Word: nimitz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Darkest Day. Within an hour after the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had impressed his superiors as a man well suited for the Pacific command. He had been summoned to Frank Knox's office on the second "deck" of the barracks-like Navy Department on Washington's Constitution Avenue. There were gathered the Secretary, Under Secretary Forrestal, Assistant Secretary Bard, Admiral Harold R. ("Betty") Stark, Chief of Naval Operations. Nimitz, then a rear admiral and chief of the Bureau of Navigation, was the calmest man present...
Soon, Knox went to President Roosevelt to decide the appointment of a new Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet. A year before, Knox had submitted two names: Husband Edward Kimmel and Chester William Nimitz, in that order. Franklin Roosevelt had picked the first name. This time, said Knox, he would be satisfied with the second name from the same list. The President agreed. Nimitz himself demurred; he suggested that the command should go to Vice Admiral William S. Pye, who had taken over temporarily from Kimmel after the disaster. But he accepted his orders, and started west in civilian clothes, under...
Light in the Darkness. There Nimitz found, in his own concise summation, "too many people and too much pessimism." His attitude toward his luckless predecessor, Kimmel, was that of a professional who sees a brother officer under the lash of defeat: "There, but for the grace...
...Kimmel's staff, and the scratch staff which had served Pye during the last days of December. In particular, Nimitz had to appraise balding Captain Charles H. ("Sock") McMorris, Kimmel's war plans officer, who had said (a week before Dec. 7) that Japanese airmen would never surprise Pearl Harbor. In BuNav, Nimitz had seemed a hard executive, despite his amiable manner. He had found the Bureau slack, and had made it taut. The officers whose careers had seemed blasted by Jap bombs and torpedoes expected Nimitz to sweep them all out to some naval Siberia...
...long armistice between the wars, Nimitz had the usual assortment of duty. Always his chief contribution was a sense of balance, of pulling the team together. If things were slack, he tightened them. If he took over a taut ship, he loosened it up a little. He got along well with civilians, because he did not brass-hat them...