The Admirals

by Walter R. Borneman

  One of Charles and Sophia’s many offspring was Chester Bernard Nimitz, a weak lad with a frail constitution. Doctors advised him never to marry, but when he was twenty-nine, he fell in love with the butcher’s daughter, Anna Henke. She, too, came from a family of twelve children. Chester and Anna were married in March 1884, but within a year Anna went from bride to wife to widow and mother. Chester Bernard died five months after the wedding, and Chester William Nimitz was born on February 24, 1885. Grandfather Charles thought the birth coincided with Washington’s Birthday—February 22—but his mother, Anna, would always associate it with Valentine’s Day.

  Young Chester revered his grandfather. With an eager audience at his knee, “Captain Charles” became even more of a teller of tall tales. With a flowing beard that went from blond to white as he aged, and twinkling blue eyes, “Opa” Charles indeed looked the role he had assumed. Later, Anna Nimitz remarried his youngest son, William, making William both young Chester’s uncle and stepfather. But it was Opa Charles and Anna who would always be the dominant forces in his early life.

  Another dominant force was the Texas hill country itself. Chester grew up hunting and fishing on countless camping trips with his grandfather. He mixed it up with the other boys in town, sometimes resorting to fists—probably at his grandfather’s urging—to defend himself. And he spent time on his maternal grandfather’s cattle ranch, where Henry Henke raised beef for his butcher shops. Whether killing rattlesnakes and scaring girls with the rattles or running across the wide-open prairie, Chester was a part of Texas, and Texas was a part of him.

  After William and Anna married, they moved with Chester to nearby Kerrville to manage the St. Charles Hotel. William was not exactly a model of hard work, and Anna ended up doing the lion’s share of running the hotel, besides having two more children. But Chester was clearly her favorite, and she was determined that he grow up without the frailties that had killed his father. Chester in return helped all he could, whether at the hotel before or after school or as a delivery boy for the Henke meat market. Unlike his fragile father or increasingly portly stepfather, Chester grew up strong and lean and seemed utterly determined to remain physically fit.

  At the age of fifteen, Chester entered Tivy High School, so named for nearby Tivy Mountain. That summer of 1900, two shavetail lieutenants fresh from West Point stopped at the St. Charles Hotel. Given all the military posts in West Texas, army officers were nothing new to Chester. Many had been frequent guests there and at his grandfather’s hotel. But Chester was suddenly struck by how close these two soldiers were to his own age. When he compared his world of hotel work and butcher shops to their spit-and-polish ways and worldly sophistication, he found the prospects for his future decidedly lacking. Then and there, he resolved to take the entrance exams for West Point.

  Congressman James L. Slayden was willing to consider Chester, but he offered no encouragement about his prospects. All the congressman’s West Point slots were filled, and given the large number of army posts in his district, the waiting list of career officers wanting their sons to go there was long. Chester’s dread of a lifetime in the hotel or meat market business again loomed large. Then Congressman Slayden offered another option. Given the increase in enrollment following the Spanish-American War, he had an opening at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1901. Would young Nimitz be interested?

  That was only a year away, and Chester would not even be able to finish high school. But taking the plunge, he said yes and embarked on a frenzied year of tutoring, particularly in mathematics. He never graduated from high school, but this preparation allowed him to place first in Slayden’s examinations the following spring. That August, Chester W. Nimitz passed the Naval Academy’s entrance exams, and on September 7, 1901, he was sworn in as a naval cadet. With wavy blond hair, steely blue eyes, and a ruggedly square jaw, he looked every bit the Germanic warrior of his heritage.2

  At Annapolis, Chester Nimitz found the changes that Ernest King had seen occurring as he’d graduated the previous June. Massive Bancroft Hall was under construction as a dormitory, and new granite-and-gray-brick academic buildings were replacing crumbling Civil War–era structures. There were 131 cadets in Nimitz’s incoming class of 1905, and while that was still small by later standards, it was almost double the number in Bill Leahy’s class just eight years before. The naval resurgence inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s foresight and the Spanish-American War was indeed in full swing.

  Nimitz was determined that his lack of a high school diploma would not hamper his advancement, so he continued his West Texas habit of rising early—before reveille—to get in extra study time. His first roommate, Albert Thomas Church of Idaho, was a similarly serious student. Together, they engaged in a friendly competition, but more important, they supported each other’s studying. Nimitz and Church became such an academic duo that classmates insisted they split up after their first year in an effort to tutor lesser achievers. Their subsequent roommates may have regretted the change when Nimitz and Church got them up for their usual pre-reveille studying.3

  By all accounts, Nimitz was a hardworking and even-tempered cadet who got along easily with subordinates, peers, and superiors alike. The Lucky Bag struck at the core of his personality by observing that he “possesses that calm and steady going Dutch way that gets at the bottom of things.” His identifying quote his senior year was from Wordsworth: “A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays and confident tomorrows.”

  Part of his appeal was that Nimitz had inherited his grandfather’s storytelling ability. He passed on some of Grandfather Charles’s tall tales and began to spread a few of his own. Nimitz was on the small side for football, but he played a solid set of tennis and made the varsity rowing crew his third year. He was the eighth man, the stroke. This was the rower closest to the coxswain in the stern and the one charged with setting the crew’s rate and rhythm. Nimitz was well suited to the position, and it earned him a coveted navy “N.” The role of managing tempo was one that he would play many times throughout his career.4

  Nimitz diligently continued his personal regimen of exercise—running and swimming—when he was not playing team sports. And despite not playing football himself, he enjoyed the game and struck up a friendship with the academy’s star promoter of athletics, a cadet one class his senior named Bill Halsey.

  Aside from several bouts of pneumonia, Nimitz, his mother’s wavy-haired golden boy, took good care of himself. His only serious injury occurred on a summer cruise aboard a destroyer. He developed an abscess in one ear. With no doctor on the ship, the captain ordered an oil syringe from the engine room and squirted boric acid into the affected ear. The light antiseptic seemed to work, even if the cleanliness of the delivery vehicle was suspect. Nimitz experienced a slight deafness for the rest of his life, perhaps the result of the abscess, but more likely an effect of the make-do syringe. In any event, Nimitz adopted his usual positive attitude and learned to compensate by becoming an inconspicuous lip-reader.5

  There were two other incidents during his Annapolis years that seem to have left a lasting impression on Chester Nimitz’s professional development. One commanded national attention; the other was a minor episode that nonetheless underscored a valuable element of Nimitz’s leadership style.

  Nationally, there was a continuing public debate over the roles Rear Admiral William T. Sampson and Commodore Winfield Scott Schley had played in the Battle of Santiago. Schley had been aboard the cruiser Brooklyn on the scene and Sampson momentarily away on his flagship, New York, visiting the army. Who, the public debated, deserved to be credited with the victory? (This was one reason why Dewey became the unanimously adored hero of Manila Bay—he had acted alone and without controversy.)

  Hot oil was poured on this issue during Nimitz’s plebe year at the academy when the third volume of Edgar S. Maclay’s History of the United States Navy was published and adopted as an academy textbook. Maclay was scathing in his criticism of Schley for “deliberately turning tail an
d running away” before the Brooklyn subsequently turned and engaged the Spanish fleet. The Brooklyn had indeed made what other observers considered a deft circular maneuver to check the emerging Spanish fleet; certainly there was no question that the ship joined the Oregon in the chase of the Cristóbal Colón.6

  As the partisans of each officer took sides, Schley demanded that the Naval Academy cease using Maclay’s book as a text, which it did. But the damage had been done to what otherwise was largely a growing and glowing postwar reputation of the navy. Instead of merely celebrating three heroes—Dewey, Sampson, and Schley—the navy was put on public display when Schley demanded a court of inquiry to clear his name. Admiral Dewey had the unwelcome task of presiding over forty days and two thousand pages of testimony. The even greater embarrassment came when the court split in its findings and the entire charade seemed destined to continue. Angered that “his” navy was being made a public spectacle, President Theodore Roosevelt finally slammed his fist and ordered all sides to stand down.

  For Nimitz and his classmates, the case provided plenty of fodder for discussion, and there were supporters of both Sampson and Schley. But the lesson Chester Nimitz seems to have taken from this event was that “washing of the Navy’s dirty linen in public” was deplorable and should be avoided at all costs.7 When another war presented other choices of heroes and other courts of inquiry, Nimitz may well have remembered this early lesson.

  The other lesson in leadership he learned came from a much more lighthearted event. Nimitz was well known as a “mixer of famous punches”—usually nonalcoholic—and he had no qualms about joining an occasional beer party—quite forbidden, of course. After his class occupied the newly completed first wing of Bancroft Hall at the start of his senior year, Nimitz and his classmates quickly discovered that its expansive roof offered the perfect, well-concealed beer garden. Procuring such refreshments bordered on child’s play, because seniors were granted a “free gate” to make unsupervised treks into downtown Annapolis to visit tailors preparing their postgraduation uniforms.

  Lots were routinely drawn for the task of going into Annapolis proper with an empty suitcase and returning with a dozen bottles of cold beer. One Saturday afternoon, despite the fact that he was a “three-striper” company commander with the gold stars of academic excellence on his collar, Nimitz drew the assignment.

  He made the trip in uniform—otherwise he would not have been permitted out the gate—and visited his tailor, who was friendly to the cadets’ plight and also provided a clandestine beverage service. On this particular occasion, there was another customer, an older, dark-haired gentleman in civilian clothes, in the store. Nimitz paid him no heed, placed his order, and soon returned to his room in Bancroft Hall, “having re-entered the Gate with no more trouble than I had experienced in leaving.” The beer party that night was “a great success.”

  Nimitz gave no further thought to his errand until the following Monday morning, when he marched into his new chemistry class and found his instructor to be the dark-haired stranger—now in uniform as a lieutenant commander newly assigned to the academy. Nimitz squirmed uneasily for a time and assumed he would be summoned before the officer. The summons never came. Even though Nimitz was certain that the officer recognized him, the officer showed no sign of it. “This escapade taught me a lesson,” Nimitz later recalled, “to look with lenient and tolerant eye on first offenders when in later years they appeared before me as a Commanding Officer holding Mast.”8

  The beer-garden parties atop Bancroft Hall came to an abrupt end when, due to the urgent need for young officers in Theodore Roosevelt’s growing navy, the Annapolis class of 1905 graduated at the end of January instead of in the traditional first week in June. The term “midshipman” had come to replace “cadet” during Nimitz’s tenure, but the navy still required two years of sea duty before awarding the commission of ensign. Thus, Nimitz’s class of 114 graduates—of which he stood seventh—went to their first shipboard assignments as “passed midshipmen.”

  Unlike many of his classmates, Nimitz left behind the assortment of nicknames he had acquired in the course of four years: “Natchew,” “Nonnie,” “Nim-i-tiz,” and, by some accounts, “Natty.” What he didn’t leave behind was a lifelong camaraderie with his own classmates and those several years ahead or behind him. Sixteen midshipmen in Nimitz’s class of 1905 achieved the rank of rear admiral or higher. Other Nimitz contemporaries at Annapolis who would achieve prominence, as well as certain ridicule years later, included Frank Jack Fletcher, John S. McCain, and Raymond A. Spruance.9

  Because of his class standing, Chester Nimitz was accorded a choice assignment on board the new battleship Ohio. Commissioned in San Francisco only the prior October, the Ohio was an example of the United States’ post–Spanish-American War increase in battleship might. The ship displaced almost thirteen thousand tons and carried main armaments of four 12-inch guns, eight 6-inch guns, and two submerged torpedo tubes. With Nimitz aboard, the Ohio departed San Francisco on April 1, 1905, for its assignment as flagship of the Asiatic Squadron. The big battleship’s first cruise took it across the Pacific to Manila, where it was soon charged with a semisecret diplomatic assignment.

  Late in May came the news that the Japanese had dealt the Russians a deathblow at the Battle of Tsushima. Theodore Roosevelt, who had previously held the Japanese in high regard, was suddenly wary of what the island empire’s next move would be. Any nation that could humiliate the Russian bear on both land and sea might well prove capable of challenging U.S. interests in the Philippines or even Hawaii.

  The president dispatched the unlikely duo of his mercurial daughter Alice and Secretary of War William Howard Taft to Tokyo. They sailed first to Manila and then embarked on the Ohio for the journey north to Japan. While Alice provided the fireworks and held the attention of the press, Taft quietly met with Japanese prime minister Taro Katsura. They discreetly agreed to certain limits of Japan’s newfound power vis-à-vis the United States, even as Roosevelt was preparing to act as a neutral mediator between Japan and Russia. Japan, Taft and Katsura agreed, was to have a free hand in Korea—which had been at the heart of the Russo-Japanese War in the first place—but in return, Japan provided Taft with a gentleman’s agreement that it would not menace American interests in the Philippines and Hawaii.10

  Alice Roosevelt was twenty-one at the time, a year older than Nimitz, but it is doubtful that she exchanged so much as a glance with him. She was completely enamored with Congressman Nicholas Longworth, fifteen years her senior and a member of the American delegation. Instead, Nimitz’s brush with fame came in Tokyo when officers of the Ohio attended a garden party at the imperial palace complete with Russian champagne captured at Port Arthur.

  When a table of junior officers saw the victor of Tsushima, Admiral Togo, coming near, it was Nimitz who was pushed forward to invite the admiral to join them. Perhaps with a wry smile, Togo, who spoke fluent English after seven years in England, accepted the invitation and shook hands all around. Nimitz was as impressed by this act of modesty as he was by the admiral’s tactical brilliance at Tsushima. He would remember both.11

  After a year in the Western Pacific, Ohio returned to the United States without Nimitz. He stayed in Manila and was briefly assigned to the cruiser Baltimore, an aging relic of Admiral Dewey’s squadron, while he passed the examinations to receive his commission as an ensign. In January 1907, with commission in hand, Ensign Nimitz was given command of the ninety-two-foot, ex-Spanish gunboat Panay and dispatched to cruise the Sulu Archipelago off Mindanao, mostly to show the American flag. His second-in-command, from the Annapolis class just behind him, was John Sidney “Slew” McCain.

  In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines officially had become U.S. territory, but among its lesser islands, any semblance of American control was fleeting. Still, Nimitz was proud to command the Panay and the tiny naval station of Polloc (now Cotabato) on Mindanao, complete with twenty-two U.S. marines
. In fact, Nimitz delighted in honing his seamanship aboard the tiny gunboat. “I can practice piloting and navigation and so forth as well as on a small ship,” he wrote his grandfather, “and besides it should teach me a certain amount of self-reliance and confidence.”

  That self-reliance and confidence were summoned to the forefront on a sultry day in the summer of 1907 when the Panay docked at the main U.S. naval base in Cavite, outside Manila. Ensign Nimitz dressed in his whites, buckled on his sword, and reported to the base commander, Rear Admiral Uriah Harris. There were wild rumors of war with Japan, and Harris, a rather stiff, by-the-book individual who never cracked a smile on duty, was taking no chances. He ordered Nimitz to take immediate command of the destroyer Decatur and run it to a dry dock in Olongapo, some sixty miles away around the Bataan Peninsula. When Nimitz started to return to the Panay for his gear, Harris stopped him mid-stride and sent him directly to the Decatur with a gruff, “Your clothes will catch up to you.”

  So, in sparkling whites, Ensign Nimitz arrived on the run-down destroyer. Nothing was in order and even the engine telegraphs were hooked in reverse so that the first time Nimitz signaled quarter speed astern and tried to back away from the buoy, the ship lunged forward instead. But Nimitz got the job done and made a mark for himself as a doer. Two weeks later, the Decatur was out of dry dock and ready for sea. Stuffy Admiral Harris must have been pleased, because he kept Nimitz in command.

  Six months later, after weathering the typhoon, the Decatur was hard aground on a mudflat at the entrance to Batangas harbor. Nimitz peered over the side into the dark water and ordered full astern. The destroyer shuddered but gave no sign of moving. Turning the helm slowly to port and then to starboard brought no movement either. Finally, Nimitz ordered all stop and pondered his fate. This was definitely a situation that could easily sink a young officer’s career.