Chester W. Nimitz

Who is Chester W. Nimitz?

Chester William Nimitz was a Fleet Admiral of the United States Navy who served as Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, throughout most of World War II. Appointed to the post shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Nimitz was tasked with rebuilding American naval power in the Pacific and halting further Japanese expansion. In June 1942, acting on intelligence broken by U.S. Navy cryptanalysts, Nimitz committed his heavily outnumbered carrier forces to intercept the Imperial Japanese Navy near Midway Atoll, a remote coral atoll that today forms part of the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands. The resulting Battle of Midway, fought from 4 to 7 June 1942, saw American aircraft sink four Japanese fleet carriers in a decisive turning point of the Pacific War, ending Japan's offensive naval dominance. Nimitz went on to lead the island-hopping campaign across the central and western Pacific for the remainder of the war and was present aboard the USS Missouri for the formal Japanese surrender in September 1945. He later served as Chief of Naval Operations and remained an influential figure in American naval strategy until his death in 1966.

Sources: Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. IV: Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions (1949) · E.B. Potter, Nimitz (1976) · Official U.S. Navy communiques, June 1942