Kimmel’s attention to his carrier needs highlights a quality of his naval leadership that has been overlooked in the historical literature. At a time when most naval authorities in the United States and Japan, indeed worldwide, counted the battleship as a navy’s indispensable weapon, when strategists eagerly envisioned decisive main-battery salvos in blue-water engagements like the Battle of Jutland, and, accordingly, when most fleet commanders planned operations around the use of the great-hulled, strutting brutes that were the battle line of the fleets, Kimmel, like his Japanese opposite number, Yamamoto Isoruku, believed that the opening stages of the Pacific war would be, and should be, a carrier war and not a clash of battleships or heavy cruisers. On 22 October he wrote Stark: “The type of operations we have planned in the early stages of the war puts a premium on aircraft operations from carriers [emphasis added].”31
Elsewhere, Kimmel had developed his strategy, which emphasized light forces, particularly air power:
In the Pacific our potential enemy is far away and hard to get at. He has no exposed vital interests within reach of Pearl Harbor, and has a system of defense in the Mandates, Marianas and Bonins that requires landing operations, supported by sea forces, against organized land positions supported by land-based air. This is the hardest kind of opposition to overcome and requires detailed preparation and rehearsal. It also requires a preponderance of light forces and carrier strength, in which we are woefully deficient in the Pacific. Our present strength is in battleships—which come into play only after we have reduced the intervening organized positions. They [battleships] will have to be used to “cover” the intervening operations and prevent interference therewith, but their real value can not be realized until the intervening opposition has been overcome and a position obtained from which solid strength can be brought to bear. The Japanese are not going to expose their main fleet until they are … forced to do so by our obtaining a position close enough to threaten their vital interests.32
What was gall and wormwood to Kimmel’s warrior soul was that his fleet was so reduced in light force and carrier strength that its offensive capabilities were severely crippled. Moreover, the Pacific Fleet was lacking in auxiliary vessels—tankers, cargo ships, transports—to the degree that he could not mount an overseas expedition, “even on a small scale,” for many months. A reconnaissance and raid in force on the Marshalls, mandated in WPL-46, he could carry out on schedule, as he could also “prepare to capture and establish control over the Caroline and Marshall Island area [emphasis added],” but actual occupation of the Marshalls and the Carolines and an advance westward across the Pacific could not be attempted before he was given thirty or forty troop transports—he currently had one in commission—an equal number of supply ships, seventy-five tankers, and a 30 to 50 percent increase in the fighting strength of the fleet.33 The earliest date of a small-scale voyage westward Kimmel put at February 1942.34 (This was, in fact, the month when Kimmel’s relief, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, employed the fleet in their first offensive operations in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.) And the earliest date when the fleet could operate in Philippine or Japanese home waters was midsummer 1942. Stark sought to cool Kimmel’s offensive ardor, writing him on 25 November that, as for cruising in Japanese home waters, “neither ABC-1 or [sic] Rainbow 5 contemplate [sic] this as a general policy.… Opportunity for raids in Japanese waters may present themselves, but this will be the exception rather than the rule.”35 (This was the same CNO, of course, who earlier, on 25 February, had urged Kimmel, in his planning for offensive raids to take place after hostilities began, to consider carrier bombing attacks on the “inflammable Japanese cities.”)
The import of all this—the deficiency in auxiliaries, the reduced fighting strength of the fleet, the midsummer 1942 date when Kimmel could first operate in the western Pacific—will not be lost on the reader who remembers that one of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s expressed reasons for destroying or crippling the Pacific Fleet at its anchorage was to prevent that fleet from menacing the left flank of Japan’s southward movement of conquest through the China Sea. As Navy Minister Admiral Shimada Shigetaro expressed it to Rear Admiral Fukudome, Yamamoto’s chief of staff, “There would be little chance to exploit a conquest of Southeast Asia if our long Southern Operation line, stretching far below the equator, was flanked by a dominant U.S. fleet, prepared to strike at the best time and in a manner of its own choosing.”36 With the Southern Operation long completed by the time Kimmel’s fleet could appear on the horizon, Yamamoto and his navy had nothing to fear from the U.S. warships berthed at Pearl Harbor. It were better that Japanese spies in the hills overlooking Pearl counted auxiliaries instead of warships; or, if they did, that Navy strategists in Tokyo did not discount them. It were better, too, that certain critics of Kimmel had paid more attention to auxiliaries than they did, so as not to exaggerate, as some have, what Kimmel intended to achieve with his battle line. Ironically, the evidence was clear to any knowledgeable eye that an attack on Pearl Harbor was not even necessary for Japan’s immediate purposes of conquest.37
It is true that Kimmel and his chief planner, “Soc” McMorris, had developed an offensive plan of action for execution by the fleet at some date after the opening of hostilities. Drafted in March and finalized in July, Plan Optional Dash One, or Plan 0–1 (or WPUSF-44), was a contingency plan for thrusting the Pacific Fleet into blue-water battle with the Japanese Fleet in the Central Pacific, probably along the 1,028-nautical-mile Wake-Midway line.38 Typical of thirty-four years of Orange Plan scenarios, it presupposed the availability of material resources, including auxiliaries, that were in fact lacking. The plan plainly represented the aggressive instincts of “the two foremost thrusters of the fleet,” Kimmel and McMorris, but by November–December it hardly represented any current reality, much less intent. Failure to consider a fleet’s auxiliary train, because of an obsession with that fleet’s eight battleships, can lead to a skewed assessment of what a fleet is capable of achieving. And, it must be said, an obsession with Kimmel’s background as a battleship gunner—“Although a battleship orientation was not uncommon in the navy of 1941,” one recent author writes, “Kimmel’s case was extreme”—can lead to a skewed depiction of Kimmel as some kind of naval Luddite in the matter of carriers and light forces, as in this portrayal from the same author:
Kimmel’s appreciation of air power, except for reconnaissance, was rather primitive. He thought of carriers as auxiliaries: They could sally forth on raids, but their place in a fleet engagement was with the battle line. The CINCPAC didn’t understand, and sometimes irritated, his aviators. “Fly-boys,” he called them.39
That same canard was being advanced as late as 2001, when an Army colonel, writing in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, argued that “Admiral Kimmel, for example, having spent his career in a navy built around the battleship … simply could not conceive of carriers operating apart from battleships.” By telling coincidence, the editor of MHQ, in a prefatory “Note to Our Readers” in the same issue, wrote: “A history is only as good as its sources.”40
In both instances the view taken of Kimmel is not supported by the pertinent original documents, as cited here. Furthermore, such a gratuitous position would have a hard time reconciling itself to Kimmel’s operational doctrine as applied by his subordinate commander Vice Admiral Halsey, on 28 November, when Halsey’s Task Force 8 sortied “under war conditions” to ferry Marine F4F fighters aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6) to Wake Island. It did so accompanied by his trudging battleships, as though heading for a typical exercise in the operating area; but, once at sea, Halsey sloughed off his three battleships, which busied themselves for a time in exercises, and then returned to Pearl. Similarly, when Admiral Newton’s Task Force 12, built around USS Lexington (CV-2), left Pearl for Midway on 5 December to fly off air reinforcements to that island, it consisted, besides the carrier, of three heavy cruisers and five destroyers—no battleships. (A third task force, TF-3, un
der Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, consisting of the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) and five destroyers, departed Pearl on the same 5 December to conduct landing exercises on Johnston Island.) Like Yamamoto Isoruku, Husband E. Kimmel was a farsighted pioneer in his keen understanding of the carrier war to come. Both men understood that the battleship was too slow, and its reach too short, to keep pace with that war.
In the Pearl Harbor literature much has been made of the fact that Halsey announced to Enterprise’s crew that they were operating under war conditions, that radio silence would be observed, that all torpedoes and bombs were to be armed, that any submarine sighted or detected was to be sunk, and that any aircraft not identified as American was to be shot down. His aggressive spirit and tactical preparedness have sometimes been interpreted to show that Kimmel, by contrast, lacked those qualities. Apart from the fact that it was Kimmel who authorized Halsey to go on a war footing, it was also Kimmel who, in direct violation of Stark’s restraining order, went to war conditions himself on the same date, 28 November, when he ordered all sea and air forces to depth-charge any submerged submarine detected by sonar in the harbor approaches and in the fleet operating area. Neither Newton nor Brown was put on a war footing; nor, unlike Halsey, was either told of the 27 November war warning.
* * *
By 18 October the shakeups in the Japanese cabinet were complete. The militarists were in control. Tojo Hideki, now a full general, was prime minister. He also held the cabinet offices of war minister and home minister, the latter office in charge of national police. Admiral Toyoda Teijiro was replaced as foreign minister by Togo Shigenori, a senior diplomat and moderate, who hoped that war with the United States could be put off until that power’s entry into the war against Germany, and who, under the Emperor’s mantle, wrung from Tojo a reluctant pledge to make yet one more effort to secure an accommodation with Hull and Roosevelt. In that endeavor Togo could take no comfort from the desire of Ambassador Nomura to quit his post and return home. Arguing that those Americans who trusted him were “poor deluded souls” for thinking that he had any influence with the new military cabinet, Nomura wrote, on 23 October: “I don’t want to be the bones of a dead horse. I don’t want to continue this hypocritical existence, deceiving other people.… Please send me your permission to return to Japan.” To which Togo replied, under the same date: “I appreciate the efforts you are making.… We express our hope that you will see fit to sacrifice all of your own personal wishes, and remain at your post.”41
Meanwhile, in the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters at Tokyo, as well as in naval, air, and army bases both in the home islands and in occupied territories of China and Indo-China, preparations for war moved ahead at an anxious pace. Weather conditions dictated the schedule to be followed. The Southern Operation to make Japan self-sufficient in oil, rubber, tin, bauxite, and other raw materials through the capture of Malaya and the NEI had to be mounted no later than December, before the northeast monsoon roiled the South China Sea. Effective occupation of the British and Dutch possessions had to be completed during the Manchurian winter, when traditional enemy Russia would find it difficult, though not impossible, to menace Japan’s exposed northern flank. And Yamamoto’s transpacific raid on Pearl Harbor would have to be launched no later than December, before the onset of winter gales and worsened visibility in the northern route, or Vacant Sea, which was chosen in preference to the calmer southern or central routes because it was distant from normal shipping tracks. In Japanese home waters the carriers and other warships assigned to the Hawaiian operation diligently practiced refueling at sea, which was not as commonplace then as it would become later in the war, and in various home bays air crews rehearsed the complicated approach patterns that would have to be flown in the Oahu airspace. At the same time, aircraft flew bombing-run drills to prepare for strikes they would be ordered to make on the same 7 December (8 December in the Phillipines) against Clark Field on Luzon Island, where General MacArthur’s air staff husbanded their growing fleet of B-17 Flying Fortresses.
The Japanese Army had not at first agreed with its Navy counterparts that the Philippines should be attacked at all. Its forces were not as strong as originally hoped: since, by mid-August Russia had not dispatched her Siberian troops to the German front, it appeared that only eleven out of Japan’s fifty-one divisions and 700 out of 1,500 in-commission Army aircraft (remembering that much of Japan’s manpower and equipment was tied up in the occupations of China and Indo-China) could be committed to the Southern Operation. But, the Navy argued successfully, Japan could not permit an unsinkable aircraft carrier, which was the Philippines, to stand, unmolested, astride her southward advance, trade routes, and communications. In mid-August Army strategists agreed with that imperative, and undertook the development of detailed operational plans based on the joint decision to attack and occupy the Philippines. Since an attack on the Philippines would bring the United States into the war anyway, Yamamoto’s plan for a simultaneous carrier-borne attack to disable the American fleet at Pearl Harbor made all the more sense to the Army.
On 20 October the two services agreed on a final plan for making war at one and the same time against the British Commonwealth, the NEI, and the United States. Hostilities were to open with six different but nearly simultaneous operations. These were: (1) a surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor and Oahu airfields for the purpose of destroying or neutralizing the U.S. Pacific Fleet; (2) occupation of Siam with the object of obtaining a base for operations against Malaya; (3) landings in northern Malaya and on the Isthmus of Kra as first stages in the capture of Singapore; (4) bombing raids on the U.S. B-17 Flying Fortresses based at Clark Field on Luzon Island in the Philippines; (5) seizure of the U.S. Pacific islands of Guam and Wake in order to isolate the Philippines; and (6) invasion of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The air attacks on Clark Field were to be followed by landings of ground forces on Luzon and Mindanao Islands; landings in northern Malaya were to be followed by landings in British Borneo; and capture of Jolo Island in the Sulu Sea would help make possible capture of the NEI. Second and third phases of the Southern Operation would establish a defensive cordon, or perimeter, that would run from the Kuriles through Wake Island, the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, Timor, Java, Sumatra, and Malaya to Burma, and west to India.42
* * *
On 5 November an Imperial conference placed its imprimatur on the general war plan. At the same time, its participants agreed to have Nomura make one last effort to secure an agreement with Washington. Two proposals in sequential order, lettered A and B, were to be placed before Hull and Roosevelt. Proposal A was a reformulation of previously stated Japanese positions, including Japan’s right to maintain armed forces in northern China, Mongolia, and Hainan for “a necessary period” (which Nomura was to interpret as “about twenty-five years”). All other troops presently in China would be withdrawn when that country agreed to make peace with Japan. Similarly, upon the signing of such a treaty, Japan would withdraw her troops from Indo-China. The Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy would remain in force. Unwritten but understood in these terms was the requirement on Washington’s part to force Chiang Kai-shek’s government into a peace treaty under threat of denying it all further economic and military aid. Should Washington refuse to comply, Nomura was to produce Proposal B (largely the work of Foreign Minister Togo), which posited a modus vivendi—a temporary war-preventing truce—based on the following terms:
1. Both the Governments of Japan and the United States undertake not to make any armed advancement into any of the regions in Southeastern Asia and the Southern Pacific area excepting the part of French Indo-China where the Japanese troops are stationed at present.
2. The Japanese Government undertakes to withdraw its troops now stationed in French Indo-China upon either the restoration of peace between Japan and China or the establishment of an equitable peace in the Pacific area. In the meantime the Government of Japan de
clares that it is prepared to remove its troops now stationed in the southern part of French Indo-China to the northern part of the said territory upon the conclusion of the present arrangement which shall later be embodied in the final agreement.
3. The Governments of Japan and the United States shall cooperate with a view to securing the acquisition of those goods and commodities which the two countries need in Netherlands East Indies.
4. The Governments of Japan and the United States mutually undertake to restore their commercial relations to those prevailing prior to the freezing of the assets. The government of the United States shall supply Japan a required quantity of oil.
Pearl Harbor Betrayed Page 14
