Zero

by Masatake Okumiya

  We maintained the strictest requirements for these young men, for, despite their age, they were responsible for the operation of elaborate and expensive machines and apparatus of which Japan was continually in short supply. Once in the air, they were literally “on their own;” they must be fully competent to fulfill the responsibilities with which they had been entrusted. Time and again this policy proved its worth, notably so in the excellent performance of our pilots during the Sino-Japanese Incident.

  CHAPTER 6

  Prewar Anticipation

  THE LARGE-SCALE AIR battles of the Sino-Japanese Incident, and of the first two years of World War II in Europe, were fought chiefly over the land areas of the Asian and European continents. Because there did not exist any proof of the effectiveness of bombing planes against large warships at sea, at the time of the Hawaiian Operation on December 8, 1941, our Navy backed its confi­dence in the superiority of the warship against any other type of armament. The proponents of maximum surface fleet strength pointed out the indecisiveness of mass aerial attacks against enemy objectives even on land, and further stressed the fact that the battles we could expect in the vast regions of the Southwest Pacific would be determined pri­marily by the performance of our sea and land forces. They stipulated that air units would obviously be relegated to support roles. They further strengthened their arguments by employing as the classic example the case of the Ger­man dreadnaught Bismarck which, despite the superiority of British naval air power, was destroyed mainly by the shells and torpedoes of numerous British warships.

  Despite the overwhelming argument of current history which favored surface power, there were in our Navy a suf­ficient number of farsighted officers who realized the potentialities of the bombing plane. Accordingly, the Navy exerted every possible effort to insure the maximum effi­ciency of all available bombing units. This effort received further impetus when in mid-1941 the American govern­ment froze the assets of all Japanese residing in the United States. This move clarified the general drift toward a war between the two great powers, and our Army and Navy officers discussed privately the conflict which must inevitably flare between Japan and the United States and Great Britain.

  The vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean showed clearly that a war with these two foreign powers would be most likely decided upon the open sea. In the fall of 1941 our Army lacked aircraft capable of bombing from any base under our control the vital British installations at Singa­pore and similar American installations at Manila. Nor did the Army have available any fighter planes which, operat­ing from our southernmost base in Formosa, could raid the American airfields on Luzon. Occupation of the Singapore and Manila installations was vital to any extension of Japanese control in the Pacific. Consequently, as in the case of our operations in central and south China in the early months of the Sino-Japanese Incident, the Navy was assigned the responsibility for supplying air support for our ground forces.

  By their very nature the United States and Great Britain were formidable adversaries in the air. We realized fully that, unlike the chaotic misuse of air power by China, America and England, long our seniors in aviation and the two greatest international sea powers, would employ their fighters and bombers with maximum efficiency. We expected only light resistance from enemy aviation at the outset, for we knew that only limited numbers of fighters and bombers were in the Orient in late 1941. This fact, however conducive to immediate Japanese successes, could not be regarded as an accurate appraisal of enemy air potential. We knew only too well that the two countries would quickly multiply by many times their Oriental com­plements of planes and men.

  Despite our enemies’ awesome industrial might, the Navy had confidence in the ability of our Zero fighter planes to wrest air control from the enemy over any battle area. Our intelligence and our technical groups stated flatly that the excellent performance and technical superiority of the Zero fighter meant that, in battle, one Zero would be the equal of from two to five enemy fighter planes, depending upon the type. Because of this unshakeable faith in the Zero, the Navy felt extremely confident of victory in initial campaigns.

  We expected, however, severe losses to our Type 1 land-based attack bombers, which constituted our major aerial striking forces. Where the Zero clearly could best any known enemy fighter, we realized that each bomber would be grounded for extensive repairs after two or three mis­sions. The fuel tanks of the Type 1 bombers were not of the selfsealing, or bulletproof, types, and their repair was extremely difficult.

  I agreed that we might achieve outstanding initial com­bat success against America and England. The prospects of victory dimmed rapidly, however, in the face of a prolonged war in which the United States could bring to bear upon our forces its great industrial force. Attrition would cripple our strength just as effectively as enemy guns.

  During the summer of 1941, Army and Navy staff offi­cers frequently discussed with government officials the possible ramifications of a war against the United States and England. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, fully realized the difficulties we would face in an extended struggle. Cognizant of the almost insurmountable problem of maintaining and increasing qualified flight crews and supplying minimum numbers of combat planes to the front, Admiral Yamamoto frankly informed Premier Konoye:

  “If you tell me that it is necessary that we fight, then in the first six months to a year of war against the United States and England I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories; I must also tell you that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.”

  Soon afterward, at the Imperial Council immediately prior to the decision to enter war, Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai stated to the assembly that “. . . at all cost we must avoid the war with the United States and Great Britain which means a sudden deterioration in our national situa­tion; we can afford the risk of gradual loss of our national political and economic situation. . . .”

  Ex-premier Yonai’s advice, supported by many high-ranking naval officers and civil officials, provided an excellent summation of the actual prewar situation. Admi­ral Yamamoto, however, not only properly evaluated the excellent chances for initial Japanese military success, but also foresaw with foreboding clarity the inevitable defeat which lay ahead.

  High naval staff officers realized fully the pitfalls in the way of maintaining effective strength against the enemy and emphasized that the war would of necessity be fought mainly at sea. Despite the apprehensions of these officers, who commanded the air combat units which would spearhead the proposed mass attack against American and Eng­lish forces, the Imperial Council decided in favor of war.

  The Navy’s past experience in testing foreign planes enabled us to evaluate accurately the performance of these aircraft we would be most likely to encounter in the open­ing phases of the war. Equally important, however, was the foreign evaluation of our military aircraft, and in this respect we enjoyed an undisputed advantage. Our potential enemy was sadly misinformed as to the true performance capabilities of our warplanes, and American aviation mag­azines especially went to great lengths to deride our air forces. Clearly they dismissed as inconceivable the possi­bility that Japanese planes could effectively carry the war to the Americans and the British.

  In September of 1941 the “authoritative” American magazine Aviation, in an article titled “Japanese Air Force,” stated that our military and civilian pilots suffered from the world’s highest accident rate and that our Army and Navy trained fewer than one thousand pilots each year. We could not help but wonder at the source of the magazine’s information when we read that our pilots defi­nitely were inferior in the Sino-Japanese Incident to Chi­nese pilots, and that in the campaign at Nomonhan, Manchuria, the Soviet Air Force defeated our combat units.

  The magazine continued in this pompous fashion to state that while our Air Force was aggressive, it lacked experience in such large-scale operations as were
being conducted in Europe. We could not hope, claimed the anonymous authority, ever to develop effective air power. The story ended on the note that our industry could not possibly meet the requirements of a war; that our aviation engineering depended entirely upon the “handouts” of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union; and, finally, that “America’s aviation experts can say without hesitation that the chief military airplanes of Japan are either outdated already, or are becoming outdated. . . .”

  The magazine’s observations reflected not merely this single publication’s views, but rather the international evaluation of Japanese military air power. It is true that to foreign observers our training methods may have appeared unduly reckless with regard to student casualties in a program which suffered from an insufficient number of train­ing planes.

  Unknowingly, however, the magazine paid our military services an excellent compliment, for we had long bent every effort to conceal from foreign observation our actual military strength. In this respect we were obviously most successful! Our Navy’s chief training grounds were not in the homeland, but far at sea where even our own people remained unaware of the true extent of air-sea maneuvers. Further, we concealed in every possible fashion the partic­ulars of our military weapons and especially the perfor­mance of our aircraft. Foreign observers saw only what we allowed them to see.

  So effective was our armaments censorship that prior to the Pearl Harbor attack not a single American publication realized the existence of the Zero fighter, and not until sev­eral months following the opening of hostilities did the American public receive even a reasonably accurate impression of this airplane. Again we determined the trend of American thought by observing in another magazine, published several months before December of 1941, that: “The Japanese Navy’s air force consists of four aircraft car­riers with two hundred planes.”

  In his memoirs Winston Churchill testified to the effec­tiveness of our military censorship and to the erroneous impressions of our air power held both by England and America. Referring to the battle of Malaya fought on December 10, 1941, during which our planes sent to the bottom the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, Churchill defended the actions of Vice-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, who dispatched the ships under his command to the sea off Kuantan without fighter plane cover. On the basis of all data available to Admiral Phillips, Saigon, the Japanese base nearest to Kuantan, lay more than four hundred nau­tical miles to the north, and the admiral had every reason to believe that no torpedo bomber then in existence could carry out a mission over this distance.

  Admiral Phillips was, of course, in error, as we demon­strated so clearly by destroying the two mighty battleships. As Churchill himself stated, both England and America greatly underestimated the battle capabilities of our warplanes; this contributed greatly to the success of our operations.

  The unforgivable error of “underestimating the enemy” made by the Americans and the British was perhaps best illustrated in the reliance placed upon the antiquated Brewster F2A Buffalo fighter plane, which American avia­tion experts boasted was “the most powerful fighter plane in the Orient,” and a “fighter plane far superior to anything in the Japanese Air Force.” Against the Zero fighters, the Buffalo pilots literally flew suicide missions.

  On the first day of the war we jammed the message rooms, anxiously awaiting the initial combat reports which would inform us of initial victory, or of setbacks. Our exu­berance rose steadily as an unending stream of radio mes­sages described the courageous and amazing victories won by our naval air units. My apprehension faded with the increasing number of reported victories; incredibly, the first hours of war were totally in our favor.

  The evening of December 8, Commander Ikegami, the Senior Staff Officer of our air flotilla, returned from Navy General Headquarters in Tokyo with detailed combat reports. From these we learned that Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo commanded the First Air Fleet’s task force of 376 planes (108 Zeros, 126 Type 99 dive bombers, and 142 Type 97 carrier-based attack bombers) which attacked the Hawaiian Islands; and that the Navy land-based Air Force of 566 planes (224 Zeros, 288 Type 1 and Type 96 land-based attack bombers, 30 Type 99 land-based reconnais­sance planes, and 24 Type 97 flying boats) of the Eleventh Air Fleet under Vice-Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara was in the Malayan and Philippines theaters of operations, flying from bases in Formosa, southern French Indochina, and Palau. Coordinating their attacks with Admiral Tsukahara’s forces, and the 4th Carrier Division under Rear-Admiral Kakuji Kakuda operating in the Davao area, the planes of Rear-Admiral Eiji Goto’s 24th Air Flotilla flew from their Marianas and Marshall Islands bases to lash out at Wake and Guam.

  Without exception, every combat report recorded only smashing victories. Our successes exceeded by far even the most optimistic preattack estimates.

  In all military history I do not know of any country which simultaneously launched so many battles of such magnitude and, in addition, so completely defeated its opponents as we did on that fateful morning of December 8, 1941. We coordinated our combat operations across a distance of six thousand nautical miles, spanning the ocean between Hawaii and Singapore.

  What I would like history most to record, however, is that this abrupt reversal of the Asiatic-Pacific balance of power was accomplished with the total of only approxi­mately one thousand planes of the Japanese Naval Air Force and that this same force suffered only the barest minimum of losses. An excellent evaluation of our available naval air power may best be had by referring to the air strength hurled by the Allies against Europe in the Nor­mandy division—more than eleven thousand aircraft!

  The initial anxiety of the Japanese people changed to wild joy when they learned of our astonishing military gains. Our own air force personnel jubilantly cheered each new message of conquest. To be perfectly honest, 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. Despite our brilliant gains, however, I and several other senior officers with a more intimate knowl­edge of the long-range consequences of the new war could not help but harbor anxiety as to the future of our nation.

  I remember clearly the special reactions of our young officers, who clamored for combat duty. The war was hardly more than a month old when rumors spread among the personnel of the air flotilla that before long the war would end in a smashing victory for Japan. Frontline duty appealed much more to these young pilots than did the prosaic training duties of the home air flotillas, and they thought of nothing but their own participation in air bat­tles. 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; we stressed the tremendous industrial potential of our adversaries, but with no effect. Our junior pilots were fully convinced that the war would end too soon to enable them to participate.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Pearl Harbor Attack: Overwhelming Victory as the War Begins

  THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR was a military feat so daring and so successful as to deserve a special place in history. In a single masterful stroke, Japan not only launched the opening phase of the Pacific War, but wrought mass devastation through the powerful American fleet which was caught unaware in the Hawaiian Islands.

  The success of this attack stemmed directly from the brilliant planning and the decisive measures taken by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, who for the eighteen years prior to the Pacific War had, with a fervor amounting almost to reli­gion, devoted all his efforts to the end of creating a power­ful Japanese naval air force.

  When our intelligence tabulated the final results of the Hawaiian Operation (this was its official designation), we discovered that the surprise attack had inflicted far greater damage to the American warships in Hawaii than our most optimistic advance estimates had a
nticipated. The crippling of a large and powerful segment of the American fleet placed Japan’s naval units in a position of strength suffi­cient to permit our rapid movement elsewhere throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans.

  The great majority of Americans will undoubtedly be surprised to learn that the Pearl Harbor assault was not intended to be a sneak blow, although it has come to be accepted in the public mind as such. The conditions and timing of the attack, as related to diplomatic activities con­ducted simultaneously in Washington, D.C., unhappily cre­ated a situation in which it appeared our Navy deliberately struck without any prior notice of hostilities.

  This unfortunate eventuality occurred despite the fact that the Japanese government had forwarded an ultimatum to the United States through the Japanese Embassy in Washington. Although the ultimatum was dispatched to the Embassy in sufficient time to permit translation and delivery to the State Department prior to the actual attack, the Japanese Embassy’s inexcusable delay in making the translation resulted in delivery of the message after our planes had commenced their attack.

  Actually, this statement does not embody any unusual revelation, since the truth has already been revealed during the international war criminal trials at Tokyo. The writer wishes, however, to “set the record straight” in these pages.

  The Hawaiian Operation was carried out under the direct command of Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who was given command of a special carrier task force for the Pearl Harbor operation. The attacking fleet was composed of twenty-three vessels, including six aircraft carriers. These were the Akagi and the Kaga of the 1st Carrier Divi­sion; the Soryu and the Hiryu of the 2nd Carrier Division; and the Zuikaku and the Shokaku of the 5th Carrier Divi­sion. Augmenting the carrier force were the battleships Hiei and Kirishima, the two heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma, one light cruiser, nine destroyers, and other ves­sels.