Pearl Harbor Betrayed (10 page)

Yamamoto was now convinced that Japan's descent into war was ineluctable, impelled by forces, both personal and material, that would not be thwarted. He had now exhausted whatever credit and leverage he might have had in the attempt to deflect the inevitable. What else remained for him, a professional officer of the Emperor, but to prepare his forces for battle? “Now that things have come to this pass,” he told his friend Baron Harada Kumao, “I'll throw everything I have into the fight. I expect to die in battle on board the
Nagato
.”
22

It was with this mind-set, then, that Yamamoto proposed to Navy Minister Oikawa that the unavoidable war with America must begin with a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor and the airfields of Oahu. It was an operational plan that he had first discussed, so far as we know, in either March or April 1940, with his then chief of staff Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigero. “It may be said that except for the late Admiral Yamamoto,” Fukudome wrote in December 1955, “I was the only person acquainted with detailed plans of the operation from the moment of its conception.”
23
Next to know was Oikawa, but, without waiting for the minister's reaction, Yamamoto drafted a three-page outline of what came to be called the
Hawai sakusen
(“Hawaii Operation”) and presented it to a trusted old friend, Rear Admiral Onishi Takijiro, chief of staff of the 11th Air Fleet. Although the 11th was not carrier-based, Yamamoto valued the sound judgment and practical airman's sense possessed by Onishi. If anyone could find defects in the scheme, taken simply as an aviation project, it would be he. In one sign of his good judgment, Onishi enlisted the assistance of someone less conventional and cautious than himself: Commander Genda Minoru, an air staff officer on board the carrier
Kaga,
known to his friends as “madman Genda,” for his radical ideas of air warfare. The two officers—one senior, the other junior; one solid, the other mercurial—came to the conclusion that the plan was “not impossible” to achieve. But when Onishi presented their joint study to Yamamoto's chief of staff, Fukudome, at the end of April 1941, he fingered two seemingly insurmountable problems.

The first was the expectation that aerial torpedoes dropped into the shallow (thirty to forty-five foot) water of Pearl Harbor would strike and stick in the mucky bottom before they could run their courses. The second was that the success of an attack of that kind depended on the maintenance of absolute secrecy, which seemed highly unlikely given the large number of people who would have to be involved in its planning and execution.
24

Onishi gave the plan only a 60 percent chance of succeeding. Fukudome, interestingly, gave it only a 40 percent chance: “Had I from the very beginning been entrusted with the study of the idea instead of Onishi, I would certainly have recommended to Commander in Chief Yamamoto that the Hawaii Operation be abandoned.”
25

But Yamamoto would not be deterred by percentages. He was comfortable with the hand he held.

*   *   *

Husband Edward Kimmel's ancestors on his father's side emigrated from Bavaria in 1755 and settled in Somerset County, Pennsylvania colony. His father, Marius Manning Kimmel (1832–1915), attended Princeton University until his junior year, then accepted an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he was commissioned a second lieutenant of cavalry in 1857. During the following four years he fought against the Comanche Indians in the Battle of Nescutunga Valley and against Mexican marauders on the Rio Grande. When the Civil War broke out, then Major Kimmel served in defense of Washington in the First Battle of Bull Run on 21 July 1861. He then obtained leave to go home to Kentucky, where he changed sides, resigning from the Union army and accepting a commission in the Confederate forces. In the latter uniform he served as chief of staff to Major General Earl Van Dorn in the defense of Vicksburg in 1862. Following the surrender at Appomattox, Kimmel rode southwest to become a civil engineer on the Vera Cruz–City of Mexico Railroad, then under construction. For six years beginning in 1866 he engaged in a number of business enterprises in Missouri, then moved to Henderson, Kentucky, where he married and, at 512 North Green Street, began raising a family of seven boys and girls. Mrs. Kimmel was born Sibbella Lambert, the daughter of Joel Lambert and Polly Husband, of Henderson, hence the introduction of “Husband” into the family as a given name.

Young “Kim,” or “Hubbie,” as Husband was called within the family, was a serious boy, his brother, Singleton, older by twelve years, would remember in later years: “The Admiral used to haunt my office.” (Singleton was the city and county road engineer.) “He learned everything he could about the business, served as my surveying party rodman for a while. He always wanted to know the whys and wherefores of everything. I remember that when he was still in high school he went out and surveyed the old Lambert farm, plotted it, drew a map of it, located all the buildings.”

At age sixteen Kim was valedictorian of his graduating class at Barrett High School. Afterward, inspired by his father's diploma from the military academy, he applied to his congressman from the Second District of Kentucky for an appointment to West Point.
26

While waiting for the decision he completed his freshman year at Central University in Richmond, Kentucky. Told then that the allotments for West Point were filled, he secured an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, at Annapolis. The academy that he entered on 21 May 1900 was less an institution of higher learning than it was a training establishment or novitiate.

Cadets (the title of midshipman did not come into use until 1904) learned by the book, that is, by texts in tabloid form that had to be committed to memory. Innovative thinking was expressly discouraged. Cadets developed “a slavish adulation for the book” rather than “a quickening of the intellect.”
27
In 1902 only 12 percent of the faculty were civilian academicians; the balance were academy graduates who had passed through the same regimen. Indeed, at Annapolis the intellect was deliberately subordinated to the will, and the subjects of instruction were frequently employed as a means of punishment; for, if any one subject ruled the curriculum, it was discipline. Molding character was thought more important than enlargement of the mind. Controlled by an iron hand of authority in every sector of his life, the cadet was understood not to be an individual aspiring to naval service but as one
belonging
to the service; hence, to resign from the academy required permission to do so. The overall and intentional effect of discipline was mastery over self, in the sense that it was thought to produce men who displayed, as the great naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (class of 1859) expressed it, “uncomplaining, noble self-abnegation.”
28
A Cistercian monk could not have put it better.

One by-product of self-mastery was the development in each cadet of a deep personal sense of honor. Reputation and a good name were paramount values, to be esteemed both in the academy and in later service at sea. Cadets were taught to “guard their own honor and the honor of the service.” Death should be preferable to dishonor. By such exhortations cadets were persuaded that, like medieval knights, they possessed a morality superior to that of civilians. It was a morality to be expressed not in self-absorption, much less in conceit, but in refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and becoming modesty. When taking on their first fleet assignments after graduation, passed midshipmen presumably would know not to assert themselves too much among their peers and certainly never to take initiatives that would outshine a superior. They would be loyal, obedient, and efficient officers according to their ranks, and the discipline through which they had passed at Annapolis would always abide as a ready anchor to windward.

At least that was the theory, and it seems not to have had any lasting deleterious effect when one considers the accomplishments of Kimmel's contemporaries at the academy, many of whom, a half century later, went on to become the principal naval leaders of World War II: Harold R. Stark, Ernest J. King, Chester W. Nimitz, William F. Halsey, Raymond A. Spruance, Royal E. Ingersoll, Robert L. Ghormley, John H. Towers, John S. McCain, Wilson E. Brown, H. Kent Hewitt, Milo F. Draemel, Aubrey W. Fitch, Richmond Kelly Turner, William S. Pye, and Thomas C. Kinkaid. The last-named, future commander of the Seventh Fleet, became Kimmel's brother-in-law when his sister Dorothy gave her hand in marriage to Kimmel on a snowy evening in January 1912 at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, Annapolis.
29
It would be difficult to argue that the sterile intellectualism of the academy appreciably hindered those particular classes, on whom “the stars fell,” either in the prosecution of their careers or in the achievement of their wartime victories.

As for Cadet Kimmel, who would also rise to high position, second only to that of Chief of Naval Operations, he successfully observed the academy discipline as a “regulation” cadet, passed his courses, became a member of the varsity gymnasium team, played on his class football team, managed the varsity crew, and reached the cadet rank of brigade adjutant. Not the least of his accomplishments had been to form numerous strong friendships with quality individuals. One such staunch relationship had bonded him with Harold Raynsford “Betty” Stark, in the class (1903) ahead of him. Stark got his nickname from upperclassmen during his plebe year at the academy. His hazers mistook a distant Stark relative's name from the Revolutionary War period to have been Betty, instead of Molly. But Betty stuck. Kimmel was able to escape the academy as Kim, except that Stark would later call him by the Turkish “Mustapha,” because Kimmel sounded like “Kemal,” as in Mustapha Kemal, president of the Turkish Republic (1923–1938). Their paths would intersect many times in the years ahead.

*   *   *

After graduating thirteenth in his class of sixty-two on 1 February 1904, Passed Midshipman Kimmel was ordered to duty in the battleship USS
Kentucky,
where he served in the gunnery department. Other tours of duty followed in battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, as the novice officer rose in rank. In 1914, as a lieutenant, he became aide and fleet gunnery officer on the staff of the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. During the years 1913–15 he was engaged in the task of rescuing stranded Americans from the coast of Mexico, then in the throes of revolution. On 18 July 1914, while on board ship, he was wounded twice in the right arm and in each leg by shots fired from shore. When the United States entered the World War in 1917, the now lieutenant commander was detailed as a U.S. naval observer to the British Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow to demonstrate a photographic system for the analysis of gunnery scores that he had had a major hand in developing. Afterward, he served as squadron gunnery officer with the five battleships that formed the so-called American Battle Squadron attached to the British fleet. Later, in 1918, as executive officer of the
Arkansas,
he witnessed the ignominious surrender (and scuttling) of the German High Seas Fleet at Rosyth.

In the early 1920s, Commander Kimmel served three years as production officer in charge of 6,700 civilian workers in the Naval Gun Factory at Washington Navy Yard, after which he was made captain in charge of the Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines. He then served two years on the Asiatic Station as commander of Destroyer Division 45, a part of whose mission was to guard U.S. Army round-the-world aircraft on their leg between Hong Kong and Calcutta. That duty was followed by studies at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he completed the senior course, the greater part of which was taken up by analysis of the latest version of War Plan Orange, the Navy's secret projection of how it would fight and win the “inevitable” naval war with Japan. Two years of duty at the Navy Department in the Policy Section of Naval Operations preceded another two years in destroyers, this time as commander, with the rank of captain, of a squadron of Battle Force destroyers.

In every assignment, Kimmel acquired an outstanding annual performance evaluation (“Officer's Record of Fitness”) from direct superiors: “an all-around officer of great promise,” “energetic, forceful and of pleasing personality,” “good common sense and initiative,” “a splendid officer of high character,” “excellent in organization, management, and in handling personnel.” So impressive was Kimmel's proficiency in ship movements, the then Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William V. Pratt, added his own encomium to the fitness report of April 1933: “Captain Kimmel is a humdinger. He is a driver and a worker most efficient and he does it all without antagonizing people; I like him because he says what he thinks, never fools you, and his judgment is excellent. He is eminently qualified for promotion and I expect to see him get to the very top someday. He will make good.”
30

It was axiomatic that for advancement to flag rank an officer must first serve as commanding officer of a battleship. Kimmel received that compliment later in 1933 when he was given command of the 27,000-ton USS
New York
(BB-34), built in 1914. It was a ship on which he had been stationed briefly, when on the staff of Admiral Hugh Rodman, with the British Grand Fleet, in 1917. (His senior air officer on board, Lieutenant Logan C. Ramsey, would later, in August 1937, write a prescient article for the United States Naval Institute
Proceedings
entitled, “Aerial Attacks on Fleets at Anchor.” In 1941, while serving Kimmel again as operations officer of Patrol Wing 2 at Pearl Harbor, Ramsey would be the first to sound the attack alarm on 7 December.) After only a short stint as skipper of the
New York,
Kimmel was transferred to become chief of staff for Commander Battleships, Battle Force. Yet another Washington assignment followed in 1935, as budget officer for the entire naval establishment. On 13 October 1937, to no one's surprise, he was promoted to rear admiral.