Pearl Harbor Betrayed (9 page)

Yamamoto had been faithful to his charge, but he had little reason to share in the fleet faction's jubilation back home. He continued to believe that treatyless oceans presented a perilous state of affairs, especially for Japan. And he wanted Emperor Hirohito to know that “there was no appearance whatsoever of two powers [the United States and Great Britain] combining to oppress the third [Japan] at these talks.” In the conclusion of his official report to the throne, dated 19 February 1935, he stated: “I deeply regret that it was not possible to persuade Britain and America to accept the imperial government's views, and am convinced of the necessity for still further efforts in this direction.”
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When the Second London Naval Conference opened in December 1935, Japan's delegation was led by Admiral Nagano Osami, a protégé of Admiral Kato Kanji. There was no surprise, but certainly plenty of dismay, among the other powers when, during the opening sessions of the conference, Japan's “further efforts” consisted of a repetition of Yamamoto's earlier position, without change or compromise: Nagano demanded parity, a common upper limit, reduction in overall tonnage, and abolition of all battleships and carriers. A deep gloom settled over the conference deliberations during the weeks that followed, as the other delegations came to realize that, owing to Japan's intransigence, a dangerous naval race was in the offing. On 15 January 1936, the four Western powers formally voted down Japan's “impossible” demands. The Japanese delegation thereupon retired from the proceedings, pledging as they did so that their nation would not start a naval race. But that is exactly what, in less than a year, it would do.
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In the viewfinder: Pearl Harbor.

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Following his return from the talks in 1934, Yamamoto found himself at loose ends. Though assigned to both the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff, he had been given no special responsibilities or tasks, in keeping, it appears, with a traditional Japanese practice of shunning for a time plenipotentiaries and other delegates to international conferences, as though they were assumed to have come home stained by foreign contaminants. To his friend Hori Teikichi, he occasionally spoke of his desire to retire. Each time, Hori succeeded in dissuading him. In his case, Yamamoto should not have been particularly surprised by his dismissal. Few admirals in the leadership of the two naval factions knew what to make of his apparent independent spirit. Though nominally a moderate and a member of the treaty faction, he had gone to London, reluctantly at first, but in the end willingly, to deliver and plead a set of demands from the fleet faction that included, among other things, abolition of the aircraft carrier, by that date his own new passion. How to account for his ambivalence must have been a question that bothered both sides in the ideological debate. Perhaps the answer was that Yamamoto truly believed while in London that he could bluff and win with a losing hand—that a treaty on his impossible terms might actually be secured. But back in Tokyo, wiser by half, he no doubt realized that his personal disquietude resulted from the realization that he had been coldly used by the fleet faction admirals to wreck the scheduled conference of 1935; and that he had been naive to think he could alter their purposes. Remarkably, his friends in the treaty faction, forgiving him that transgression while acknowledging his undoubted naval patriotism, rallied around him for support.

During this period in limbo Yamamoto was not without his divertissements. A gambling addict, he played poker at night into the wee hours; in London he had relieved the First Sea Lord, Admiral A. Ernle M. Chatfield, of twenty pounds by that means. And the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, William H. Standley, learned to respect his skills at bridge. Takagi Sokichi, a naval officer who worked under Yamamoto in a variety of posts, wrote of him:

Few men could have been as fond of gambling and games of chance as he.…
Shogi, go,
mahjongg, billiards, cards, roulette—anything would do. At parties and the like, although he could not drink, he would make up for it by organizing “horse races” on paper and getting the younger officers accompanying him or the young women serving at a teahouse to bet fifty sen on the outcome.
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Yamamoto's professional career was resurrected in 1935, when he was appointed chief of the Aeronautics Department, in command of all navy aviation. Air warfare had become his primary professional interest, and now that international restraints had been rejected he could throw all his energies into the promotion of the carriers and air arm that he had been instructed to oppose in London. Believing that the Navy's main strength would shift from battleships, the other “offensive weapons” of London renown, to carrier-borne aircraft, he vigorously opposed the current diversion of a major share of the Navy's resources to the design and construction of two mammoth 63,700-ton “unsinkable” battleships,
Yamato
and
Musashi,
with 18.1-inch main batteries.
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His surely was a quixotic effort in a Navy still wedded, through Mahan, to the primacy of battlewagons in any fleet that would aspire to rule the seas. The big-ship, big-gun admirals were obsessed with the realization that, at one stroke, the two battleships would advance the Navy's strength in capital ships from 60 percent of American strength to a position of dominance. That the battleship in whatever size was fast becoming an anachronism, as Yamamoto argued, was simply beyond their comprehension. (The U.S. Navy also continued to place its faith in the central role of the battleship.) Though he failed to stop the design phase and to reduce the funding of the behemoths, the farsighted Yamamoto did significantly advance the Navy's air assets by other means, and it was a newly invigorated vice admiral who received a call in 1936 to assume the office of navy vice minister, a position that gave him access to the money and power required to create a naval aviation arm second to none in the world.

Prior to the collapse of the Second London Naval Conference, the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff had represented two separate interests and sets of talents. To the Navy Ministry went officers who excelled in politico-administrative detail and whose interests ran to policy. The General Staff, by contrast, attracted warrior-type officers who demonstrated ability in operational command. With the ideological victory of the fleet faction, men of like mind could be found in both billets by 1936, and the differences between ministry and staff became blurred. By 1936, too, the Japanese Navy was distinctly pro-German, and becoming more so. A higher number of officers served as attachés and members of their staffs in Berlin than in Washington or London. The same people who formed the new “German faction” also exhibited a pronounced anti-Americanism, part of it aroused by a U.S. Navy fleet problem (maneuvers) conducted in the previous year near Midway, 1,300 nautical miles to the northwest of Hawaii. (From that problem the U.S. Navy learned that its Pacific Fleet would be defeated by superior Japanese speed and weaponry should it venture into the western Pacific.) It is in 1936 that one finds the first recorded hint of a strategy to come: in November of that year the Navy War College completed a study, entitled “Strategy and Tactics in Operations Against the United States,” in which it was proposed: “In case the enemy's main fleet is berthed at Pearl Harbor, the idea should be to open hostilities by surprise attacks from the air.”
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No doubt that study was read with high interest by the new air-minded vice minister, who, we do know, was much influenced in this period by his friend Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, head of the Aviation Section of the Navy General Staff. Inoue's tenet was: “He who commands the air commands the sea.”
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Together, these two airpower advocates succeeded in making certain that Japan's accelerated naval construction program (the Third and Fourth Replenishment Plans) that began in 1937 included carriers and advanced-model aircraft in the mix.

Between 1937 and 1941, in addition to one super battleship, six cruisers, and a number of destroyers and submarines, Japan added to her strength four fleet carriers:
Akagi
(a conversion), embarking 104 aircraft;
Hiryu,
73;
Shokaku,
84; and
Zuikaku,
84. In addition, she added three light fleet carriers:
Taiyo, Chuyo,
and
Unyo,
each embarking 27 aircraft. Altogether, during the nineteen years that passed since the Washington Treaty of 1922, the Japanese almost doubled the size of their Navy in terms of tonnage. By 1941 her naval forces slightly exceeded in number the U.S. Pacific Fleet in all categories excepting carriers, where her then existing six fleet and four light fleet carriers greatly outnumbered the U.S. Pacific Fleet's three—a testament to the enterprise of Yamamoto and Inoue.
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Their influence can also be discerned in the design and manufacture of new models of aircraft for the carriers. The premier dive-bomber in production by 1941 was the Aichi Type 99 (D3A1 to D3A2), which the Americans and British code-named “Val.” The first-line torpedo bomber was the Nakajima Type 97 (B5N1 to B5N2), known to the West as “Kate.” The Type 97 was also employed as a high-altitude level (horizontal) bomber. And the primary carrier-based fighter was the Mitsubishi Type 0 (A6M2 to A6M8) “Zero” or “Zeke.” (Type numbers corresponded to the last one or two digits of the first production year in the Japanese calendar, according to which the year 1940 was 2600. Hence the Nakajima Type 97 was brought into service in 1937, and the Mitsubishi Type 0 was first produced in 1940.) The Zero was unquestionably the finest carrier fighter afloat at the outbreak of the Pacific war, when its speed, rate of climb, maneuverability, range, and firepower made it superior to any American fighter, carrier or land based, Navy or Army, including the Navy's first-line Grumman F4F Wildcat. Its sole weaknesses were the absence of self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection for the pilot. The naval air arm was divided into flotillas, two or more of which formed an air fleet. By December 1941 there were two air fleets in being. The 1st Air Fleet was carrier-borne. Its 500 pilots, the cream of naval aviation, had about 800 hours flying time each, many of those hours in combat over China. There was no mightier shipborne air force in the world. Its destiny was to attack Pearl Harbor. The 11th Air Fleet was land-based. With about the same number of pilots, the 11th would accompany the southern operation. The entire inventory of operational aircraft at the end of 1941 was estimated at 3,400.

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A man sometimes of seeming contradictions, Yamamoto did not want to take the aerial armada he had assembled to war against the United States and Britain, each of which, he knew, would quickly rally to help the other. In the course of such a conflict, he stated freely, America would soon outbuild Japan, hence in the end defeat her. He would be just as outspoken in his opposition to talk of a Tripartite Pact that would formally link Japan to the aggressor states Germany and Italy. During the year before that axis was formed, on 27 September 1940, when extreme nationalists in Japan were pushing for the pact, Navy Minister Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa insisted that Yamamoto be accompanied everywhere by armed plainclothes police, lest he be eliminated from the scene by rightist assassins. In the end, Yonai, who agreed with Yamamoto's view, decided that the only way to save his life was to send him off to sea.
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Thus, on 30 August 1939, Yamamoto, who had served under four successive governments as Navy vice minister, donned his formal white uniform with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, First Class, upon the left breast, and presented himself at the Imperial Palace to be invested with Japan's highest command at sea, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. He would retain for now the rank of vice admiral.

Back at the redbrick building that housed the ministry, the new commanding officer, equivalent to the U.S. Navy's commander in chief, United States Fleet (CINCUS), held a press conference at which he stated: “For a navy man, the post of C. in C. of the Combined Fleet is the greatest honor possible.… I feel overwhelmed at the great task with which I have been so undeservedly entrusted, but I mean to do my humble best in the service of His Imperial Majesty.”
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In honor of the occasion the teetotaler CINC downed a beer in a single draft.

Yamamoto took formal command of the Combined Fleet on board his flagship, the battleship
Nagato,
on 1 September 1939. It was the same day on which Germany invaded Poland, launching the Second World War. Yamamoto at once tightened training exercises and placed the 40,000 officers and men in his command on notice that they must prepare for any eventuality. Training was conducted in daylight, twilight, night, and early dawn. Gunnery drills took place off Sukumo and Cape Ashizuri. Carrier aircraft launches were made off Yokosuka. Wintertime torpedo attacks were rehearsed at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea. But the training was not relentless, since Yamamoto, like all fleet commanders, knew that after four straight weeks of constant and intense work, efficiency declined and accidents increased. So rest and recuperation periods were regularly scheduled at Kure, Sasebo, and Beppu. All knowledgeable observers agreed that, after a year under Yamamoto's discipline, the Combined Fleet was in its highest-ever state of readiness.

In September 1940, the new Navy Minister, Admiral Oikawa Koshiro, summoned the Navy's highest-ranking admirals to a conference in Tokyo. Oikawa wanted everyone's consent to the signing of the Tripartite Pact. All present nodded agreement. Yamamoto was the only one to speak: “I haven't the slightest intention of raising any objections to steps on which the minister has already decided,” he said, resignedly. But, in the
praeteritio
style of Cicero, he did object by warning that America and Britain, from whose territories Japan imported 80 percent of her raw materials, were likely to embargo those materials in response to the pact. Then what would Japan do? The anger he hid at the conference came out in a letter he sent afterward to Admiral Shimada Shigetaro, who commanded the China Area Fleet: “At this stage, to express shock and indignation at American economic pressure is either childishly impetuous or … extraordinary inattentiveness to recent events.”
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It was during this same visit to Tokyo that Yamamoto met with Prime Minister Prince Konoye Fumimaro, himself a moderate who sought to resolve Japanese-U.S. tensions through diplomatic negotiation, and to Konoye's question, How would the navy fare in the event of a war with America, made his famous answer: “If we are ordered to do it, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”
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