Chester W. Nimitz

Biography

Chester Nimitz was born in 1885 in Fredericksburg, Texas, into a German-Texan family; his father died before his birth and he was strongly influenced by his grandfather, a former merchant seaman. Unable to get a place at West Point, he won an appointment to the Naval Academy in 1901 and graduated with distinction in January 1905.

After early service in the Far East he became a submarine specialist, commanding the First Submarine Flotilla from 1909 and overseeing the change from gasoline to diesel engines. In the First World War he was chief of staff to the commander of the Atlantic submarine force. Between the wars he commanded the cruiser Augusta and battleship and cruiser divisions, developed underway refuelling and in June 1939 became chief of the Bureau of Navigation.

Ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt chose him to command the Pacific Fleet. As commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet and of the Pacific Ocean Areas he directed Allied forces through Coral Sea, Midway and the Solomons and then the central Pacific drive towards Japan, and on 2 September 1945 he signed the Japanese surrender for the United States. He was chief of naval operations from December 1945 to December 1947, cutting the fleet to peacetime size, backing Hyman Rickover's plan for a nuclear submarine and supplying an affidavit on submarine warfare for Karl Dönitz's defence at Nuremberg.

As a fleet admiral he remained on active duty for life. He was a regent of the University of California from 1948 to 1956, was named by the United Nations in 1949 as plebiscite administrator for Jammu and Kashmir, a role India never accepted, and helped raise funds to restore the Japanese battleship Mikasa. He died in San Francisco in 1966.