The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (5 page)

Nimitz was eager to use the submarines right away. An old submarine hand himself, he held his change-of-command ceremony on board the submarine
Grayling
(SS-209) on the last day of the year. He did so not only because of his longtime association with submarines but also to boost the morale of the so-called silent service. Given the fact that the U.S. had gone to war against Germany in 1917 ostensibly because of Germany’s conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare, it is ironic that the first operational command sent out in December 1941 was the one to “EXECUTE UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE AND AIR WAR AGAINST JAPAN.”
²⁷

Before the war was over, American submarines would take a terrible toll on the Japanese Navy and on her merchant fleet, and play an important role in several major surface actions as well, including Midway. But in the first year of the war, their impact was compromised by the fact that their torpedoes didn’t work. The American Mark 14 torpedo was equipped with an advanced magnetic proximity detonator that was designed to run underneath the target vessel and explode when it recognized the iron hull of the ship above it. Though no one in the Navy knew it in December 1941, the torpedoes ran eleven feet deeper than the specifications indicated, which was often too deep for the warheads to register the magnetic anomaly of a ship’s hull. Even after some sub skippers changed the settings so the torpedoes didn’t run so deep, the warheads often failed to detonate. Some torpedoes actually struck an enemy ship only to bounce off the hull with a perceptible metallic clang and sink. Finally, the torpedoes were so erratic that their course was unpredictable, a few of them running in a circle, targeting the sub that had fired them.

There were two explanations for these catastrophic failures. The main one was that the peacetime Bureau of Ordnance had been underfunded during the Depression years, and, since the torpedoes cost ten thousand dollars each, the Bureau forbade live-fire testing. The second explanation was that the cutting-edge magnetic warhead was classified SECRET, and, according to the official postwar history, “security … became such a fetish, that measures designed to protect [the magnetic warhead] from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations.” The result was a torpedo that often simply failed to detonate. On the very day that Nimitz arrived in Pearl Harbor, Commander Tyrell D. Jacobs, in command of the submarine
Sargo
(SS-188), fired eight torpedoes at three different ships from close range and scored no hits. He could not believe that he had missed and notified his superiors that there had to be something wrong with the torpedoes. Officers in BuOrd attributed his failure to bad shooting. Even after other skippers reported similar problems, the Bureau continued to insist that it was due to human error and not technical failure. Nimitz himself finally ordered deactivation of the magnetic proximity detonators in June of 1943, eighteen months after the war began.
²⁸

These were the tools that Nimitz had to hand when he assumed command of the American Pacific Fleet: a battleship fleet that rested on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, three carriers with a theoretical capacity of 264 airplanes, a handful of cruisers and destroyers, and a submarine fleet whose torpedoes did not work. The arrival of the
Yorktown
from the Atlantic would give him a fourth carrier, but because of the Allied commitment to Germany First, as well as the industrial production schedule, he had little prospect of getting any other meaningful reinforcement anytime soon. In the weeks and months ahead he would have to decide how best to use these tools to contest Japanese domination of the Pacific, careful to preserve what he had, yet not so cautious that he conceded the Pacific to the enemy.

Throughout that period, to all outward appearances, Nimitz maintained a cool, confident demeanor that lifted the spirits of those about him. It was an act, for he was beset by unrelenting anxiety. Though he worked hard all day, at night sleep refused to come. On the day he assumed formal command as CinCPac, he wrote his wife, “I have still not reached the point where I can sleep well because there is so much going on and so much to do.” He felt like he was on “a treadmill whirling around actively but not getting anywhere very fast,” and even after a month, he confessed to her, “I do feel depressed a large part of the time.”
²⁹

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, the Japanese celebrated what certainly looked like a decisive victory at Pearl Harbor, and they had already embarked on a campaign to consolidate their triumphs by establishing what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: an empire that stretched from China to the mid-Pacific, and from Alaska to Australia. At the heart of this Japanese success was the group of six Japanese aircraft carriers that had executed the attack on Pearl Harbor, a force known as the Kidō Butai.

*
More than fifteen hundred Americans were taken prisoner by the Japanese when the island fell. Most of them (1,146) were civilian construction workers; the others included 368 Marines, 65 Navy men, and five Army soldiers. Most were transported to Japanese POW camps where they remained—those who survived—until 1945. A hundred or so of the construction workers were retained on Wake, and in 1943, when it looked like the island might be recaptured by the Americans, the survivors were lined up and shot.

*
In fact, these old battleships were too slow to operate with the much faster carrier and cruiser forces and needed significant modification even to fulfill their eventual role as shore bombardment vessels.

2

The Kidō Butai

T
ranslated literally, the Japanese term Kidō Butai means “Mobile Force,” though the spirit of the term is better understood as “Attack Force,” or “Strike Force.” Composed of six large aircraft carriers plus two fast battleships, and screened by a dozen cruisers and destroyers, it was the most powerful concentration of naval air power in the world. The American practice was to operate carriers singly, putting each one at the center of an independent task force as Kimmel had done with the
Saratoga
for the aborted relief mission to Wake Island. That meant that an American task force could put ninety airplanes in the air at most, though sixty was more realistic. With the Kidō Butai, however, the Japanese put all their eggs into one basket, operating six heavy carriers as a single unit that, theoretically at least, could put 412 airplanes aloft at the same time. For the attack on Pearl Harbor, they had launched 350 aircraft.
¹

The man who had conceived that attack was the commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. A somewhat enigmatic figure in the history of the Pacific war, Yamamoto was neither physically intimidating nor particularly aggressive. At five foot three he barely met the minimum height standard for admission to the naval academy at Eta Jima, and he possessed what one fellow officer called an “almost feminine delicacy,” a characterization that was intended as a compliment. He was both keenly intelligent and fiercely ambitious, traits that contributed to his boundless self-confidence. He was also something of a maverick; one recent scholar remarked on his “pronounced individuality.” While serving two tours as the Japanese naval attaché in Washington, he had taken courses at Harvard University and traveled extensively throughout the United States. He was one of a very few Japanese naval officers who supported flight training, believing strongly that aviation was key to the future of naval warfare. Subsequently, he commanded both the aircraft carrier
Akagi
(1928–29) and the First Carrier Division (1933–34). He shared at least one characteristic with Chester Nimitz: he had a quiet confidence and austerity that led others to defer to him. One associate noted that “however difficult the question, he always appeared totally unperturbed,” though an American officer who knew him before the war claimed, “You could see it if something irritated him for his eyes would become hard and cold.”
²

Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, shown here in his official portrait, was a maverick in the Imperial Japanese Navy who seemed to enjoy imposing his daring plans on the Army and Navy hierarchy. (U.S. Naval Institute)

In other ways, however, Yamamoto was quite different from his dour American counterpart. He was something of a showman, even a show-off, and frequently acted as if he were deliberately tempting fate. With very little encouragement, he would perform daring gymnastic feats, such as standing on his hands on a ship’s railing. One of his most salient characteristics was his fondness for (perhaps even obsession with) games of chance. Though he was proficient at games of skill such as
shogi
and chess, he was infatuated with the Japanese game of
go
and American poker. (Chester Nimitz’s favorite card game was cribbage.) Yamamoto would bet on almost anything and did so often, sometimes bullying subordinates into betting against him. He could play poker for hours, foregoing sleep and playing literally around the clock. That willingness to tempt fate may also have contributed to his remarkable candor. In a society in which a misspoken word might become the start of a bitter feud, he tended to speak his mind openly even when it offended powerful elements within the government. Indeed, he seemed to relish this risky high-wire act. This last quality was particularly evident during the 1930s when Yamamoto assumed great professional and personal risk by expressing opposition to the political and strategic agenda of the Japanese Army.
³

It is impossible to understand the origins of the Pacific War without appreciating both the extraordinary influence the Army had on Japanese government policy, and the intensity of the rivalry between the Army and Navy over the direction of that policy. Because the cabinet ministers representing the armed services had to be active-duty officers, the Japanese Army or Navy could topple a government merely by withdrawing its minister. Though the Navy seldom availed itself of this gambit, the Army did—or at least threatened to do so—unless its policies were adopted. The practical result was that by the mid-1930s, the Army effectively controlled the government. Most Navy officers resented this. Yamamoto himself once incautiously referred to “those damn fools in the Army,” and as a result some marked him as an obstacle to Japan’s emergence as a great power.
⁴

Virtually all Japanese Army officers sought to strengthen the armed forces and increase their role in national politics. There was disagreement, however, about how to bring this about. The dominant Army faction was the
Tōseiha
(Control Faction), whose members sought to work within the existing framework of government. But an extremist element known as the
Kōdōha
(Imperial Way Faction) was impatient with the slow pace of change and the perceived obstructionism of the bureaucracy. These “Spirit Warriors” sought to lead the nation to glory by championing an idealized, mythological past. While claiming to revere the emperor, they were also determined that he adopt their expansionist views. They were perfectly willing, even eager, to take unilateral action. In 1931 Japanese soldiers detonated a small explosion near the Japanese-controlled railroad in Manchuria, and the Army used that “attack” as a justification for the occupation of Manchuria. In July 1937 a brief exchange of fire between Chinese and Japanese soldiers near the Marco Polo Bridge provided a pretext for what was called “the China Incident”—in fact, a full-scale war of conquest. Many Army officers also admired the vitality and ambition of Hitler’s regime in Germany and advocated a military alliance with the Third Reich. Those who opposed these views risked public criticism and disparagement—or worse, for members of the
Kōdōha
did not shrink from assassinating government ministers whom they saw as trying to thwart their aspirations. More often than not, the assassins were merely chastised rather than punished, as if extreme patriotism somehow excused their actions.

On February 26, 1936, a group of junior Army officers forced their way into the office of the minister of finance and murdered him. They also killed the lord privy seal and the inspector general of education. They invaded the home of Prime Minister Okada Keisuke, intending to assassinate him, too, though in their fervor they inadvertently killed his brother-in-law instead. Their goal, they insisted, was patriotic: to protect the emperor from ministers who did not understand the Imperial Way as Army officers did.
*

This time there were consequences. After a series of trials, seventeen of the killers were executed, and other members of the
Kōdōha
were purged from the Army. Even so, the episode did not slow the Army’s growing control over policy; having punished the leaders of the February 26 coup, the Army now argued that it had to be even stronger to protect the government from future coup attempts.
⁵

The Imperial Army’s increasing domination over government policy had disastrous consequences for Japan. Army leaders insisted on resolving the China Incident—that is, completing the conquest of China, an ambition that was jeopardized by a growing scarcity of strategic materials, especially oil. Because Japan’s traditional source of oil—the United States—was increasingly unreliable, Japanese leaders convinced themselves that it was necessary to move southward to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. In August 1936, the government formally adopted a document entitled “Fundamental Principles of National Policy,” which established the goal of becoming “in name and in fact a stabilizing power for assuring peace in East Asia, thereby ultimately contributing to the peace and welfare of humanity.” The Japanese presented this to the Americans as a kind of Japanese Monroe Doctrine, though in practice it signaled their intent to dominate East Asia and the western Pacific. To prepare for wars in two directions, both the Army and Navy were to be expanded. For the Army this meant more active divisions; for the Navy it meant formal abandonment of the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty. The Imperial Japanese Navy had long resented this agreement, which restricted the Japanese to a battleship force only 60 percent as large as that of either Britain or the United States. Its abandonment now made possible the construction of a new and greatly enlarged fleet, including new battleships and aircraft carriers.
⁶

The rivalry in the Army between the
Tōseiha
and the
Kōdōha
was mirrored in the Navy by competition between the so-called treaty faction and the fleet faction. Members of the latter embraced two ideas almost as articles of faith. The first was that the United States was Japan’s logical, even inevitable, enemy; and the second was that because war with America was inevitable, it was essential for Japan to maintain a battle force that was at least 70 percent as large as the American battle force. Many officers believed that the 60 percent ratio imposed on them by the Washington Treaty was not only a national insult but also undermined Japan’s security, and even her sovereignty. So widespread was this view among junior and middle-grade officers that some admirals feared that taking a contrary position would incite mutiny. The emperor himself worried that the Navy would “no longer be able to control its officers” and was “jeopardizing vital diplomatic issues for the sake of placating subordinate officers.”
⁷

Because the British and Americans did not build their own navies up to the limits imposed on them by the 1922 treaty, Japan was able to maintain her fleet at a level that was roughly 70 percent that of the United States Navy despite the treaty. It was evident, though, that if the Americans did suddenly decide to expand their Navy to the treaty limits, any serious effort to match that expansion would bankrupt Japan. Therefore, members of the fleet faction sought to overcome America’s quantitative advantage by focusing on quality—that is, by building ships of such size and power that they could outrange or overwhelm American battleships. They supported the secret construction of four Yamato-class battleships, which, at 73,000 tons each when fully equipped, would be more than twice as big as the largest American battleship. The project was hugely expensive and commanded a disproportionate share of the national budget, but it allowed the champions of the fleet faction to argue that they had an answer to America’s numerical and industrial superiority.