Introduction -- Prologue -- Taking command -- The South Pacific -- The central Pacific drive -- Dénouement -- Epilogue

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. From the early years of the war to the surrender ceremony on Tokyo Bay four years later, Nimitz carried the expectations of a nation impatient for revenge-- and transformed the devastated Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history. Symonds covers all the major campaigns, and captures Nimitz's uncanny sense of when to assert authority and when to pull back. -- adapted from jacket

"NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, as a new assistant professor in the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, I shared an office suite with Elmer B. "Ned" Potter. Ned had taught at the Naval Academy since before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was also the co-editor with Chester Nimitz of the book Sea Power (1961), which we all used as a text in the required naval history course that I subsequently taught at the Academy for thirty years. Ned knew Nimitz well having worked closely with him on Sea Power. Ned's biography of the admiral (entitled, simply, Nimitz) appeared in 1976, and he kindly gave me an inscribed copy. I still have it. Since we shared a telephone line, I often took calls intended for him. My favorites were from his wife Grace, a Virginia lady in every sense of that term. She never identified herself, as in "Hello Craig, this is Grace Potter." She never had to. When I heard, "Wheyal, halloh thayah"-each word two distinct syllables-it could be no one else. I never got a call from Nimitz since he had died in 1966, but Nimitz was very much a part of the many conversations Ned and I had about naval history until Ned retired in 1977. We remained friends until he died twenty years later in 1997. I hope he would have approved of the wartime portrait of the admiral that I offer here"--