How Nimitz Rebuilt the Pacific Fleet After Pearl Harbor — And Turned the War Around

On Christmas morning 1,941, a 56-year-old man in a plain civilian suit stepped off a flying boat into the pouring rain at Pearl Harbor. He carried no admiral’s insignia. He traveled under a false name. Harbor around him was still on fire 18 days after the attack. He had been given 14 words of instruction by the president of the United States.

No strategy, no timeline, no promised reinforcements. Out to Pearl and stay there till the war is won. I This is the story of how Chester Nimits took command of a fleet that by every measure known to naval sentence no longer existed. Answer evening the 7th of December 1,941 in a modest home in Washington D. Nazi that same 56-year-old rear admiral sat in his living room settling into an armchair to listen to the New York Philarmonic.

A conductor that afternoon was Arur Rojinski. The music was the kind of quiet civilized ritual that a man like Chester Nimttz found necessary at the end of a long week. died. He was chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation, an obscure but powerful post responsible for the personnel records of every officer in the fleet. Nine. He knew by name most of the men who would soon be fighting the greatest naval war in history.

The music was interrupted by a bulletin. Japanese aircraft had attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Emitz did not shout. He did not swear. He leapt from his chair. Art picked up the telephone and called his assistant John F. Art Shafroth. Within the hour, the two men were driving through the Washington dusk toward the Navy building.

Imitz walked into his office, went to the safe containing the current war plans, and discovered that the safe had a time lock. It would not open until Monday morning. In the greatest crisis in the history of the United States Navy, its own bureaucracy had locked itself out of its own war plans. He walked next door into the office of the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, and began the first of what would become an unending series of conferences with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Under Secretary James Foresttol, Assistant Secretary Ralph

Bard, and every senior admiral in Washington night. He worked through the night, he worked through the next day. and he worked through the following week on the 16th of December 1,941 9 days after the attack Admiral Chester Witz was working at his desk in the Bureau of Navigation when the summons came.

Ox Secretary Nox wanted to see him. The meeting was brief. Roosevelt had made his choice. Nimttz would take the Pacific Fleet. To do it, he would be promoted two ranks in a single stroke from rear admiral to full four-star admiral, jumping over dozens of more senior officers. The president had passed over Wilson Brown. He had passed over William Pi.

I had passed over the fireeating aviator William F. Oie himself, and he had done it in the face of quiet private doubts from both Harold Stark and the newly ascended Nest King, who did not either of them entirely believe that this soft-spoken Texan was equal to the task. Did not care. He had made up his mind. Nimttz packed a bag.

Christmas morning, 1941. A cold, steady rain fell over the island of Oahu, drumming against the metal roofs of the naval base and blurring the low gray clouds that hung above the harbor. Somewhere above those clouds, the deep uneven drone of four engines began to grow. Was a consolidated PV2Y Coronado, a massive 4engine flying boating slowly through the mist on its final approach to East Lock.

Inside the aircraft, Nimitz sat quietly by the window. His hair, once light blonde, was already turning white at the temples. His gray eyes were calm, almost sleepy, the eyes of a man who preferred bridge games and long walks to speeches. He carried no admiral’s insignia. His name did not appear on the passenger manifest.

He was traveling under a false identity because the security officers in Washington could not guarantee that Japanese sympathizers were not watching every Pacific bound flight. But in 6 days he would take command of what was left of the United States Pacific Fleet. Coronado settled onto the water with a long hissing spray.

Marvin as the propellers wound down an admiral’s barge cut across the oil blackened harbor and drew alongside stepped down without ceremony. Two men waited to greet him. Captain William W. Smith and Captain Harold Sea Train chiefs of staff to the ousted commanders. Their faces were tight with exhaustion. There were no salutes.

There was no crowd. There was only the smell. That smell would stay with every man who came to Pearl Harbor in those first weeks. Aunt paint, charred wood, bunker oil, thick and black, floating in slow rainbow slicks across the water, dying, and beneath it all faint but unmistakable, the sweet, terrible odor of bodies still trapped in the flooded compartments of the sunken battleships.

asked tapping from inside the hulls had stopped only 2 days before he arrived. I took him to headquarters. He set down his bag and then later that same Christmas day the officers offered him a boat tour of the harbor. He accepted. As the small craft moved slowly through the wreckage, Nimmit said almost nothing.

Right? He simply looked to his right. The shattered superructure of the battleship Arizona jutted from the water at a broken angle. her forward magazine still a black wound where more than a thousand of her crew had been vaporized in a single instant. Further along battleship row lay the cap-sized hull of the Oklahoma upside down in the mud is exposed to the sky like the belly of a dead whale.

The West Virginia had settled upright on the bottom only her upper decks above the waterline. of California, VA, Tennessee, Maryland, or Pennsylvania. I every battleship in the harbor on the morning of December 7th had been damaged, sunk, or destroyed. Iron by every doctrine taught at the Naval War College, by every strategic assumption of the previous 40 years, the United States Pacific Fleet no longer existed.

battleship was still in the minds of the world’s senior admirals, the queen of the sea mine and America’s queens were resting in the mud of a Hawaiian harboring. But even during that terrible tour, Nimitz was already seeing what other men had missed. Great fuel oil storage tanks up on the hillside.

More than 4 and a half million barrels of it. Black gold that would power the entire Pacific war effort sat completely untouched. The submarine base was intact. The dry docks were intact. Machine shops, repair yards, power stations, the communications centers, all of it functional. But out on the ocean, three aircraft carriers, the Enterprise, the Lexington, and the Saratoga, had all been at sea on the morning of December 7th.

Every one of them, the Japanese had come to kill the American fleet. But they had killed its yesterday. They had left its tomorrow completely alone. Io. As the boat pulled back to the dock, a young officer asked Nimmitz what he thought of what he had seen. He gave a small, tired answer. It could have happened to anyone. 9 days earlier, on the 16th of December, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had made the call.

Harvey needed a new commander in the Pacific. Not tomorrow, not next week. Immediately, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a 67-year-old former rough rider with a newspaper publishers’s Instinct for public morale, had recommended Nimmits. President agreed. The next day, December 17th, Admiral Husband E.

Kimmel was formally relieved of command of the Pacific Fleet. Disgrace was total. The press had already convicted him. Congressional committees were sharpening their knives. mind. In the American mind, Kimmel was the man who had let Pearl Harbor happen. Was not Roosevelt’s first choice. He had in fact been offered the Pacific Command a full year earlier in early 1,941 and had turned it down.

He did not want to jump over the heads of senior officers, did not want the resentment. He did not want the spotlight. was by every account an who preferred to work quietly nationally out of sight. But there was no time for such preferences now. He left Washington on a 7-day journey, first by train across the frozen American heartland, then by air from San Diego on the Coronado of Patrol Squadron 13y.

He carried a single directive from the president delivered by Nox in tones that admitted no discussion. Martin words, no strategy, no timeline, no resources promised, just when the world Nimmits was inheriting was collapsing in every direction at once. Model On the day he had boarded the train in Washington, the map of the Pacific was already unrecognizable from the one that had existed 3 weeks earlier.

[music] Arm had fallen on the 10th of December. a small American garrison overwhelmed by Japanese landing forces. In a matter of hours, Lake Island, the tiny coral atole defended by a handful of Marines and the 12 Wildcat fighters of Marine Fighting Squadron 211, had held out with astonishing courage before finally surrendering on the 23rd of December.

Its survivors loaded onto prison ships bound for years of brutal captivity. Hong Kong, the great British bastion of the Far East, had lowered its flag on Christmas Day itself the very morning Nimmits had landed in Hawaii. The images of British soldiers marching into Japanese captivity had not yet even reached the American newspapers. Nine.

And there was one more wound, one that had nothing to do with the Japanese. [music] On the 22nd of December, with the Wake Island garrison begging for relief, the acting commander of the Pacific Fleet, Vice Admiral William Pi, had made a fateful call. A relief task force built around the Saratoga was already at sea, only hours from launching aircraft to save the Marines on Wake.

I terrified of losing his last carriers to Japanese bombers, ordered the ships to turn back. Lake fell the next day. The garrison went into captivity. island. And when the men of the Pacific Fleet learned that their own commander had abandoned their brothers on the Atal, something broke inside the organization that could not be easily repaired.

Oral, already devastated, collapsed into something close to despair. Was the fleet Nimitz was inheriting, not just wrecked, to shammed. To the south, the Japanese 25th Army under General Yamashita was slicing down the Malayan Peninsula towards Singapore. moving through jungle that British planners had confidently declared impassible.

And in the Philippines, the worst American nightmare was already unfolding. General Douglas MacArthur, 61 years old, imperious and theatrical, was pulling his combined American and Filipino forces back into the Batan Peninsula. Night. His forward supply dumps had been abandoned in the retreat. Food, ammunition, medicine, all of it left behind or destroyed.

Within weeks, his men would be starving. From his subterranean command post deep inside the Malinta tunnel on the fortress island of Corodor, MacArthur began sending cables. Furious cables. Desperate cables. Cables that thundered up the chain of command and landed on desks in Washington with the weight of political explosives.

He demanded that the Pacific fleet fight its way through the expanding Japanese blockade. He demanded that carriers, cruisers, destroyers, transports full of reinforcements be sent immediately to relieve his trapped garrison. The American public, reading daily headlines about the heroic, doomed defenders of Batan, agreed with him.

Something had to be done. But mathematically, mechanically, physically, no rescue was possible. sailing a slow surface fleet thousands of miles across an ocean now dominated by Japanese carrier aviation and land-based bombers would be a suicide mission even the fully intact pre-war fleet could not have done its nimtts did not have the pre-war fleet nimtts had wreckage of him in Washington another force was gathering hard cold personal force with the name Ernest Joseph King was 63 years old tall gaunt and famously abrasive subordinates said

he was so tough he shaved with a blowtorrch. His enemies said he was arrogant, unforgiving, and drank too much. Modru on the 18th of December by presidential executive order 8,984, King had been named commanderin-chief of the United States Fleet, a newly redefined post carrying supreme operational command over the Atlantic, Pacific, and every American naval force in between.

N he would formally assume the title of Shu on the 30th of December, one day before Nimttz took command in Hawaii. 3 months later, in March 1,942, he would also absorb the title of chief of naval operations, becoming the most powerful naval officer in American history. King wanted offensive action. He wanted it now.

Roosevelt needed a punch back. The country needed a punch back. Doing nothing was politically impossible. And privately, King had never wanted Nimmits for this job. Annie, he had made his doubts clear to Roosevelt. He would spend the next year testing the man he had not chosen. And yet, when Nimttz walked into the reinforced concrete headquarters overlooking the still smoldering harbor, and asked for an inventory, the numbers he was handed were the numbers of a defeated force.

His three aircraft carriers, unarmored, carried perhaps 250 aircraft between them, scattered across an ocean covering 64 million square miles. Lost. If those three flight decks were lost, the war in the Pacific was arguably over before it truly began. The west coast of the United States from San Diego to Seattle would lie open.

Japanese bombers could theoretically strike Los Angeles. Iron Nimits was being ordered in the same breath to hold that ocean, defend Hawaii, protect the sea lanes to Australia, and launch aggressive raids against enemy island fortresses. And he was being asked to gamble with the ships America owned at a table where the enemy held every card.

But the formal change of command ceremony was set the last day of the year. It should have been grand under in chief of the Pacific Fleet by tradition accepted his flag on the Polish teak deck of a great battleship are surrounded by rigid ranks of thousands of sailors in dress whites beneath the towering steel architecture of American naval supremacy are no battleships available.

Every one of them lay in the mud or was being slowly towed back to West Coast shipyards for repairs that would take months or in some cases years. So on the morning of December 31st 1,941, Chester Nimttz walked out onto the warf of the Pearl Harbor submarine base and stepped across a narrow gang plank onto the wet dark gray casing of a diesel electric submarine. Name was USS Graing.

Her whole number was SS 209. The choice was in one sense fitting. Nimttz had begun his career as a submariner. He had helped pioneer American diesel electric submarine technology when the field was still in its infancy. I was in a very literal way coming home. But every officer standing on that warf understood the deeper symbolism and the newsre cameras that recorded the moment captured it with unforgiving clarity.

United States Navy had been driven underwater but was nowhere else to stand. Nimitz read his orders. Finally, he accepted command from Vice Admiral William S. Pi, the caretaker who had cancelled the Wake Island relief mission and who had held the post for two agonizing weeks after Kimmel’s dismissal. My face was a mask. He stepped his sight without a word.

I’m pinned decorations on veterans of the early combat actions. Right. He said a few quiet words, and then he stepped back onto the warf, walked to his headquarters, and prepared to face the men whose careers were now in his hands. That afternoon, the surviving officers of the Pacific Fleet staff began to file into a small conference room.

I knew they were the same men who had served under Kimmel. not to the same men whose intelligence had failed to detect the Japanese strike force of the same operations officers who had left the battleships morowed in neat rows and the same planners who had ordered the aircraft parked wing tip to- wing tip on the airfields where a single strafing run could destroy dozens at once.

They were exhausted. Some had not slept properly in weeks. Their uniforms hung loose. Their eyes were hollow. Every one of them expected the same thing. the axe. By every military culture, in every era, the protocol after a catastrophic failure is absolute. No commander arrives. He conducts a purge. He installs his own loyalists.

Signals to Washington, to the press, the public that a new era of competence has begun. Ernest King expected it. The Roosevelt administration expected it. The American press was howling for it. Congressional committees were already drafting subpoenas. Men in that room fully expected to be fired, reassigned to backwater posts or dragged before courts.

Mosachel some had already written letters of resignation. Some had packed their personal effects. Commander Edwin Leighton the fleet intelligence officer had already privately concluded that his career in intelligence was over. draft tid a request for reassignment to sea duty, hoping to command a destroyer, not to disappear into the fleet, escape the shame of Pearl Harbor by taking his chances against Japanese torpedoes rather than American press.

Captain Charles McMorris, the war plans officer, was equally certain he would be gone by dawn. Nine. They sat down. They waited for the sentence. Imit sat behind a desk. His broad shoulders were still. His gray eyes moved slowly across their faces. He did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice.

He told them quietly that he did not blame them for the morning of December 7th. Anie, he told them that what had happened at Pearl Harbor could have happened to any commander on any morning in any port. He told them he had complete confidence in their abilities. I know, he said that any man in the room who wished a transfer could count on his personal assistance in arranging one.

Auntie hoped, he said, that most of them would choose to stay. I And then he told them to get back to work. The room did not react at first. I The words were too far from what the men had prepared themselves to hear. Slowly the meaning settled. He was keeping them, all of them. race staff, the tainted intelligence officers, the men the newspapers wanted destroyed.

He was defying the unspoken expectation of Washington, the political appetite of the White House and the direct wishes of the most powerful admiral in the United States Navy. Not compassion, it was not sentiment. It was the coldest, most calculated professional gamble of his career. Because Nimitz understood something the political operators in Washington did not.

In the middle of the greatest crisis in the history of the United States Navy, he could not afford to spend 6 months breaking in a new staff. He could not afford to shatter the institutional knowledge, the operational relationships. Hard one experience that even a failed staff still possessed either.

and he could not afford to tell every officer in the American fleet that failure, even honest failure, meant destruction. He needed [music] those men not because they were perfect and because they were what he had. There was another reason too, and it was one only Nimmits could have known. His previous post had been chief of the Bureau of Navigation.

The bureau that kept the personnel records of every officer in the Navy model. He had read their files. He knew their careers. He knew which men were strong and which were weak, which had promise and which did not. Iron and he had already decided before he ever set foot on the grailing that this staff was worth keeping.

Ida, if they failed a second time, his own career would end in disgrace by theirs. He had chained his professional survival to men the entire country had already condemned. Nine, and he had done it in his first hours in command before firing a single shot. Gamble was placed. The chips were down. Now he had to build a war out of mud, out of wreckage, and out of three unarmored flight decks scattered across the largest ocean on Earth.

Harbor outside his window was still burning. Somewhere beneath the black oil, divers were still bringing bodies to the surface. Washington King was already drafting his next demand for offensive action. Manila, [music] MacArthur was already drafting his next cable for rescue. In Tokyo, the admirals of the Imperial Japanese Navy were already planning their next strike.

On the last night of 1,941, Chester William Nimmitz sat alone in the headquarters of a fleet that by every measure known to naval science no longer existed, but he had 6 months to prove it did. The war Nimitz was about to fight would not be won on any battleship. It would be won or lost in a windowless basement 14 ft beneath the earth.

Arsment lay directly under the administration building at the 14th naval district headquarters, only a short walk from Nimmits’s own office. Its door was heavy steel. Its ventilation was terrible. The air inside was hot, stale, and thick, with cigarette smoke that never quite dispersed.

On the walls hung enormous charts of the central and western Pacific, marked and remarked in colored pencil by men who had not slept a full night in weeks. Nights was station Hypo, one of the three American naval cryptologic units in the Pacific. Army and the man in charge of it was one of the most eccentric officers in the United States Navy.

Lieutenant Commander Joseph J. Roshvfort was 41 years old, thin, pale, and often unshaven. wore a red smoking jacket over his uniform. On his feet, he wore carpet slippers. His hair was unccombed. He worked 80 and 90 hours a week, ate almost nothing, and sustained himself on black coffee and pure force of will. To the traditional battleship admirals of the pre-war Navy, Rofort looked like a lunatic, he was something else.

He was leverage marble because Roshfort and his team of roughly 130 analysts, linguists, and radio men were quietly doing the impossible. They were reading Japanese naval codes. Not perfectly, completely, but well enough that Rosh could hand Nimtt’s reports on Japanese fleet movements, ship dispositions, even the personal habits of enemy admirals.

Not the chief intelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet, the man who now had to package these reports and present them directly to Nimttz was Lieutenant Commander Edwin T. Leighton. Leighton was 38 years old, a fluent Japanese speaker who had personally met many of the enemy admirals he was now hunting. Mining. He had lived in Japan as an assistant naval Atachi before the war.

I had played cards with this Heroku Yamamoto himself. He knew the mind of the enemy in a way almost no other American officer did. But Leighton had also been part of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. Ivy been part of the staff that missed the signs. A political frenzy sweeping Washington. He was tainted goods.

Ernest King up in his cavernous office in the Navy Department made it quietly clear that men like Leighton should be swept out with the rest of the disgraced Kimmel staff. Nitz did the opposite. The two men met in Nimitz’s office. Nton, still expecting to be relieved, opened the conversation by requesting sea duty.

He wanted to command a destroyer. He wanted to leave intelligence work behind. He in effect offering to punish himself before Nimitz could. Nitz refused. He looked at the younger man across the desk and delivered a single instruction that would define the next four years of the Pacific War.

I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Nagumo might have them. Are to see the war, operations, aims from the Japanese viewpoint. Father, if you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war. Would later write that he was not at first entirely sure Nimitz was right.

Not sure any American could truly think like Chuichi Nagumo. Not he accepted. From that day forward until the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay in September 1,945. Alv, Edwin Leighton would be the only officer on Nimitz’s staff other than the flag secretary. Withstanding permission to enter the admiral’s office at any hour of the day or night.

Not the operations officer, not the war plans officer, not the intelligence officer. Nimmits pulled him into his innermost circle. He instructed Leighton to bring him raw signals intelligence without softening it, without editing it for political palatability, and without waiting for Washington’s approval. And then he did something even more radical.

He extended his personal command protection over Roshfort and every man in that basement. He made it known quietly but unmistakably that any attempt from Washington to reassign, discipline, or interfere with station hypo would go through him first. Notice this mad because a bureaucratic knife fight was already underway. In Washington, the Naval Cryptologic Organization known as OP20G, jealous of the Hawaiian station’s autonomy, had begun to argue that Hypo’s reports were unreliable, that Roshfort was insubordinate. Ider that the entire

operation ought to be brought under tighter central controls, without picking a public fight, made it clear that this would not happen on his watch. It was a staggering bet. If the codereakers were wrong even once about a major Japanese movement, if a decrypted intercept led Nimitz to send his carriers into an ambush, the political fallout would be catastrophic.

His career would end, the war in the Pacific might end with it. And yet Nimitz understood something the gun club admirals could not accept. outgunned, operating almost blind across the largest ocean on Earth. The Pacific fleet could no longer afford to rely on the gut instincts of senior commanders. Punctuation was a luxury for a navy with reserves. Nimitz had no reserves.

I had intelligence and he was going to trust it all the way to the end. While Nimitz was gambling his career on code breakers in a basement, another gamble was already underway in the black oil soaked water outside his window. On he had chosen to run the salvage of Pearl Harbor was Captain Homer Norman Wallen. Wen was 48 years old.

A career naval constructor blunt lost it. Utterly practical gave him an order that most engineers of the era would have called impossible. I’ll clear the harbor, refloat the sunken battleships, do whatever you have to do though, and do it without bothering me for permission. That single delegation, that willingness to hand a massive industrial problem to a technical expert and then get out of his way would define Nimitz’s entire command style for the rest of the war.

Marlin walked the wreckage line and made his lists. Our Arizona was gone. There was no bringing her back. Her forward magazines had exploded with such force that the ship had literally been broken apart from the inside. Marvin more than 1100 of her crew were still intombed in the twisted steel below the waterline and they would remain there forever.

Oklahoma was capsized upside down in the mud, her keel exposed to the sky. Ider even attempting to write her would take months of engineering work and specialized equipment that did not yet exist in Hawaii. It an old training ship was also lost, but the rest Wallen decided could be saved. All of them. The Pearl Harbor Navy Yard swelled almost overnight into one of the most intense industrial sites on the planet.

Niger, civilian workers arrived by the thousands, and eventually more than 20,000 men would be working around the clock in shifts that never stopped. They lived in hastily built barracks. They ate in mesh halls that ran 24 hours a day. ward. They worked in the tropical heat, in the tropical rain, and in the wreaking darkness of ships that were half flooded, half burned, and half buried in mud.

Navy divers who descended into the sunken hulls faced conditions that no training school had ever prepared them for. Inside the flooded compartments of the capsized Oklahoma and later inside the drowned interiors of the California and the West Virginia, the divers worked in absolute pitch blackness. No visibility at all. The oil in the water was so thick that a flashlight beam died within inches of the lens.

They navigated entirely by touch, iron, feeling their way along overturned bulkheads through inverted passageways, hot objects they could not see and did not want to identify. They found bodies, sometimes still in their bunks, sometimes tangled in the wreckage, sometimes floating quietly in air pockets that had not yet been breached. They cut them free.

They brought them up. They went back down of the water. The engineering effort was equally brutal. [music] Massive underwater cutting torches burned through steel plates. Gigantic wooden coffer, some of them 30 ft high, were built around torpedo holes to seal them. High-capacity pumps ran continuously, sucking millions of gallons of sea water out of flooded compartments while divers below patched holes in real time.

The physics were merciless. Break the suction of the mud too quickly and the ship could roll. pumped too slowly and a leak could reopen. Every operation was a slow agonizing mechanical negotiation between engineering and disaster. Walked the yards regularly. He did not micromanage lecture.

He simply appeared spoke quietly with the men covered in grease and chemical burns. them by name when he could and left. Their workers understood without being told that the admiral was watching to catch mistakes, to bear witness. And then just 11 days after Nimitz took command, the war reached and hit him again.

The morning of January 11th, 1,942, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga was steaming approximately 500 m southwest of the Hawaiian Islands. I know she was one of the three flight decks that represented the entire striking power of the United States Pacific Fleet. She was escorting reinforcements bound for Samoa, one of the last isolated American outposts still holding out in the southern Pacific.

Her captain, Archable Douglas, was on the bridge. Se was calm. Somewhere below, a Japanese fleet submarine I6 moving quietly at periscope depth. Our commander lined up the site. He fired a spread of torpedoes. Just after 6:00 in the evening, a violent explosion ripped into the Saratoga’s port side, tearing a hole roughly 30 ft long and letting the ocean pour into three of her fire rooms.

Six sailors were killed instantly. Hundreds of tons of seaater surged into the hull. The great carrier listed hard, then slowly, painfully writed herself as her damage control parties fought to seal the flooding. not sink, but she was finished, at least for now. Mind the damage was too severe for the makeshift facilities at Pearl Harbor.

Would have to be limped back across the ocean to the Puet Sound Navy Yard in Washington State for full repairs. For 5 months at his desk in Pearl Harbor, Nimitz received the message and read it in silence. Single evening he had just lost onethird of his aircraft carriers. Not to a great fleet battle, not to a heroic engagement, not to a single torpedo from a single Japanese submarine in the middle of a routine escort mission.

Now had two operational carriers in the entire central Pacific enterprise, the Lexington, that was America. He did not communicate the panic he must have felt to his staff night. He simply issued new orders adjusting the disposition of his remaining forces and returned to work. But the men who saw him that night noticed something or walked more slowly.

He drank more coffee than usual. Nine. According to those who worked closest to him, he took to walking the peers alone at night that January. Nine. He would later say to a close friend in a rare unguarded moment, the January of,942 was the worst month of his life. Month. And yet in that same terrible month, the impossible was already beginning to happen out in the harbor.

The dead were rising. The battleship USS Nevada had been the only capital ship to get underway during the attack on December 7th. Her crew, with battle damage already spreading through the ship, had attempted to escape the harbor. But as she moved down the channel, another wave of Japanese bombers had targeted her, hoping to sink her in the narrow entrance and bottle up the entire fleet.

Oh, to prevent this, her officers had made a terrible decision. her. They deliberately ran her a ground at hospital point on the eastern side of the channel so that if she sank she would not block the harbor. She had settled there are first into the mud are to wash her superructure blackened by fire.

Asked Japanese intelligence examining aerial reconnaissance photographs in Tokyo had marked her as a permanent loss. written off dead. The California had settled upright into the silt of her mooring, sinking so slowly and evenly that she had almost seemed to lie down to sleep. Arial photographs showed her main deck submerged, only her superructure and gun turrets above water.

She too was classified in Tokyo as unreoverable. They were wrong. Under Wallen’s relentless directction, the salvage teams went to work. Divers spent months patching the Nevada’s torpedo damage. Massive pumps worked continuously to expel the water flooding her compartments. Fedams were built. Sections of hull were cut away and replaced.

On the 12th of February, 1,942 just 7 weeks after Nimmits took command, the Nevada rose from the mud, floated, not gracefully, not proudly, but she floated. night she was towed slowly dry dock too at Pearl Harbor where the deeper repairs began in April she began the long voyage under her own power to the Puet Sound Navy Yard for a complete modernization California took longer she had settled deeper compartments were more thoroughly flooded but she too was refloated on the 25th of March 1,942 and eventually returned to the west coast so did the West Virginia so did

others Ship after ship after ship marked in Japanese records as permanent kills was quietly resurrected out of the Hawaiian mud. But these battleships would not return to the war in time to matter in,942. But some would not return until 1,944, but they would return fine. And when they came back, what be the old slow obsolete queens of the pre-war fleet or would be modernized, refitted with the newest radars, the newest anti-aircraft guns, the newest fire control systems.

In effect, the Japanese had accidentally forced the American battleship force to skip an entire generation of upgrades. The Nevada, resurrected from the mud of Pearl Harbor, would eventually shell the beaches of Normandy on the morning of June 6th, 1,944, more than 2 years later. Archie would then be transferred back to the Pacific and shelled Japanese positions at Ewima and Okinawa.

The dead were rising, and they were coming back angrier. But even as the salvage triumphs mounted, another crisis was quietly poisoning Nimits’s ability to fight. The submarine force, his own former specialty, his most important remaining offensive weapon, was broken. In the first weeks of the war, Nimitz had inherited a doctrine that had been radically changed within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Before December 7th, American submarine commanders had been trained as scouts. Their job was to observe, report, and support the main battleship fleet. Now, with the battleships gone, that doctrine was dead. On December 7th itself, the United States government had officially authorized unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan.

It was a radical decision throwing out decades of international naval treaties in a single afternoon. American submarines were now to hunt Japanese shipping wherever they found it. Our ships, tankers, freighters, gunports, anything flying the flag of the enemy. Strategy was clear and cold. Japan was an island nation with almost no domestic resources.

A war machine ran on oil from the Dutch East Indies, rubber from Malaya, iron ore from Manuria, and food from her conquered territories. All of it moved by sea in slow unarmored merchant ships. Took those supply lines, and the Japanese Empire would starve. I The submarines were the scalpel meant to do the cutting. There was only one problem. Their weapons did not work.

Standard American submarine torpedo was the Mark1 14, a weapon developed in the utmost secrecy during the peacetime years by the Bureau of Ordinance in Washington. It was fitted with the highly classified Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder designed to sense the magnetic field of a steelhold ship passing overhead and detonate underneath the target, breaking the keel and sinking the ship instantly.

Theory, it was a revolutionary weapon. In practice, it was a disaster. Marine captains returning to Pearl Harbor after their war patrols began reporting the same story over and over with increasing fury. I had maneuvered into perfect firing positions, launched torpedoes at close range at slowmoving Japanese tankers.

They had watched through their periscopes as their weapons ran too deep and passed harmlessly under the keels of their targets. I exploded prematurely in the open ocean hundreds of yards from the ship. Or when a torpedo did strike the whole dead center at a perfect 90° angle, produced nothing but a dull thud and a splash of foam as the firing pin crushed itself against the enemy plating without detonating the warhead.

Night after ship, patrol after patrol, torpedo after torpedo, failure after failure. The men in the submarines were risking everything. They were diving into shallow enemy waters, evading Japanese destroyers, holding their breath while depth charges shook their hulls apart. A and their own weapons were betraying them.

The Bureau of Ordinance in Washington refused to admit that anything was wrong. Miro was one of the most politically powerful and defensively insulated organizations in the entire United States Navy. Its senior officers had spent decades designing the Mark1 14 torpedo and the Mark 6 exploder. To admit that their weapons were defective was to admit that decades of institutional work had been wasted.

So they blamed the men firing the torpedoes. Poor marksmanship. They said our angles of attack, cowardice, some of them privately suggested. However, a generation of submarine officers was being professionally slandered for weapons failures that were not their fault. Was now fighting a two-front war. One against the Japanese Navy across the vast open ocean and another against the bureaucratic inertia of his own weapons establishment 4,000 mi away in Washington.

Into this crisis stepped a man who would become one of Nimitz’s most important and least famous partners. Rear Admiral Charles A. Lockwood was 51 years old, a career submariner, blunt and unafraid. In the spring of 1,942, he took command of the submarine force in the southwest Pacific based in Fremantle, Australia.

Later, he would take command of all Pacific submarines. And when Lockwood arrived, he made a decision. If Washington would not test the torpedoes, he would organized a series of quiet, unauthorized live fire tests. American submarines fired torpedoes at underwater nets in the calm waters of Australia. I fired them at cliffs. The results were undeniable.

Ano, the torpedoes were running an average of 10 to 11 ft deeper than their depth settings called for. Magnetic exploders were detonating erratically. The contact exploders were crushing themselves on impact. Evidence was gathered. The reports were sent. Washington still would not admit anything.

The It would take more than a year of struggle. More than a year of American submariners dying with defective weapons in their tubes before the Bureau of Ordinance finally admitted the truth. The process had begun, and Nimmits, quietly, without confrontation, without public feuds, had shielded Lockwood every step of the way. Every single Japanese transport, every tanker, every freighter that American submarines managed to sink, even with broken weapons and was buying the United States something it desperately needed.

Time, but time was exactly what Ernest King up in Washington refused to grant. King wanted action. Roosevelt wanted action. The country wanted action. And doing nothing was politically impossible. And so on the last day of January 1,942 authorized the first great gamble of his command of the he ordered his two most aggressive carrier admirals to strike back. Vice Admiral William F.

Halzy 59 years old was the personification of the old fighting sailor. profane dog jaw, endlessly aggressive, but he commanded task force 8 built around the Enterprise. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, 56, commanded Task Force 17, built around the Yorktown, which had just arrived from the Atlantic. Orders were simple.

Sail deep into hostile waters. Marshall, the Japanese held Marshall and Gilbert Islands. Sink whatever you can find. Bomb whatever you can hit. Iron, get out before the enemy can concentrate against you. Iron. Morning of the 1st of February, 1,942. Less than 2 months after the Pearl Harbor disaster, American carrier aircraft launched their first offensive strikes of the Pacific War.

Ali’s Enterprise pilots hit Quadalin, Wii, and Maloap in the Marshalss. As Yorktown pilots struck Mackin, Millie, and Jallowit in the Gilberts. Physical damage was small. A few Japanese patrol aircraft destroyed on the ground. A few auxiliary ships sunk, a few coral air strips cratered. Iron compared to what the Japanese had done at Pearl Harbor.

The raids were mosquito bites on a giant. Operationally, the raids were a laboratory. They tested for the first time in combat the complicated ballet of modern carrier warfare. Ask forces refueling destroyers from oil tankers on the open sea while under threat of submarine attack. Primitive radar systems being pushed to their limits.

Lighter combat air patrols being coordinated over vast distances. Homage control crews learning to fight fires on decks loaded with aviation fuel and live ordinance. Air groups learning to strike and run before the enemy could concentrate. Every officer, every pilot, every sailor came home wiser than they had left.

And a new breed of naval officer, an aviation-minded generation Nimmits would ride to victory was quietly being forged in the sky above tiny coral atoles no American had ever heard of before. When Holly brought the Enterprise back into Pearl Harbor, he was greeted by cheering sailors lining the rails of every ship in the harbor.

The country needed a hero. Ay, unshaven, hosted, not grinning, gave it one knew the truth. The raids had barely registered in Tokyo. To truly disrupt the Japanese timetable to force the enemy to react rather than plan, America needed something bigger. That defied basic military logic, something the Japanese would find not just annoying, but personally, culturally, spiritually intolerable.

Idea came from the top. Roosevelt wanted the Japanese home islands bombed. He wanted it done quickly. He did not care how. In early 1,942, no American aircraft in the Pacific had the range to reach Tokyo from any friendly base. Every logical planner declared the mission impossible. N a joint army navy team came up with an answer that bordered on the insane.

Put land-based twin engine army bombers on the deck of an aircraft carrier. launch them from the sea, have them bomb Tokyo, and then have them fly onward and crash land in unoccupied China. Army officer who volunteered to lead the mission was Lieutenant Colonel James H. O little. He was 45 years old, a legendary pre-war stunt pilot in aeronautical engineering and one of the most technically brilliant aviators in the United States.

He was in essence exactly the kind of man crazy enough to attempt something like this and disciplined enough to make it work. Early April, the newly commissioned aircraft carrier USS Hornet sailed out of San Francisco with 16 large B-25 Mitchell bombers lashed to her wooden flight deck. Each bomber carried a full load of four 500lb bombs and they were so big their wings hung over the edges of the ship.

They could not be struck below into the hangar. They sat fully exposed to the corrosive salt air. Their sheer footprint meant that the Hornet’s own defensive fighter squadrons were trapped below, unable to reach the flight deck at all. Middle of the vast Pacific, the newest American carrier was effectively defenseless.

Aussie’s Enterprise sailed north from Pearl Harbor to meet the Hornet, providing the only combat air cover for the entire task force. Not as they steamed west, radio silence was absolute. If the Japanese detected them, the mission would end in catastrophe. Two carriers, out of only three surviving in the entire Pacific Fleet, could be lost in a single afternoon.

The war would be over before midway. [music] Nimmits in Pearl Harbor waited. Marvin. On the morning of April 18th, 1,942, the operation nearly collapsed. Approximately 650 nautical miles off the coast of Japan. Still well outside the planned launch point. An American lookout on the cruiser USS Nashville spotted a small Japanese vessel on the horizon.

>> [music] >> She was the Nitto Maru, a converted fishing boat now serving as a picket, part of a long chain of small craft the Japanese had strung out across the ocean to give early warning of exactly this kind of attack. Nashville opened fire immediately. It took her more than 900 rounds to sink the tiny boat, but it was too late.

Before she went under, the Nitto Maru had gotten a radio message off. Oko now knew an American task force was inside her outer perimeter. Aussie had to make a split-second decision. Turn back and abort the mission, wasting weeks of preparation and the lives of the men on the picket boats they had already destroyed. Launch the the bombers immediately roughly 200 nautical miles further from Japan than the original plan and hope the aviators could stretch their fuel far enough to reach China. Night he chose to launch.

The flag went up on the Hornet. On the pitching storm lashed deck in gale force winds and 30foot swells, the 16 heavily loaded bombers began to move. Pilots had never taken off from a ship before. Not one of them. They had trained on painted lines on a Florida runway, imagining what it might feel like.

Now they were doing it for real in a howling storm off the deck of a violently moving carrier with the enemy waiting somewhere over the horizon. Or little went first. His bomber lumbered down the deck, engines howling and barely cleared the bow before pulling up into the gray overcast sky. One by one the rest followed.

Every plane got off. Every plane made it to Japan. They dropped their bombs on Tokyo. Osuka, Nagoya, and Kobe. The physical damage was minor. Some factories hit. Fires started. Fewer than 100 Japanese civilians killed. All strategic target destroyed. 15 of the 16 bombers out of fuel crashed in China. 16th landed in the Soviet Union where its crew was interned.

Most of the flyers survived. Some through incredible orals in Japanese occupied Chinese countryside. Three were executed by the Japanese. Others died in captivity. By any material accounting, the do little raid was a pin prick. By any other accounting, it changed the war. Because in Tokyo, the psychological impact was catastrophic.

The Imperial Japanese Navy had promised the emperor that the sacred home islands could never be attacked. That promise had just been publicly, spectacularly, and personally broken. Either the emperor’s own palace had been placed within theoretical range of American bombs, a military defeat. It was a cultural and spiritual humiliation all and it gave Admiral Auroku Yamamoto, 58 years old, commanderin-chief of the combined fleet, exactly the political weapon he had been waiting for months.

Yamamoto had been arguing with the conservative faction of the naval general staff in Tokyo. or leader, Admiral Osami Nageno, favored a slow consolidation of Japan’s newly conquered territories. Disagreed. He wanted to draw the American aircraft carriers, the same carriers that had just launched Doolittle, into one decisive apocalyptic battle, want to annihilate them.

Neano had blocked him. The Doolittle raid shattered that resistance. Yamamoto threatened to resign unless he was given full authority to strike. Marvel general’s staff, embarrassed, horrified, and politically paralyzed, gave in. Amato’s target was a tiny coral atal roughly a thousand miles northwest of Hawaii, the last American sentry post before the islands themselves.

Its name was Midway. He would draw Nimmits into a trap using an outpost so vital that the American admiral would have no choice but to commit every carrier he had left to its defense. But Yamamoto did not know one thing. Down in that basement in Pearl Harbor, the codereers were already reading his mail. In the first week of May 1,942, the men in that basement handed Chester Nimmits a piece of paper that would decide the fate of the Pacific War.

It was a decrypted fragment of Japanese naval radio traffic. Oshfort’s analysts had been piecing it together for days, matching call signs, cross-referencing ship names, watching the volume of transmissions grow and shift the way the tides shift before a storm. What emerged from the scraps was clear.

[music] A major Japanese amphibious force was moving south. Their objective was Port Moresby on the southern coast of the great island of New Guinea. If Port Morsby fell, the Japanese would have an air base within striking range of the northern coast of Australia, but the supply lines from the United States to the Australian continent would be severed.

An entire nation of Allied strength would be isolated. The Southern Pacific would belong to the Empire of Japan. Sat in his office in Pearl Harbor and looked at the Intercept, looked at his charts. He looked at the tiny handful of ships he had available to intercept an enemy force that included two large fleet carriers, not Shoku and the Zukaku, light carrier Sho, US cruisers, destroyers, I and the amphibious transports themselves, not two carriers he could send, the Lexington and the Yorktown, but two flight decks, roughly 140 aircraft, Amy against an enemy that

outnumbered him in every category. And the only thing telling him this was a real Japanese operation and not an elaborate deception designed to lure his last carriers to their destruction was the word of a chain smoking codebreaker in a basement wearing carpet slippers. Although every traditional voice in the pre-war Navy would have said no, Signals intelligence was a supporting tool, not a foundation for betting the fleet.

To risk two of the four remaining fleet carriers in the entire United States Navy on decrypted radio traffic was a gamble so extreme it bordered on professional insanity. Gave the order, send them south. Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher aboard the Yorktown took tactical command. Rear Admiral Aubry Fitch aboard the Lexington would command the air operations.

And what unfolded over the next 5 days in the humid cloud shrouded waters of the Coral Sea between Australia and the Solomon Islands would change naval warfare forever. On the 7th of May, American search planes found the light carrier. Strike went in fast and hard. 93 aircraft from the Lexington and the Yorktown poured over her, dropping bombs and torpedoes in a coordinated attack that lasted less than 15 minutes.

Shaho, hit by an estimated 13 bombs and seven torpedoes, blew apart and sank in a matter of moments. She was the first Japanese aircraft carrier ever sank by American forces. As she went down, the lead American dive bomber pilot, Lieutenant Commander Robert Dixon, radioed a message back to the Lexington that would be repeated in American newspapers for the rest of the war.

Squan Flattop, three words, nothing more. But for a country that had spent 5 months reading nothing but news of retreat, defeat, and disaster, those three words were the first taste of what victory sounded like. But the battle was not over. It had barely begun. On the 8th of May, the two main forces finally found each other. And what happened next was something that had never happened in the history of naval warfare.

The Japanese fleet and the American fleet, separated by more than 150 mi of ocean, never once saw each other with the naked eye. Not a single sailor on either side, ever laid eyes on an enemy ship. The entire battle was fought by aircraft launched from carriers that remained beyond the horizon, hunting each other through dense cloud banks and blinding rain squalls. I know.

It was the first fleet action in history in in which the opposing surface ships never fired a single shot at each other. Old rules of naval combat, the rules that had governed sea battles from Salamis to Trafalga to Jutland. The rules that said ships fought ships in visible range were being rewritten in real time in the sky above the Coral Sea.

Improvised intelligencercentric doctrine. The doctrine forced upon him by the destruction of his battleships was being tested in combat for the first time. The results were brutal. American dive bombers and torpedo planes found the shocku and hit her hard. Bombs slammed into her flight deck, tearing it open, setting fires that raged through her hanger.

She survived, but she was finished as a fighting ship, at least for the immediate future. She turned north and limped away, heading for repairs in Japan. Isaac escaped physical damage. She was hidden by a rain squall at the critical moment. But her air group and the air group of the Shokaku had been slaughtered. Highly trained Japanese carrier pilots, the elite of the Imperial Naval Air Service, men who had been training for years.

Men who represented the accumulated experience of a decade of aviation development were being killed in the sky above the Coral Sea. Aircraft could be replaced in months. Pilots could not. Not those pilots. The cost of the Americans was terrible. Japanese aircraft found the Lexington first. Two torpedoes struck her port side almost simultaneously.

Bombs crated her flight deck. Fires broke out below. Her damage control parties fought them. Seemed to be winning. Seemed to be saving the ship. But she was still steaming under her own power. She was still launching aircraft. Her captain believed she could be saved. Then at approximately 12:47 in the afternoon, deep in the guts of the ship, aviation fuel vapors from a cracked line ignited.

The internal explosion tore the Lexington open from within. Fires spread out of control. Ammunition began to cook off. Men in the engineering spaces were driven back by walls of flame and choking smoke. By evening, it was clear the ship could not be saved. Her captain, Frederick Sherman, gave the order to abandon ship.

More than 2,000 of her crew were transferred to nearby destroyers. I then, in a final act of naval mercy, the destroyer USS Phelps was ordered to put her out of her misery. Five torpedoes went into the Burning Hulk. The Lexington rolled and sank into the depths of the Coral Sea. Otown, hit by a single bomb that penetrated three decks and killed 66 men, staggered north through the darkness, damaged, burning, but still afloat.

Lost by the strict accounting of tonnage sunk, the battle of the Coral Sea was a Japanese victory. They had lost one small carrier. They had sunk one large American carrier and heavily damaged a second. In Tokyo, the newspapers celebrated another triumph. But something else had happened. something that had never happened before in the war.

The Japanese invasion force that had been steaming toward Port Moresby, the entire reason for the battle turned around. Either it abandoned its objective. It sailed back north to Rabbal without a single soldier setting foot on New Guiney’s southern coast. For the first time since December 7th, a major Japanese offensive had been stopped.

Had lost the Lexington. He had traded her for something more valuable than any ship. He had proven that the system he had built, the codereers in the basement, the aviation-minded admirals commanding the carriers, the pilots learning to fight in three dimensions, all improvised architecture of the new American way of war actually worked.

Carrier warfare guided by signals intelligence could stop the Imperial Japanese Navy. But he had done something else and it would not be visible for another month. Shukaku, hit by three bombs, was too damaged to fight again for months. She would not be at midway. The Zuiaku had escaped without a scratch.

I But her air group had been so decimated in the Coral Sea that she could not be brought up to combat strength in time. She too would not be at Midway. Two of the six Japanese fleet carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor were now removed from the board. Not sunk, but absent. Absent from the greatest naval battle in a generation which was already being planned by Yamamoto in the wardrooms of the battleship Yamato.

Did not yet know it. Yamamoto did not yet know it. But the accounting of the Coral Sea, which looked like a defeat on the day it ended, was in fact quietly rearranging the arithmetic of Midway. Not two flight decks that Yamamoto was counting on would not be there. island. And in a battle that would ultimately be decided by narrow margins measured in minutes and in miles, two absent carriers would prove to be the difference between the survival and the destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

That was the last week of May, 1,942. Chester Nimitz had been in command of the Pacific Fleet for exactly 5 months. He had begun with three carriers. He had lost the Saratoga to a submarine in January. Lost the Lexington in the Coral Sea in May. Last his two remaining operational carriers, the Enterprise and the Hornet, were racing back to Pearl Harbor to prepare for the trap already being sprung at Midway.

Oktown, torn open on fire, taking on water, was limping across the Pacific behind them. Harveyard estimated her repairs would take 3 months. Emitz gave them 72 hours. 1,400 workers working three continuous shifts would perform in three days repairs that peacetime engineering had said were impossible in three months. Olders worked in flooded compartments in scuba gear.

Fitters slept on the deck between shifts. Electricians laid new cables while other men were still torching out the old ones. Walked the ship personally, saying almost nothing, watching everything. Yorktown would sail for Midway on the 30th of May. Her welds still hot, her decks still wet with paint, her damage control team still on board, making repairs as she steamed into battle.

That story belongs to Midway, and Midway is another film. What matters here is what had happened in those first five months. What matters here is the truth about Pearl Harbor. Because at the end of everything, the deepest irony of the Pacific War, the irony that historians have argued about for 80 years comes down to a single strategic fact.

The Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor to destroy the United States Pacific Fleet. And in a purely tactical sense, they succeeded. They sank or damaged eight battleships. I know they killed 2,43 Americans. They shattered the naval force that had stood watch over the central Pacific for a generation. But the fleet they destroyed was already the wrong fleet.

For more than two decades before the war, the United States Navy had been dominated by an entrenched faction of senior admirals known as the gun club. These men, veterans of the great steel and cordite era of naval combat, believed with religious conviction that the battleship was still the queen of the sea.

Aircraft carriers were auxiliaries. Submarines were scouts. Cold breaking was a parlor trick. Nichi, the future of naval warfare, they believed, still belonged to fleets of great armored ships firing enormous shells at each other across visible distances of ocean. They were wrong, but their control of navy budgets, promotions, and doctrine was almost total.

Decades of peaceime debate had failed to break their grip. battleship remained supreme in the minds of the men who ran the navy until the morning of December 7th 1,941. In a single Sunday morning of fire and torpedoes and twisted steel, the Imperial Japanese Navy did something that 30 years of internal reformers had failed to do. They removed the battleship from the equation.

They settled the American dreadnaugh fleet into the Hawaiian mud and they left Chester Nimmits with no choice at all, not fight a traditional gunline action. He did not have the ships. And even if he had wanted to fight the old kind of war, the old kind of war was no longer available to him. They he had to build something new. He had to trust codereakers and carrier admirals and someriners.

Hard to run his fleet on decrypted radio traffic and calculated risk. Had to abandon the doctrine of a generation not out of vision but out of desperate necessity. The transformation that would normally have required decades of bureaucratic struggle was accomplished in 5 months by the raw pressure of survival. The Japanese Empire had attacked the United States Pacific Fleet.

The what they had actually done was destroy its obsolete version. What they had actually done was force the American Navy to modernize overnight ahead of Shajol on a war footing into exactly the kind of fast mobile aviation center intelligenced-driven force that would eventually cross the Pacific and burn the Japanese Empire to the ground.

Final. And in their haste to kill the American fleet, the Japanese had also left behind the tools with which it would be rebuilt. or dry dock, every machine shop, every submarine pen light and 4 and a half million barrels of fuel oil sitting in unarmored tanks on a Hawaiian hillside that a single follow-up attack could have set on fire.

But fuel powered every American ship that sailed from Pearl Harbor for the next four years. It was the single greatest strategic error of the Japanese war plan. I knew and it was made by men who thought battleships were what mattered. Every one of those six Japanese carriers that has struck Pearl Harbor, the Akagi, the Kaga, the Soryu, the Hiryu, the Shokaku, the Zuikaku, would themselves lie at the bottom of the Pacific before the war was over.

Ider of them within 30 days of the Coral Sea at the hands of the American carriers they had failed to catch at Pearl Harbor. And the doctrine that killed them would be the doctrine that Chester Nimttz had been forced to invent between the 25th of December 1,941 and the 8th of May 1,942. Not he had done it quietly. He had done it by protecting the men.

Washington wanted to purge by trusting the codereers other admirals dismissed. by handing an impossible salvage job to an engineer and getting out of his way, not defending submariners, fighting with defective weapons against a bureaucracy that would not admit its failure by absorbing the loss of the Saratoga in January and the Lexington in May without ever raising his voice.

He had done it because he understood something the political operators in Washington and the traditionalists in the gun club did not. won by heroes. Wars are won by systems. By the end of that first summer of 1,942, the system Chester Nimitz had built out of the wreckage of Pearl Harbor was ready to fight and what it would do at Midway, at Guadal Canal, at Tarowa, at Lee Gulf, and finally in the surrender ceremony aboard the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September 1,945.

Is the rest of the story of how the Pacific War was won. I know. But it all began that Christmas morning in 9,941. It began with a 56-year-old man in a plain civilian suit stepping off a flying boat into the pouring rain. Began with a smell of oil and death rising from the water. I It began with a quiet man looking at a ruined fleet and refusing to accept that it was ruined.

He had been given nothing. He had been ordered to win and he