Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  III. Hideki Tojo was so ramrod by-the-books and so harsh to his subordinates that he was nicknamed the Razor. When he became prime minister, one of his first orders of business was to look through people’s garbage on his morning walks, which he told the press was to ensure that wartime rations were working effectively. If this was PR, it wasn’t successful, as he was quickly called the Dumpster Minister. His pretentious speeches, filled with therefores and thuses, were so odd, schoolchildren made a game of imitating them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  AUTUMN 1941

  On August 7, “Ganji” Kuroshima met at the Naval General Staff headquarters with Operations chief Tomioka to again discuss the details of Yamamoto’s Operation Z. The general staff remained unconvinced. How could a large force moving across the Pacific avoid “enemy ships or aircraft or ships of neutral countries on the way [or] aerial reconnaissance?” Tomioka wondered. Wouldn’t the US Pacific Fleet detect the task force and then attack it in coordination with her land-based aircraft? If Kimmel’s ships weren’t in port once the Japanese reached Hawaii, the First Air Fleet did not have enough scouts to search for them. Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters meant that torpedoes would not work, making the attack reliant on Japan’s notoriously ineffective horizontal bombers. Besides, what about the untested method of refueling at sea, and, what about the weather? Finally, the operation meant reducing the number of carriers available for Japan’s great gamble, Operation Number One. Tomioka concluded: “This Hawaii Operation is speculative and has little chance for success. In the worst case we may even lose our forces, which are like tiger cubs now.”

  None of these arguments dissuaded Yamamoto and Ganji, who responded just as aggressively. To force the general staff into agreement, Kuroshima moved up the navy’s annual war games to September from November and included a private analysis of Operation Z.

  Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye at this moment realized that the only way he could avoid war with America was through a personal, face-to-face meeting with Roosevelt. Knowing that War Minister Hideki Tojo would be opposed to such a strategy, Konoye sent General Naruhiko Higashikuni, an uncle of the emperor’s who had spent his childhood in France, to talk sense to the army minister. At their meeting, Higashikuni shared with Tojo that French general Marshal Pétain and Premier Georges Clemenceau had predicted that, because of the power struggle in the Pacific, the United States and Japan were destined to go to war, a war Japan was destined to lose due to America’s greater industrial power. Tojo replied that if the present course of history continued, Japan as a nation would disappear; that the chance of winning a war was fifty-fifty; and that it was better to fight than to do nothing and lose one’s country. Higashikuni then said that since both Hirohito and Konoye wanted a meeting with Roosevelt, that Tojo should accede to their wishes. Tojo grudgingly agreed, telling Konoye that, if things did not go as the prime minister hoped, “You shall not resign your post as a result of the meeting on the grounds that it was a failure. Rather, you shall be prepared to assume leadership in the war against America.”

  Konoye ordered Nomura on August 7 to arrange a summit with FDR, but the ambassador immediately ran into obstacles. Americans had a very low opinion of the prince since he had previously been prime minister when the army committed its barbaric war crimes and he was originally a vociferous supporter of allying with the Nazis. Even the sympathetic Joseph Grew said that Konoye was “saddled with the responsibility for some of the worst acts of banditry on the part of Japan which have been recorded in international history.” Combining this résumé with their thinking that the Japanese were racially duplicitous—a viewpoint seemingly confirmed both by MAGIC and by the betrayal of Nomura’s diplomatic negotiations with the invasion of Indochina—Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson didn’t consider Konoye’s summit offer sincere, saying, “The invitation is merely a blind to try and keep us from taking definite action.” They knew the prime minister didn’t have the full force of the government behind him and assumed that, regardless of the results of any meeting with Roosevelt, Japan’s generals wouldn’t significantly alter their battle plans.

  Roosevelt told Nomura on August 17 that if peace could be brought to the Pacific, he would meet with the prime minister, but if Japan kept trying to negotiate nonaggression pacts with the United States while at the same time invading Asia, “we could not think of reopening the conversations.”

  Nomura insisted that Konoye was sincere, and on the twenty-eighth, he met with Hull to plan a summit. The prime minister had offered to meet halfway in Hawaii, but the president said that this was too far for him to travel, and he suggested they meet on a battleship anchored off Juneau, Alaska. Konoye accepted and secretly arranged for a ship to be prepared and waiting for him in Yokohama harbor so that he could leave at once to meet with Roosevelt.

  Akiho Ishii, the senior staff officer in charge of operations for the Southern Area Army, would be accompanying the prime minister to Alaska and was certain as to the outcome. The president and prime minister would begin at loggerheads, due to the terms preapproved by Japan’s military leaders. Then, at the last moment, when everything seemed destined for the brink of war, the emperor would assume command, castigate the generals for their poor behavior, and even though it would mean the embarrassment of troop withdrawals from Indochina and China, insist on peace with America.

  One of the few direct warnings given American officials about Pearl Harbor then occurred on August 12, when triple agent Dusan Popov (who worked for Yugoslavian intelligence under the code name Dusko, for Britain’s MI6 foreign spy operations as Tricycle, and for Germany’s Abwehr as Ivan) appeared in the offices of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. He wanted to offer the FBI details on the spy network he was setting up in the United States on behalf of the Nazis. Besides a goodly sum of money, the Germans had given Popov—a wealthy cosmopolitan playboy and inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond—a three-page questionnaire to answer, one full page of which requested detailed information about America’s defenses at Pearl Harbor. Though MI6 had provided him with the strongest of bona fides, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover mistrusted a double agent and a womanizer who was at the moment, Hoover knew, having an affair with French movie star Simone Simon. The Bureau refused to take Popov’s revelations seriously. When the Serbian operative later learned of the assault on Oahu, he was crushed: “I had the right information to forestall the attack. I had traveled thousands of miles to deliver the information, which would certainly have shortened the war by a year or more. American red tape stopped the information going through.”

  A week after Popov tried to convince the FBI of Axis threats against Pearl Harbor, on August 20 the army in Hawaii sent Washington the “Plan for the Employment of Bombardment Aviation in the Defense of Oahu,” as prepared by Colonel William Farthing. “Our most likely enemy, Orange [Japan], can probably employ a maximum of six carriers against Oahu,” Farthing determined. “An enemy should be primarily interested in obtaining the maximum cover of darkness for his carrier approach. . . . The early morning attack is, therefore, the best plan of action to the enemy.” Since “the key to this plan is found in the provision for first, a complete and thorough search of the Hawaiian area daily during daylight,” the colonel asked for “180 B-17 D type airplanes or other four-engine bombers with equal or better performance and operating range and 36 long-range torpedo carrying medium bombers.” The Army Pearl Harbor Board later called this memo “prophetic in its accuracy and uncanny in its analysis of the enemy’s intention,” as indeed it was. However, as of the August date of the memo, the entire US Army had 109 B-17s, while Farthing’s other great miscalculation was an idea shared by many in Hawaii—that war would be declared, and then an attack would be made. Additionally, Farthing later admitted what so many American officers believed: “I didn’t think [Japan] could do it. I didn’t think they had that ability.”

  On August 27 at Konoye’s residence in Tokyo, graduate students from the Total War Resea
rch Institute spent nine hours presenting a report to the nation’s ministers. After six weeks researching the government’s own data on military, economic, and diplomatic history, the students concluded that if Japan attacked the Anglo-Saxons, she might win the opening salvoes, but any prolonged war would consume all her resources, and eventually she would be defeated. The students were then assigned a war game, with the theoretical condition that Japan had been economically isolated and needed to take Southeast Asian oil fields by force. The students concluded that this made the unwinnable war they’d predicted inevitable. Enemy fleets, they noted, could easily attack petroleum tankers, making the whole endeavor pointless. The students suggested that the fiasco could and should be avoided though diplomacy.

  Their instructor, Colonel Horiba Kazuo, said that they had forgotten a crucial ingredient: “Yamato-damashii is what the United States is lacking, and that is the greatest resource of our country,” he lectured, referring to “Japanese spirit,” a quality shared by the people of the nation, which included discipline, hard work, and resilience. No matter their data or their conclusions, Yamato-damashii would ensure that Japan would win.

  Navy Chief of Staff Nagano met with Hirohito at the palace on August 31 to discuss Japan’s latest war plans. Before his emperor, Nagano insisted he was completely opposed to the Tripartite Pact, as it kept Japan from diplomatically moving forward with the United States, and that a war with America must be avoided. However, he now said, “If our petroleum supplies were cut off, we would lose our stock in two years. If a war broke out, we would use it all up in eighteen months.” Under such circumstances, there was “no choice but to strike.”

  “Could we expect a big victory, such as our victory [over Russia] in the Sea of Japan?” Hirohito wondered.

  “I am uncertain as to any victory,” Nagano said, “let alone the kind of huge victory won in the Sea of Japan.”

  “What a reckless war that would be!” Hirohito exclaimed.

  Meanwhile, in a sign of growing desperation, the Imperial Japanese Army had stripped away the cast-iron ornaments and fences from Tokyo’s buildings to manufacture a mere nineteen hundred pounds of weaponry.

  • • •

  As Japan’s leaders lurched between war and peace, Minoru Genda continued to develop Operation Z. To ensure that his pilots were achieving their best, he recruited a naval academy classmate with a reputation as both a fearless China War torpedo ace and a vociferous advocate of carrier warfare among his fellow naval officers, Mitsuo Fuchida. Nicknamed Tako (octopus) since he was so quick to blush—octopuses turn red when cooked—Fuchida was such a charmer that he became fast friends with both Genda and Prince Takamatsu, Hirohito’s brother, at the naval academy, Etajima, Japan’s Annapolis. A hotshot pilot and hard drinker born on the rural outskirts of Kyoto in 1902, the year of the tiger (tora in Japanese), Fuchida so admired Hitler that he groomed his mustache until it resembled the Führer’s. In 1940, when he was Third Air Squadron staff officer in charge of the pilots on carriers Ryujo and Shoho, the young ensign heard another naval officer say, “How many planes do we need on the carriers to protect our battleships?” This made Fuchida—another fervent disciple of Gendaism—enraged. “Aircraft carriers should not protect battleships; it should be the other way around,” he yelled. “Japan should gather all her carriers into one great squadron for massive air striking power. The battleships, cruisers, and other ships should protect the carriers.”

  Like many Japanese of this era, Fuchida thought Christians were treasonous and blasphemous because they wouldn’t refer to the emperor as O Gimi (great master), an honorific they reserved for Jesus. He also believed Japan was doing the right thing in her conquest of China, since the Japanese were clearly the superior race, destined to rule over Asia. And unlike Yamamoto and Hirohito, Mitsuo Fuchida had no ethical qualms about launching a surprise attack before formally declaring war. If soldiers weren’t ready to fight for their defense, he reasoned, they deserved the justice of death.

  Genda appointed Fuchida commander of the First Air Fleet’s air groups. Operation Z would be comprised of thirty-one vessels ferrying over four hundred aircraft within 220 miles of Oahu. Fuchida organized his squadrons into arrow-shaped formations of five high-level horizontal bombers and nine dive-bombers. He then spent the autumn of 1941 drilling these air crews again and again in trial runs outside the town of Kagoshima on the island of Kyushu, a spot remarkably similar in geography to Pearl Harbor. The trainees were shocked by the advanced torpedo course, in which they roared over the city at a little more than one hundred feet.

  Two great revolutions in naval warfare would be wrought by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. The first would be the ascendancy of the flattop coupled with the fall of the battleship; but the other has been little discussed: the torpedo. A descendant of the floating mine named by Robert Fulton after a genus of electric rays and originally developed as an accessory for his French submarine Nautilus, the torpedo was first granted self-propulsion (from compressed air) by English engineer Robert Whitehead, which turned it into an excellent David-versus-Goliath weapon. In the wake of HMS Dreadnought, battleships were heavily armed, heavily armored, and thus slow and expensive. Cheap torpedoes could be deployed by small boats, by airplanes, and even by individual frogmen. Running beneath the armored sides to strike the keel and other structural elements of a hull’s underbelly, they could break the back of any warship.

  Aerial torpedo technology mixed together seemingly every variable of the material world—flight; air; gravity; water; propulsion; detonation; explosion—requiring wildly complicated engineering mathematics to work effectively. In the Japanese standard technique, in which torpedoes were dropped at high speed from a height of three hundred feet, they descended one hundred to three hundred feet into the water, with some then shooting up so sharply they would porpoise over the surface, while others ran so deeply they would pass right under a target’s keel. American navy officer Bradley Fiske developed a patented technique of descending in a spiraling dive to escape enemy fire, leveling at ten to twenty feet over the water while setting a course to adjust the torpedo’s path, waiting to release until fifteen hundred to two thousand yards from the target, and finally executing a steep climb to avoid collision with a warship’s superstructure. Fiske reported that, given enough depth and distance, ships could be sunk in their own harbors with this technique.

  Genda and Fuchida ordered the fleet’s finest torpedo pilots, the Yokosuka Air Group, to combine engineering with technique to prevent their Model II torpedoes from descending farther than thirty-three feet underwater. After months of experiments and drills, a wooden fin was attached to the torpedoes’ tails that would break away when the missile hit the water and, in doing so, slow its dive. This fin additionally gave the torpedoes such quick steadying they could run in a narrow confine, such as a harbor. But manufacturing enough, under a deadline, was a problem; Fuchida could only have thirty by October 15, another fifty by October 31, and the final hundred would not be delivered until November 30. Between October 30 and November 4, however, only five to ten fins were available to test in Kagoshima. The results were “irregular.”

  Finally, however, the pilots perfected the missing ingredient: Fiske’s leveling technique of skimming over the water at a shockingly low altitude. On a beautiful day that fall, three torpedoes were dropped into waters as shallow as Pearl Harbor’s. One sank to the bottom and stuck there, but the other two righted themselves and barreled straight into their targets. If his airmen could maintain this same two-of-three ratio over Hawaii, Fuchida knew he could achieve a great victory. Even so, the commander decided, “We cannot rely only on torpedoes. Nor can we expect too much from dive-bombing because the missiles are too light to penetrate the heavy armor of a United States battleship. We must work on high-level bombing and train incessantly until our bombardiers are good enough.” Additionally he saw that only an outbound ship could be attacked with torpedoes on a double mooring. He brought up all these technica
l worries about torpedo attacks with his commander. “Do it anyway!” Genda said.

  Since they expected Pearl Harbor and its biggest ships to be ringed with torpedo nets, Yokosuka experimented with various methods of cutting them. Nothing worked. Fukudome later said that, faced with nets, “It was decided to make bombings only against them, giving up torpedo attacks.” But that wasn’t the whole truth, as Fuchida had furtively gotten Genda’s approval to have pilots suicide-dive into any torpedo nets to shatter them.

  The high-level bombing presented even more of a problem than the torpedoes, since the Japanese had no shells that could penetrate a battleship’s high-armored decks; the ones that they did have wouldn’t fall straight, and their bombsight technology was so primitive it meant a humiliating failure rate in hitting their targets. After days of experiment and failure, Fuchida’s teams finally came up with the answer. By adding metal fins to a sixteen-inch, seventeen-hundred-pound battleship shell to ensure it would fall nose-first, and then dropping it from a height of eleven thousand feet, the shell’s weight, combined with the power of gravity, created a bomb that could penetrate a battleship’s deck. Fuchida also exchanged the traditional nine-plane high-level formation for five planes in an arrowhead, which gave him ten attack units, each of which could concentrate on its assigned target. After months of drilling, squads led by the best high-level pilots with the best bombardiers had every crew drop their ordnance when their leaders did. The hit rate improved by 70 percent.