The Battle of Midway (Pivotal Moments in American History) (7 page)

Vice Admiral Nagumo Chūichi commanded the six big carriers of the Fleet Striking Force—the Kidō Butai—from the attack on Pearl Harbor through the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

If Nagumo was not prepared to “jump into the jaws of death,” Yamamoto was. It was the gambler Yamamoto who conceived of, and then insisted upon, the Pearl Harbor operation. The government made the decision for war in October of 1941. While it was true enough that “those damn fools in the Army” (to repeat Yamamoto’s phrase) were the initial champions of war, junior and middle-grade officers of the Imperial Navy’s fleet faction proved enthusiastic partners. By 1941 opposing war within the Navy had become, in the words of one admiral, “like rowing a boat against the current … above Niagara Falls.” To gain access to the resources of South Asia, the plan was to strike south and occupy not only the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, including its citadel at Singapore, but also the American-held Philippines. The planners accepted the fact that this meant war with Britain, Holland, and the United States, but they were not deterred.
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Yamamoto insisted that since Japan was to fight the United States, it was essential to begin with a preemptive strike against the American battle fleet. “The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S.,” he wrote to the Navy Ministry in January 1941, “is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the U.S. Navy and her people goes down to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.” When members of the Naval General Staff balked at so dramatic a move, Yamamoto let it be known that unless his plan was adopted, he and his entire staff would resign. That settled the matter. Though the strategic objective was the resource base in South Asia, the war would begin with an attack on Pearl Harbor, and the instrument of that strike would be the Kidō Butai under Nagumo Chūichi.
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When the six carriers of the Kidō Butai departed the Kurile Islands in the far north of Japan for Pearl Harbor, their hangar decks were packed with some of the best combat aircraft in the world. Airplane development in Japan had come a long way in a short time. Though Japan had begun designing and building her own battleships as early as 1910, she did not cast off her dependence on foreign designers and begin to produce her own combat aircraft until 1932. All-metal monoplanes replaced the cloth-covered biplanes that had been the mainstay of Japanese (and American) naval air power. Though the aircraft industry in Japan was putatively private, the government asserted more and more control over production after the beginning of the China Incident in 1937.
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The war in China proved both a blessing and a curse for Japanese aircraft design. It gave Japanese designers and engineers a vital testing ground for their combat aircraft. However, the experience also led the Japanese to underestimate the importance of armor protection and to place undue emphasis on range and maneuverability. Most technologies are a product of the culture that spawns them. The decision to minimize the importance of armor derived from a Japanese worldview that valued attack over protection. As a result, Japanese airplanes carried heavy armament but little armor; they could fly long distances on a single tank of fuel, but those fuel tanks were not self-sealing, which meant that a single bullet could ignite an explosion. Japanese combat aircraft were lighter and more nimble and had greater combat range than their Western counterparts, but they were also much more vulnerable.

Another weakness was that even in 1941 much of the work in Japan’s aircraft factories was still done piecemeal, by hand. One modern expert estimates that “half of all riveting and one-third of all sheet-metal processing in the Japanese aircraft industry was done by hand.” That was due in part to the fact that Japan was still industrializing in the 1930s, but another major factor was the Japanese preference for quality over quantity. It seemed more important to them to have one hundred airplanes of the highest quality than two hundred that were merely adequate.
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This mindset helped make Japan’s carrier airplanes among the best in the world, and this in turn contributed to the decision to go to war with the United States in the first place. It also meant that once the war began, Japan would be unable to produce replacement airplanes quickly or in large numbers. During 1941, even as Japan prepared to start a war that had already been decided upon, its aviation industry was producing only about 162 airplanes a month. By contrast, Roosevelt called for the construction of 4,000 planes a month in 1942, and by the following year U.S. plants were turning out 10,000 planes a month. Japanese industry was simply incapable of matching such productivity.
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In December of 1941, however, Japan’s leaders ignored this inherent weakness. Like Confederate soldiers in 1861 who believed that one Reb could whip five Yanks, they were convinced that
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could overcome both numbers and industrial superiority. “You could quote them figures till you were blue in the face,” one officer remembered later of the Japanese high command, “but they’d have none of it.” This is what Navy Captain Ōi Atsushi meant when he wrote after the war, “The Japanese people are romantic and illogical.”
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Japan’s 1,800 frontline carrier aircraft in 1941 were divided into three types: dive-bombers, carrier attack planes (which could carry either bombs or a torpedo), and fighters. The dive-bomber was the Aichi D3A1 Type 99, nicknamed the “Val” by Allied naval intelligence.
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A two-seat monoplane, with a pilot in front and a radioman/gunner in the rear seat, the Val carried one 250-kilogram (551-pound) bomb and two smaller (60 kg) bombs under the wings. It borrowed some design elements from Japan’s new ally, having an elliptical wing like the German Heinkel and fixed landing gear like the Stuka. It proved a very reliable weapon in China against ground targets and weak opposition, but its indifferent speed of 205 knots (242 mph) would make it vulnerable to American fighters in the war to come.

More impressive, and more central to Japanese doctrine, was the Nakajima B5N2 Type 97 carrier attack plane, which the Allies dubbed the “Kate.” The Kate could function as a level bomber, but it was deadliest when used as a torpedo plane. Indeed, it was very likely the best torpedo plane in the world. It had a crew of three and could handle a bomb load of over 800 kilograms (1,764 pounds), which meant that it could carry either a heavy fragmentation bomb for attacks against land targets or the new Type 91 aerial torpedo. Though the Americans had not used live torpedoes in peacetime training because of the expense, the Japanese did, and this led to improvements that paid off in wartime. The Type 91 torpedo boasted wooden tailfins that kept it stabilized during the air drop and then broke away when it hit the water. It traveled at a speed of 42 knots (nearly 10 knots faster than American torpedoes) and had great accuracy thanks to an internal gyroscope. The one weakness of the airplane that carried this powerful weapon was that, like most other Japanese combat airplanes, the Kate was mostly unarmored, so that while it packed an impressive offensive punch, even minor damage was often fatal.
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The Japanese B5N2 Type 97 carrier attack plane, called the “Kate” by the allies, was the best torpedo plane in the world in 1942, especially when carrying the big Type 91 aerial torpedo, seen here. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The third component of the Japanese carrier triad was the Mitsubishi A6M2 Type 00 fighter. Officially the Americans named this the “Zeke,” but nearly everyone called it by the name that is remembered by history: the Zero. This iconic airplane of the Pacific war came about because of Japan’s desire to provide bombers in China with long-range fighter support. In the fall of 1937, the Japanese set out to build a monoplane fighter with both longer range and heavier weapons. When it debuted in 1940, the Zero was a zippy little sports car of a fighter. It had not only a longer range than any other fighter—even land-based fighters—but it could climb faster and turn sharper. Moreover, in addition to its two machine guns, it carried two 20 mm cannon in the wings, which meant that like the Kate it packed a terrific offensive punch. One problem was that these cannon fired only sixty rounds before running out, making extended combat operations difficult unless the pilots hoarded their ammunition. On some occasions, the Zeros had to land to reload after a relatively short flight. And while the Zero had an impressive maximum speed of 287 knots (330 mph), its light airframe meant that it could not dive as fast as the sturdier American fighters; American pilots learned that the best way to escape a Zero on their tail was to dive straight down. Nonetheless, Japanese pilots reveled in the acrobatic abilities of their nimble little fighter plane, and early in the war they had an unmistakable advantage over their American counterparts, especially at low altitudes. But once again their lack of armor made them vulnerable. Like so many Japanese combat planes, the Zero was all offense and no defense.
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