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

by Ian W. Toll

  Since 1923, the Japanese navy had identified the United States as its principal “hypothetical enemy.” This meant fleet expansion plans were based on a premise that Japan must be prepared to fight and defeat the U.S. Navy. Whatever its merits, that conceptual framework had supplied the admirals with potent leverage in budget negotiations. For nearly two decades, it had secured their funding priorities. It did no harm so long as it was understood as a bargaining posture, but in 1940, American sanctions brought the essential questions of war and peace out of the realm of long-term planning and into the sphere of immediate decision. Navy leaders did not want war with the United States, but could not bring themselves to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. “Inwardly we felt we could not fight with the Anglo-American powers, but we could not unequivocally say so,” admitted a staff officer at the Navy Ministry. “We had called ourselves an invincible navy and we had been telling the army that we could take on the United States. . . . So, we could not say we lacked confidence now. We were afraid that the army would say, ‘If the navy can’t fight, give us your materiel and budget.’” Another officer added, “If we say we shall absolutely never fight the United States, the army will grasp Japan’s total national strength and financial power for its own purposes.” Navy Vice Minister Sawamoto was sensitive to the army’s oft-repeated taunt that “a navy that cannot make war is worse than useless.”

  On November 1, 1941, Navy Minister Shigetaro Shimada met with Tojo and expressed his “war determination,” but in the same breath asked for an increase in the navy’s 1942 steel allotment. Seeking clarity, Army Chief of Staff Hajime Sugiyama asked, “Will you decide for war, Shimada-san, if the navy gets the steel it demands?” Shimada nodded: 300,000 tons of steel would buy the navy’s support for the war it did not really want to fight. It is hard to quarrel with the army staff officer who left his reaction in the Confidential War Journal: “How pathetic the navy is!”

  Negotiations in Washington dragged out through 1941, but there was never any serious prospect of a settlement. Secretary of State Hull did not waver from his position that the sanctions would continue until Japanese troops were pulled out of China. Hirohito and his closest advisers were opposed to war, but the emperor did not go beyond frequent exhortations to his cabinet to “do your best to achieve a peaceful solution.” The Foreign Ministry carried on talks, but did so largely in the dark—the Japanese envoys in Washington had no idea that should their efforts fail, Japan would open immediate hostilities. General Tojo, the army minister, was unequivocal in declaring that a withdrawal from China was impossible. “I cannot yield to this. America’s real intention is to control the Far East. Therefore one concession by Japan would lead to another, and so on.”

  At an Imperial Conference on September 6, 1941, it was decided that war would begin in October unless the Washington talks unexpectedly bore fruit. In October, Tojo forced Prince Konoye out of office and assumed the office of prime minister himself (while maintaining the office of army minister). Under his leadership, he said, there would be “no compromise on the stationing of troops in China.” On November 5, Yamamoto’s Top Secret Operation Order No. 1, outlining the Pearl Harbor attack plan, was distributed to commanders throughout the fleet. On November 26, the six big aircraft carriers of Nagumo’s carrier group Kido Butai, observing strict radio silence, slipped out of Hitokappu Bay in the remote northern Kurile Islands, and set sail for a rendezvous north of Hawaii. On that same date, Secretary of State Hull handed the Japanese ambassador a letter reiterating the American position: sanctions would be lifted upon withdrawal of all Japanese forces from Indochina and China. The impasse was apparently irresolvable. Tojo described Hull’s note as an ultimatum, though it had included neither a deadline nor a threat. The general was now the dominant figure in Japanese politics, and he was determined to take the country to war: “Sometimes people have to shut their eyes and take the plunge.”

  The ears of the Japanese people were ringing with propaganda calculated to arouse them to war, and they never heard a dissenting point of view. They heard that Japan was a nation of destiny, with a divine mission to liberate Asia. They were told that the spiritual power of the Japanese people, when fully mobilized, would overcome any material deficiency in conventional military power. They were assured that the Western democracies had grown soft and decadent from easy living, and lacked the stomach to fight. Under the relentless barrage, even well-educated Japanese found it difficult to think clearly. “I did have doubts at times,” recalled Harumichi Nogi of the years immediately before the war, “but on such occasions I believed that these thoughts surfaced in my mind because I was lacking in patriotic fervor and spirit. I felt I had to drive myself forward. If a nation decides to take action, everyone must move along with the decision!” Yes, everyone, even the leadership. As much as they might have liked to procrastinate, to wait and watch, the men who ruled the country did not believe they had the luxury of time. The oil embargo amounted to a slow strangulation of the Japanese economy: with each passing day the stockpiles ebbed. The United States had begun a massive naval buildup, and the longer Japan waited to strike, the more formidable the enemy would become. Their Nazi allies were on the move in Europe, and if Japan did not seize the day, would it forever miss the chance to secure its rightful share of the spoils?

  By the fall of 1941, no one in Japan could stop the slide, except possibly the emperor, and he had always acquiesced in whatever fragile consensus the ruling circle presented to him. In the end, whatever their doubts and misgivings, no member of the cabinet could find the moral courage to tell the truth and face the consequences. Their recommendation for war was unanimous. Hirohito said, after 1945, “I held the view that being a monarch of a constitutional state, I had to approve the unanimous opinion of the government and the Supreme War Council. If I failed to do so, Tojo would resign and there would be a major coup d’etat, and the completely reckless advocates of war would gain control.” Though self-serving, Hirohito’s supposition was probably accurate. Tojo had stated that the army was “straining at the leash,” and navy leaders believed that the alternative to a foreign war might be a civil war. The leaders of Japan shared a sense that the coming crisis was an external force, beyond their control, like an earthquake or tsunami. It was happening to Japan. “The arrow has left the bow,” the generals and admirals told each other, and the time had come for each to revert to his proper place in the military hierarchy. With a shared sense of relief, the men who ruled Japan turned away from the great issues of foreign policy and bent to the more familiar task of launching a war, as if it were a mission that had been assigned to them and not one they had chosen.

  Chapter Four

  U.S. NAVY HEADQUARTERS, OR “MAIN NAVY,’ WAS HOUSED IN A massive concrete-asbestos edifice on the Washington Mall. The three-story, grime-streaked complex was connected by a covered walkway to a similar structure called the Munitions Building.* Together, they occupied a third of a mile along Constitution Avenue immediately north of the Reflecting Pool, with nine wings branching to the south and running to the edge of the pool itself. The building was one of a dozen “tempos,” built hastily and on the cheap in 1918, during the First World War. These crumbling monstrosities had been thrown up on the Mall, between Capitol Hill and the Lincoln Memorial, with the understanding that they would be demolished once the emergency had passed. After the war, the path of least political and bureaucratic resistance had been to leave them standing. Their occupants were content to remain in such a desirable location, so close to the White House and Capitol Hill, and Congress was content not to pay to tear the buildings down and erect replacements.

  An officer remembered the prewar Navy Department as a somnolent place, in which “unadorned offices of standard size stretched interminably along dreary corridors.” The floors were faded linoleum, the overhead lighting dim and sickly yellow, and windowless wooden doors were identified only by stenciled acronyms or numbers. After December 7, the pace of life suddenly accelerated:
an officer arriving a few days after Pearl Harbor described the headquarters as “an ant hill with the top kicked off.” The lights burned all night as officers worked around the clock. Many did not physically leave the building in the first week of the war. Cots were rolled into offices, and food brought in on trays. All officers had been ordered to report to work in uniform beginning on Monday, December 8. Prior to the war, it had been the practice of many officers billeted in administrative posts to work in civilian clothing, so in the first few days many senior officers appeared in mismatched, outdated, or ill-fitting uniforms. A young lieutenant recalled seeing several officers wearing uniforms that could not be buttoned, because they had gained weight since having last put them on. “Rear Admiral John Wainwright, one of my favorite Admirals, was evidently missing his raincoat and overcoat. He had on his Admiral’s cap, and below it was a very loud Scottish tweed coat.”

  Marines in steel helmets, bayonets fixed on their rifles, demanded identification from anyone wishing to enter or exit, including high-ranking officers in uniform. A few days after Pearl Harbor, BBC correspondent Alistair Cooke walked into the department through a side door, where he found no guards. He visited the officer he had come to see, but when he tried to leave the building, “a guard lowered his rifle and barred the way.” Cooke had been ensnared in one of those distinctive military-bureaucratic paradoxes that Joseph Heller would later describe as a “catch-22.” “The theory,” Cooke wryly observed, “was that if you were not wearing a visitor’s button, you never in the first place came in and were technically not present. This was reasonable but uncomfortable to anybody who hoped soon to resume his life in the world outside the Navy Department.” After appealing to an admiral in a nearby office, the Englishman was let out.

  Depression-era officers had been schooled in the virtues of parsimony, proper administrative channels, and meticulous execution of paperwork; and that was especially true among those who handled the navy’s money, equipment, and materials. Should they fail to account for every item or dollar consumed or spent, their careers would suffer. But on December 8, the service was overtaken by a collective sense that all of that must change. Velocity was paramount. “We were busy as bird-dogs in those weeks following the attack,” said a gunnery training officer. “It’s hard to describe just how much the workflow moved up.” Men up the chain of command were too swamped to answer every request for instructions, so officers and enlisted men of every rank had to assume a wider scope of authority. They sensed, even if they were not actually told, that no one could afford to hesitate when authority to act was uncertain. The new mood lent itself to peremptory action, leaving paperwork and legal authorization to be sorted out in good time. When Rear Admiral Ben Moreell, chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, was asked for funds to build a new antiaircraft gunnery training center, his reply was very much in the new spirit. “Hell,” he said, “I’ll give you all the money you want. I don’t give a goddamn what the law says.”

  Navy Secretary Knox, having flown to Pearl Harbor to assess the devastation firsthand, was back in Washington on the evening of Sunday, December 14. On Monday morning, he held a press conference at his office on the second “deck” (floor) of the Navy Department. “An enormous crowd turned out, the biggest he’ll ever have,” wrote Glen Perry of the New York Sun. “His office was packed, and it took a long time to get credentials checked out. He waited, puffing calmly at his pipe.” Frank Knox was an old protégé of Theodore Roosevelt, and had ridden in the “Rough Riders” regiment in the Spanish-American War. In 1930, he had become publisher and part owner of the Chicago Daily News. Though he was personally loyal to FDR, Knox’s paper had been a tenacious critic of the New Deal, and he himself had been the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 1936. He had taken over the Navy Department in 1940, at the same time that another prominent Republican, Henry Stimson, assumed the post of secretary of war. The two accepted Roosevelt’s invitation to join the cabinet because they opposed their party’s isolationist platform in the 1940 election campaign.

  As a veteran newspaper editor, Knox knew how to make reporters lie down like lambs, and his performance was a tour de force. He surprised them, and sapped their prosecutorial ardor, by revealing more of the truth than they expected to hear. He admitted that the Arizona and the Utah were destroyed, as well as three destroyers and a minelayer; he also admitted that the Oklahoma had capsized, but predicted that she would be righted and returned to service. He allowed that other ships had been damaged “in varying degrees which will require repairs ranging from those which can be done immediately to work covering a period of months.” As for casualties, he described the losses as “heavy,” and when pressed by the reporters, he admitted that there had been close to 3,000 men killed. Knox conceded that the Japanese attack had been “very cleverly organized and carried out with great skill,” but he insisted that morale in Pearl Harbor was very high (which was not entirely true) and added, “I wish the bastards would come back.” He emphasized the heroic efforts of the sailors caught up in the raid, and eulogized the dead for having given their lives to a higher cause. News coverage picked up his well-placed cues and followed in the same spirit.

  Still, the disagreeable questions remained: How was the U.S. Navy caught so utterly off guard? Who was at fault and who was going to be called to account for the catastrophe? There had been angry rumblings in Congress, demands for the court-martial of the local commanders, even demands for the resignation of Secretary Knox himself. In his brief visit to Hawaii, Knox’s pointed questions to Admiral Kimmel left no doubt that the Pacific Fleet commander had been selected as the inevitable scapegoat. To the assembled reporters, Knox would say only that a “formal investigation” would be launched to determine if there had been “any dereliction of duty.” But he also stated outright that “the land and sea forces were not on the alert,” thus fixing the impression in the minds of the public that the local commanders were chiefly to blame. Kimmel and his army counterpart, General Walter Short, would be relieved of duty, unjustly pilloried in the press, and condemned to spend the rest of the war running an obscene gauntlet of investigations rigged to deflect blame away from Washington.

  Kimmel’s successor would be Rear Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the fifty-six-year-old chief of the Bureau of Navigation. The decision was Roosevelt’s and was rendered without hesitation. “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there until the war is won,” he told Knox on Tuesday morning. Shortly afterward, the phone in Admiral Nimitz’s office was answered by Lieutenant H. Arthur Lamar, the admiral’s devoted flag secretary. The caller asked to be put through to “Chester.” Lieutenant Lamar did not recognize the low, stentorian voice on the other end of the line, and felt “insulted that anyone should be calling my admiral by his first name.” He asked for the caller’s name. “This is the president,” came the brusque reply. “Put him on the phone.”

  Nimitz spoke to the president briefly, then hurried out to his car for the three-block drive to the White House. Two hours later he returned and told Lamar, “I am going to the Pacific.”

  Descriptions of Chester Nimitz usually resort to the term “towheaded,” because he had a dramatic shock of white hair that stood in contrast to his keen blue eyes and ruddy complexion. His eyebrows were as white as his hair, and combined they gave him gravitas, the look of an elder sage. His eyes were powerfully expressive, alternately broadcasting warmth, skepticism, regret, mirth, or anger, even when the rest of his face gave nothing away. They earned him a nickname among his staff: “the man with the blue eyes.” He had good bones. As a young man, Nimitz had been as handsome as a movie idol—a brawny athlete with perfect posture, a strong jaw, and a square, honest face. At fifty-six he retained his good looks. He kept himself fit with long walks and vigorous bouts of tennis.

  This was the second time Nimitz had been offered command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. In early 1941, he had declined the offer on the grounds that he was too junior on the admiral’s list. To
accept the job would have sent him leapfrogging over the heads of more than fifty admirals who stood above him on the duty rolls. His appointment would have incurred their resentment, said Nimitz, and made it difficult to do the job properly. Now, with the nation at war, no one was quite so concerned with the niceties of the naval pecking order, and in any case the assignment had come in the form of a command.

  Like most of his colleagues at the Navy Department, Nimitz had been working around the clock. In the first seventy-two hours of the war he slept on a couch in his office, eating nothing but soup brought to him in a thermos by his wife. After the third day of the war he went home after midnight, crawled into bed for three or four hours of sleep, then rose at dawn and returned to work. The Bureau of Navigation, notwithstanding its name, was actually the navy’s personnel department, and the onset of war had saddled Nimitz and his staff with an immense workload. The phones had been ringing almost without interruption, and a daily tidal wave of telegrams washed in through the varnished wooden doors of Nimitz’s suite of offices. Officers killed in action had to be replaced; officers whose ships had been knocked out of action had to be reassigned; officers had to be sent out to man a rapidly mobilizing fleet. To the bureau fell the grim, indispensable task of tabulating accurate casualty lists and notifying the families of men killed in action. There were moments, in those early days, when Nimitz seemed on the verge of succumbing to the general epidemic of despair that had swept through the ranks. To a captain in his bureau he remarked, “We have suffered a terrible defeat. I don’t know whether we can ever recover from it.” He later confided to a friend: “From the time the Japanese dropped those bombs on December 7th until at least two months later, hardly a day passed that the situation did not get more chaotic and confused and appear more hopeless.”