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Show Mmites Naval Figure r . I TIC . The towering naval figure of World War II in the American Navy was Admiral Chester Nimitz. Nimitz was born Feb. 24, 1885, at Fredericksburg, Texas. As a youngster he leaned toward West Point but won an appointment to the Navy Academy at Annapolis in 1901. AFTER graduation in 1905, Nimitz was sent to China and though he asked for duty aboard battleships was assigned submarines. In the first World War he served on the staff of th commander of the submarine force in the Atlantic. By 1939, he was an admiral and chief of the Bureau of Navigation in Washington and already considered to be second in the Navy only to Admiral Harold Stark. Following Fol-lowing the Pearl Harbor disaster, disas-ter, he was sent to the Pacific base (December 17, 1941) to take command of the Pacific fleet. He served there for the rest of the war, eventually commanding the largest and most powerful naval force ever assembled. THE U.S. Navy began World War II with inferior tor-pedoes tor-pedoes and though the Japanese won many of the ear- ly naval engagements between the fleets, the Navy gradually emerged during 1942 and early 1943 as the more effective fleet. Submarines of the U.S. Navy-Nimitz's old specialty-were specialty-were outstanding and did more than air power or surface units of the fleet to strangle the eco- nomyofJapan B,,, face forces were 'y utilized; the arc S,bn!i Nimitz. s '-'K |