The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (6 page)

Yamamoto was skeptical. Speaking to a class of air cadets in 1934, he compared battleships to the expensive artwork that wealthy Japanese families displayed in their living rooms: they had no particular function, he said, except to serve as “decorations.” Yamamoto’s rivals in the fleet faction were infuriated. They hadn’t forgotten that he had been a delegate to two naval arms limitation conferences, and his two tours as Japan’s naval attaché in Washington made him suspect in their eyes. His apostasy concerning the utility of battleships was simply one more reason to distrust and even despise him.
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Yamamoto himself was a member of the treaty faction, which also included Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa. Yonai and Yamamoto held that the key overall effect of the 1922 treaty was to restrain the United States from using its overwhelming industrial superiority to outbuild the Imperial Navy, which would have placed Japan at a far more disadvantageous position than the treaty did. With the backing of the emperor, Yonai served as prime minister for six months in the first half of 1940. His efforts to promote an accommodation with the Americans were anathema to the
Kōdōha
, however, and he was the target of several assassination attempts. In July 1940, he was replaced by Prince Konoe, who was more sympathetic to the ambitions of the
Kōdōha
and the fleet faction.

The Army was suspicious of Yamamoto, too, and officially assigned a group of men to “guard” him, though their real task was to keep an eye on him. As vice minister of the Navy, Yamamoto lived in constant expectation of being murdered, and he avoided one assassination attempt only by leaving town at the right moment. Indeed, his appointment to command the Combined Fleet in 1939 was engineered by his friends in the hope that sending him to sea would save him from being killed in his bed. The appointment satisfied his enemies in the Army and the fleet faction because it got him out of Tokyo. Yamamoto was aware of the motives behind his appointment, but he did not protest. “I can turn my back on everything else,” he wrote to a friend, “and devote myself entirely to naval matters.”
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Yamamoto took up his new duties as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet on September 1, 1939, the very day Germany invaded Poland marking the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. To those pushing for closer ties with Germany, this was more evidence of the vigor and clear-sightedness of the Nazi regime, and they renewed their advocacy of an alliance with Hitler’s government. It had the opposite effect on Yamamoto. Only three days after assuming command, he wrote a fellow admiral, “I shudder as I think of the problem of Japan’s relations with Germany and Italy.” He was convinced that an alliance with Germany meant war with the West, including the United States, and insisted that “a war between Japan and the United States would be a major calamity.” His concerns fell on deaf ears. One year later, Japan signed what became known as the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, and a year after that the Army’s domination of the government became complete when General Tōjō Hideki became both war minister and prime minister. By then the descent into war had generated its own unstoppable momentum.
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Yamamoto was realistic enough to see that, whatever his own views, once Japan signed the Tripartite Pact war became inevitable, and it was his professional duty to prepare for it. As the government’s statement of fundamental principles put it: “Since war with the United States may become unavoidable, sufficient preparations must be made for this eventuality.” Just as American naval officers designed their war games around Plan Orange and modeled their summer exercises on imagined confrontations with the Japanese fleet, so, too, did Japanese officers—Yamamoto included—conduct their war games and fleet exercises in the assumption that the U.S. Navy was the likely enemy. As early as 1934, Lieutenant Genda Minoru, who was already emerging as one of the Imperial Navy’s most original thinkers, wrote a paper at the Navy Staff College with the title “Naval Armament Essential for the Effective Prosecution of War with the United States.”
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For Yamamoto, Genda, and other Navy planners, the question was how to structure the Navy so that it could win such a war. The traditional assumption, in Japan as well as in the United States, was that the war would culminate in a classic battleship engagement somewhere in the western Pacific. What the Japanese needed was a way to whittle down the American fleet as it moved toward this inevitable confrontation so that the smaller Japanese battle fleet could emerge victorious. To do that, Japan counted heavily on its fleet submarines and on land-based aircraft. The Japanese vastly improved their submarine capability in part by studying German World War I submarines, and they simultaneously focused on building a new generation of long-range, multiengine aircraft. According to the Japanese war plan, the American warships would be picked off one by one by submarines, or damaged by land-based aircraft operating from a web of island bases, until the opposing fleets were near parity. Massed torpedo attacks by destroyers and cruisers the night before the battle would weaken the Americans further, and in the final battle, superior Japanese fighting spirit (
Yamato damashii
) would determine the outcome.
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Yamamoto himself devoted much time and energy to the development of a long-range, land-based bomber. First in 1935 came the Mitsubishi G3M, which the Allies dubbed the “Nell,” a big two-engine bomber that at 200 knots (230 mph) had an impressive range of over 3,500 miles, so that it could patrol widely over the central Pacific to search out American warships and damage or sink them. Then in 1939 came the G4M1, which the Allies called the “Betty.” The Betty had better armament than the Nell and at 230 knots (265 mph) was slightly faster, but both planes were vulnerable, for in order to increase range, the designers sacrificed both armor and self-sealing fuel tanks. A few Japanese advocates of air power, such as Rear Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, believed that land-based aircraft could successfully defend Japan’s island empire without the assistance of the fleet. Inoue went so far as to argue for the abolition of both battleships
and
carriers and for investing the nation’s treasure exclusively in land-based bombers. Yamamoto would not go that far. He supported the development of land-based aircraft, but he also backed the production of more and bigger aircraft carriers.
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Organizationally, Japan’s aircraft carriers were grouped into carrier divisions (CarDivs) of two carriers each. CarDiv 1 was composed of Japan’s two biggest carriers, the
Kaga
and
Akagi
. Both were accidents of circumstance. The terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty had allocated the United States and Great Britain a maximum of 525,000 tons of battleships each, while Japan was limited to 315,000 tons. Quite apart from the perceived national humiliation of those limits, one practical problem was that Japan had several new battleships and battle cruisers under construction at the time, and their completion meant Japan would exceed the limits imposed on her by the treaty. That treaty, however, allowed both Japan and the United States to convert two of their big ships into carriers.
*

Until then, carriers had been relatively small, displacing 10,000 to 12,000 tons each and carrying only enough airplanes to provide cover for the battleships. But these new carriers were constructed on top of capital-ship hulls, and they were enormous. Displacing over 40,000 tons each when fully loaded, they had flight decks over 800 feet long. Together these two behemoths could carry as many as 182 airplanes. One drawback was that because of their large armored hulls, they were also relatively slow. The sleeker battle-cruiser hull of the
Akagi
allowed her to make a respectable 31 knots, but the heavy armored battleship hull of the
Kaga
kept her to a top speed of 28 knots. This compared unfavorably with the 33-knot speed of America’s big carriers.
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The 1922 treaty also affected the size and capability of Japan’s next carrier, though in a different way. Because
Kaga
and
Akagi
took up such a large percentage of Japan’s available tonnage for carriers (81,000 tons), Japanese designers tried to build a carrier that displaced less than 10,000 tons in order to squeeze it in under the treaty’s definition of a capital ship. It didn’t work. The
Ryūjō
, laid down in 1929 and commissioned in 1933, simply could not accommodate all the necessary functions with so small a hull, and during construction her displacement crept up to 12,500 tons, though this was kept a secret at the time so that Japan would not be found in violation of the treaty.

In December of 1936, when the government formally renounced the Washington Treaty, Japan embarked on a naval expansion program that produced four new big-deck carriers in as many years: the
Sōryū
and the
Hiryū
, each of them displacing just under 20,000 tons when fully loaded and capable of carrying sixty-three airplanes each, and the
Shōkaku
and
Zuikaku
, at 32,000 tons and capable of carrying seventy-two planes each. These last two were commissioned in 1941, only four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the end of 1941, the Japanese had a total of ten carriers, which were collectively capable of carrying over six hundred airplanes.
*

The idea that Japan’s six biggest carriers should operate as a single task group may have originated with Genda Minoru, a precocious and outspoken advocate of air power, who claimed that he got the idea while watching a U.S. Navy promotional film of all four of America’s carriers steaming together. The film was merely a publicity shot for the movie-house newsreels, but Genda saw at once that deploying carriers that way for battle would allow a naval power to apply Mahanian principles of fleet concentration to air warfare. The formal proposal came from Genda’s superior, Rear Admiral Ozawa Jisaburō, commander of Carrier Division 1, who proposed in 1940 that all Japanese naval air assets, both land-based and sea-based, be placed under a unified command as the First Air Fleet. Yamamoto was initially cool to the idea, and he was a bit miffed when Ozawa went over his head to propose it directly to the Navy Ministry. But after the Naval General Staff approved it in April, 1941, Yamamoto willingly implemented the new organization. Five months later, when the new
Shōkaku
and
Zuikaku
joined the fleet, he grouped all six of the big carriers into a single command—the Kidō Butai.
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The commander of this awesome concentration of naval air power was Vice Admiral Nagumo Chūichi. Four years younger than Yamamoto (the same age difference as between Ernie King and Chester Nimitz), Nagumo was a graduate of the Torpedo School, and for most of his career had been affiliated with the fleet faction, less because of a strong commitment to its ideology than because it was the dominant faction of the Navy leadership and therefore helpful to him professionally. That put him on the opposite side of most interservice arguments from Yamamoto and contributed to a strained command relationship with his boss. Moreover, unlike the austere and stoic Yamamoto, Nagumo was a worrier by nature who fretted over even small details. Occasionally he would call junior officers into his office to solicit reassurance from them that things were progressing as they should. His official photograph depicts him staring rather perplexedly into the camera lens as if he were unsure why he was there. Genda was unimpressed with him and asserted that although Nagumo “was thought to be very gallant and brave[.] actually he was very cautious.” Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Ugaki Matome, agreed, confiding to his diary that Nagumo was insufficiently bold to be a successful commander. “He is not fully prepared yet to advance in the face of death and gain results two or three times as great as his cost by jumping into the jaws of death.” Nagumo, in short, was no gambler.
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