Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episode: Craig L. Symonds, "Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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. From the precarious early months of the war after December 7th 1941 to the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay nearly four years later, Nimitz transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into th...