The admiral who led the greatest naval armada in history grew up in landlocked Fredericksburg, Texas, wanted to join the Army, and nearly ended his career by running his first command aground on a mud bank. This episode traces the life of Chester W. Nimitz, from the pragmatic philosophy instilled by his seafaring grandfather to the one spare Naval Academy appointment a local congressman happened to have. It examines how the 1908 grounding of the destroyer Decatur and the resulting reprimand shaped a lifelong obsession with detail, and why he chose the dangerous frontier of early submarines to rebuild his reputation.

The episode follows Nimitz through a 1913 diesel engine study in Germany that cost him part of a finger, the pioneering of underway refueling aboard the Maumee in World War I, and his appointment as Commander in Chief of the Pac ...