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By Root 1816 0

naval theater in the world. It was a call to duty that allowed no humble refusals. The president told Navy Secretary Frank Knox, “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won.” The Pacific war would be America’s war. Running it would be a lonely charge. A commentator for Collier’s magazine would call the Pacific “an unshared front where America’s production, her strategy, her skill and valor must stand the acid test alone.… Our national feeling with regard to the Pacific burns with a purer flame. We seem to realize that here is not a war rooted in the age-old hatreds and grudges of Europe. Here, rather, is a war to resolve new and inescapable problems.” Those problems would be many and their owner, as far as the Navy cared, was Chester Nimitz.

Nimitz’s chief of staff, Raymond A. Spruance, would call him “one of the few people I know who never knew what it meant to be afraid of anything.” His duties were of the kind that exhausted the conscientious and the caring. After the Oahu attack, he had to sort out its myriad administrative consequences—three thousand letters to send to bereaved families, untold gatherings of men and machines to reassign to useful tasks. As head of the Bureau of Navigation, which handled personnel issues, he had tendered the applications of the ambitious and the vengeful, including more than one U.S. congressman who phoned him after December 7 to lobby for an enlistment. Overwhelmed and sleepless, Nimitz was said to have told his congressional supplicants, “Go back and vote us appropriations. We’re going to need them.”

On December 19, Nimitz left his office on Constitution Avenue and returned to his apartment on Q Street to share the news of his appointment with his wife. Sensing his reluctance, Catherine reminded him, “You always wanted to command the Pacific Fleet. You always thought that would be the height of glory.”

“Darling,” replied Nimitz, “the fleet’s at the bottom of the sea. Nobody must know that here, but I’ve got to tell you.”

He had grown to dread the assignment, and would have even if it didn’t entail commanding a wounded squadron, the battleships of Task Force 1, whose lifeblood, their oil, still seeped in rainbow ribbons from their broken hulls off Ford Island. He would have dreaded it because he knew his promotion was a zero-sum transaction; it required the demotion of someone else, and that person happened to be one of Nimitz’s closest friends, Husband E. Kimmel. Pearl Harbor had burned on Kimmel’s watch, so Kimmel paid the price. If the charge of negligence failed by the standard of a trial court, and if the proceeding that tarred him was driven more by political expediency than by examination of a fuller truth concerning who had what level of warning and when, it was also the verdict that the code of naval leadership required. A captain was expected to go down with his ship; why not an admiral with his base? The principle was clean, simple, and predictable in operation. It was the Navy way.

Within a few short years America’s fleet would be more powerful and capable than any before it. The same could be said of Nimitz’s superior in Washington, the leading U.S. naval commander of the day. Though he worked in guarded isolation, giving subordinates little direct access, no admiral had ever wielded the same degree of personal influence on wartime policy as Ernest J. King. As the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet (COMINCH) and chief of naval operations (CNO), he was preeminent in both planning and command. His influence and his formidable personal nature made him a figure to be reckoned with within the Navy Department bureaucracy. Ensconced on the front corridor of the fourth floor of “Main Navy,” the large headquarters building on Constitution Avenue, he was memorably unlike Nimitz. “Subconsciously he sought to be omnipotent and infallible,” his biographer wrote. “There were few men whom he regarded as his equal as to brains; he would acknowledge no mind as superior to his own.” He was abrupt and unyielding, visibly intolerant of those he deemed