by Mark Felton
The story of Japan’s emergence as the greatest Asian aggressor in history began with US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry’s ‘Black Ships’ flotilla dropping anchor in Tokyo Bay in 1853, and only ended with the annihilation of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Japan’s journey was incredible, from an insular, feudal island nation ruled by a militarist warrior clique drawn from the samurai class headed by the shogun, to becoming the first Asian country to successfully challenge the regional hegemony of the Western Powers (led by Britain, France and the United States). From 1868, and the restoration of Emperor Meiji as head of state, alongside the creation of a modern democratic governmental system and military and naval establishment, the Japanese were anxious to prevent their country from becoming another China. Since the time of the First Opium War in 1841–42, Britain and the other Western Powers had come to dominate the weak Qing Dynasty of China. Millions of Chinese had become hooked on opium imported from Bengal in British India, and in return the white traders had made huge profits from this and every other form of trade with China. On each occasion that the ruling Qing Dynasty had attempted to control the spread of opium addiction and the activities of the ‘foreign devils’ inside the Celestial Empire, the Western nations had threatened the Chinese with punitive military expeditions. Each time the Imperial Court had backed down, and granted what the foreigners had asked for, namely complete control of China’s foreign trade, and treaty ports such as Shanghai through which to regulate that trade, free of any legal restrictions under Manchu Chinese law. The Japanese observed this process and they quickly determined that Japan would not end up in a similar position to China, prostrated before the power and influence of Western trade interests. Unlike in China, the new Meiji government poured capital into new companies, such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi, building a strong economy that remained in the hands of the Japanese. In 1894 Japan was strong enough to begin looking overseas for territory to conquer, and colonies to possess in order that she might ape the European powers that dominated Asia. Japan picked a fight with, of all countries, China, which although the country’s central government was weak and vacillating when faced with outside threats, nonetheless possessed a modern, British-constructed fleet, and a huge standing army. Most Westerners assumed that the upstart Japanese would be rudely defeated, but to widespread surprise it was the Chinese who were to lose the contest, firstly witnessing half of their fleet being sent to the bottom by the also largely British-built warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy at a battle at the mouth of the Yalu River in August 1894. The Japanese destroyed the remainder of China’s fleet in August 1895 at a battle opposite the Chinese city of Wei Hai Wei (now Weihai). The Japanese demanded and received from China the island of Formosa (Taiwan), the Korean peninsula and the Pescadores.
In 1904 Japan shocked the entire world, and sent a shiver of fear running down the spines of the white governors and taipans of Asia when she engaged herself in war with Czarist Russia, which was considered to have one of the most up-to-date naval fleets in the world, and won. In 1904, the mighty Russian Baltic Fleet steamed halfway around the world intent on teaching the Japanese a severe lesson, only to be completely torn apart by Admiral Togo’s British trained officers and men at the Battle of Tsushima. Although witness to heavy fighting on land, the Japanese also overcame and captured Russia’s warm-water base in China, Port Arthur (now Lushun), in 1905. As Colin Smith notes, the ‘…victory over Czarist Russia had demonstrated its [Japan’s] success in marrying western technology to the spirit of the samurai.’2 The world was shocked because an Asian power, until then considered inferior in every way, had defeated a supposedly superior white nation, and such a result was unprecedented. It was also noted that although Britain’s Royal Navy had been the force that had most directly influenced and moulded the Imperial Japanese Navy, the British had been used solely for their technology and the Japanese had not taken on the traditions and values of the Royal Navy. ‘Royal Navy officers noticed that though their Japanese counterparts were eager to learn whatever they could about naval technology, strategy, and tactics, they had no interest in the Western civic values that went with them. Japan remained a nation driven by the samurai code of Bushido, the warrior values of its violent feudal past.’3 This mindset was to make the Imperial Navy as savage and brutal in character and behaviour as any other part of the Japanese war machine, demonstrated in countless atrocities and acts of barbarity and cruelty committed by its officers and men throughout the course of the War of Aggression against China between 1937 and 1945, and the Pacific War of 1941 to 1945.
Just prior to the Russo-Japanese War the Imperial Navy had taken delivery of its first submarines from the United States, five Holland Class vessels. Although not destined to play a part in the war as the conflict ended before they could be deployed, these vessels became the nucleus of the future Japanese submarine force, joined shortly afterwards by two home-built examples. Japan had emerged from the war with Russia as a major sea power, and a possible future threat to the hegemony of Britain and the United States over the region’s oceans. The Japanese worked closely with Britain in the design of some of her pre-First World War submarines, often in association with Vickers in the north of England. Japan, who was an ally of Britain and the United States during the First World War, benefited technologically from the German surrender in 1918. Seven former U-boats (all of them subsequently scrapped) were transferred to the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1919,4 and sent to the giant Yokosuka Naval Base, located south of Tokyo. Alongside working examples of German submarine technology, Japan spent lavish sums of money attracting former U-boat officers, designers and technicians to work for the navy and large Japanese firms. The unequalled expertise of these Germans set alarm bells ringing throughout the intelligence organizations of the recently victorious Allied powers. By 1920 there were over 800 Germans formerly associated with U-boats as either submarine skippers and officers or designers and engineers working for the Japanese. American Military Intelligence noted that ‘Engineers and ex-U-boat officers were most sought after, commanding the highest salaries,’5 and of these 800, most were employed by Kawasaki, later to figure as a major submarine manufacturer in its own right.
As the Western Powers grew increasingly concerned about Japan’s increasing naval strength they convened conferences in London in 1921 and Washington, DC and London in 1930. These meetings and the agreements that emerged from them limited the size of Japan’s surface fleet so that Japan was unable to tip the balance of power in the Far East in her favour by outnumbering and outgunning the British and Americans. Around the time Britain and the United States first began to take steps to place serious limitations on the size and potency of the Japanese fleet, both the Japanese and US Navies had begun developing ‘the strategic thesis of their fleets crossing an ocean for a major duel of capital ships. The concept had been articulated earlier in the widely read writings of American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan.’6 The United States understood that in order for their Pacific-based fleet to sortie westwards to any great range from the west coast it would have been necessary to have in place a series of forward bases. To this end the Americans began building up Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Cavite in the Philippines and the island of Guam into superb naval bases allowing most of the fleet to be stationed well in advance of the American mainland. The Japanese watched these movements with great interest and decided that although their own surface fleet was strong, they were not as strong as the Americans. They decided that submarines would fill the gap in the strength of their battle fleet, and so design and construction began of huge, long-range submarines able to sally forth and attack the American fleet as it began its move westward. The submarines would serve two important purposes in countering the numerical superiority of the Americans by, firstly, slowly wearing down the enemy’s strength to a size comparable with the Imperial battle fleet, which could meet it on more equal terms, and, secondly, it was envisioned that the submarines would act as an unseen reconnaissance sc
reen giving the Japanese forewarning of American fleet movements.
The 1930 London Naval Conference was a disaster for the Japanese, because the terms of the agreement could have eroded Japan’s submarine force, thereby leaving them hamstrung in any future efforts to stop an American advance westwards across the Pacific. However, the Washington Treaty, unbelievably, forced the British to reduce the size of their fleet to achieve parity with the Americans, Britain losing her hard won pre-eminence over the world’s oceans held for over 200 years as inter-war economics encouraged government penny-pinching over the size and strength of the navy. However, both the London and Washington naval agreements failed to address properly the issue of submarine forces, and this oversight allowed the Japanese to concentrate a great effort on attempting to match, and better technologically, Britain and the United States in building up her submarine fleet. Much of the subsequent construction programme took place in great secrecy, in a similar way to German U-boat developments that were made in contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Both fleet submarines and midget vessels were developed during the early 1930s, in the full expectation that these machines would see active service in the not-too-distant future as Japan convulsed internally between forces for Imperial expansion and those of democracy and friendship towards the West. In 1934 the Japanese government felt secure and strong enough to ignore the naval restrictions imposed on her in 1930, the Japanese arguing that such restrictions were unfair and Japan would have had difficulty in defending itself if it was to abide by the American and British instigated naval reductions. Although the Japanese were drawn back to the conference table in 1935, Japan took umbrage at what it perceived as the bullying attitude of the British and Americans towards her and withdrew the next year. Japan was by this stage already on the warpath, having flexed her military muscles in China several years before, and almost in the terminal grip of the militarists. After 1936 the Imperial Navy’s fleet would grow steadily as the country began a massive warship construction programme that would culminate in the two biggest battleships ever built, Musashi and Yamato, as well as a strong aircraft carrier force and submarine service.
In 1931, the riches afforded to Japanese industry and the military build-up then underway turned Japanese eyes covetously upon the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. Japanese militarists decided to engineer a confrontation with China. Manchuria was seized and renamed Manchukuo, and Japanese prime ministers who attempted to curb the ambitions of the militarists were routinely assassinated as the army and navy vied for power in Tokyo. The army prevailed and launched a full-scale war against China in 1937. The Chinese managed to resist sufficiently to prevent the Japanese achieving an easy, or swift, victory, although by 1938 most of eastern and southern China was under a brutal Japanese occupation in a war that was to last until 1945. The Japanese also courted an alliance with the world’s other two aggressor nations, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, making plans to divide up the world between themselves once the threats of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States had been dealt with. In the event, Japan backed away from a war with the Soviet Union, later signing a non-aggression pact with Stalin, and the Japanese government monitored events in Europe carefully as Hitler began his Blitzkrieg campaign against the West. With the fall of France in June 1940, many of the colonies in the Far East, including French Indo-China and the Netherlands East Indies looked vulnerable. The British had also begun to appear militarily much weakened in the Far East, as the best naval units and most of the modern air force were withdrawn to fight the Germans and Italians in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The only real fly in the Japanese expansionist ointment was the unknowable reaction of the United States to any Japanese takeover of south-east Asia. The US Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was enormously powerful and would have to be neutralized by the Japanese concurrent with any operations to conquer the European colonies of Asia. A plan was drawn up for the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleets, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in January 1941, outlining how the American threat could be removed from the equation. As Lord Russell notes, ‘A surprise air attack was to be made by a special task force and was to be carried out while the two countries were still at peace. Were the attack successful, it was most likely that Japan would be able to occupy all her objectives in the Pacific and Indian Oceans before the United States could recover sufficiently from the blow to mount a counter-attack.’7 Simultaneously, army and naval forces were to attack and occupy British Malaya and southern Thailand with the objective of capturing the modern naval base at Singapore. Other Japanese forces were to conquer the British colonies of Burma and Hong Kong, the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), the Philippines, the International Settlement in Shanghai (which up to then had been regarded as neutral territory by Japanese forces occupying the rest of the city), and the Solomon and Central Pacific Islands. The Japanese had also been aware of the United States established strategy for any war that opened in the Pacific, the general naval advance westwards then known as ‘Plan Orange’. Orange envisioned that the US Pacific Fleet would advance directly from Hawaii to relieve that other strategic outpost of America, the Philippines. Therefore, in Japanese naval minds since the 1930s there had been the conclusion that if the United States moved to prevent Japanese expansion into south-east Asia and the Pacific, there would inevitably be a major naval showdown somewhere in the Western Pacific, as the Japanese Combined Fleet collided with the US Pacific Fleet. When Japan signed up to the 1930 Washington Naval Treaty, the agreed capital ship ratio had been 5:5:3, Great Britain, the United States and Japan respectively. Therefore, the Royal Navy and most especially the US Pacific Fleet would outnumber and outgun the Imperial Fleet’s surface vessels. Of course, by 1941, Britain’s naval commitments in Europe and the Mediterranean had all but removed the Royal Navy from fending off any aggressive Japanese moves against her Asian colonies. As we have seen, for this reason, a determined effort was made by Japan to build up its submarine fleet to offset the imbalance created by the agreed warship ratio. In fact, submarines were going to have to play the role of the cruisers and destroyers Japan was forbidden to add to her fleet by the terms of the Washington Treaty, and this made the Japanese design and built a range of world-beating submarines far superior at the time to anything then in service with other navies, including the German Navy’s U-boat Service. In the Japanese naval mind the Combined Fleet was designed to meet the US Pacific Fleet in one gigantic battle on a scale with the Japanese clash with Russia at Tsushima in 1904. It was therefore imperative that submarines be designed that were capable of engaging enemy warships, instead of only interdicting unarmed commercial traffic, and the idea remained current of removing some of the numerical advantage of the enemy before both fleets clashed. Of course, the eventual plan to attack the US Pacific Fleet in harbour made this plan largely redundant, the submarines designed to counter ‘Plan Orange’ had already been constructed and entered service by 1941, and Japanese submarine developments continued to produce extraordinary vessels throughout most of the rest of the war.
The very size of the Pacific Ocean meant that Japanese submarines, if they were to cooperate with the main fleet, would have to be big, with an extensive range, and capable of high surface speeds. Long-range fleet submarines, such as those that operated off Pearl Harbor and the American west coast between December 1941 and mid-1942, were very large, and capable of cruises approaching 20,000 nautical miles lasting a third of a year. It was only as the world entered the nuclear age after the Second World War that submarines began to outsize wartime Japanese models. Other innovations included speed, and although many Japanese submarines were huge, they were also swift, as they were required to stay close to the surface fleet acting in the role of cruisers. The Japanese did not ever possess a massive submarine fleet in terms of numbers of boats, but in terms of quality they were in advance of many comparable nations. The Germans fielded 1,171 U-boats during the entire period of the Second World W
ar, but very few of their designs matched or surpassed Japanese long-range I-boats. Of 174 submarines employed by the Japanese during the Second World War (111 of which were built during the conflict), 110 were capable of submerged top speeds of 16 knots, and four of these could exceed an incredible 19 knots. This compares favourably with the most technologically advanced submarine type produced by any of the combatant nations during the Second World War, the German Type XXI electro-boat, which was capable of a top submerged speed of 17.5 knots (and only one of these advanced boats actually conducted a war patrol before the German surrender in May 1945).
