Remembering Nimitz, a real wartime leader and hero
Months before World War II in the Pacific came to its abrupt conclusion, one of the great and largely unacknowledged heroes of Texas appeared suddenly off the island of Guam. The heroes who most deserve honor are often the ones who do not seek it out, whose actions spoke more than their words.
Decked out in his tropical whites on May 26, 1945, Fleet Adm. Chester A. Nimitz, commander of all allied naval forces closing in on Japan, stood on the deck of the British battleship H.M.S. George V which stopped in Guam after bombarding the Ryukyu Islands. In a few clipped sentences, Nimitz praised the British task force as “efficient” and “valuable.”
Seemingly modest, those words are high praise in the military. That tiny moment in the torrent of history and Nimitz are worth recalling now.
World War II ended 75 years ago this year. With Memorial Day, we reflect on the fallen. We also cannot help but reflect on the great leaders of that time. Certainly imperfect, Nimitz was renowned for a few qualities: He was taciturn, diligent and experienced, which led to his fourth — the ability to take informed, decisive risks. Last, he was humbly empathetic to his sailors.
Nimitz, one of this nation’s greatest naval commanders, was born Feb. 24, 1885 in the unlikeliest of places: landlocked Fredericksburg, Texas, some 200 miles from the sea. The only other arrival of note in Fredericksburg that year would be the new, limestone-block jail. As a boy, Nimitz was a smart student, worked at his family’s hotel, now the National Museum of the Pacific War, and wanted to be an officer — in the U.S. Army, according to his modern biographers. He had glimpsed a few in town one day and West Point became his desire.
But when appointment time came, his congressman informed him that the West Point slots were full. Nimitz could apply for another service academy: the U.S.
Naval Academy at Annapolis. Recalling the seafaring stories an immigrant paternal grandfather had told him as a boy, Nimitz jumped at the chance. Accepted, he skipped graduating high school to enroll on the verdant campus on the banks of the South River, majestic Chesapeake Bay just around the point.
He graduated seventh in his class in 1905, the same year the U.S. Army was finally putting down the last of the insurrections in U.S.-held Philippines. His first junior officer appointments were typical but filled with the romance of Asia and the broad swells of the Pacific; his first command nearly ended in disaster when he grounded the gunboat U.S.S. Panay on a shoal in the Philippines. His subsequent court martial found that faulty charts wer to blame. Skippering several submarines in the Atlantic, he was ordered to shore duty in 1913, just four years before America would enter World War I.
The middle of Nimitz’s career seems decidedly unglamorous. The career of a great naval officer is punctuated with stints steering desks, heads’ full of engineering problems and mastering the vast bureaucracy down to the details of personnel. Boring old competence counts. Besides, Nimitz had a head for math.
So, he headed to Groton, Conn., to build diesel engines. Then he vanished into the Navy bureaucracy, a staff officer during World War I who didn’t see combat in that war, graduate school and building the Navy ROTC. A couple of California fleet commands under his belt later, the Bureau of Navigation in Washington beckoned. . After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Nimitz headed to Hawaii as the new commanderin-chief of Pacific naval forces.
Married with a family, Nimitz was different than many of his fellow flag officers, some imperious with ambitions of empire, like George S. Patton in Europe or Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific.
“In his private moments he could not throw off the depression that had burdened him since his arrival,” E.B. Potter wrote in his seminal 1976 biography, “Nimitz.” “He was disappointed that he could do so little to turn the tide of war, and he suspected that he had disappointed his sponsors.”
“I will be lucky to last six months,” Nimitz wrote to his wife, Catherine in 1942. “God grant me the courage to not give up what is right, even though I think the situation is hopeless.”
The Battle of the Coral Sea in the spring of 1942 stopped the Japanese invasion of New Guinea, which would have possibly led to the Allies’ loss of Australia. The Battle of Midway was a risk, certainly, but Nimitz had foreknowledge: intelligence showed the Japanese would invade. He caught them off guard, and his force sent four Japanese carriers to the bottom; Nimitz altered the balance of power in the Pacific. Nimitz got the fleet he needed in 1943 to press the Japanese back, and so he did through 1944 from the Marshall Islands.
That opened the door to the Battle of the Philippine Sea where Japanese Adm. Soemu Toyoda said: “The fate of the empire rests on this one battle.” Toyoda lost the battle along with two carriers and 400 aircraft. Saipan and Guam followed, and then Tinian, where atomic-bomb laden planes launched for Japan the next year.
In what is widely hailed as among the greatest naval battles ever fought, the Battle of Leyte Gulf from Oct. 23-26, 1944, involving 200,000 men, Nimitz not only stopped Operation Sho-Go, a last-ditch effort to stop the Allied landings on the Philippines — he destroyed the entire offensive threat of Japan’s Imperial Navy.
“In my opinion, we were blessed and lucky to have had such a man as this,” said retired general Michael Hagee, former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and CEO of the foundation that operates the National Museum of the Pacific War with the Texas Historical Commission. “He frequently said, ‘I did not win the war.’ He did not seek recognition.”
Washington created a new rank for him: fleet admiral, the highest rank in the Navy yet. At Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Harbor, in 1945, he bit his tongue to play second fiddle to the swollen pride of MacArthur.
Walk the leafy lawn of the state Capitol in Austin and you’ll find heroes of the revolution against Mexico and monuments to the Confederacy. But no statue of Nimitz. At the Battleship Texas State Historic Site in the Houston Ship Channel? Nope, even though the U.S.S. Texas fought her last war in Nimitz’s Pacific campaign.
It is long overdue for the state to erect a statue of Nimitz at the Capitol. Austin should simply gift financial and marketing help to the National Museum of the Pacific War, too, no strings attached.
Nimitz was both a hero and a leader. , We could stand to remember what they look like.