Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay - Craig Symonds

Description

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz was not the most senior candidate available, and some, including his new boss, U.S. Navy Admiral Ernest J. King, considered him a "desk
admiral," more suited to running a bureaucracy than a theater of war. Yet FDR's selection proved nothing less than inspired.

Craig Symonds' Nimitz at War reveals how the quiet man from the Hill Country of Texas eventually surmounted all of these challenges. Using Nimitz's headquarters―the eye of the hurricane―as his vantage point, Symonds covers all the major campaigns in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. He
captures Nimitz's composure, discipline, homespun wisdom, and most of all his uncanny sense of when to assert authority and when to pull back. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine anyone else accomplishing what Nimitz did. As Symonds' absorbing, dynamic, and authoritative portrait reveals, it
required qualities of leadership exhibited by few other commanders in history, qualities that are enduringly and even poignantly relevant to our own moment.