeing things for himself, however. He visited Midway in May 1942 to
ascertain the needs of the key outpost, and in September he went to Guadalcanal when the
operation there appeared to be in jeopardy. His evaluation of the Guadalcanal campaign and the
South Pacific headquarters led him to replace the area commander, longtime friend Robert L.
Ghormley, with the aggressive Admiral William Halsey. As the war continued Nimitz visited
Tarawa and Okinawa among other places and in 1944 moved his own headquarters to Guam to
be nearer the scene of combat.
Calm and affable, Nimitz got on well with both admirals and younger staff officers. His concern
for enlisted personnel is amply documented. Nimitz loved a good story, but he also used his
collection of tales, frequently described as "salty" or "Lincolnesque," for serious purposes.
Although reporters compared CinCPac conferences to college seminars where ideas were freely
exchanged, the planning sessions at which he presided sometimes grew argumentative. Then
Nimitz usually had an appropriate anecdote that eased tensions. Cautious in his strategic
thinking, he often had good reason to be so. For instance, because two of the Pacific Fleet's four
carriers had been sunk during the Guadalcanal campaign and the remaining two damaged,
Nimitz believed that any subsequent operation would have to take place within 300 miles of his
nearest air bases.
By the last half of 1943, the combined air groups from the new carriers that Nimitz had available
numbered some 700 planes, enough to give his forces air superiority in any operation they
undertook. The bold steps that King had been urging Nimitz to pursue could finally be
undertaken. While American troops continued to advance in New Guinea and the Solomon
Islands, Nimitz's air and amphibious forces began a devastating new Central Pacific campaign
that seized those Japanese bases that promised to be useful in future American operations and
bypassed the remainder. Among those taken by American forces were Tarawa in the Gilberts,
Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls, and Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas.
Planners in Pearl Harbor and Washington agreed on taking Leyte in the Philippines after the
conclusion of the Marianas operation, but King then wanted to seize Formosa while Generals
George C. Marshall and MacArthur favored a return to Luzon, the northernmost of the major
Philippine Islands. Nimitz and most of his senior officers believed that invading Formosa as
King proposed would be too ambitious and that landings on Luzon followed by assaults upon
Iwo Jima and Okinawa would require fewer personnel while also providing the steppingstones
for the invasion of Japan. MacArthur would have control of the Luzon campaign and Nimitz of
the Iwo Jima and Okinawa operations. King, who had been adamant about invading the
Marianas, deferred to Nimitz's reasoning in this instance. The capture of Okinawa in the spring
of 1945 turned out to be the last of the great amphibious operations undertaken by Nimitz's
forces.
After the Japanese surrender Nimitz, who had been promoted to the five-star rank of Fleet
Admiral in 1944, began a two-year appointment as chief of naval operations (CNO). His term
was dominated by four primary concerns: overseeing the demobilization of the wartime navy;
assessing the material and personnel needs of the service in the postwar years; assisting Secretary
of the Navy James Forrestal in developing an appropriate position for the navy in regard to the
unification of the armed services; and formulating a mission for the navy in opposing the Soviet
Union, the only great-power adversary the United States might have to face in the foreseeable
future. Since the Soviet Union, unlike Japan, was primarily a land power, the navy's role was
defined accordingly. Deciding how the navy could best use atomic energy was a closely related
matter. Eager to see nuclear power developed for use by submarines, Nimitz also supported the
inclusion of atomic weaponry in the navy's arsenal.
Led by Admiral Forrest Sherman, Nimitz's chief wartime planner, strategists assumed that in the
event of a Soviet attack the Red army would make major gains in Western Europe. However,
they anticipated that planes operating from carrier task forces in the Mediterranean could defend
oil resources in the Middle East, bomb accessible targets in the Soviet Union, help to seize and
defend bases that would enable the United States and its allies to gain the strategic initiative.
Keeping open the Atlantic sea lanes would also be essential.
Nimitz reached mandatory retirement age in 1947. He rejected many lucrative business
opportunities to lead a much anticipated life of leisure in Berkeley but soon grew restless. He
became involved in public service, chiefly as a roving goodwill ambassador for the United
Nations and then as a regent at the University of California. Mindful of the fact that his daughter
Nancy had difficulty securing a government job because of her involvement in radical causes
during the 1930s, Nimitz spoke firmly against McCarthyism when freedom of speech became an
issue at Berkeley. He died in the naval hospital on Yerba Buena Island, California.