Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th

by Newt Gingrich

  “Bank to port!” Fuchida snapped.

  If simply a practice attack, Hideo would have skimmed across the enemy deck, so low that no one could effectively shoot at them, cleared the port side, dived down to skim the waves, then raced off pulling evasive turns until out of gunnery range. But he wanted to see the results.

  Hideo went into a sharp banking turn, the force of it pressing Fuchida down low in his seat, as they pivoted above the deck of his beloved carrier, men on the deck now running to the starboard railing to watch the results of the attack.

  There were only two tracks of bubbles approaching the Akagi. The torpedoes were approaching at just thirty kilometers per hour, barely half speed, throttled back so if they hit the torpedo net deployed out ten meters from the carrier, they would simply snag without damage.

  It took nearly two minutes for them to reach the target, one slicing fifty yards behind the stern—to his shame, it looked to be the one launched by Hideo—the second striking amidships a few seconds later, head crumbling in the torpedo net. Of course there was no hundred-meter-high pillar of water from the explosion, just a dull thump, and seconds later the inflatable bladder, set in the torpedo so it could be recovered, brought the bent weapon to the surface.

  “The rest of you, head back to base,” Fuchida announced sharply to the squadron; then he ordered Hideo to circle back over the drop point and skimmed in low. A small tender was already approaching the area. One torpedo was on the surface, bladder inflated; why it failed completely would have to be carefully studied. Bubbles were surfacing from the drop point of two others. The sixth torpedo there was no sign of at all; most likely it was broken apart on the bottom, shattered as it hit.

  Damn, damn all, he sighed. The torpedoes were obviously stuck in the mud at the bottom of the bay.

  It was another failure.

  The drop point for the attack and positioning of Akagi had been carefully selected. The bottom at low tide, exactly thirteen meters deep, the depth of Pearl Harbor’s main channel and anchorage.

  Four torpedoes damaged by the drop or hitting the bottom, only two successfully launched, only one striking the target, a huge carrier, stationary and only a thousand meters away.

  What do I say to Genda, he wondered. He had hoped that the lower, slower approach into the target, the diving planes on the torpedoes calibrated so that they would not sink more than ten meters after drop, rather than the usual twenty to thirty before surfacing back up for the run into the target, would work. It had not worked. They could go no slower without stalling, and for that matter making themselves absolutely nothing more than suicidal targets before even launching, and they could go no lower.

  Damn all, some other way to launch the torpedoes had to be found, otherwise all of Genda’s elaborate plans would be for naught.

  “Take us back in, Hideo,” he said dryly, dreading the report he would have to file upon return to base.

  Tokyo

  2 July 1941

  The years of debate within the army, between its young aggressive officers and older conservatives, between army and navy as to potential directions to take, between military and government and within government between conservatives such as himself and hotbloods like Foreign Minister Matsuoka, so enamored with Hitler… had now at last come to this moment.

  Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye felt trapped, as he most certainly was, trapped into the ritual now about to take place, and at such a moment, as they stood waiting, he knew there was no room for maneuver this day.

  The side door to the audience chamber opened and all bowed low, from the waist as first the President of the Privy Council Yoshimichi Hara entered the small room, followed then by the Emperor himself.

  Related by blood to the Royal line, Prince Konoye had, since childhood, always felt himself in somewhat of a unique relationship with the Emperor. They were nearly of the same age, had known each other as boys, and in the privacy of some inner chambers of the palace the relationship was as close as possible to what a living god could call a friendship. The prince would tell jokes, gossip, play go, and felt a close kinship, though even then, there was the sense that here must be the living presence of all that was Japan, the manifestation on Earth of Japan’s unique position in all the world, the one nation blessed and entrusted with the “eternal presence,” a presence which all Japanese shared, from prince to the lowest peasant, and which therefore placed upon them a mandate unique in history.

  And this new age might very well make manifest that destiny intended by the gods. Isolated, remote, while the rest of the world grew, expanded, fought wars, empires rose and fell, Japan had always been remote, and in that remoteness had honed its own steel against itself, the tradition of the samurai, the ultimate example of the warrior ideal, cultured, refined, faithful and yet when called upon, deadly, with the quickest of strokes barely seen. In the two hundred plus years of the Tokugawa regime, Japan had safely insulated itself from the rest of the world while the Westerners ran greedily rampant through the world. In this, the time of Meiji, Japan had stirred out of its self-imposed isolation, for to not do so would mean ultimate submission to the vastly superior technologies of the West.

  And now, was the moment at last arriving when the nation with the living presence of a god begin to achieve its destiny?

  Konoye knew that all around him felt he was a cipher. He could be urbane, witty, even Western in style, dress, manner, and humor. He had traveled the world and knew the world and enjoyed the latest in gadgetry and luxury the West had to offer. Yet he could also appear to be so traditional, frequently preferring the kimono to the three-piece suit, a quiet evening at home with wife and family rather than the accepted practice of spending those evenings in the geisha houses. Some thought him weak, for whoever came before him to press a case, he always seemed to agree. And yet none, not even the Emperor himself, truly knew his heart; and at this moment, his heart was filled with infinite sadness, even as he fully prepared to perform the ritual forced upon him.

  Foreign Minister Matsuoka had been the one, at last, to force the crisis and the decision to take place this day. Several months back he had crossed Russia to visit Berlin, there to meet with Hitler and Ribbentrop, and there he had been mesmerized by the power and glory of the Reich, triumphant on every field of battle. On his return, ironically he had been hosted by Stalin as well, even publicly embraced by the wily dictator when departing and boarding his train in Moscow. Stalin had personally come to see him off and swept him up in a bear hug, while dozens of photographers recorded the moment of the diminutive Japanese foreign minister enfolded in the dictator’s friendly embrace. Matsuoka was the opposite of everything Konoye felt himself to be: admired, brash, crude, a show-off, given to extremes, and above all else a manipulator without any finesse and thought for the higher ideals of Japan. Boasting for weeks of his friendship with “Stalin-san and Hitler-san,” he pushed his proposal that now was the time for Japan to finish with the Western presence in the Pacific, and the army radicals had gladly embraced him, talking of a vast axis of power, stretching from Europe to the Atlantic to the Pacific, the three great new powers humbling forever the effete and decadent democracies of the West.

  Thrown momentarily off guard by the stunning turn of events of June 22, when one of the proposed great allies had turned on the other, with Hitler turning on Stalin (something Matsuoka’s own professional diplomats had warned of months earlier), he had barely missed a beat, again joining hands with the army, this time with the slogan “Don’t miss the bus,” a slogan ironically based on Chamberlain’s famous remark about Hitler.

  Absurd, Konoye thought as he remained bent low, waiting for the Imperial Presence to come to the center of the room and sit down, the signal for all of them to resume an upright position and then sit as well.

  Join the bus, join the bus, and it did not matter in which damn direction it was going. At this junction some in the army had shouted that now was the time to jump out of Manchukuo and expand into Si
beria, perhaps in their wilder dreams meeting the Germans along the slopes of the Urals.

  Madness! To do what? Conquer a frozen wilderness into which a million additional troops might disappear forever, breaking the budget, and bringing back not one yen of true profit, as was still the case in China after nearly four bitter years of fighting.

  But in a way, it was Hitler against Stalin that Konoye knew had finally forced his own hand as well. He had never been totally dismissive of the use of war, for after all, he was Japanese, and the code of the samurai, of courtly patience but if need be of swift direct action in service to the Emperor and to the ideal of what it was to be of Japan, was in his blood.

  If there was to be war, though, to what purpose? The fire-and-blood youths of the army, caught up in some strange almost cinemalike illusion of being warrior samurai of 350 years past, eager to fight—and frankly to hell caring not with whom it was they fought, just simply to fight—now held a strange perverse sway, so powerful that even the upper ranks, the older heads, some of them who actually had seen total real war back in 1904–05, were now swept up in the fever as well.

  China was a deadlock, the analogy of the serpent and the pig so apt. Japan had swallowed the pig halfway, but it was so big it could never fully be swallowed, nor could it be disgorged. Any realist knew that for a generation to come, if they should decide to try and stay on, it would be a long, twilight struggle. If not against the Nationalists then the far more deadly Communists, so adept at dissimulation, the dagger in the night, thousands of good soldiers dying to no possible gain other than more reprisals and blood… and still no profit.

  Why the Americans were so damn insistent to pick a fight over that godforsaken country of China was beyond him in spite of all his years of professional experience and his current tenure as the prime minister.

  He was trapped. In the week after the German invasion, the army had actually argued to reconsider the “northern approach,” to take on the Soviets, though of course, ultimately there was no logic to it beyond the grabbing of territory, since it would take billions of yen in capital investments across a score of years before even the remote hope of a profit to the Empire could ever be shown.

  And in this now insane topsy-turvy debate it was the navy that presented the counter-argument… if there was war let it be to the south.

  He was boxed. The army wanted war, at least the middle-level rankers did, and there was still the haunting fear of another February 26 coup if they did not get their way. The upper echelon paid lip service to the “revolutionaries” out of fear as well, but also saw the potential political power within their grasp if war should indeed be declared. It did not matter if it was the Soviets, the British, the French or the Americans. The navy saw no future in a war with Russia, but most definitely power, and with it a logical goal of seizing Indochina for all its resources and bases. Once bases were established there, Malaya and Singapore, the Gibraltar of the East, and ultimately the oil-rich Dutch East Indies would be ripe for the taking.

  At this moment the entire oil usage of all Japanese coming from their possessions and reserves was but eighty thousand barrels a day. Barely enough to keep the fleet afloat, let alone a modern army of nearly a million in the field in China, and that would run completely dry in less than a year if the Americans, sitting atop their vast reserves of billions of barrels, should turn the flow off.

  Every barrel was rationed, every barrel balanced between turning it into aviation gas for a plane to fly for an hour or a battleship to cruise but for a minute or two at flank speed. The Americans most assuredly knew this.

  That was his frustration now. It was foregone that the army’s next move would be into Indochina. There was no stopping that now, their appetite for a quick acquisition from a weakened and nearly craven Western opponent too much to resist. And yet his conversations with Ambassador Grew made it clear that such a move would trigger President Roosevelt to a rage, and the taking of the next step could be a full oil embargo, and at that moment war would be inevitable. Otherwise within less than two years every ounce of fuel reserve would be gone and Japan, in an instant, thrown back to a powerless medieval kingdom, ripe for the picking.

  It was an impasse, and he was trapped in the middle now with no real recourse. Resist the army and there would be another February 26 and he would be dead. Not that he feared that death, but he did fear the thought of Matsuoka somehow then seizing his post.

  And there was the other thought as well, one with a faint glimmer of optimism. Was this indeed the moment that Japan must risk all, in spite of the known risks, to seize the destiny that had awaited it for two thousand years, to bring to the rest of the world the realization that their nationhood ultimately represented the living manifestation of God on Earth? That there could be a new Golden Age, a unification of all the Orient under a single banner, the expulsion of the exploiting West, the establishment of Japan’s proper “place in the sun,” and from that, after but a brief struggle, the realization by America and Britain that a new equal had emerged upon the global field, and out of that, a lasting peace with each cooperating with the other in their destined spheres of influence?

  There was a sharp hand clap, the signal by the privy seal that the Emperor was seated.

  Prime Minister Prince Konoye raised his head, upright gaze turned toward the Emperor. It was a breach of protocol—to look directly at him was uncouth—but after all, as boys they had once been friends.

  He sat there, so curious looking. Pale porcelainlike skin, dressed in the field uniform of the cavalry, thick glasses distorting his eyes, almost fragile. Dare he think it: if met on the street in other circumstances the Emperor might be mistaken for a bank clerk, a professor, or the owner of a dusty bookstore. And he wondered if inwardly this man, the grandson of the great Meiji, might not have secretly wished for a fate different than this one.

  Bowing formally to the throne, Konoye bent over stiffly and picked up a report, its cover bound in ornate red silk. Turning back the cover he began to speak formally, in the ritual language of the court, ignoring the eyes of the others upon him, that of the President of the Privy Council, of Matsuoka, the assembled heads of the army and navy.

  It was July 2, 1941, and Konoye began to read: “Outline of National Policies in View of Present Developments…”

  French Indochina was to be occupied within the month, under the pretense of establishing more bases to wage the campaign against China, and also to interdict the road across Burma, built with so called “volunteer help” from America, that was feeding supplies to the Nationalists. But the move was a cover as well to establish bases for the eventual attack on Malaya, Singapore, and from there on into the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

  Such a move would surely provoke America to war, and it was now stated that such a war must open with a blow that would cripple the Americans in the opening minutes of battle, and thus in one strike finish their will to fight… then to seek a generous, negotiated peace, perhaps even to make concessions about partial withdrawal from the quagmire of China, a concession that could never be made now with the Americans insisting upon such without any concessions from them in return.

  He read the report, forcing his voice to remain calm. It was, he realized, without doubt the boldest move Japan might very well have made in over six hundred years, since its rejection of the demands of the Mongol emperor Kublai to swear submission or face an invasion of annihilation. They had resisted, the gods had intervened with the sending of the Divine wind, the typhoon of legend, the Kamikaze, and Japan had survived. May the gods intervene again, he prayed even as he read his report.

  He knew what would transpire once he was done speaking. The privy seal, always the cautious one and in such a meeting the voice of the Emperor, who by tradition would remain silent, would argue against, suggesting instead waiting to see if Hitler’s legions did succeed in collapsing Stalin, thus leaving the back door open to take Siberia, or at least continuing negotiating with the Vichy government,
and each argument would be shot down in turn by the army and or the navy, now set on their course.

  The Emperor would say nothing; it was all but unheard of for him to do so. The meeting would wind down, for after all, it was already mere ritual. The decision had been reached days ago. Once the report by Konoye was accepted, it would be taken to the secretariat, who would transcribe it into traditional form on the finest of silk paper. It would then be signed by Konoye, the representatives of the army and navy, presented before the Emperor to gaze upon without comment, then taken before the keeper of the privy seal, who would stamp it with the Royal seal of the emperors. And at that moment, on July 2, 1941, it would become official policy. Japan would seize French Indochina by force before the month was out, and then prepare for war with America, Britain, France, and the Dutch before the year was out. The move to the south was now official policy and was as certain as the juggernaut rolling forward toward its destiny.

  Hanoi

  Vichy French Indochina

  23 July 1941

  This was beyond ironic, Cecil thought as he stepped off the plane and into the boiling heat of Hanoi on a late summer afternoon. Six months ago he would have been arrested and thrown in jail the moment the plane landed, because Vichy France and Great Britain were at war. But now, though technically still governed by Vichy France, this was as much Japanese territory as Nanking, Formosa, or Manchukuo.

  Japanese planes, mostly twin-engine transports but also some bombers and their new Zeroes, lined the far side of the tarmac.

  The half dozen other passengers getting off the flight from Hong Kong, flown by a Portuguese airline based out of Macao, were mostly Westerners, plus several Japanese businessmen.

  Walking the short distance to the terminal he was already drenched in sweat, and once inside endured fifteen chilled minutes of questioning at the customs gate by a typical French official.