Nimitz, Fleet Admiral Chester W.

Nimitz, Fleet Admiral Chester W. (1885–1966),US naval officer who succeeded Rear-Admiral Kimmel as C-in-C US Pacific Fleet (Cincpac) after Pearl Harbor, a post he retained throughout the war.

Born in Texas of parents of German stock, Nimitz spent most of his early career in submarines and was instrumental in having diesel engines adapted for US Navy use. He achieved flag rank in June 1938 and the next year became chief of the Bureau of Navigation (later Bureau of Personnel), which brought him into contact with Roosevelt, who thought highly of him. To Nimitz, Pearl Harbor was not an unmitigated disaster. The carriers were intact, the base facilities almost untouched, and the battle fleet, though at the bottom of the harbour, was mostly salvageable, which it would not have been if it had fought the vastly superior Japanese forces in deep water. ‘It was God's mercy that our fleet was in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941,’ he said later.

He built up around him a first-rate staff and exceptionally able fighting commanders— Halsey, Turner, Marc Mitscher, Spruance, and the top Marine Corps commanders, Holland Smith (1882–1967) and Alexander Vandegrift (1887–1973). A submariner who chose a submarine as his flagship, Nimitz was a man who liked to attack and to keep constant pressure on his opponents. He ordered Halsey's carrier group to raid the Japanese-held islands in early 1942 and then had him launch the Doolittle raid that April. The same month, when the Pacific was divided between his navy command and MacArthur'sSouth-West Pacific Area command, he became C-in-C Pacific Ocean Areas (Cincpoa), which gave him command of Allied air and land forces in his area as well as all naval ones.

The battle of Midway in June 1942 was, with Guadalcanal, the turning-point in the Pacific war, and it was planned and executed by Nimitz. ULTRA intelligence was the key to that battle, and it was Nimitz who, in those early days before ULTRA had proved its true worth, decided the intelligence was valid and acted accordingly. After Midway Nimitz went on to the offensive by landing forces on Guadalcanal in August 1942. By February 1943 it had been cleared of Japanese troops and he then implemented the effective strategy that governed the series of amphibious warfare landings in the Central Pacific beginning with Tarawa. Simultaneously, his submarines gradually eliminated the Japanese merchant marine creating a stranglehold on vital supplies that the Japanese could not break and which by August 1945 was total. His forces supported MacArthur's during the landings on Leyte in October 1944 (see Philippines campaigns), and in the ensuing battle Leyte Gulf the Japanese Navy was practically destroyed. Iwo Jima and Okinawa followed, vast operations which Nimitz commanded from Guam, and he signed the Japanese surrender document on the US government's behalf.

Nimitz was an easy-going, affable man, but he could be tough when necessary, and he was one of the ablest strategists the US Navy ever produced. The Pacific war was a naval war and Nimitz won it in under four years with a fleet that at first had hardly existed (see USA, 5(d)), an astonishing achievement. Promoted to admiral on taking command of the Pacific Fleet in 1941 he became a fleet admiral in December 1944 and in November 1945 was made chief of naval operations when Admiral King retired.

Bibliography

Potter, E. B. , Nimitz (Annapolis, Md., 1976).