Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy

Author:David M. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: 20th Century, Retail, Oxford History of the United States, American History, History
ISBN: 9780195144031
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1999-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

16

War in the Pacific

The closest squeak and the greatest victory.

—George C. Marshall Jr. on the Battle of Midway

During the first days of December 1941, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan's Combined Fleet, fretted in his headquarters aboard the battleship Nagato in Hiroshima Bay. On November 26 he had directed a powerful task force under Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo to sortie from Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands, under orders to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Though Yamamoto had provided that "in the event an agreement is reached in the negotiations with the United States, the Task Force will immediately return to Japan," the negotiations had by now irretrievably collapsed. There would be no turning back.1

Other Japanese naval forces were at the same time initiating the massive Southern Operation, slicing southward from Japan to land invasion troops in the Philippines, Malaya, and the great oil-rich prize of the Dutch East Indies. The Hawaii expedition was the pivot of this complex scheme. On the outcome at Pearl Harbor turned the fate of the Southern Operation, which could not imaginably succeed if its eastern flank remained exposed to the firepower of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Because of the very power of that fleet, concentrated in the midocean anchorage of Hawaii, Nagumo's mission was also the most perilous of the several huge military operations Japan now had under way.

Preparations for the assault on Pearl Harbor had been exhaustive, including repeated mock attacks on a model of the Hawaiian base set up in Japan's Saeki Bay. Sailors and airmen had analyzed knotty problems of resupplying ships at sea, navigating the attack convoy without radio communication, and coordinating the waves of high-level horizontal bombers, dive-bombers, torpedo bombers, and fighter planes that would deliver the blow.2

Yet so much could go wrong. The strike force, designated First Air Fleet, had been organized only eight months earlier and had never fought a concerted action. With the six aircraft carriers that composed its fighting core, it embodied the experimental concept of naval air power, long advocated by visionaries like the American Billy Mitchell and First Air Fleet's own air staff officer, Commander Minoru Genda, but still virtually untested in the unforgiving crucible of battle. The very length of the attack route—thirty-five hundred miles, well beyond the Japanese navy's traditional radius of action—necessitated tricky refueling at sea and amplified the chances for detection.

Surprise would enormously enhance the prospect of success, just as surprise had favored Japan when it launched its other great war against a Caucasian power by besieging the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904. So Nagumo's ships plowed methodically eastward from Hitokappu Bay in strict radio silence, enveloping themselves as well in the cloud and mist of an eastering weather front. Yamamoto could trace their putative movements on his charts but would know nothing for certain until radio silence was broken.

Short, deep-chested, swift and sarcastic in argument, bold and ingenious in battle, born in 1884 in the great flowering of the Meiji Restoration, Yamamoto was at the summit of his distinguished naval career in 1941.

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