Chester W. Nimitz

His father died six months before he was born, and his mother later married the dead man's brother. The sea came from his grandfather, Charles Henry Nimitz, a German merchant seaman who kept the hotel in Fredericksburg that now houses the National Museum of the Pacific War. What the old man taught him was that the sea, like life, is a stern taskmaster, and that the way to get along with either is to learn all you can, do your best, and stop worrying about what you cannot control. Nimitz wanted West Point. No appointment was open. A Texas congressman had one slot at Annapolis and said it would go to whoever tested best, so Nimitz studied for it, won it, and graduated seventh of 114 in 1905.

He went into submarines when nobody in the fleet wanted them, studied diesel engines at the M.A.N. works in Nuremberg in 1913, and ran the first underway refuelings anyone had attempted, from the tanker Maumee in 1917. He built the submarine base at Pearl Harbor and was its first commanding officer, and set up one of the first Navy ROTC units at Berkeley. Ten days after the Japanese attack, Roosevelt gave him the Pacific Fleet, and he took command on the deck of a submarine because every battleship in the harbor was sunk or wrecked. Broken codes told him Midway was the target and he sent everything he had. Then the Gilberts and Marshalls, the Marianas, the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. On September 2, 1945, he signed the Japanese surrender for the United States.

His first command ran aground. In July 1908 the destroyer Decatur stuck on a mud bank at Batangas because her 23-year-old skipper had not checked the tide tables, and a board of inquiry handed him a letter of reprimand. Years later a diesel engine took most of his left ring finger and would have taken the rest if the machine had not jammed against his Annapolis ring. He fought the whole Pacific war with his wife on the other side of the country — Catherine never joined him in Hawaii or on Guam. And in 1946, for the Nuremberg trial of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Nimitz swore an affidavit defending unrestricted submarine warfare, the practice he himself had used against Japan for four years. It is widely credited with holding Doenitz's sentence to ten years.

A stroke and pneumonia took him down in late 1965. He died at Quarters One on Yerba Buena Island on the evening of February 20, 1966, four days short of 81, and was buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery on what would have been his birthday, beside his wife and three fellow admirals — Spruance, Turner and Lockwood — an arrangement the group made while they were all alive. As Chief of Naval Operations he backed Hyman Rickover's chain-of-command-jumping proposal for a nuclear submarine, which is why the first nuclear carrier carries his name. His daughter Catherine christened her in 1972. USS Nimitz sailed for decommissioning in March 2026 and the Navy reversed itself days later, extending her to 2027.

Chester W. Nimitz's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Underway replenishment invention
  The first at-sea refuelings, run from the tanker Maumee 1917
• Submarine Base Pearl Harbor building
  He supervised the build and served as its first commanding officer 1920
• Naval ROTC unit, University of California, Berkeley company
  One of the first, and he argued the program into expansion 1926
• Central Pacific island-hopping campaign mission
  Adopted over MacArthur's plan to advance through New Guinea and the Philippines 1943
• Operation Starvation mission
  B-29s mining Japanese ports and waterways, cutting the home islands off 1945
• Japanese Instrument of Surrender other
  Signed for the United States aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay 1945

• August 14, 1884 His father dies, six months before he is born
• January 30, 1905 aged 19 Graduates from Annapolis with distinction, seventh of 114
• July 7, 1908 aged 23 Runs the destroyer Decatur aground and is reprimanded He had not checked the tide tables at Batangas. He was 23.
• April 9, 1913 aged 28 Marries Catherine Vance Freeman at Wollaston, Massachusetts
• December 31, 1941 aged 56 Takes command of the Pacific Fleet on the deck of a submarine Every battleship at Pearl Harbor had been sunk or damaged three weeks earlier.
• June 1942 aged 57 Commits his carriers to Midway on the strength of broken codes
• December 19, 1944 aged 59 Takes the oath as fleet admiral, a rank created five days earlier
• September 2, 1945 aged 60 Signs the Japanese surrender for the United States aboard the Missouri
• February 20, 1966 aged 80 Dies at Quarters One on Yerba Buena Island, four days short of 81

• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. rival theater commander
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. gave him the Pacific Fleet
• Hyman G. Rickover 1900–1986
  Architect of the nuclear Navy who transformed submarine propulsion, naval engineering, and military management. backed his nuclear submarine
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. decorated him at the White House
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. argued for Germany first