During this period in limbo Yamamoto was not without his divertissements. A gambling addict, he played poker at night into the wee hours; in London he had relieved the First Sea Lord, Admiral A. Ernle M. Chatfield, of twenty pounds by that means. And the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, William H. Standley, learned to respect his skills at bridge. Takagi Sokichi, a naval officer who worked under Yamamoto in a variety of posts, wrote of him:
Few men could have been as fond of gambling and games of chance as he.… Shogi, go, mahjongg, billiards, cards, roulette—anything would do. At parties and the like, although he could not drink, he would make up for it by organizing “horse races” on paper and getting the younger officers accompanying him or the young women serving at a teahouse to bet fifty sen on the outcome.13
Yamamoto’s professional career was resurrected in 1935, when he was appointed chief of the Aeronautics Department, in command of all navy aviation. Air warfare had become his primary professional interest, and now that international restraints had been rejected he could throw all his energies into the promotion of the carriers and air arm that he had been instructed to oppose in London. Believing that the Navy’s main strength would shift from battleships, the other “offensive weapons” of London renown, to carrier-borne aircraft, he vigorously opposed the current diversion of a major share of the Navy’s resources to the design and construction of two mammoth 63,700-ton “unsinkable” battleships, Yamato and Musashi, with 18.1-inch main batteries.14 His surely was a quixotic effort in a Navy still wedded, through Mahan, to the primacy of battlewagons in any fleet that would aspire to rule the seas. The big-ship, big-gun admirals were obsessed with the realization that, at one stroke, the two battleships would advance the Navy’s strength in capital ships from 60 percent of American strength to a position of dominance. That the battleship in whatever size was fast becoming an anachronism, as Yamamoto argued, was simply beyond their comprehension. (The U.S. Navy also continued to place its faith in the central role of the battleship.) Though he failed to stop the design phase and to reduce the funding of the behemoths, the farsighted Yamamoto did significantly advance the Navy’s air assets by other means, and it was a newly invigorated vice admiral who received a call in 1936 to assume the office of navy vice minister, a position that gave him access to the money and power required to create a naval aviation arm second to none in the world.
Prior to the collapse of the Second London Naval Conference, the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff had represented two separate interests and sets of talents. To the Navy Ministry went officers who excelled in politico-administrative detail and whose interests ran to policy. The General Staff, by contrast, attracted warrior-type officers who demonstrated ability in operational command. With the ideological victory of the fleet faction, men of like mind could be found in both billets by 1936, and the differences between ministry and staff became blurred. By 1936, too, the Japanese Navy was distinctly pro-German, and becoming more so. A higher number of officers served as attachés and members of their staffs in Berlin than in Washington or London. The same people who formed the new “German faction” also exhibited a pronounced anti-Americanism, part of it aroused by a U.S. Navy fleet problem (maneuvers) conducted in the previous year near Midway, 1,300 nautical miles to the northwest of Hawaii. (From that problem the U.S. Navy learned that its Pacific Fleet would be defeated by superior Japanese speed and weaponry should it venture into the western Pacific.) It is in 1936 that one finds the first recorded hint of a strategy to come: in November of that year the Navy War College completed a study, entitled “Strategy and Tactics in Operations Against the United States,” in which it was proposed: “In case the enemy’s main fleet is berthed at Pearl Harbor, the idea should be to open hostilities by surprise attacks from the air.”15 No doubt that study was read with high interest by the new air-minded vice minister, who, we do know, was much influenced in this period by his friend Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, head of the Aviation Section of the Navy General Staff. Inoue’s tenet was: “He who commands the air commands the sea.”16 Together, these two airpower advocates succeeded in making certain that Japan’s accelerated naval construction program (the Third and Fourth Replenishment Plans) that began in 1937 included carriers and advanced-model aircraft in the mix.
Between 1937 and 1941, in addition to one super battleship, six cruisers, and a number of destroyers and submarines, Japan added to her strength four fleet carriers: Akagi (a conversion), embarking 104 aircraft; Hiryu, 73; Shokaku, 84; and Zuikaku, 84. In addition, she added three light fleet carriers: Taiyo, Chuyo, and Unyo, each embarking 27 aircraft. Altogether, during the nineteen years that passed since the Washington Treaty of 1922, the Japanese almost doubled the size of their Navy in terms of tonnage. By 1941 her naval forces slightly exceeded in number the U.S. Pacific Fleet in all categories excepting carriers, where her then existing six fleet and four light fleet carriers greatly outnumbered the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three—a testament to the enterprise of Yamamoto and Inoue.17 Their influence can also be discerned in the design and manufacture of new models of aircraft for the carriers. The premier dive-bomber in production by 1941 was the Aichi Type 99 (D3A1 to D3A2), which the Americans and British code-named “Val.” The first-line torpedo bomber was the Nakajima Type 97 (B5N1 to B5N2), known to the West as “Kate.” The Type 97 was also employed as a high-altitude level (horizontal) bomber. And the primary carrier-based fighter was the Mitsubishi Type 0 (A6M2 to A6M8) “Zero” or “Zeke.” (Type numbers corresponded to the last one or two digits of the first production year in the Japanese calendar, according to which the year 1940 was 2600. Hence the Nakajima Type 97 was brought into service in 1937, and the Mitsubishi Type 0 was first produced in 1940.) The Zero was unquestionably the finest carrier fighter afloat at the outbreak of the Pacific war, when its speed, rate of climb, maneuverability, range, and firepower made it superior to any American fighter, carrier or land based, Navy or Army, including the Navy’s first-line Grumman F4F Wildcat. Its sole weaknesses were the absence of self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection for the pilot. The naval air arm was divided into flotillas, two or more of which formed an air fleet. By December 1941 there were two air fleets in being. The 1st Air Fleet was carrier-borne. Its 500 pilots, the cream of naval aviation, had about 800 hours flying time each, many of those hours in combat over China. There was no mightier shipborne air force in the world. Its destiny was to attack Pearl Harbor. The 11th Air Fleet was land-based. With about the same number of pilots, the 11th would accompany the southern operation. The entire inventory of operational aircraft at the end of 1941 was estimated at 3,400.
* * *
A man sometimes of seeming contradictions, Yamamoto did not want to take the aerial armada he had assembled to war against the United States and Britain, each of which, he knew, would quickly rally to help the other. In the course of such a conflict, he stated freely, America would soon outbuild Japan, hence in the end defeat her. He would be just as outspoken in his opposition to talk of a Tripartite Pact that would formally link Japan to the aggressor states Germany and Italy. During the year before that axis was formed, on 27 September 1940, when extreme nationalists in Japan were pushing for the pact, Navy Minister Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa insisted that Yamamoto be accompanied everywhere by armed plainclothes police, lest he be eliminated from the scene by rightist assassins. In the end, Yonai, who agreed with Yamamoto’s view, decided that the only way to save his life was to send him off to sea.18 Thus, on 30 August 1939, Yamamoto, who had served under four successive governments as Navy vice minister, donned his formal white uniform with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, First Class, upon the left breast, and presented himself at the Imperial Palace to be invested with Japan’s highest command at sea, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. He would retain for now the rank of vice admiral.
Back at the redbrick building that housed the ministry, the new commanding officer, equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s commander in chief, United States Fleet (CINCUS)
, held a press conference at which he stated: “For a navy man, the post of C. in C. of the Combined Fleet is the greatest honor possible.… I feel overwhelmed at the great task with which I have been so undeservedly entrusted, but I mean to do my humble best in the service of His Imperial Majesty.”19 In honor of the occasion the teetotaler CINC downed a beer in a single draft.
Yamamoto took formal command of the Combined Fleet on board his flagship, the battleship Nagato, on 1 September 1939. It was the same day on which Germany invaded Poland, launching the Second World War. Yamamoto at once tightened training exercises and placed the 40,000 officers and men in his command on notice that they must prepare for any eventuality. Training was conducted in daylight, twilight, night, and early dawn. Gunnery drills took place off Sukumo and Cape Ashizuri. Carrier aircraft launches were made off Yokosuka. Wintertime torpedo attacks were rehearsed at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea. But the training was not relentless, since Yamamoto, like all fleet commanders, knew that after four straight weeks of constant and intense work, efficiency declined and accidents increased. So rest and recuperation periods were regularly scheduled at Kure, Sasebo, and Beppu. All knowledgeable observers agreed that, after a year under Yamamoto’s discipline, the Combined Fleet was in its highest-ever state of readiness.
In September 1940, the new Navy Minister, Admiral Oikawa Koshiro, summoned the Navy’s highest-ranking admirals to a conference in Tokyo. Oikawa wanted everyone’s consent to the signing of the Tripartite Pact. All present nodded agreement. Yamamoto was the only one to speak: “I haven’t the slightest intention of raising any objections to steps on which the minister has already decided,” he said, resignedly. But, in the praeteritio style of Cicero, he did object by warning that America and Britain, from whose territories Japan imported 80 percent of her raw materials, were likely to embargo those materials in response to the pact. Then what would Japan do? The anger he hid at the conference came out in a letter he sent afterward to Admiral Shimada Shigetaro, who commanded the China Area Fleet: “At this stage, to express shock and indignation at American economic pressure is either childishly impetuous or … extraordinary inattentiveness to recent events.”20 It was during this same visit to Tokyo that Yamamoto met with Prime Minister Prince Konoye Fumimaro, himself a moderate who sought to resolve Japanese-U.S. tensions through diplomatic negotiation, and to Konoye’s question, How would the navy fare in the event of a war with America, made his famous answer: “If we are ordered to do it, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”21
Yamamoto was now convinced that Japan’s descent into war was ineluctable, impelled by forces, both personal and material, that would not be thwarted. He had now exhausted whatever credit and leverage he might have had in the attempt to deflect the inevitable. What else remained for him, a professional officer of the Emperor, but to prepare his forces for battle? “Now that things have come to this pass,” he told his friend Baron Harada Kumao, “I’ll throw everything I have into the fight. I expect to die in battle on board the Nagato.”22
It was with this mind-set, then, that Yamamoto proposed to Navy Minister Oikawa that the unavoidable war with America must begin with a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor and the airfields of Oahu. It was an operational plan that he had first discussed, so far as we know, in either March or April 1940, with his then chief of staff Vice Admiral Fukudome Shigero. “It may be said that except for the late Admiral Yamamoto,” Fukudome wrote in December 1955, “I was the only person acquainted with detailed plans of the operation from the moment of its conception.”23 Next to know was Oikawa, but, without waiting for the minister’s reaction, Yamamoto drafted a three-page outline of what came to be called the Hawai sakusen (“Hawaii Operation”) and presented it to a trusted old friend, Rear Admiral Onishi Takijiro, chief of staff of the 11th Air Fleet. Although the 11th was not carrier-based, Yamamoto valued the sound judgment and practical airman’s sense possessed by Onishi. If anyone could find defects in the scheme, taken simply as an aviation project, it would be he. In one sign of his good judgment, Onishi enlisted the assistance of someone less conventional and cautious than himself: Commander Genda Minoru, an air staff officer on board the carrier Kaga, known to his friends as “madman Genda,” for his radical ideas of air warfare. The two officers—one senior, the other junior; one solid, the other mercurial—came to the conclusion that the plan was “not impossible” to achieve. But when Onishi presented their joint study to Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Fukudome, at the end of April 1941, he fingered two seemingly insurmountable problems.
The first was the expectation that aerial torpedoes dropped into the shallow (thirty to forty-five foot) water of Pearl Harbor would strike and stick in the mucky bottom before they could run their courses. The second was that the success of an attack of that kind depended on the maintenance of absolute secrecy, which seemed highly unlikely given the large number of people who would have to be involved in its planning and execution.24
Onishi gave the plan only a 60 percent chance of succeeding. Fukudome, interestingly, gave it only a 40 percent chance: “Had I from the very beginning been entrusted with the study of the idea instead of Onishi, I would certainly have recommended to Commander in Chief Yamamoto that the Hawaii Operation be abandoned.”25
But Yamamoto would not be deterred by percentages. He was comfortable with the hand he held.
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Husband Edward Kimmel’s ancestors on his father’s side emigrated from Bavaria in 1755 and settled in Somerset County, Pennsylvania colony. His father, Marius Manning Kimmel (1832–1915), attended Princeton University until his junior year, then accepted an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he was commissioned a second lieutenant of cavalry in 1857. During the following four years he fought against the Comanche Indians in the Battle of Nescutunga Valley and against Mexican marauders on the Rio Grande. When the Civil War broke out, then Major Kimmel served in defense of Washington in the First Battle of Bull Run on 21 July 1861. He then obtained leave to go home to Kentucky, where he changed sides, resigning from the Union army and accepting a commission in the Confederate forces. In the latter uniform he served as chief of staff to Major General Earl Van Dorn in the defense of Vicksburg in 1862. Following the surrender at Appomattox, Kimmel rode southwest to become a civil engineer on the Vera Cruz–City of Mexico Railroad, then under construction. For six years beginning in 1866 he engaged in a number of business enterprises in Missouri, then moved to Henderson, Kentucky, where he married and, at 512 North Green Street, began raising a family of seven boys and girls. Mrs. Kimmel was born Sibbella Lambert, the daughter of Joel Lambert and Polly Husband, of Henderson, hence the introduction of “Husband” into the family as a given name.
Young “Kim,” or “Hubbie,” as Husband was called within the family, was a serious boy, his brother, Singleton, older by twelve years, would remember in later years: “The Admiral used to haunt my office.” (Singleton was the city and county road engineer.) “He learned everything he could about the business, served as my surveying party rodman for a while. He always wanted to know the whys and wherefores of everything. I remember that when he was still in high school he went out and surveyed the old Lambert farm, plotted it, drew a map of it, located all the buildings.”
At age sixteen Kim was valedictorian of his graduating class at Barrett High School. Afterward, inspired by his father’s diploma from the military academy, he applied to his congressman from the Second District of Kentucky for an appointment to West Point.26
While waiting for the decision he completed his freshman year at Central University in Richmond, Kentucky. Told then that the allotments for West Point were filled, he secured an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, at Annapolis. The academy that he entered on 21 May 1900 was less an institution of higher learning than it was a training establishment or novitiate.
Cadets (the title of midshipman did not come into use until 1904) learned by the book, that is, by texts in tabloid form that had to be committed to memory. Innovative thinking was expressly discouraged. Cadets developed “a slavish adulation for the book” rather than “a quickening of the intellect.”27 In 1902 only 12 percent of the faculty were civilian academicians; the balance were academy graduates who had passed through the same regimen. Indeed, at Annapolis the intellect was deliberately subordinated to the will, and the subjects of instruction were frequently employed as a means of punishment; for, if any one subject ruled the curriculum, it was discipline. Molding character was thought more important than enlargement of the mind. Controlled by an iron hand of authority in every sector of his life, the cadet was understood not to be an individual aspiring to naval service but as one belonging to the service; hence, to resign from the academy required permission to do so. The overall and intentional effect of discipline was mastery over self, in the sense that it was thought to produce men who displayed, as the great naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (class of 1859) expressed it, “uncomplaining, noble self-abnegation.”28 A Cistercian monk could not have put it better.
One by-product of self-mastery was the development in each cadet of a deep personal sense of honor. Reputation and a good name were paramount values, to be esteemed both in the academy and in later service at sea. Cadets were taught to “guard their own honor and the honor of the service.” Death should be preferable to dishonor. By such exhortations cadets were persuaded that, like medieval knights, they possessed a morality superior to that of civilians. It was a morality to be expressed not in self-absorption, much less in conceit, but in refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and becoming modesty. When taking on their first fleet assignments after graduation, passed midshipmen presumably would know not to assert themselves too much among their peers and certainly never to take initiatives that would outshine a superior. They would be loyal, obedient, and efficient officers according to their ranks, and the discipline through which they had passed at Annapolis would always abide as a ready anchor to windward.
Pearl Harbor Betrayed Page 7
