A Question of Balance

At his new, Seabee-built headquarters on Guam, Chester William Nimitz sat at a shiny new desk. He wore khaki shorts, and an open-necked shirt with the five stars of a fleet admiral on the points of his collar. He was waiting. Radio Tokyo went off the air, came on again, screaming about the approach of U.S. planes. Then the Navy signal was flashed. Mitscher's attack had begun.

Nimitz reached for his pen, gripped it in a hand gnarled by rheumatism (from submarine service a quarter of a century ago), and wrote in a neat, upright hand: "This operation has long been planned, and the opportunity to accomplish it fulfills the deeply cherished desire of every officer and man of the Pacific Fleet."

The disciplined language of the communique was scarcely an emotional outburst. But in those words Nimitz had allowed himself to unbend, for the world at large, more than at any previous time in his three years under the immense burdens of duty as Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas.

The 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 the pseudonym of "Mr. Wainwright," by rail to San Diego, and thence by air to Pearl Harbor.

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 of God, go I."

He met 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 and to bring in his own team. They trudged to the new CinCPac's conference.

Said Nimitz: he had every confidence in all the officers present; he wanted them to stay on, as his staff. Officers who for three weeks had been as pitiable derelicts as the bomb-scarred hulks lying in the mud across the channel were salvaged by that simple verbal operation.

Army or Navy? There had been little in Chester Nimitz' early life to suggest that he would become a naval officer, and little in his early career to suggest that he would become an admiral with the greatest command in history--65,000,000 square miles and millions of tons of ships. How had it happened?

In the 18405, Captain Charles Nimitz, a German-born sailing-ship master, settled in Fredericksburg, Tex. and built a hotel which, as additions were made, acquired a boat deck, a bridge and the nickname ''Steamboat Hotel." The hotelkeeper's son Chester married Anna Henke; in the fall of 1884, Chester died. On Feb. 24, 1885, his baby was born, to be christened Chester William Nimitz.

Chester listened to Grandfather Nimitz' stories of the sea, but he listened more eagerly to stories of the Army from soldiers stationed in the area. The towheaded, compactly built youth, nicknamed "Cottonhead," wanted to go to West Point. But there was a dearth of appointments to the Military Academy, and a glut of candidates. For the Naval Academy, it was the other way round. Nimitz won an appointment to Annapolis.

Balance and Timing. Cadet Nimitz was equally intense in his studies and in physical training. He stood 5 ft. 9 1/2 in., weighed 150 lbs., and was judged too light for the football team. But he stroked the crew in his last two years. Here was the first hint of the qualities which made him outstanding 40 years later: he had a fine sense of balance and of timing.

For the Lucky Bag, the class yearbook ('05), Nimitz wrote: "I have enjoyed every one of my assignments, and I believe that it has been so because of my making it a point to become as deeply immersed and as interested in each activity as it was possible for me to become." (Said the Lucky Bag of him: a "man of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows.")

In 1908 Ensign Nimitz asked for battleship duty and was assigned to submarines. In those days, he says, "undersea craft were regarded as a cross between a Jules Verne fantasy and a whale." The first subs he commanded, the Plunger and Narwhal, were tiny gasoline burners, pathetically unlike the undersea cruisers of 1945. But Nimitz applied himself, characteristically: he went to Germany to study diesels; the textbook he wrote on submarines in 1912 is still valuable. (His only son--he has three daughters--followed him into the submarine service. Last week, Commander Chester W. ["Buddy"] Nimitz Jr., teaching at the New London sub base, received the Navy Cross: he has been on twelve combat patrols, on two as commander.)

Human Gyrocompass. Nimitz was chief of staff to Admiral Samuel S. Robison, commander of U.S. submarine forces in World War I, and got along well with the British Navy at a time when many U.S. officers were rattled by that venerable institution's condescension toward the upstart U.S. Fleet.

In the 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.

In the first bleak days at Pearl Harbor, one of Nimitz' main tasks was to balance the fleet, set it on course for Tokyo and keep it there. Nimitz became to the fleet what a gyrocompass is to a ship.

Unlike some admirals, he had never gone to Pensacola in middle age to take a course in aviation which would qualify him to wear wings. But he listened attentively while his flying officers--"Bull" Halsey, Forrest ("Fuzz") Sherman, Frederick ("Ted") Sherman, Aubrey W. ("Jake") Fitch--argued the case of the carrier-cruiser task force. Nimitz was convinced. He sent Halsey out on the hit-run raids which buoyed the fleet's morale, and the nation's, early in 1942.

The First Half. In the Coral Sea came history's first "battle beyond the horizon," in which carriers sent aerial artillery to strike at each other across hundreds of miles of water. Nimitz lost the Lexington but saved Australia and New Zealand.

For the Battle of Midway, Halsey was ailing and unavailable. Nimitz sent Raymond Ames Spruance out first with two carriers, then Frank Jack Fletcher with the Yorktown. As senior, Fletcher took overall command, but when the Yorktown retired from the fight, crippled, Spruance carried on. The victory ended the Jap threat to Hawaii, the Panama Canal and the U.S. itself. It was the turning point of the Pacific war. In announcing the triumph, Nimitz punned: "We are about midway to our objective."

The Long Second Half. Midway it may have been, in one sense, but it was less than midway in point of time or distance. The real march to Tokyo could not begin from Midway: it had to start from Guadalcanal, and disaster nearly overtook it. Nimitz hated to relieve Vice Admiral Robert Lee Ghormley, who had burned himself out in the South Pacific, allowing himself neither exercise nor relaxation, trying to run an offensive on a shoestring (and four months ahead of schedule). But at last Nimitz sent Halsey south to take over.

Ghormley went to Pearl Harbor, as commandant of the Hawaiian Sea Frontier. There Nimitz gave him, and all his other subordinates, a daily object lesson in how to keep fit. By then Nimitz had moved his headquarters to a steel & concrete building, supposedly bombproof, overlooking the yard. Each morning he walked a mile or so before breakfast; each afternoon he played tennis (beating many a man much younger), or walked up & down Aiea Mountain, or hiked seven miles to a beach for a three-mile swim. The only man who could outwalk his chief was Spruance, chief of staff and Deputy CinCPac. On a private pistol range set up beside the building, Nimitz could outshoot most visiting marksmen.

"There Was a . . ." The towheaded boy was now a snow-thatched man nearing 60, tanned from daily sun baths, 30 pounds heavier. He had acquired the sureness of a man experienced in great responsibility. He composed differences among his staff by telling ribald stories, and had a fine knack of adapting them to fit the immediate circumstances. He broke young-officer ice by thrusting out his hand and saying, "My name's Nimitz." He was photographed dancing with a hula girl at an enlisted men's recreation center in Waikiki--and foresightedly sent the first print to Mrs. Nimitz at Berkeley, Calif. He posed happily for a goofy picture with a gooney bird at Midway.

Stern, rock-hewn Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the Fleet, delegated ample authority to Nimitz, and Nimitz in turn knew how to delegate it to his subordinates. These were as diverse as the ebullient Halsey and the inscrutable Spruance, the wry, wizened Mitscher and the florid, polished Vice Admiral John H. Towers (now Deputy CinCPac).

Advance to the Rear. Although he had never bothered to win wings, Nimitz has never been branded a "battleship admiral." Just as he listened to flying officers in the early days, so he listened to them in mid-1943, when they told him they could knock out the Japs' forward positions in the Marshall Islands and give him air cover to strike with the amphibious forces at Kwajalein and Eniwetok, deep in the rear.

It was Nimitz who welded the carriers and cruisers of the war's early task forces into new and far more deadly task forces with battleships--when the new, fast battleships became available. As more & more ships, more & more planes reached the Pacific, Nimitz directed ever bolder strokes toward Japan. It was, said he, "simple arithmetic--subtraction for them and addition for us." This naval arithmetic has brought him to Japan's front yard.

The Road Ahead. There are two island routes through the front yard to Japan's doorstep: one from the Bonins through the Izu group to Honshu, one through the Ryukyus to Kyushu. There is one through the back yard: along the Kurils (as forbidding as the Aleutians) to Hokkaido. None offers a particularly promising route for the great air forces and vast amphibious forces which must be staged within reach of the target. But each would help, if Nimitz meant to go to the coast of China and thence to Korea, and use Korea as General Eisenhower used southern England for staging the descent upon Normandy.

Only a month ago, Nimitz had all his documents duplicated, packed in 75 crates, each 6 ft. by 3 by 2, weighted (so they would sink in case of accident), and shipped to Guam. His staff and their subordinates were divided into five groups. One day, a Douglas four-engined transport (R5D) took the lowest echelon to Guam. Next day another took the next higher echelon, and so on. Thus the headquarters of CinCPac and CinCPOA moved to the Marianas, 3,500 miles closer to Tokyo, without interruption of their vast and complex tasks.

The expert staff which moved with Nimitz was at once the measure of his past achievement and a largely contributive cause of his continuing success. His chief of staff now is Sock McMorris, most noteworthy of the officers salvaged from Pearl Harbor. In charge of war plans is Fuzz Sherman, advocate of the fast task force after Pearl Harbor. But the boss of his staff is, as always, Nimitz, the fleet's human gyrocompass, always on the true plane, always on course for Tokyo.

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