December 1941 by Evan Mawdsley

Author:Evan Mawdsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-15445-0
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Admiral Kimmel said as much when he explained to the Congressional Investigation why he and his staff had thought the Japanese were destroying their codes. ‘This information,’ he testified, ‘fit in with the information which we had received about a Japanese movement in southeast Asia. Japan would naturally take precautions to prevent the compromise of her communication system in the event that her action in southeast Asia caused Britain and the United States to declare war, and take over her diplomatic residences.‘71

* * *

The blame for defeat at Pearl Harbor must, on balance, rest with the American commanders on the spot. In mitigation, it should be said that the Pearl Harbor raid had been a daring, indeed reckless, gamble on the part of the Japanese.72 Planning and preparing the operation had provoked strong debate in the upper ranks of the Imperial Navy. It is worth pausing the narrative here to recount this remarkable story.

The Pearl Harbor raid was the vision of one man. Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku had been C-in-C of the Japanese Combined Fleet for fourteen months when, in January 1941, he wrote to the Minister of the Navy about the need to further develop the naval air force and to prepare, if war with America became inevitable, to undertake a first strike against the US Navy. At the same time Yamamoto set up, on his own initiative, a small planning team to assess whether an operation against the main base of the Pacific Fleet, at Hawaii, was feasible.

The round-faced, clean-shaven little Admiral – Yamamoto was only five feet three inches tall, short even by Japanese standards of the time – enjoyed enormous authority and popularity in the Imperial Navy.73 He was self-confident, energetic and intelligent, somewhat eccentric in his personal habits, and very well-informed both about changing technology and the world outside Japan. He was an enthusiastic games-player – of bridge, poker, Mah-jong and Shogi. Calculated risk was an outstanding feature of his way of thinking, and of the operation for which he is most famous.

Born into a samurai family, Yamamoto entered the fleet through the Naval Academy in 1901. The war with Russia began before he graduated, and in 1905 he took part as a midshipman in the crushing victory at Tsu-shima, where he was injured (in a gunnery accident). The young man was identified as an officer of great potential, and promotion was rapid. He was selected for foreign duty; he had two years at Harvard University after the First World War, and a tour in the mid-1920s as naval attaché in Washington, as well as postings to London in 1929 and 1934 for naval disarmament conferences. In December 1936 he became Vice Minister of the Navy, a post he held until August 1939.

Yamamoto was a truly remarkable officer.74 In the 1920s he realised that the future of naval warfare lay with the aeroplane, and one of his first major commands was the new Akagi (the future Pearl Harbor flagship). He was a champion of carrier- and land-based naval aviation in the 1930s, with his work in the Naval Air Department.

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