Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  On the morning of December 11, Benito Mussolini spoke from a balcony overlooking the Piazza Venezia in Rome, declaring to a rapturous throng that the “powers of the pact of steel” would prevail over the democracies. Hitler spoke before the Reichstag that afternoon at 3 p.m. The Führer’s speech was typically strident and convoluted, a ninety-minute performance laced with sarcasm, paranoia, invective, menace, and plaintive appeals to Germany’s victimhood and good intentions. Paragraphs were expended in bile directed against the Soviet Union and Great Britain. He spoke at length on the Wehrmacht victories on the eastern front in the first six months of the Nazi-Soviet War, without admitting to the recent setbacks in the siege of Moscow.

  When he turned to the United States, Hitler fastened his wrath on the figure of Roosevelt as a member of the “Upper Ten Thousand,” a representative of “the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies . . . this meddling gentleman . . . this honest warmonger . . . the man who is the main culprit of this war.” The war, declared the Führer, had been arranged and provoked by a small circle of bankers and plutocrats, mostly American and Jewish, who had employed Roosevelt as their agent. Hitler congratulated Japan on having been “the first to take the step of protest against his historically unique and shameless ill-treatment of truth,” for the attack on Pearl Harbor had filled “the German people, and I think, all other decent people in the world, with deep satisfaction.”

  The declaration of war came in roundabout fashion, well over an hour after Hitler had taken the rostrum. “I have therefore arranged for his passports to be handed to the American Chargé d’Affaires today, and the following . . .” and at this point the expectant deputies drowned the Führer’s words in applause. “The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots—that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.” The Axis powers, the Führer announced, had concluded an agreement which bound the three partners not to lay down their arms until they had subjugated and destroyed “the Anglo-Saxon–Jewish–Capitalist World.”

  In Washington, the counterdeclarations came quickly and without debate. The vote was unanimous in both houses of Congress. In signing the measures, Roosevelt said that the Allies were engaged in a single, integrated, global conflict across land and sea in every corner of the world. “The forces endeavoring to enslave the entire world now are moving towards this hemisphere.” The war would require a long, hard struggle against “the forces of savagery and barbarism.”

  The Axis propagandists had caricatured America as helplessly splintered by race, ethnicity, class, and creed; as a pampered, luxury-loving society in which the only cause that aroused the people was the pursuit of the almighty dollar; as a nation of loafers and malingerers, overpaid, overfed, and over-enfranchised, in which politicians went with hats in hand to receive the benediction of union bosses. To their eyes, the United States was a sprawling, individualistic, leisure-loving nation, strung out on jazz, movies, baseball, comic strips, horse racing, and radio comedies—anything but work, and certainly not the work of marching off to war. It was a nation enfeebled by divided government, with power impotently shared by the president and Congress and law courts, all constantly put upon by an insolent, unbridled press. Americans were a parochial, self-absorbed, inward-looking people, who could not care less about the rest of the world, who would never consent to spill a drop of blood to defend England, the villainous oppressor of their revolutionary heritage; or Russia, the nerve center of global communism; or any part of Asia, a place so distant and alien it could have been in another galaxy.

  The critique was shallow and disingenuous, a collage of crude stereotypes and half-truths. But even in America one heard self-criticism along similar lines, and the nation was clearly unprepared to confront the Axis in 1941. The American people did not like the naked aggression of Germany and Japan, and a majority favored Roosevelt’s policy of providing munitions and material support to their victims. But entering the war was a very unpopular prospect. In a Gallup poll taken less than two months before Pearl Harbor, only 17 percent of Americans had favored war with Germany. There was open talk of mass desertions from the army, encapsulated in the mutinous acronym “OHIO,” or “Over the hill in October.” In August, the House had voted to extend the peacetime draft by the 1-vote margin of 203 to 202. The isolationist movement actually grew stronger in the weeks leading up to Pearl Harbor, with its leaders shouting to packed public halls that Roosevelt was conspiring to foment war with the Axis. By 1941, the president saw that war was coming but could do nothing more than he had already done to change the temper of the American people. He could only wait for some inciting incident or provocation.

  “The turning point,” Hitler had called the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “A complete shift in the general world picture,” Goebbels had concluded. They were right, but not in the sense they intended. Before December 7, 1941, the American industrial economy, lying completely beyond the reach of Axis bombers or armies, had been the single best hope of the embattled Allies. Only by militarizing that economy, harnessing it entirely to war production, could the power of the Axis be destroyed. But the sprawling republic would never be mobilized or militarized without the consent of the American people. “There was just one thing that they [the Japanese] could do to get Roosevelt completely off the horns of the dilemma,” wrote the presidential speechwriter Bob Sherwood, “and that is precisely what they did, at one stroke, in a manner so challenging, so insulting and enraging, that the divided and confused American people were instantly rendered unanimous and certain.” If the Second World War could be said to have pivoted on a single point, it was not the Battle of Britain, or El Alamein, or Stalingrad, or the fall of Italy. Pearl Harbor, by giving Roosevelt the license to do what needed to be done, sealed the fate of both Germany and Japan.

  Chapter Three

  IN JAPAN, NEWS OF PEARL HARBOR HAD BEEN BROADCAST OVER THE radio: “News special, News special. . . . Beginning this morning before dawn, war has been joined with the Americans and British.” Throughout that bitter cold winter day, traditional patriotic anthems such as the “Battleship March” were interrupted by announcers breaking in with updates. Radios blared from shops and houses: to know the latest, one only had to walk the streets and listen.

  To millions of ordinary Japanese, it felt as if heaven and earth had been torn asunder. Even the date, December 8 (a day later than in the United States), seemed to hold transcendent meaning and power. This was Rohatsu, a day of special significance to Buddhists—the eighth day of the twelfth month, the day Buddha had gazed up at the morning star and realized enlightenment. Even decades later, when recalling the moment, many Japanese harkened back to an intense physical sensation—“as if my blood boiled and my flesh quivered,” said Koshu Itabashi, a middle school student. “I felt like someone had poured cold water on my head,” recalled Lieutenant Toshio Yoshida of the Naval General Staff. “A chill cut right through me. I can feel it now.”

  There was no hint, in the first reports, that the raid on Pearl had been a smashing success, and the voices of the broadcasters were shrill and edgy. Forces were engaged, hostilities had begun; that was the only news at first. Many felt consternation. The United States and Britain were powerful industrialized nations. It seemed improbable that Japan could hold its own against either. But against both simultaneously? With the war in China yet unresolved? “Is it all right to fight a war against such countries?” wondered Ei Hirosawa, a student in Yokohama: “Can we possibly win? What would victory mean? . . . I couldn’t imagine. That was the way I felt as a boy of seventeen.” But doubts soon gave way to growing certainty as the day’s tally was broadcast—the U.S. battle fleet was smashed, sunk, or burning, and Japanese airplanes reigned supreme over the Philippines and Malaya. Later in the war the Japanese news reports would grow increasingly divorced from reality, but in those early days no deception was necessary: the plain facts were as triumphant as whatever fabricatio
ns could have been dreamed up in a propaganda office.

  There was elation and exulting—“Victory! Victory!” they shouted to one another—but perhaps the most conspicuous feeling was one of relief. For almost a year the Japanese people had hung in suspense, poised on the brink of war, as the news referred confusingly to various diplomatic transactions. Now there was decision, clarity, unity. “I was thrilled,” said Ryuichi Yokoyama, a cartoonist for the Asahi Shinbun, one of Tokyo’s major newspapers. “Happy. All the indecisive gloom cleared off just like that.” The war in China had never rallied the Japanese as this war would rally them. China was an Asian neighbor, the source of Japan’s written language, the homeland of Confucius, the cradle of Eastern Buddhism. The war against Britain and the United States was different, or so it was easy to believe—it would be a campaign of liberation against colonial oppressors on behalf of all Asians. It elevated the meaning of the war. Someone, finally, had laid down the gauntlet against the Western imperialists who had always had their way in Asia. “Never in our history had we Japanese felt such pride in ourselves as a race as we did then,” wrote Takao Okuna, a literary critic.

  The emperor Hirohito was dressed for the day in his navy uniform. Upon receiving the news (according to the diary entry of Koichi Kido, the lord privy seal), he was “perfectly calm, unmoved, and self-possessed.” He issued a formal declaration of war in the form of an “imperial rescript,” blaming Britain and the United States for “disturbing the peace of East Asia.” Japan’s long and weary efforts to preserve the peace had been thwarted by the ambitions of the Western powers, who had shown “not the least spirit of conciliation,” but had instead “intensified the economic and political pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission. . . . Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense, has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.” The prime minister, General Hideki Tojo, addressed the nation over the radio. He emphasized that the war would be long and hard. “In order to annihilate this enemy and to construct an unshakable new order of East Asia, we should anticipate a long war.” But there was no doubt Japan would prevail. “For 2,600 years since it was founded, our Empire has never known a defeat.” The day ended with a huge rally outside the walls of the Imperial Palace.

  At the Navy Department in Tokyo, said Lieutenant Yoshida, men “were swaggering up and down the halls, swinging their shoulders. Full of pride.” A special celebratory sweet red-bean soup was served out to the officers on the Naval General Staff. Throughout the fleet and shore stations of the Imperial Japanese Navy, at home and overseas, officers and men crowded into radio rooms to hear the latest updates from the theaters of combat, and let out savage cries of triumph upon hearing each fresh victory report. “To be perfectly honest,” wrote airman Masatake Okumiya, “I personally was astounded at the enemy’s inexplicably weak resistance. We expected our forces to fight hard and to achieve a certain minimum of successes, but prior to the attack no one would have dared to anticipate the actual results of our initial assaults.” Men posted in the home islands fretted that the war might be over before they could get into it, and clamored for combat assignments with a vehemence that bordered on menace. “We could not disabuse these overenthusiastic youngsters of their belief that the war would end too quickly for them to try their mettle against the enemy,” added Okumiya. “Our junior pilots were fully convinced that the war would end too soon to enable them to participate.”

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, was on his flagship, the battleship Nagato, anchored off Hashirajima Island in Hiroshima Bay. He had remained awake through the night and morning of the Pearl Harbor attack, hovering in the operations room, playing shogi intermittently with his administrative officer, Captain Yasuji Watanabe. As the attack unfolded, his radio operators had intercepted messages directly from Japanese planes, and others from the Americans on Oahu. “Surprise attack successful. . . . Enemy warships torpedoed; outstanding results.” Members of the crew, in a celebratory gesture, were permitted to purchase sake at the canteen. Each message brought a fresh burst of rejoicing from the gathered officers, but Yamamoto remained stoic, expressionless. He was disappointed that Admiral Nagumo had withdrawn his carriers after only two attack waves, believing that he should have stayed and pressed the advantage—but the C-in-C shrank from issuing a preemptive order for a third attack, knowing that to do so would humiliate his subordinate. Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki, wrote bitterly in his diary that Nagumo’s premature withdrawal was nothing more than “sneak thievery and contentment with a humble lot in life.”

  Pearl Harbor had been Yamamoto’s brainchild. The Naval General Staff had approved the operation only reluctantly and in the face of Yamamoto’s threatened resignation. He had not intended a sneak attack. Indeed, Japanese historians have convincingly documented that the admiral was deeply bothered by Japan’s failure to declare war before the bombs fell. He had repeatedly asked the Foreign Ministry for reassurances that the “14-Part Message” would be delivered to the U.S. State Department before the strike, and had received such assurances. The delay in decoding the message at the Japanese Embassy in Washington was to blame for the delay, though most Americans would know nothing of that imbroglio until after the war.

  The success of the daring operation in the teeth of the Naval General Staff’s opposition strengthened Yamamoto’s hand. As a proponent of naval aviation, he believed in the striking power of his carriers, and in the vulnerability of surface ships to air attack. When he had learned of the arrival of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in Singapore, he had personally ordered thirty-six torpedo-armed G4M “Betty” bombers to reinforce the 22nd Air Flotilla, and urged them to hunt down the British battlewagons. He had even placed bets that the two ships would be sunk. The destruction of Force Z was a personal triumph for Yamamoto and for Japanese naval airpower; it was also a cause of mighty chest-beating by the nationalist press. “Like a once-bitten stray dog,” declared the editors of a magazine, the New Order in Greater East Asia, “the British Navy must turn around and run as it barks.” In other publications, aerial photos of the Prince of Wales slipping beneath the waves were paired with Western file photos taken the previous August at the Anglo-American summit in Placentia Bay, depicting Roosevelt and Churchill bowed in prayer at a religious service on the quarterdeck of the same ship. Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the British ships raised Yamamoto to a position of supreme influence within the Japanese naval hierarchy. Now he could dictate his wishes to the Tokyo admirals, and would continue to do so until the defeat at Midway, six months later.

  Mitsuharu Noda, a yeoman on the Nagato, recalled that Yamamoto received thousands of telegrams and letters of congratulations in those early weeks, and was punctilious in replying to each one in his own exquisite calligraphy. “He ordered me to have extra-large name cards made up bearing the inscription: ‘Combined Fleet Commander-in-Chief Yamamoto Isoroku,’” Noda recounted. “On each, he wrote in his own brush hand, ‘I swear I shall conduct further strenuous efforts and shall not rest on this small success in beginning the war.’” It was typical of Yamamoto to bear even the mantle of his own fame as a solemn duty. He seemed well aware that he was the most renowned military man in Japan, except perhaps General Tojo himself, and certainly the most famous admiral since Heihachiro Togo, under whom he had served at Tsushima thirty-six years earlier.

  Even in those heady early days of the war, when the navy was scoring victories beyond the wildest hopes of the Japanese, Yamamoto was strangely glum. He felt a sense of heavy foreboding. “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy,’” he wrote a friend; “it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the smitten. . . . I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.” To another correspondent he warned of the air raids on Tokyo to come, prophetically deploring “the mindless r
ejoicing at home. . . . It makes me fear that the first blow on Tokyo will make them wilt on the spot.”

  WILLIAM MANCHESTER, THE AUTHOR, biographer, and Pacific War veteran, famously called Yamamoto “the greatest admiral since Lord Nelson.” At first glance, the comparison seems ridiculous. The British admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) won an unbroken series of one-sided naval victories that left the Royal Navy in sole command of the world’s oceans. Yamamoto was directly responsible for Midway, one of the most cataclysmic defeats in all of naval history, and for the equally costly failure of Japan’s four-month sea-air-land campaign to recapture the island of Guadalcanal. So much damaging criticism has been directed at Yamamoto’s performance in the Pacific War, much of it by his own officers, that it is an awfully long stretch to call him a great admiral, let alone the greatest since Nelson.

  But in another sense there is much to be said for the analogy, because the parallels are numerous and striking. Each man possessed an indefinable “presence,” an extraordinary natural charisma or force of personality that commanded the fanatical loyalty and deep affection of his subordinates. Each man rose from humble origins, and was especially loved by the enlisted men of the “lower deck.” Each practiced a warm, collegial style with his fellow officers, and went out of his way to attend to the small comforts of his shipmates. Each had been wounded in action and wore the scars to prove it—Nelson had lost an arm and the sight of one eye; Yamamoto was missing two fingers of his left hand. Each man loved a woman who was not his wife, and in each case the affair caused a public scandal after his death. Each possessed an innate spirit of audacity that favored all-or-nothing aggression on the attack, when their more prudent colleagues would have played the odds and remained content with partial victories. For a time, until the tide of war turned against Japan, Yamamoto’s boldness brought him the same kind of glory that Nelson accrued throughout his career. Each was slain in action, and afterward semi-deified in grand public funerals; in each case their loss caused a public feeling of consternation or even dread, as if the death of one man could leave an entire nation at the mercy of its enemies. To an island people, enclosed on all sides by the sea, the quintessential great fighting admiral occupies a peculiar place in the national imagination. No corresponding archetype quite exists in a continental nation like the United States. Yamamoto was lifted up by the Japanese people as a spiritual defender of their islands in a dire emergency. In that sense he was great, maybe even as great as Nelson.