April 7, 2023
Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz was not the most senior candidate available, and some, including his new boss, U.S. Navy Admiral Ernest J. King, considered him a "desk admiral," more suited to running a bureaucracy than a theater of war. Yet FDR's selection proved nothing less than inspired. From the precarious early months of the war after December 7, 1941 to the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay nearly four years later, Nimitz transformed the devastated and dispirited Pacific fleet into the most powerful and commanding naval force in history.
Dr. Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where he taught for thirty years, including a four-year term as History Department Chair. He was the first person to win both the Academy’s Teacher of the Year award (1988) and its Researcher of the Year award (1998). He received the Navy Meritorious Service Award in 1989, and the Superior Civilian Service medal in 1994, 1998, 2005, and 2020. In 1994-95, he was Professor of Strategy at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. He returned to the Naval Academy in 2012 as The Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor of Naval History. From 2017 to 2020 he was The Ernest J. King Distinguished Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, for which he received his fourth Superior Civilian Service Medal (2020).
Symonds is the author of seventeen books, which have been translated into six foreign languages. They include biographies of Civil War figures Joseph E. Johnston (1992), Patrick Cleburne (1997), and Franklin Buchanan (1999), as well as several books on the Second World War, including The Battle of Midway (2011), Operation Neptune (2014), and World War II at Sea (2018). His 2005 book, Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History, won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize for Naval History, and his 2008 book, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War, won the prestigious Lincoln Prize. His newest book is a wartime biography of Admiral Chester Nimitz entitled Nimitz at War, released in 2022.
In 2014 the Naval Historical Foundation awarded Symonds the Dudley Knox medal for lifetime achievement; and in 2023 the Pritzker Military Museum and Library awarded him the $100,000 Pritzker Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.