Chester Nimitz: From a Grounded Destroyer to Commanding the Pacific Fleet

The admiral who led the greatest naval armada in history grew up in landlocked Fredericksburg, Texas, wanted to join the Army, and nearly ended his career by running his first command aground on a mud bank. This episode traces the life of Chester W. Nimitz, from the pragmatic philosophy instilled by his seafaring grandfather to the one spare Naval Academy appointment a local congressman happened to have. It examines how the 1908 grounding of the destroyer Decatur and the resulting reprimand shaped a lifelong obsession with detail, and why he chose the dangerous frontier of early submarines to rebuild his reputation.

The episode follows Nimitz through a 1913 diesel engine study in Germany that cost him part of a finger, the pioneering of underway refueling aboard the Maumee in World War I, and his appointment as Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet ten days after Pearl Harbor, taking command on the deck of a submarine because the battleships were sunk. It covers his reliance on codebreakers at Coral Sea and Midway, the island-hopping campaign, the surrender signing aboard the USS Missouri, his support for Hyman Rickover's nuclear submarine, and his remarkable affidavit at Nuremberg on behalf of German Admiral Karl Donitz.

• How his grandfather's lesson to control only what you can control became Nimitz's operating system in the darkest days of the Navy
• Why underway refueling untethered the fleet from port and became the linchpin of the Central Pacific offensive
• How the two-pronged strategy with General Douglas MacArthur, rather than causing disaster, forced Japan to divide its defenses
• Operation Starvation, B-29 mines in Japanese home ports, and the severing of oil supply lines after the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf
• Why Nimitz admitted under oath that his own fleet practiced unrestricted submarine warfare, and how that helped Donitz avoid a harsher sentence