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July 3 - July 8, 2022
Nimitz, like Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, exemplified another leadership style, a quieter one that depended on intelligent listening, humility, and patience.
Rather than impose orders, he elicited solutions; he sought achievement, not attention. He unified. His was a quiet, calm, yet firm hand on the tiller during an existential crisis, and his leadership style reinforced rather than challenged democratic norms. It is a leadership template more relevant than ever.
Nimitz considered the reporter’s question and replied: All we can do is bide our time and take advantage of any opportunity that might come along.
It was Nimitz’s particular gift to be able to impart to others the confidence that they could succeed.
“the calm, collected type that never showed stress or strain.”
He knew, almost instinctively, which administrative battles were winnable and worth fighting, and which simply had to be endured.
Some looked upon this dexterity as weakness. In their view, a leader should command, not negotiate.
Nimitz was “political” in the way that George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were political. That is, he understood that command decisions at every level had to reflect political realities as well as strategic and operational goals, and he nurtured a non-confrontational demeanor that allowed him to deal effectively with his superiors even when he disagreed with them.
As one of those aides recalled, he “always gave a person a chance to have his say.” He might not accept your advice, the officer recalled, but “you knew you had your full day in court.” And when he did overrule a subordinate, he turned it into a teaching moment by explaining why.13 He made it a point to compliment others for their contributions because he believed that men responded better to praise and encouragement than to threats or warnings.
King is reputed to have said that when the shooting starts, that’s when they send for the sons of bitches.
Early in the war, when one correspondent asked him to predict the outcome, Halsey replied that before he was finished, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.
because his father had died before he was born, Nimitz had been raised by his maternal grandfather, and one piece of advice his grandfather gave him was never to worry about things that were beyond his control.
“Learn all you can, then do your best, and don’t worry—especially about things over which you have no control.”
Years before, when his son, Chet, was freshly commissioned, the younger Nimitz had asked his father how to deal with a bullying superior. Chet recalled his father telling him that a “frontal attack” was seldom effective. Instead, he told Chet, he should “continue to be extraordinarily polite, and don’t reveal to him your purpose, and at all times be slowly removing the rug from under him.”
Twenty years earlier, as a student at the Naval War College, Nimitz had written his thesis on naval tactics. In it, he argued that “great results cannot be accomplished without a corresponding degree of risk.” “The leader who awaits perfection of plans, material, or training, will wait in vain,” he wrote, “and in the end will yield the victory to him who employs the tools at hand with the greatest vigor.”
The Battle of Midway had been tactically decisive—one of the few naval battles in history that ended with the virtual destruction of an enemy force. In American history, only the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813 and the two naval battles of the Spanish-American War in 1898 fell into that category.
Given American industrial superiority, it was virtually certain that in time the country would produce the thousands of planes needed to overtake and eventually overwhelm the Japanese. But planes without trained pilots are useless, and the loss of trained and experienced pilots in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and elsewhere was a serious problem.
In his student thesis at the Naval War College back in 1923, Nimitz had written that effective command required senior officers to identify the objective and then endow their subordinates with “authority, responsibility, and great freedom of initiative.”
He continued to host lunches and dinners in his home, sometimes with a dozen or more guests, making a point of including junior officers whenever he could. These were not just social events; they allowed him to keep his finger on the pulse of officer morale and hear views from outside the circle of official advisers on his staff. As one junior officer recalled later, “He never minded questions from his subordinates and in fact encouraged them.”
His specialty was an old-fashioned constructed from his own recipe. He put a sugar cube in the bottom of the glass, added one drop of Angostura bitters, then added just enough hot water to melt the cube. That was followed by cracked ice, two ounces of bourbon, and, to top it off, an ounce of rum, which made it particularly lethal. He called this powerful concoction a “CinCPac.”
The military historian Russell Weigley once posited that the dominant characteristic of “the American Way of War,” as he called it, was to amass overwhelming resources in order to deliver vastly superior firepower against the enemy. After all, America’s great advantage over her foes, at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, has been superior wealth and industrial productivity. Because of that, the United States could afford to expend dollars rather than the blood of its citizens to secure victory.33
shortcomings. To his son, Nimitz confessed, “I can stand anybody who’s dumb. I can stand anybody who’s stubborn. But I can’t stand somebody who’s dumb and stubborn.”
Yet Spruance had internalized most aspects of Nimitz’s leadership including his work ethic and strategic outlook. He wrote his wife, Margaret, that his boss was “a marvelous combination of tolerance of the opinions of others, wise judgment after he listened, and determination to carry things through,”
Bernard Austin recalled that in addition to appreciating Calhoun’s work, “Admiral Nimitz was very fond of Admiral Calhoun as an individual.” Calhoun repaid the support with efficiency. The official Navy history of wartime logistics asserts that “no single command contributed so much in winning the war with Japan as did the Service Force of the Pacific Fleet.”
The losses at Tarawa also reinforced his insistence that American fighting men should never be sent into battle without overwhelming numerical and material superiority. As the official Army history put it, “Never again in the Pacific war would the assault troops be so handicapped as they had been at Tarawa.”22
The Japanese added the word maru, meaning “circle,” to ship names as a token of good luck. It implies that each ship is a little world (circle) of its own, and also that it will return from its voyage, thus completing a circle.
Even more than his audacity, however, it was his steady hand on the helm that was the key to success. Though he never conned a ship, dropped a bomb, or stormed a beach, he was the essential element of American victory in the Central Pacific campaign.
The cost of the victory had been staggering. American casualties totaled 26,038, with 6,821 killed. Japanese numbers are less certain, but most authorities agree 19,000 soldiers were killed, with another thousand taken prisoner. It was the only battle of the Pacific war in which the Americans suffered more total casualties than the Japanese.
Within days, the campaign for Okinawa was over. Ushijima killed himself three days after Buckner died. Marine Corps Lieutenant General Roy Geiger completed the conquest of the island. It had been grueling. Both the Army (4,675 killed) and Marines (2,928 killed) had suffered terribly, yet due to the kamikazes, mortal casualties among Navy personnel (4,907) were greater than either. The numbers paled in comparison to Japanese losses (more than 90,000 killed), plus the death of as many as 150,000 Okinawa civilians.
In all these venues, he insisted that it was not the atomic bomb or Russian intervention that had won the war against Japan; it was the persistent application of American naval power that had stripped away Japan’s empire, destroyed her navy, ravaged her maritime commerce, and left her a wrecked nation.
