Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  Look at the various personalities with whom he worked over the senior years of his career—starting with the difficult Admiral Ernest King, of whom it was said, “when things get tough they send for the sons-of-bitches,” a comment he reveled in and repeated himself. King was notoriously hard drinking, harsh on his sailors, and possessed of a towering ego—yet Nimitz managed not only to remain on his good side, but also to help King navigate the political storms of Washington with sound, measured advice. Another challenging but talented subordinate was Admiral Halsey, famous for his off-handed but highly printable and colorful remarks to the media (he was the Navy’s version of General George Patton). Halsey was a “fighting admiral,” and Nimitz was able to soothe his subordinate’s temper and keep him on a successful course despite his occasional lapses both personally and tactically. Nimitz did this endlessly with numerous others, even putting up with the greatest ego in American military history, General Douglas MacArthur, as they ran parallel campaigns across the Pacific and competed for resources from the Pentagon.

  Another great stream of Nimitz’s development as an officer was his drive to acquire experience, responsibility, and expertise. From his earliest shipboard assignments, Nimitz eschewed the typical approach of seeking small roles on large ships in favor of taking on large responsibilities in small ships. This pushed him first into small surface combatants, where he quickly acquired the priceless experience of commanding a ship through a dangerous typhoon, and later into submarines, where he would spend the majority of his career before reaching flag rank.

  At least as important as Nimitz’s habit of seeking responsibility for himself was his practice of devolving as much responsibility as possible to the people around and below him. From two-stripe lieutenant to five-star admiral, Nimitz made the people and organizations around him better by pushing subordinates to grow beyond their own expected limitations and by preserving his own energy to focus on the decisions and actions that were his alone to make. This element of Nimitz’s character can be hard to see now, since our cultural memory of him is almost invariably of the victor of World War II who carried more responsibility than most of us can imagine. However, it is essential to note that Nimitz did not meet his superhuman task with superhuman capacity: rather, he was an extraordinary delegator who was able to do his job in large part because he had the discipline not to insist on doing his subordinates’ jobs as well—often the hardest task for a gifted leader.

  Another aspect of Nimitz’s professional development that is too often lost in the overarching shine of the World War II victory was his sheer proficiency as a sailor. Even if the war had not broken out, Nimitz might still be remembered today—at least within the Navy—for his technical innovations at sea, somewhat like Jacky Fisher. When Nimitz moved into the submarine community, the US Navy was still working out the design and use of the relatively primitive undersea boats; Nimitz quickly began writing about how submarine warfare might be waged and became instrumentally involved in the change from gasoline to diesel-electric propulsion. Nimitz was also a principal inventor of the underway replenishment techniques that would be essential to the US Navy as it confronted the logistical challenge of spanning the Pacific. He was an early and frequent contributor to the US Naval Institute’s professional journal, Proceedings. Like Jacky Fisher, he combined strategic vision and technical skill.

  The final building block of Nimitz’s development was his prewar appointment as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, which managed all naval personnel. (In later years, the bureau was renamed the Bureau of Personnel, or “BuPers.”) Nimitz’s son Chester Junior would describe that posting as the most important in his father’s development. Nimitz “was a people man entirely,” said his son. Not only was the elder Nimitz a good fit for the position, but it provided him with the breadth of perspective that comes with learning what it takes to manage all the Navy’s people. BuNav, according to Chester Junior, was the job in which his father “learned most, and in which the evaluation of his superiors was probably most critical to his subsequent success.”

  It was as chief of BuNav that Nimitz sat down that Sunday afternoon in December 1941 to listen to classical music on the radio when the attack on Pearl Harbor was announced. Half a decade before, in a conversation with Chester Junior while the latter was a midshipman, Nimitz had predicted that “we are going to have a major war, with Japan and Germany,” which he believed would “start with a very serious surprise attack and defeat of U.S. armed forces.” Nimitz knew that no admiral in command at sea when that attack came would be politically palatable after the defeat (“though it won’t be their fault necessarily”), and so wished “to be in a position of sufficient prominence so that I will then be considered as one to be sent to sea.”

  In that sense, Nimitz’s appointment to BuNav—for which he had turned down his dream job as CINCPAC—was doubly lucky. Not only did it prepare him for subsequent success, but it also kept him from being in Husband Kimmel’s position on the morning of December 7, 1941. As Nimitz had predicted, Kimmel was sacked—regardless of how much or how little he was truly to blame—and the hand of fate then turned to select a new CINCPAC. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox raised Nimitz’s name before President Roosevelt, who, after an overnight deliberation, called Knox into his office. “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won,” ordered the president. Knox promptly returned to his own office, summoned Nimitz, and asked him how soon he could be ready to travel. “It depends on where I’m going and how long I’ll be away,” the somewhat harried admiral had replied. Unable to conceal his own enthusiasm, Knox gave Nimitz the news: “You’re going to take command of the Pacific Fleet, and I think you will be gone a long time.”

  Thus, nine days after Nimitz’s predicted surprise attack had come to pass, he fulfilled his own prophecy by being in position to be named to command at sea. En route to Hawaii, Nimitz was concerned about what he would find: “We have suffered a terrible defeat,” he confided to a friend. “I don’t know whether we can ever recover from it.” But on the morning of December 31, 1941, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz stepped into the defining role of his life. He completed a journey spanning an entire continent and half an ocean to take command of the shattered US Pacific Fleet in a brief ceremony aboard the submarine USS Grayling. There was still oil floating on the surface of Pearl Harbor, and the smell of smoke and cordite hung in the tropical air. A few yards away, thousands of sailors were still entombed in the massive battleships sunk on December 7. It was a grim and purposeful rite, and a striking contrast to the normally happy atmosphere of a fleet change of command.

  The admiral came to the microphone in the center of the deck and turned to face the small huddle of fellow officers and pressmen gathered for the ceremony. As a submariner by training and therefore one to spot the humor in any situation, the irony was not lost on Nimitz that Grayling, a submarine, offered one of the only floating warship decks in Pearl Harbor on which to conduct the change of command. Suppressing the hint of a smile but not the glint of determination in his eye, Nimitz took a barely perceptible deep breath and read his orders, relieving his good friend Husband E. Kimmel from command. He knew that Kimmel’s life and career were shattered, and he felt deeply the hurt of his old friend.

  As soon as Nimitz uttered the traditional “I relieve you, sir,” the sense of irony vanished. Instantly, those four words invested the four stars newly pinned on Nimitz’s collar with the full weight of his responsibility. Salutes were exchanged, the boatswain’s whistle trilled, and with eight sharp dings of the Grayling’s bell, Nimitz went ashore. “Pacific Fleet, departing,” called the boatswain, and Nimitz began the task that would occupy him for the next four years. Setting his face and his will, Nimitz—a lifelong walker—began making his way up the extinct volcano of Makalapa Hill to his new headquarters. The walk up from the harbor that day was short, but it was the beginning of a long, arduous climb back from the disaster of Pearl Harbor
to the singular height of glory Nimitz would achieve three and a half years later. At that moment, he of course could not foresee that the voyage of the war would end in another harbor, Tokyo’s, where he would accept the surrender of Japan. All he could think about on that final day of 1941 was the shattered fleet under the oily water.

  Once on-site, however, Nimitz had the presence of mind to make several key decisions that ensured that the fleet would recover but faster than anyone could have expected. First, he stabilized the personnel situation by keeping nearly all of Admiral Kimmel’s people on staff—and keeping himself ashore. Intentionally retaining a defeated and demoralized staff was not merely a matter of discretion, but a deeply practical decision that began rebuilding morale and allowed the Navy to focus on striking back rather than building a new staff. Moving his own command ashore cost him the chance to command ships at sea in combat (something he never had the opportunity to do), but was absolutely the right decision for managing a war on the scale Nimitz soon confronted.

  Second, Nimitz—ever the clear-eyed optimist—had the perspicacity to see that even such a terrible defeat was not total destruction. Burning and sinking battleships were quite a spectacle, but Nimitz realized what the Japanese had missed. As he pored over the photographs of a destroyed Pearl Harbor, he focused on what was not in the pictures of the carnage, namely the fleet’s fuel reserves and aircraft carriers. Had either of those assets been knocked out, the US war effort would have been in great peril indeed; as it was, most of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor would be refloated and returned to combat, but the course of the war would demonstrate their obsolescence. Fuel oil, aviation gasoline, and aircraft carriers would be far more decisive in the conduct of the war.

  Finally, Nimitz was involved early and deeply in setting the strategy that the United States pursued throughout the course of the Pacific War. Working with his superior back in Washington, Admiral King, and his own staff in Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had a hand in drawing the rough outlines of the central Pacific strategy that would be the US Navy’s main line of effort for the next three and a half years. Nimitz was no armchair strategist, either. Within six months after Pearl Harbor, he had made the bold decision to launch the quick (though symbolic) retaliatory Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo; had gambled and won at Midway, inflicting a defeat from which the Imperial Japanese Navy would never truly recover; and had put Marines ashore on Guadalcanal, beginning the island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese home islands.

  Nimitz later said that those first six months were the hardest, but the war in the Pacific raged on for three more years. The scale, violence, and intensity of the fighting grew in a horrible crescendo from bloody amphibious landings, to fanatical banzai and kamikaze attacks, to the ultimate breaking of the enemy’s will with the dropping of two atomic bombs. Along the way, Nimitz’s responsibilities grew exponentially until he “commanded thousands of ships and aircraft and millions of men, amounting to more military power than had been wielded by all the commanders in all previous wars,” as his biographer wrote.

  Nimitz clearly could not be everywhere at once—and he determined not to try to be the next Nelson by playing strategist, sailor, and warrior all at once. The war was much too big and complex for that. Instead, the secret to Nimitz’s success was his skillful management of a relatively few people: those above him who managed the entire war effort, and those around and just below him who conducted the actual fighting. As his biographer put it, Nimitz’s personality served as the “link and buffer” that turned this complicated group of admirals into “one of the most effective fighting teams in history.” Without Nimitz as the glue holding it together, the unique abilities of each of the others might not have meshed. Perhaps equally important, Nimitz also managed to work out a modus vivendi with the most temperamental and difficult officer in the theater, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. Probably no one save Nimitz could have maintained an even keel in working with that colossal ego.

  After the war, Nimitz remained in uniform for several more years, replacing King as chief of naval operations, the pinnacle of the naval profession in the United States. It was a position to which Nimitz had always aspired. Due to an act of Congress that kept Nimitz and his fellow five-star admirals (including King and Halsey) on the active-duty rolls for life, Nimitz technically never retired from the Navy. However, he had the good grace and sense to get out of town after his tenure as CNO rather than lingering—and inevitably growing stale—in some “special advisory” role. He and his wife bought the first house they had ever owned in Berkeley, California, where, not surprisingly, tending the garden quickly proved insufficiently exciting. Nimitz accepted a position with the United Nations in which he was charged with negotiating a post–civil war settlement between India and Pakistan; sadly, the talks never happened, and Nimitz retired once more to Berkeley.

  Despite many lucrative offers, Nimitz never parlayed his wartime fame into a cushy second career in business. Rather, he remained a symbol of and advocate for the Navy for the rest of his days—a decision, like stepping away after his time as CNO, which did much to cement his reputation. His voyage finally ended at age eighty; he died in a sunny room in the old naval house called Quarters One on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco Bay. True to their mutual wishes, Nimitz was buried alongside fellow World War II admirals Spruance, Kelly Turner, and Charles Lockwood, together with the admirals’ wives, in the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

  The memory of this “American Nelson” lives on strongly in the US Navy today. Nimitz’s name adorns the library at the Naval Academy, as well as the lead ship of the Nimitz class of super carriers that have projected American power and maintained the peace Nimitz won seventy years ago. When USS Nimitz was commissioned, President Gerald R. Ford quoted E. B. Potter, the admiral’s biographer, in delivering this tribute to Nimitz: “He surrounded himself with the ablest men he could find and sought their advice, but he made his own decisions. He was a keen strategist who never forgot that he was dealing with human beings, on both sides of the conflict. He was aggressive in war without hate, and audacious while never failing to weigh the risks.” In so many ways, he was the greatest of our Navy’s admirals.

  Reflecting on the long trajectory of his career, it feels as though Nimitz is too much remembered as the conquering hero of 1945 and not enough as the keen strategist of 1941–42. Although it can be difficult to clearly distinguish between “Nimitz the strategist” and “Nimitz the implementer” of that strategy, the crucial point is that Nimitz was at his best when thinking through the strategic challenges he faced. All leaders are responsible for setting organizations’ goals and martialing resources. Nimitz was a master of this element of leadership, and his skill was crowned by his executive ability. He neither overplanned to the point of inaction (“paralysis by analysis”) nor struck out blindly without a clear sense of what he wanted to accomplish and how he could realistically expect to achieve it. In addition to doing the right amount of strategizing at the right level, Nimitz firmly grasped the two elements of strategy that most often slip through leaders’ fingers. First, he knew that strategy is a team sport. In his capacity as “link and buffer,” Nimitz not only smoothed the rough edges of the personalities around him but—crucially—knew how to manage upward, downward, and sideways to develop and execute the best strategy. Nimitz listened to King, who also had to worry about the war in the Atlantic but was unafraid to push back (with characteristic tact) when his boss’s ideas seemed off-base. Similarly, he communicated strategic objectives to Halsey, Spruance, and other subordinates with enough flexibility to allow them room to exercise their own discretion as commanders on the scene as events unfolded.

  Nimitz also understood that strategy is not a one-time event but rather an iterative process. Although the outlines of the central Pacific drive were set early in the war and pursued throughout, the plan had to be constantly revised and updated as the situation changed: A
mericans learned (at great cost) the art of amphibious warfare, Japanese resistance stiffened, land- and sea-based airpower evolved before everyone’s eyes and changed the character of the war. Managing all those factors and many more, Nimitz knew when to see things through and when to make a change. Managing “thousands of ships and aircraft and millions of men” is above all an organizational challenge. Before Nimitz could take on the Imperial Japanese Navy, he first had to master the US Navy, and he did so with aplomb. Like strategy, organizational design and management is something that leaders at all levels need to take ownership of at some point or another, and it is best done early. From his early drive to take on outsized responsibility in undersized ships to his essential preparatory posting at the Bureau of Navigation, Nimitz developed several essential habits of management—each of which tied to his character.

  First, as previously noted, Nimitz was an outstanding delegator. This made the people and organizations around him better by identifying and growing talent quickly—and just as quickly clarifying who was in the wrong job. Being an effective delegator means first and foremost sublimating your ego and allowing others to shine in the spotlight. This reflects self-confidence and an inner sense of balance that keeps the ego in check. Second, Nimitz was supremely resourceful, creative, and humane in how he dealt with the people around him. Whether by alternating Halsey and Spruance in command of the fleet at sea or by quickly and discreetly forgiving or moving people who proved inadequate in the jobs they were in, Nimitz found ways to get the most out of everyone in the fleet and minimized inefficiency and ineffectiveness throughout the organization. Finally, and critically, Nimitz knew better than most managers where his job ended and his superiors’ and subordinates’ began. In communicating plans before and instructions during battle, Nimitz gave his commanders room to command and resisted the temptation to micromanage by radio. If Nimitz could stay off the radio during some of the chanciest moments of the war in the Pacific, many modern managers—with infinitely more access to their subordinate’s inboxes—could take a lesson from the admiral’s self-discipline.