Home Is the Sailor

All the way from Washington, Chester Nimitz had studied the statistics of disaster. None conveyed so urgently the task that faced him as the sight that met the admiral at Pearl Harbor on Christmas Day, 1941. Where three weeks earlier the proudest flagships of the U.S. Navy had swung at anchor, only small boats plied through the oil slick, still bringing ashore the dead crewmen of a dead fleet.

Thirty-seven years earlier, his Annapolis classbook had taken a curiously prophetic bearing on the sailor who was to lead his nation out of the greatest naval disaster in its history. "He is a man," it had said, "of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows." So he proved to be. As new Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Nimitz set out first to restore the Navy's shattered nerve--and then to restore the Navy. "I have complete confidence in you men," he briskly assured the ashen-faced staff at Pearl Harbor. "We've taken a terrific wallop, but I have no doubts as to the ultimate outcome." In less than two years, U.S. shipyards enabled him to begin to fight on even terms. In the meantime, perilously outnumbered, Nimitz played a brilliant game of parry and thrust.

Break in the Chain. Japanese strategy was to 1) destroy the rest of the Pacific fleet that had miraculously been on patrol when the dive bombers struck Pearl Harbor, and 2) build such strong defenses on its newly won island bases that no new U.S. force, no matter how strong, could possibly break through to disturb the inner empire. The island of Midway, 1.136 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor, was to be the final link in this defense chain. At the end of May 1942, some 200 ships, the bulk of the Imperial Navy, converged for an invasion of Midway and a second surprise attack on the battered Pacific fleet.

By then, Nimitz was ready. From a reading of the Japanese "Purple Code," deciphered by Army cryptographers nearly a year before, naval intelligence knew an attack was planned at invasion point "AF." Washington thought that "AF" was Hawaii itself. Nimitz was certain it was Midway. He bolstered the little island with every plane he could spare, ordered nearly every ship in his command to rendezvous just outside what he thought would be the farthest radius of Japanese air patrols. Nimitz urged on his commanders the same policy principle of "calculated risk" that he himself had followed in ordering his ships to Midway. He explained: "You shall interpret this to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage on the enemy."

Unmentionable Word. His gamble paid off. In the resulting battle, the enemy lost four irreplaceable carriers and the momentum that had propelled him from victory to victory. For the Japanese, Midway became an unmentionable word. Nimitz indulged himself in a rare pun: "Perhaps we will be forgiven if we claim that we are about midway to our objective." Though more than three years of hard, bitter fighting remained, that single, three-day battle marked the turning point of the Pacific war, the beginning of the end of Japanese ambitions.

A spare, modest, friendly man, blue-eyed, Texas-born Chester Nimitz never won or sought the public renown that came to the aloof MacArthur or his own subordinate, flamboyant William ("Bull") Halsey. Early in his career Nimitz had run a destroyer aground in Manila Bay, escaping with a reprimand when he might have been drummed from the service; he was seldom thereafter unsympathetic to the shortcomings of junior officers. Despite his burdens as wartime commander, he revived the custom of inviting every commander who passed through Pearl Harbor--from tugboat skipper to captain of the biggest battleship--to chat with him in his office.

After the war, Nimitz, now one of four five-star admirals,* succeeded Admiral Ernest King as Chief of Naval Operations in Washington until 1947, when he returned to his adopted home in the San Francisco Bay Area to serve the University of California as a regent and his nation as a naval adviser; a five-star admiral is never retired. In his study he kept mementos from the days when he commanded the greatest armada the world has ever seen--or is likely to see again. Last week Nimitz, 80, died at his home and was buried beside the Pacific, at his own wish, without the pomp of a state funeral, like any other sailor home from the sea.

* The others, all dead: Ernest King, William Leahy and Halsey.

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