Thank you very much U.S Navy for uploading this informative and fascinating talk on Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz. I downloaded a copy of the "Gray Book" and found the reading extremely interesting. I read notes on Tarawa and did not know that that the island was regularly bombed by small Japanese air raids, months after the island had been successfully taken. Great prompt. Many thanks again for the upload and thank you U.S Navy for your outstanding work.
There are not enough laudatory words to pay sufficient tribute to Adm. Nimitz. I shudder to think what might have happened were he not our leader during the troubled days of World War Two. Fair winds and following seas, Admiral Nimitz.
1:15:40 My father was of those brave men that fought under Admiral Nimitz. Thank God for the both of them, and the other brave men and women who served our great nation.
Thank you very much for a fascinating and interesting lecture on a WW2 naval leader I have for many years had an interest in and admired more than any other. I enjoyed the talk enormously.
How does an Admiral, that came from a submarine command preside over the twenty-two-month-long torpedo failure on PTboats, Destroyers, and Submarines? It will remain an astounding and sad legacy of his command. He was not alone in his neglecting of this problem. Admirals King, Spruance, C. Wright, and Admiral Halsey also stood by and kept mum while the Navy salvoed off dozens of ineffective dozens. It extended the war in the Pacific by at least a year. No accounting has ever been given of misses/Duds/mistracking let alone a full list of successes. The F35 is going to have cost Americans over a Trillion dollars. No one will ever trust procurement without even historical accountability being permitted 75 years after the fact.
Joel, a year later. I blame the failure on privileges of rank that allowed silence on great embarrassments. Nimitz could claim a great many other tasks and weighty responsibilities, of course, and yet his command would have no greater loss than the Bureau of Ordnance's refusal to even acknowledge much less finally fix their problem. How far back to we go back to trace this? Admirals Stark? Furlong? Blandy? There were 'fathers' of the exploder that let everyone in their circle know they took offense to suggestions there WAS a problem, and thus fixing it was delayed for at least a year. It's a SICK commentary overall. I've also wondered what Age had to do with it - all of these leaders were OLD MEN supposedly 'set in their ways' and I can't help but wonder fresher eyes wouldn't have solved problems more quickly. But at the cost of other problems?
I wish I'd known of this conference seven year ago! Many years before that, I graduated from the Chester W. Nimitz elementary school at Pearl Harbor. Either then (1960) or a few years earlier, I became interested in Pacific War history. That interest remained with me over the years. I've read E.B. Potter's NIMITZ twice, but the last time I read it was in the 1980's. I have at least two copies of NIMITZ in my house here on Molokai. I also have a paper copy of the Gray Book that I downloaded and printed the week it first became available online. I've a long interest in Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into WWII that goes back to the mid-1950's, the first time my family lived in Hawaii. (My late father, Captain Andrew McKane, MC, USN, was in the Navy medical corps.) I've been working at serious research into Pearl Harbor since late 1983. I hope to have either a book or an article ready for publication on Pearl Harbor by the end of August (in time for the 80th anniversary). Great lecture by Professor Symonds! Thank you very much, Dr. Symonds. Go Navy! (P.S. I've read, and I suspect you have also, that R. Kelly Turner wanted his sunset cruise in the Navy to be as President of the Naval War College. That position went to Admiral Spruance---a close personal friend of RKT. Turner ended his naval career as the senior U.S. naval member of the United Nations military staff committee.)
What a stark contrast of competent military leaders compared to the goofball Biden’s transgender nutcases trying to claim girl DNA is no different than boy DNA. My god, could you imagine a war with Biden’s nutcases in charge compared to level 5 leaders like Nimitz.
