Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet during World War II, decades later would stand in front of a cohort of Navy student officers in Newport and tell them that, “the War with Japan had been reenacted in the game rooms there so many—by so many people, and in so many different ways, that nothing that happened during the War was a surprise.”[1] This quote, a part of a lecture given by Nimitz at the Naval War College in 1960, is now part and parcel of the myth of the wargames run at the Naval War College between World War I and World War II: a myth that an institution—simply by doing its job well—carved out victory for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. It is not a linear progression of influence, but instead a bureaucratic game of maneuver in which its true influence was not necessarily in the ability to infiltrate the staff of the Navy leadership, but instead to build a generation of naval officers that would build the campaigns and arsenals of World War II. The combination of Newport in the summer, the theater of the wargames, and the romantic renderings of map board surrounded by uniformed mustachioed officers in the pages of Harper’s Weekly helped Taylor garner influence in the most important offices in Washington, D.C. Secretary of the Navy Herbert reported back from his summer visit in 1895 that he was “well pleased by what he saw,”[2] and Theodore Roosevelt (in his position as assistant secretary of the Navy) wrote that “I look back with greatest pleasure on my altogether too short visit to the War College, and when I come on again I want to time my visit so as to see one of your big strategic war games.”[3] Harper’s Weekly waxed quixotically about “all these things considered, it would seem as though nothing in the wide circle of national work is more deserving of public sympathy and hearty support than the Naval War College at Newport.”[4]
Author: March 24, 2026
Published at: 2026-03-24 00:00:00
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