The Pacific War in Color episode 4: After a disastrous start, Admiral Chester Nimitz’s island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific has gained momentum and led his men to their largest and most important target yet: Saipan in the Mariana Islands.
The nearly month-long battle on this island featured mountain sieges, Banzai attacks, white-knuckled dogfights, and escalating tensions between the U.S. Army and Marines. Color combat footage and testimony from the soldiers who were there bring this seminal moment of the Pacific War to life.
The Pacific War was unlike any military conflict before it in terms of its scale, scope, and savagery. Witness the massive attacks on Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and Nagasaki that bookended the war, along with the ferocious battles in between–ones waged on tiny islands and remote atolls and fought by soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors. With color combat footage and accounts from those who experienced the fight firsthand, we reveal the brutal reality of life on the frontline during the battle for the Pacific.
The Pacific War in Color episode 4 – The Enemy Underground
Chester William Nimitz, Sr. was a fleet admiral of the United States Navy. He played a major role in the naval history of World War II as Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet and Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, commanding Allied air, land, and sea forces during World War II.
Nimitz was the leading US Navy authority on submarines. Qualified in submarines during his early years, he later oversaw the conversion of these vessels’ propulsion from gasoline to diesel, and then later was key in acquiring approval to build the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, whose propulsion system later completely superseded diesel-powered submarines in the US. He also, beginning in 1917, was the Navy’s leading developer of underway replenishment techniques, the tool which during the Pacific war would allow the US fleet to operate away from port almost indefinitely. The chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation in 1939, Nimitz served as Chief of Naval Operations from 1945 until 1947. He was the United States’ last surviving officer who served in the rank of fleet admiral.