The Military History community has been enriched by the life and scholarship of Prof. Craig Symonds and is impoverished by his death from cancer on October 13, 2026 at the age of 79.
Drafted for Vietnam, Craig was assigned to teach Naval History at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. After finishing his service in 1975, Craig returned to Florida to finish his dissertation, and then was hired by the United States Naval Academy as a professor of history in the fall of 1976.
Craig taught history at the Academy for the next thirty years, including an exchange year in Dartmouth, England at Britannia Royal Naval College, and retired as one of its most decorated professors. He won the yard’s highest awards for teaching, research (fifteen books on the Civil War and the US Navy while at the Academy), and civilian service. His last book on the Civil War, Lincoln and his Admirals, won the Lincoln Prize in 2009. He also won the Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement award in 2014, and returned to the Naval War College in Newport to serve as the Ernest J. King chair from 2019-2021.
Upon retiring from the classroom, Craig shifted the focus of his writing to World War II, writing four books for Oxford University Press that ultimately led to his receiving the Pritzker Military Museum and Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2023: The Battle of Midway, Neptune, World War II At Sea, and Nimitz at War (which also won the Gilder-Lehman Military History Prize). In 2025, he published Annapolis Goes To War, the story of the Naval Academy class of 1940, and his final book, Twelve Battles that Changed America, will be released posthumously next year.
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