by Ian W. Toll
The immediate crisis had passed, but as in 1932 the emperor was quick to let bygones be bygones, and the entire affair only empowered the military and emboldened the ultranationalist right. The new government agreed to demands that all cabinet appointees be approved by the army and navy ministers. Political parties were now completely emasculated. It emerged that the plot, like so many others of that period, had been a poorly kept secret throughout the upper ranks of the army. Even members of the royal family apparently had known of the plot in advance and sympathized with its objectives. None of the leaders was above the rank of captain, but higher-ranking officers knew about it in advance and sat on their hands. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that many had pledged to support the coup if the emperor appeared to give it his support. However, none of those ranking sympathizers was severely punished. General Terauchi, minister of war in the Hirota government, later remarked of the events in 1936: “In connection with this Incident there are those not directly involved but who knew that such plans were afoot. Yet they kept quiet. Some directly incited the men to action; others kept quiet. A really disgraceful group of men were gathered together. And yet if all who were thus involved resigned it would be difficult to find men to take their places.”
The conspirators enjoyed broad public sympathy, if not outright support. Their manifesto, demanding economic justice for the rural poor and an end to political corruption, was thought worthy of admiration, both in its composition and its sentiments. When several of the surviving assassins went on trial, a year after the fact, calls for amnesty were raised in the press. The ringleaders of the failed coup were lauded as the conscience of the nation, as honest patriots targeting corruption and timidity in the high councils of government, and as the guardians of chukin.
The army made its long-anticipated move into China on July 7, 1937. Like the invasion of Manchuria, the action was touched off by an “incident”—in this case an exchange of gunfire between Chinese and Japanese troops in Lukouchiao, near a Hun River bridge crossing about ten miles west of Peking (now Beijing). The fighting quickly escalated, and Japanese troops poured across the border into China’s northern region. Japan’s more efficient army won victory after victory, and in the air the Japanese reigned supreme; but no matter how much territory fell to the invaders, the Chinese Nationalist troops fought on and Mao Tse-tung’s Communist guerrillas put up dogged resistance behind the lines. Rapid movements of Japanese troops followed, without authorization from Tokyo. Units were landed up and down the coast, and in December, Japanese troops fell upon the city of Nanking in one of the most ghastly scenes of the twentieth century. They slaughtered perhaps 100,000 Chinese troops and civilians (possibly many more: no one can say for sure). Japanese soldiers, whipped up into a frenzy by reckless officers, committed the crimes of rape, torture, and mass murder on a scale that caused even Hitler’s local diplomatic representatives to wince.
IN THE MID 1930S, while the West merrily imagined that Japanese airpower amounted to a few obsolete, cast-off European airplanes piloted by crash-test dummies, the Imperial Navy toiled in obsessive secrecy to develop a homegrown aircraft industry and an elite corps of aviators. The leaders did not make the mistake of ignoring their prospective adversaries. Naval attachés in the United States and Europe traveled to air shows, scanned aviation magazines, and struck up friendly conversations with foreign pilots and engineers. Whenever possible, the Japanese government purchased Western aircraft and transported them to Japan. They built European airplanes under license, steadily improving their manufacturing capabilities. In 1935, the Japanese navy built a full-size mock-up of the U.S. carrier Saratoga and practiced aerial attacks on her. For years Japan had studied and borrowed from Western technology, but by the early 1930s the domestic industry had developed enough engineering expertise to design and build new aircraft, and by 1936, a quartet of industrial firms—Mitsubishi, Aichi, Nakajima, and Kawanishi—were secretly building some of the best naval fighters, bombers, and seaplanes in the world. Even so, the industrial base was still very small and emergent, relying on a tiny, hard-driven coterie of trained engineers and machinists, a scattered network of subcontractors making hand-tooled components, and a handful of large research centers and assembly plants in Nagoya, Yokosuka, Musashino, Ota, Kure, and Kawanishi. That the Japanese were building such fine airplanes was remarkable, a testament to their ingenuity and ambition—but the industry was not designed to scale up for mass production. The problem would grow acute after the first year of the Pacific War. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps nothing was so eloquent as the image of a sleek new fighter plane, gleaming brilliantly in the sun, hauled by a team of oxen over a rutted dirt road, passing unhurriedly over rice fields and through tumbledown villages, from the Nagoya factory where it had been built to the Kagamigahara airfield where it would be tested. It was a practice that would continue through the end of the war.
By 1937, the year of the China Incident, the Japanese navy had achieved near-complete autonomy from Western aviation technology. What is more, the navy had placed into service two Mitsubishi-built airplanes that were at or near the forefront of military aviation throughout the world. The A5M Type 96 (Allied code name “Claude”) was the first monoplane carrier fighter placed into service by any navy in the world. It was a sleek aluminum acrobat with a maximum speed of 250 miles per hour, a fast climber, and it proved a champion dogfighter, routinely slaughtering the Soviet-built I-16 fighters of the Chinese air force. The second was a twin-engine, land-based medium bomber, the G3M (Allied code name “Nell”), which could carry either a torpedo or a bomb payload of 1,764 pounds, and had a range of 2,365 nautical miles. The G3M was succeeded by the G4M (“Betty”), which carried the same payload capacity while increasing its flight range to more than 3,000 nautical miles. Two superb carrier-based attack bombers were developed for the Japanese navy between 1937 and 1941. A dive-bomber, the Aichi D3A1 Type 99 (“Val”), went into production in December 1939. Its fixed landing gear made it easy to recognize even at a great distance (and by 1941 gave it the guise of obsolescence, as retractable gear was by that time de rigueur in aviation circles). But the Val was a perfectly serviceable dive-bomber, with a range of more than 900 miles: it maintained stability through an attack angle of up to 80 degrees, allowing for good bombing accuracy. In the hands of the more seasoned Japanese carrier aircrews, it was a fearsome weapon. The Nakajima B5N2 Type 97 carrier attack plane, or “Kate,” could be configured as a high-altitude horizontal bomber or a torpedo bomber, but always did its most devastating work in the latter role. A big, low-wing monoplane with a long, greenhouse-style canopy, the Kate had a range of more than 600 miles and a maximum airspeed of 235 miles per hour. In 1941, it was without question the best torpedo attack aircraft in the Pacific, far superior to its obsolete American counterpart, the Douglas TBD Devastator. And it was armed with the Type 91 800-kilogram aerial torpedo, the best and most reliable weapon of its kind in the world.
The story of the development of the Zero fighter, successor to the A5M Type 96 (“Claude”), is one of the great tales of aviation history. Finding itself in need of a new fighter plane that could accompany the medium bombers on long-range missions into the heart of China, the Japanese navy demanded of Mitsubishi a new machine with seemingly unattainable specifications for speed, maneuverability, range, and rate of climb. After doubting that such an aircraft could ever be built, the brilliant aeronautical designer Jiro Horikoshi and his team managed to find a way to build a fighter that actually exceeded every one of the desired specifications. The Zero’s control surfaces were consummately responsive; pilots learned to love the plane because of its fingertip maneuverability, often remarking that it felt as if the plane was an extension of their bodies. Introduced into combat over the China mainland in 1940, the Zeros wiped the skies clean of their opponents. In dogfights they usually scored clean kills—that is, they shot down their adversaries without being struck by enemy fire. In those conditions the Zero’s greatest we
akness—its lack of defensive armor and self-sealing fuel tanks—did not much matter. The Zero was light, fast, long-legged, supremely maneuverable, and armed with a heavy punch—in other words, perfectly suited to the needs of the air war over China.
Isoroku Yamamoto could claim a lion’s share of the credit for those achievements. He had staked his career on the future of aviation in the comparative dark ages of 1924, when, as a forty-year-old captain recently returned from the United States, he requested and was granted the job of executive officer of the Kasumigaura Naval Air Training Center, the “Japanese Pensacola,” near the city of Tsuchiura, about fifty miles north of Tokyo. Thereafter he held a series of important aviation jobs, both at sea and at a desk: captain of the carrier Akagi, 1928–29; chief of the Technical Department of the Naval Air Command, 1930–33; commander of the First Aircraft Carrier Division, 1933–34; director of the Naval Air Command, 1935–36. Throughout his career, even as a vice admiral, Yamamoto made a point of flying as a passenger in naval aircraft of every type, even during the most hazardous training missions. By exposing himself personally to the risks of those wild pioneering days of aviation, Yamamoto established an emotional bond with the pilots of the Japanese navy, one that would last until the admiral’s death in 1943 (fittingly, in an airplane).
In demanding aggressive practice routines, Yamamoto was conscious that the lives of many aircrews would be cut short, but remained adamant that such sacrifices were necessary. As captain of the Akagi, he had ordered that the names of the ship’s dead airmen be inscribed on a wall in his wardroom. His shipmates sometimes found him reading the names with tears in his eyes. But he did not relent for safety’s sake. “The naval air corps will probably never be really strong until the whole wardroom is plastered with names like these,” he told his pilots. “I want you to be resigned to that idea in your work. The first thing I propose you do today is go up and do five or six loop-the-loops with your instructors; and when you’re finished, you can come and report to me.”
Naval Academy graduates sometimes went directly into flight training, as in the United States—but in Japan, a much larger ratio of airmen were recruited from the ranks of enlisted men and petty officers already serving in the fleet. Commissioned officers were always a privileged minority of the naval air corps, and Etajima graduates an even smaller percentage. Most of the Japanese aces were non-commissioned officers, and as Osamu Tagaya observes, “It was they who did most of the flying, the fighting, and the dying.” Beginning in the late 1920s, teenaged boys aged fifteen to seventeen were recruited directly into naval flight training out of Japanese schools through a program known as Yokaren. To arouse interest in the program the navy staged school fly-overs. The students (even the youngest) stood at attention in the schoolyard as the planes roared low over the rooftops, dipping their wings in salute. Hideo Sato recalled one such demonstration over his school in the suburbs of Tokyo. The pilots dropped rubber balls attached to small parachutes. He was eight years old. “I guess they did it to draw us children into the war effort,” Sato said. “Whatever the facts, I only know I was in ecstasy when it was my turn to go up to receive my very own ball.”
The prewar navy was obsessed with building a small, elite corps of flyers, and selection criteria were almost prohibitively exclusive. Less than 1 percent of Yokaren applicants passed the initial written exam, and many of the fortunate few who made that initial cut would then be weeded out during rigorous physical exams. The select few who remained were sent into basic training. Here each day began with reveille at 5 a.m., followed by a forced immersion in cold water. The recruits rushed out to the parade ground, bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace, recited an oath of loyalty to the emperor, and were led through a punishing calisthenics routine. Everywhere, throughout the day, they were expected to run, not walk. Meals were Spartan, consisting of rice mixed with barley, or miso soup and pickled vegetables, occasionally some fish or meat. Parade ground drills and basic combat training alternated with classroom instruction in math, science, engineering, reading, and writing. A contemporary photograph depicts pilot-trainees sitting on benches at a long table, listening intently to an instructor. They are dressed in identical crisp white uniforms with oval name tags. Their hair is close-cropped, their faces rapt and hard-set. Each had to maintain a minimum grade average or face expulsion, and class standing was always determined by academic rank. They slept in hammocks slung from the walls of their barracks, like jack-tars on the lower deck of an eighteenth-century man-of-war.
Takeshi Maeda, who would go on to fly a torpedo bomber at the Battle of Midway, went through basic training at Yokosuka Naval Base on Tokyo Bay. Each day he and his fellow recruits spent hours on the bay, rowing an open boat in all kinds of weather. “Because of the friction between my body and the seat, my pants were covered with blood,” he recalled. “After that your flesh became infected, and it produced yellow pus. . . . I would go to the infirmary, and they treated my wounds by applying ointment and gauze. The following day, when I did cutter boat training, the same thing would happen again, and my old wounds would reopen, which was very painful.”
Recruits were subjected to unremitting brutality by upperclassmen, instructors, and officers. Any infraction, shortfall, wrong answer, or complaint brought instant retribution, ranging from a casual slap across the cheek to a sudden punch in the face to a savage beating with a baseball bat. A recruit might be forced to stand on his tiptoes for an hour or more, or stand rigidly at attention while a petty officer smashed him repeatedly in the face, or bend over while his tormentor repeatedly belted him on the buttocks with a club. Kicks and blows often persisted after a man had fallen to the ground. No cries or moans of pain were permitted. Often an entire squad was subjected to a brutal beating for one man’s imagined transgressions. If any bones were broken, the injured man was sent off to the hospital; once healed he would be re-inducted with a subsequent class.
Saburo Sakai, who went on to become one of the most celebrated fighter pilots of the Pacific War, was once dragged out of his hammock in the dead of night and beaten in front of his shocked mates while they rubbed the sleep from their eyes. The petty officer forced Sakai to bend over: “with that he would swing a large stick of wood and with every ounce of strength he possessed would slam it against my upturned bottom. The pain was terrible, the force of the blows unremitting. There was no choice but to grit my teeth and struggle desperately not to cry out. At times I counted up to forty crashing impacts into my buttocks. Often I fainted from the pain. A lapse into unconsciousness constituted no escape however. The petty officer simply hurled a bucket of cold water over my prostrate form and bellowed for me to reposition, whereupon he continued his ‘discipline’ until satisfied I would mend the error of my ways.” After watching one of his fellow recruits subjected to a similar beating, Takeshi Maeda remembers feeling a surge of bitterness: “How could a human being hit another with a baseball bat?”
Such beatings were a fact of military life in Japan. Indeed, they were generally much worse in the army. Unabashed sadism had a lot to do with it, no doubt; but there was also a school of thought, prevalent in the army and to a slightly lesser degree in the navy, that the beatings did the men good, served to harden and toughen them, groomed them for combat. Military men were convinced, said Katsumi Watanabe, who was beaten savagely as an army draftee, that “beatings were a form of education”—indeed, the beatings were often called “lessons.” The cumulative violence, wrote Sakai, transformed the recruits into “human cattle” who “never dared to question orders, to doubt authority, to do anything but immediately carry out all the commands of our superiors. We were automatons who obeyed without thinking.” Naval policy seemed not just to tolerate but to encourage such brutality; Takeshi Maeda observed that the most violent instructors were rewarded with promotions. Recruits could not fight back, nor file formal complaints; they could not quit, and they dared not risk being discharged. To be drummed out of the service would bring shame on their fa
milies—and not the kind of shame we talk about in the West. A failed recruit’s entire family might suffer social ostracism and even persecution. It was a staggering burden, and no surprise that many young men resolved the dilemma by taking their own lives.
Those who survived basic training were assigned to flight training at Kasumigaura. The base had two long runways, 3,000 and 2,200 yards long, and a huge complex of hangars housing hundreds of aircraft. The road to the main gate was lined with a magnificent stand of mature cherry trees, with views of Lake Kasumigaura beyond the airfield. The daily routines of a first-year flight student remained exactingly regimented, and he would continue to suffer the occasional slap or fist punch—but here at least he was permitted (at prescribed times) to smoke, to drink, even to spend a Saturday afternoon in Tsuchiura. The specter of dismissal at any time for any reason hovered over his head. The initial weeks of the program involved a full day of classroom instruction, with a greater emphasis on such practical skills as over-water navigation, engine maintenance, and radio communications. Students pressed their noses into the books for two hours each night before lights-out; many slipped surreptitiously from their cots in the small hours to study by flashlight. The program was designed to function as a ruthless screen for weaker performers. Even those trainees who demonstrated good aptitude in both the classroom and the cockpit were often expelled for trivial offenses. Of Sakai’s entering class of seventy students, forty-five were gone before the end of the initial ten-month course, and he noted that expulsion “was feared far more than any mere savage beating.”
