Pearl Harbor Betrayed (7 page)

In the open-sea operating area Kimmel drilled his fire control and turret crews in practice firing at fast-moving targets (sleds, not rafts). Specialized training was given in range finding, tracking, radar detection, zigzagging, towing, fueling, and damage control. Each exercise was judged and graded. A perfectionist, Kimmel never displayed or expressed satisfaction with any performance. Knowing that the fleet was on the cusp of actual warfare, when its offensive tasks in the Pacific war plan were to move against the Japanese mandated islands in the mid-Pacific and to divert Orange strength away from the Malay Barrier (the string of islands from the Kra Isthmus in the west to Timor at the eastern end of the Indonesia archipelago) through denial and capture of positions in the Marshall Islands, Kimmel drove his officers and men hard, drilled them to peak efficiency, instilled in them a fighting spirit, and taught them to be Lees and not McClellans. There were not only gun crews to be trained but also officers and men detailed to ship control, to the engine room, to the electrical installations, to the radios, to the signals, to the lookouts, to the sick bay, to the commissary, and to the numerous other billets on a fighting ship. In combat a breakdown in proficiency in any one of those responsibilities could be costly, if not fatal.

As Lieutenant Commander Layton, who came to know Kimmel the taskmaster, wrote:

Admiral Kimmel was a very forthright officer. He could sometimes be a little starchy, but he was more starchy with senior officers who were lax than with junior officers. He was demanding in devotion to duty, setting in his own performance an outstanding example. He had little tolerance for laziness or indecision. He had an infectious, warm smile when pleased by something and a frosty demeanor if displeased.
52

More than a few officers thought that Kimmel was overly immersed in minutiae, and that he was a bit of a school principal where appearances were concerned: he forbade officers to wear the khaki working uniform on the grounds that “it lessens the dignity and military point of view of the wearer and has a tendency to let down the efficiency of personnel”; when off duty and dressed in civilian clothes, officers were required to wear neckties and fedora-style hats that quickly became known as “Kimmels”; while cleaning the exterior of the sides of their ships, a dirty job at any time, sailors were required to wear their white uniforms (which were personal property, not government issue) instead of dungarees; and, said one chief petty officer, “We spent more for bright-work polish than the Japanese spent on fuel oil.” But even those few subordinates who later criticized Kimmel for being “arrogant,” “conceited,” and “not well informed,” or “narrow gauge” or “a martinet and detail man” who “did not delegate authority” never had the temerity to suggest that he was derelict in his duty—if anything, said his fleet operations officer, Captain DeLany, he was almost
too
devoted to his duty as CINCPAC, working longer hours at his desk than probably were necessary. The words
Kimmel
and
dereliction
were antithetical.

All criticisms aside, the distillate was that, as Captain Kitts averred, “The efficiency and training of the Fleet was at its highest level in history.”
53
Other staff members and subordinate commanders agreed that in ships, gunnery, and aircraft the fleet exhibited a higher state of material readiness and personnel proficiency under Kimmel than it had ever achieved before in peacetime. Such statements were given by Pye's chief of staff, Rear Admiral Harold C. Train; Rear Admiral William L. Calhoun, commander, Base Force; and Aviation Officer Davis. Vice Admiral Halsey, who stated in 1947 that, “I don't believe there was a flag officer in the Pacific Fleet who did not feel that Kimmel was an ideal man for the job,” added this encomium:

I have never known a Commander in Chief of any United States Fleet who worked harder, and under more adverse circumstances, to increase its efficiency, and to prepare it for war; further, I know of no officer who might have done more than Kimmel did.… When the Roberts Comission asked me how I happened to be ready for the Japanese attack, I told them, “Because of one man: Admiral Kimmel.”
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Was there no substantive shortcoming in this commander in chief's performance? No one critical action that he could have taken but did not? One omission that he allowed himself, which, if not allowed, might have altered history?

THREE

OPPOSITE NUMBERS: YAMAMOTO AND KIMMEL

Most people think Americans love luxury and that their culture is shallow and meaningless. I can tell you Americans are full of the spirit of justice, fight, and adventure. Also their thinking is very advanced and scientific.

Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku

 

On 7 January 1941, a small man of towering reputation in the Japanese Navy took brush in hand to compose a letter to his nation's Navy Minister, Admiral Oikawa Koshiro. The writer was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, commanding the Japanese Combined Fleet. During the previous November when his flagship, the battleship
Nagato,
was anchored at Yokosuka Naval Station, Yamamoto had confided to Oikawa an outline of the views he was now committing to paper. He divided the scheme of his text into five sections, entitled: “Preparations for War,” “Training,” “Operational Policy,” “A Plan of Operations to Be Followed at the Outset of Hostilities,” and “Personnel.” On the margin of the first page, in red ink, he brushed: “For the eyes of the Minister alone: to be burned without showing to anyone else.”
1

Yamamoto revealed his belief that war with the United States and Great Britain was now inevitable. In the fourth section of his text he proposed that the necessary means of victory in that conflict was the sudden, unexpected destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in the first hours of hostilities.

Prior to this pivotal moment in Yamamoto's professional career, Japanese naval doctrine had held that, in the case of war with the United States, the best strategy for fighting the American Navy was “attrition and ambush.” A predicate of this strategy was that in any Japanese-American clash, Great Britain would remain inactive, in order not to jeopardize her Asian colonies and interests. Since the United States had given clear signs, including a fleet problem, or exercise, off Hawaii in 1925, that she was prepared to send the Pacific Fleet to protect the Philippines, the first act of Japan in the event of war should be to seize that U.S. territory—and the U.S. island of Guam as well—and thus lure the American fleet into the distant waters of the western Pacific.

When the U.S. armada left its West Coast bases—Pearl Harbor after May 1940—it would be shadowed by Japanese long-range I-class submarines that, with a cruising range of 10,000 nautical miles and a top speed of 23.5 knots, would stay abreast and ahead of the slower moving (17 knots) American formations. The submarines were equipped with Type 93 24-inch torpedoes fueled by compressed oxygen and kerosene, capable of 39-knot speed and a maximum range of 24 miles, or of 49 knots at a range of 12 miles (compared to the 2½-mile range of U.S. torpedoes). The submarines would launch their full arsenal of these high-explosive weapons at both the main body and trailing edges of the U.S. fleet, hoping to achieve substantial material and psychological damage. Then, when the fleet drew near the Japanese mandated islands, the Marshalls, Marianas, and Carolines, land-based bombers such as the Mitsubishi Type 96 would attack with the smaller Type 91 torpedo, still capable of sinking a capital ship (as this type did on 10 December 1941 when the British
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
went down off the Malayan coast).

According to Japan's strategic theory, the U.S. fleet would have been ground down to Japan's lesser number, but higher quality, of ships by the time it reached a midway point between the Marshalls and the Philippines. There, in the final attrition phase, a Japanese advance party of fast battleships, cruisers, and destroyers would throw down a Jutland-like gauntlet and invite the U.S. fleet to pursue it. When the U.S. warships went after the bait, and darkness came, the faster Japanese vessels would turn and launch two hundred or more long-range Type 93 torpedoes at the lumbering Americans. It was expected by the strategists that 25 percent of those warheads would hit home, and that two more such nighttime launches might be made.

When daylight came, the remaining elements of Japan's fleet, including carriers, would be brought to bear in an ambush, and under the most propitious conditions, near the home islands, where lines of communication and supply favored the defender. An attempt would be made to sink the American carriers; failing that, Japanese bombers would hole the flight decks, making launch and recovery of aircraft impossible. There then would follow the decisive fleet action, as the Japanese overwhelmed the enemy with both land and carrier-based aircraft, ships' guns, and torpedoes launched by cruisers and midget submarines. At the conclusion of battle, the strategists estimated, about one-half of the American fleet would have been sunk or damaged. Forced to retire, the U.S. Navy would require at least two years to rebuild, repair, retrain, and prepare for another attack.
2

The Operations Section of the Naval General Staff had long made this basically defensive plan the foundation of all training, war games, and maneuvers. Yamamoto, though, had begun to think as early as March or April 1940 that such an ambush strategy had three defects: (1) it conceded the initiative to the Americans; (2) it failed to take into account the fact that a southern operation, then being planned, against Malaya and the Dutch East Indies would divert major components of the fleet away from a western Pacific battle; and (3) the strategy, assuming as it did that Japan would continue to have a Navy in quality superior to or at parity with the Americans' Pacific Fleet, ignored the fact that the United States was then engaged in a massive and rapid expansion of naval forces, and that, if Japan remained too long in a defensive posture, new construction would give the U.S. Navy a decisive edge in any collision of forces, when it came.

Yamamoto had gotten to know the United States, her resources and her people, during two tours of duty, first as a student of the English language at Harvard University in 1919–21, and then as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington during 1926–28. From his extensive travels through the United States, where he visited, among other sights, the oil fields of Texas and the automobile plants of Detroit, he had come to know the country's vast resources, its industrious people, and its potential manufacturing might. In January 1941, he had no doubt that the shipyards and aircraft plants of America would eventually overwhelm Japan's naval assets.

Already, in 1938, with Japan in China and Europe sliding toward war, the U.S. Congress, at President Franklin D. Roosevelt's urging, had authorized a 20 percent growth in naval strength. Then, on 19 July 1940, with France defeated, Britain reeling, and an aggressive Japan looking southward, Roosevelt had signed the Two Ocean Navy Bill, authorizing the largest-ever naval expansion.

Two new carriers,
Yorktown
(CV-5) and
Enterprise
(CV-6), joined the United States fleet in 1939. Two of a new class of battleship,
North Carolina
(BB-55) and
Washington
(BB-56), with speeds (28.5 knots) approaching that of the Japanese battleships
Kirishima
and
Hiei
(29.8 knots), were due for completion in 1941 at the New York and Philadephia navy yards, respectively. Four new battleships of the
South Dakota
class were scheduled for commissioning in 1942. Six battleships of the even larger (45,000 tons displacement) and faster (33 knots)
Iowa
class, with 40,000-yard-range 16-inch main guns, were in the contract stage. In aircraft carriers (soon to displace the battleship as the dominant ship type), construction was accelerated: the
Wasp
(CV-7) had been commissioned in April 1940; the
Hornet
(CV-8) was due out of the ways in the fall of 1941; and no fewer than seventeen carriers of the
Essex
class (short-hull and long-hull groups) were expected to be at sea in the years 1942–45. Similar expansion was under way in other categories of warships: heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, and submarines.

Since Japan could not keep up with America's industrial productivity, and since the longer Japan's naval power waited to engage the American fleet the smaller the chance of victory, there was no alternative, Yamamoto concluded, but to make a preemptive strike against the Americans as soon as practicable. “We should do our best,” he wrote, “… to decide the fate of the war on the very first day.” If the enemy's main body was in Pearl Harbor, Japanese carrier aircraft and submarines should sink the principal ships (carriers and battleships) at their moorings and blockade the harbor entrance. If the U.S. fleet was at sea, it should be located and sunk off soundings. For the United States the result would be that “the morale of the U.S. Navy and her people” would “sink to the extent that it could not be recovered.”
3
The entire air strength of the First and Second Carrier Divisions must be committed to the operation, and the strike itself should be made on a moonlit night or at dawn. Should Japan hesitate to attack Pearl Harbor, worrying about possible heavy damage to her own forces, and “continue crouching in the Far East,” the Americans, with an eventually dominant fleet, “would proceed to Japan to bomb and burn down the cities.” The same early assault principle must be applied in the Philippines, so that U.S. air forces there would be destroyed in concert with the Hawaii operation, and thus securing the Navy's flanks for a southern operation to capture Malaya and the East Indies.
4