Nineteen forty-one would be the most dramatic year in Captain Leach’s life. In a period of less than seven months his battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, would engage the pride of the German Navy, would almost engage an Italian battleship and at the end of the year would defend herself from a large and dangerous air flotilla of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Before examining those stirring events it is necessary to interrupt the narrative and take a close look at each enemy navy, commander-in-chief and naval strategy at the outset of 1941.
On 1 January 1941 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder was commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy. He was then 65, although photographs make him look considerably younger. In December 1938 Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham was appointed head of a naval delegation to go to Berlin to persuade the German Navy and Hitler not to increase the size of the German U-boat fleet. Under the terms of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 Germany had the right to build up to 100 per cent of British submarine strength but only under exceptional circumstances. In early December the German government informed His Majesty’s Government that Germany intended to invoke this clause. Cunningham described his contacts with Admiral Raeder, then Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine:
… at 9.30 next morning [we] presented ourselves at the German Admiralty, where we were received by Admiral Raeder, a fine-looking man who made us a pleasant speech of welcome … we conferred until 1 pm; but though the Germans gave the impression of great friendliness we soon realised we were up against a blank wall … They entertained us for lunch at the Kaiserhof Hotel, with Raeder presiding. During the meal I attacked him on the subject, using particularly the argument of the effect upon public opinion at home. Eventually he promised that he would telephone to Hitler that afternoon to give him the substance of our conversation and ask his decision.50
Later that afternoon Cunningham received a message from Raeder that Hitler would not consent to any alteration of his plans to build the additional submarines. In a few months Hitler would promote Raeder to Grand Admiral of the German Fleet. Before Raeder resigned his command in January 1943, he had grown to loathe Hitler. Even though the Second World War generated considerable hatred towards not a few Nazi officers, there was mutual respect between Admiral Cunningham and Admiral Raeder. The latter would write over ten years after the war concerning the aforesaid negotiations and his impressions of Cunningham:
The visit of the two British naval officers ended with a function at which they were my guests. Once again the fundamentally good relations between the two navies was made evident.
The negotiations went very smoothly and in a most friendly atmosphere. In a discussion between us after the negotiations both Admiral Cunningham and I expressed the warm hope that our countries would never be enemies again, and I am sure that he was as sincere in expressing that hope as I was.51
Some appraisals of Admiral Raeder have been inadequate and partial, with the emphasis on his conviction as a war criminal. Fortunately, the historian Ludovic Kennedy has written a more balanced view of the man.
The head of Hitler’s navy was Erich Raeder, Grand Admiral in the German Fleet, a handsome square-faced man of 65, highly intelligent and approachable, son of a teacher of languages near Hamburg, like his parents, deeply religious. He joined the Navy in 1894, was navigator of the Kaiser’s famous yacht Hohenzollern in 1911, then for five years was Chief Staff officer to Admiral Hipper, commanding the scouting forces. With Hipper he’d seen action on that other May day in 1916, off the coast of Jutland, when Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet and Scheer’s High Seas Fleet had their only rendezvous of the war and by next day twenty-four ships were at the bottom and over 6,000 British and 2,500 German sailors had died. … After Germany’s defeat, the sending of the High Seas Fleet to Beatty for disposal, and the scuttling of it by Von Reuter at Scapa Flow, Raeder remembered these things. He remembered also the accusations of inactivity, even timidity that had been levelled at the High Seas Fleet.52
At the beginning of 1941 Raeder could look back on the previous year with satisfaction, but also with grave concerns. He had recommended and planned the Norwegian Campaign, which, despite the loss of a large number of the German Navy’s destroyers, had proved a success. In September 1940 he had recommended that Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, about which he had always had the gravest doubts, be postponed indefinitely. Hitler had accepted his recommendation, but ignored his advice on a different front. When Hitler made his fateful decision to invade Russia in November 1940, Raeder had been the only senior member of OKW (Oberkommando Der Wehrmacht – German High Command) to go on the record as being against it at the time.
Raeder was not only a student of naval strategy; he had a clear conception of an overall strategy that might well have enabled Germany to win the Second World War. He strongly recommended that in 1941 Hitler adopt a Mediterranean strategy involving the bulk of the Wehrmacht (German Army) and Luftwaffe. There is little doubt that in 1941 Germany could have quickly taken Malta and overrun Egypt, Palestine and Syria. This would have opened the door to the Middle East and all its oil riches. The next phase would have been the seizure of Iraq. Baghdad lay only slightly over 300 miles north-west of the Port of Abadan at the head of the Persian Gulf, which was where the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had its main offices. The majority ownership of this company was held by the British Government. Since 1933 Anglo-Iranian had a contract with the Government of Persia to extract oil from their oil fields, pipe it to Abadan and then refine and export it for sale abroad, a contract that did not expire until 1993. The Anglo-Iranian refineries were primary sources of oil for the Royal Navy, and Raeder believed that all of these countries and their oil resources were within the reach of Germany’s armed forces. In such an event the possibility of a link-up with the Japanese Navy was very real.
Admiral Raeder and the Naval High Command begged him [Hitler] to launch a major thrust at the Middle East, which at the time was well within German capabilities. British naval, air, and military power was thinly stretched over a vast area and vulnerable everywhere … Raeder’s view was that such a coup would strike the British Empire ‘a deadlier blow than the taking of London’. Hitler had 150 divisions, plus most of the Luftwaffe, arrayed in Eastern Europe. Barely a quarter of these forces would have been enough to drive through to India. … Britain and America, instead of being able to draw resources from five-sixths of the world and its oceans, would have been largely confined to an Atlantic sphere of operations. Victory, in these circumstances, would have seemed a wearily distant if not unattainable object …53
When it became obvious that Hitler was obsessed with invading Russia no later than June 1941, Raeder had to revise his strategy. He believed that it would be difficult, but not impossible, for the German Navy to cut Britain’s lines of communication with the outside world. To achieve this he would use a combination of long range U-boats, pocket battleships, battle cruisers, and his most powerful ship of all, the Bismarck. In addition he would send out auxiliary cruisers disguised as neutral merchant ships.
At the beginning of 1941 Raeder was desperately short of destroyers, although they were of little or no use as surface-raiders. He was also short of light cruisers which had the same shortcomings. Perhaps the best of his light cruisers was Nürnberg, but her main armament of nine 5.9-inch guns in three turrets would not suffice in any engagement with a British heavy cruiser. Her radius of action with diesel engines at 14.5 knots was only 3,800 miles. Raeder did have at his disposal three modern heavy cruisers, Admiral Hipper, Prinz Eugen and Seydlitz that were armed with eight 8-inch guns and had a cruising radius of 6,800 miles. He also had two pocket battleships that were less than ten years old, Lützow and Admiral Scheer that were armed with six 11-inch guns and had a cruising radius of 10,000 miles at 15 knots, and two small modern battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau that were armed with nine 11-inch guns and had a cruising radius of at least 10,000 miles. Within six months Raeder would acquire two new battleships which were the largest and most powerful ever built for the German Navy. They were Bismarck and Tirpitz. These two behemoths were armed with eight 15-inch guns and had a cruising radius of over 8,000 miles.
Raeder was deadly serious about cutting Britain’s lines of communications and was willing to take enormous risks with everything he had in both ships and men. During the first eighteen months of the war his ships broke out into the Atlantic through the Denmark Strait, the passageway between Greenland and Iceland, as well as the passageways east of Iceland. They then spread out into the vast reaches of the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean searching for prey.
Near the end of October 1940 the pocket-battleship Scheer put to sea from the small naval base at Brunsbüttel. Between then and her return to Bergen on 30 March, her captain’s 48th birthday, she had sunk the 14,000-ton British armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay and fourteen allied merchantmen and had taken two prizes. More significantly she had caused prolonged and serious disruption to the British convoy system and to the dispositions of the Royal Navy in the Atlantic and beyond.
In 1941 Raeder risked his only two battleships on a prolonged raid into the Atlantic. On 23 January Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under the flag of Admiral Günther Lütjens sailed from Kiel. After refuelling from one of their previously dispatched fuelling tankers in the Arctic, they passed through the Denmark Strait on the night of 3/4 February. While they had some close encounters with heavy units of the Royal Navy, they nevertheless were able to continue their mission. A few hundred miles east of Newfoundland they sank five ships from a freshly dispersed convoy. After veering as far south as the Cape Verde Island, they returned to the route of convoys between Halifax and the British Isles. In that area on 15 and 16 March they sank sixteen ships from dispersed convoys. A number of other ships under Admiral Raeder’s command were also active in the Atlantic during this period. They included the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and disguised auxiliary cruisers.
When the Royal Navy intensified its efforts to locate and destroy Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, these two formidable ships took the shortest route to a friendly harbour, rather than returning through the Denmark Strait to Norway. On 22 March they sailed triumphantly into Brest.
The historian Dan van der Vet has written of their successful voyage:
When Lütjens brought his ships unharmed into Brest, Raeder’s second congratulatory telegram was positively fulsome. It was richly deserved. At the end of March 1941, nineteen months into a war with the world’s greatest navy, the Germans had lost only one pocket-battleship and one heavy cruiser from the major ships in their small but modern and powerful surface fleet … Admiral Raeder and his staff could look back with considerable satisfaction on a year and a half in which an onslaught by mines, surface-ships and submarines had seriously affected the enemy’s ability to fight on.54
This same historian gives much credit to the German Navy for what he describes as ‘the superb efficiency of the German mid-ocean supply system’.55 The aforesaid successes of the German surface-raiders could not have been accomplished without refuelling tankers and supply ships with naval stores that always seemed to appear at the right time and the right place.
Grand Admiral Raeder has been relegated to second place by most naval historians who consider his successor Admiral Karl Doenitz as the greater of the two Supreme Commanders. Yet they may have underestimated Raeder. In addition to his organisational skills that were reflected in the efficiency with which the German Navy resupplied its surface raiders in early 1941, Raeder had demonstrated the daring of a great admiral. After the war he described the need to take risks as follows:
If we were to achieve anything worthwhile with our numerically weak naval forces, then they had to be used to the best possible purpose, with constant tactical innovations and new ideas. This required a daring strategy and a willingness to take risks on the part of Naval Operations Command, as well as skilful operational leadership by the men in command of our ships at sea.56
Before the end of May that year, when England still stood alone, Raeder would take his greatest risk. He would order Captain Lütjens to break out into the Atlantic with Germany’s greatest ship, the Bismarck.
At the time of Mussolini’s declaration of war against Britain and France on 10 June 1940, Italy appeared to have a navy that could challenge Britain for control of the Mediterranean. At its head, Admiral Cavagnari had served as chief of staff and under-secretary for seven years which has been called ‘an exceptionally lengthy period of command during the fascist regime’.57
On the outset of the conflict, just days before the fall of France, the Italian Navy consisted of six battleships, two modern and four of which had been rebuilt; nineteen cruisers, seven of which were 10,000 tons; over 100 smaller surface vessels and 113 submarines. Churchill has described the Littorio and her sister ship as ‘of the latest type, mounting fifteen-inch guns’.58
Within the first five months of its war against Britain the Italian Navy suffered two defeats from which it never recovered. The first defeat was on 9 July 1940, less than 30 days after Mussolini’s declaration of war. It became known as the Action off Calabria, a region in southern Italy sometimes referred to as the toe of the Italian boot. Earlier in July it had been decided to evacuate as many civilians from Malta as the Royal Navy could get away. These included the wives and children of British sailors who were now scattered to the four corners of the earth. Amongst the wives was Nona Byatt Cunningham, the wife of the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Arrangements had also been made to remove all the Italian prisoners of war who had been brought to Malta and to bring out a considerable quantity of naval stores badly needed at Alexandria in four slow ships.
The whole operation involving one fast convoy and one slow convoy was to be carried out under cover of the whole fleet. Admiral Cunningham, the Commander-in-Chief, flew his flag in Warspite. Cunningham’s fleet included two other battleships, Malaya and Royal Sovereign; the aircraft carrier Eagle; five cruisers, Orion, Neptune, Sydney, Gloucester and Liverpool; and seventeen destroyers. The action is best described in Cunningham’s’ own words:
The fleet sailed from Alexandria late in the evening of July 7th, all ships being clear of the harbour by midnight … throughout July 8th all units of the fleet met with fairly heavy bombing attacks by Italian aircraft from the Dodecanese. The only casualty, but a serious one, was a hit on the Gloucester’s bridge, which killed Captain F.R. Garside and seventeen others, and necessitated the ship being steered and fought from the after control position … at dawn on July 9th the Eagle flew off three aircraft to reconnoitre. However, it was about 7:30 a.m. that another flying boat from Malta again reported the enemy fleet to the westward at distance from us of about a hundred and forty-five miles … further reports during the forenoon from the flying-boats and the Eagle’s aircraft showed that an Italian fleet of at least two battleships, twelve cruisers and numerous destroyers were out …
Vice Admiral Tovey’s four ships (the cruisers except for Gloucester) were about ten miles ahead of Warspite. About ten miles astern of us came the Royal Sovereign and Malaya screened by nine destroyers … At 3.08 the Neptune, Captain Rory O’Conor, sighted the Italian heavy ships, and was the first British warship to signal ‘Enemy battle fleet in sight’ in the Mediterranean since the time of Nelson … the great moment came when at 3.53 Warspite opened fire on the leading enemy battleship at a range of 26,000 yards. Both the Italian battleships replied. They shot well and straddled us at this great range; but the culminating point of the engagement soon came. The Warspite’s shooting was consistently good. I had been watching the great splashes of our 15-inch salvos straddling the target when at 4 p.m., I saw the great orange-coloured flash of a heavy explosion at the base of the enemy flagship’s funnels. It was followed by an upheaval of smoke, and I knew that she had been heavily hit at the prodigious range of thirteen miles …
This was too much for the Italian Admiral, my old friend Riccardi, whom I had entertained in the Hood in 1938 … His ships turned away …59
A short time later an observer from one of Warspite’s aircraft reported ‘that the enemy fleet was left in considerable confusion and that all units were making off at high speed to the west and south-west towards the Straits of Messina and Augusta.’60
The Warspite’s hit on the Italian flagship Giulio Cesare at 26,000 yards was a record not broken by any other battleship in action at sea during the entire war. From then until Italy’s surrender over three years later the Italian admirals never allowed any of their battleships to get within range of a British battleship. The significance of this victory was not lost on the naval historian Correlli Barnett:
The Royal Navy had asserted its moral domination in that first major encounter off Calabria when Cunningham’s ships for all their technical inferiority steamed straight for the enemy, who, in the C-in-C’s words, as soon as Warspite hit him in the ribs at 26,000 yards … screamed for a smoke screen, ordered 25 knots and turned 90 degrees away.61
The second victory by the Royal Navy over the Italians in 1940 inflicted much greater losses. This was the famous Fleet Air Arm attack on the Italian Fleet supposedly safely ensconced in harbour at Taranto where 21 Swordfish aircraft from the carrier Illustrious sunk or disabled three Italian battleships on the night of 11/12 November. More will be said about the significance of this action in a later chapter, but suffice to say that when Cunningham detached Illustrious (flying the flag of Rear Admiral Lyster) and her screen of four cruisers and four destroyers to her flying-off position about 170 miles south-east of Taranto, he made the following signal to Lyster:
Good luck then to your lads and their enterprise. Their success may well have most important bearing on the course of the war in the Mediterranean.62
Cunningham’s words were understated. Shortly afterwards there was a major shakeup in the top Italian Navy commanders. Admiral Riccardi replaced Admiral Cavagnari as Undersecretary of State and Head of Supermarina. Admiral Iachino replaced Admiral Campioni as Fleet Commander-in-Chief.
Riccardi was not one of the great admirals of the Second World War. He lacked Raeder’s strategic vision and willingness to take risks with his battleships. From the beginning of his tenure as Head of Supermarina Riccardi’s primary object was to safeguard his battleships. He kept them in secure harbours as far as possible from British bombers except for occasional sorties that were carefully planned to lure British heavy ships within range of Italian torpedo bombers and submarines.
Actual hostilities between the Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy did not commence until 7 December, which was 8 December in Singapore. While archival evidence is lacking (those of the Japanese were presumably destroyed in air raids on Tokyo), the circumstantial evidence is compelling that the Japanese Naval General Staff and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto – Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet – had devised a strategy to drive the British out of Hong Kong, Borneo, Malaya, Singapore and Burma and the Dutch out of the Netherland East Indies, well over a year in advance.
Three events in Europe convinced the Japanese warlords that a quick and decisive victory was achievable over the colonial powers that heretofore had possessed most of the natural resources of the South Pacific: the collapse of Holland, the fall of France and the blockade of Britain. In the Far East a minor naval encounter on 11 November 1940 resulted in a major intelligence coup. On that date the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis, disguised as a Dutch merchant ship, intercepted the Blue Funnel steamer Automedon off the Nicobar Islands. When the British ship continued to transmit distress signals, Atlantis opened fire with her 5.9-inch guns. Before the Automedon’s radio was silenced, the Atlantis’ gun fire had killed the Automedon’s captain and six others. Twelve members of the crew were wounded. A special admiralty courier was also temporarily disabled and was therefore unable to destroy top secret documents that were intended for Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief, Far East. The German boarders got into the ship’s strong room, blew the safe and seized the documents.
The following month these documents were passed on to senior officers of the Japanese Navy. The most revealing was a Chiefs of Staff report which concluded that Hong Kong, French Indo-China, Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies were indefensible, a conclusion that had been approved by the British war cabinet on 15 August 1940. The fate of these documents became known in the UK by the end of the year, but neither Brooke-Popham, the British public nor any of Britain’s allies were informed of their loss. Finally in 1980 they became public knowledge when Magic Intelligence decrypts were declassified by the United States National Security Agency. They revealed a signal from the Japanese attaché in Berlin that described the whole affair.
In the post-war years it became a matter of dogma in certain Japanese intellectual circles that Japan was forced into the war by the American oil embargo. This polemic lacks any real substance. The Japanese Navy’s war strategy was in place long before President Roosevelt’s famous oil embargo of July 1941 after which the Netherlands then cancelled all of their oil contracts with Japan. The Combined Fleet Commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy would complete his operational plans shortly thereafter, but his strategy was already well in place.
The attack on Pearl Harbor represents one of the most devastating surprise attacks in naval history. Whether the decision to attack was made before or after the decision to overrun the Netherlands East Indies is not clear. What is clear is that the purpose of the attack was the destruction of the US Pacific Fleet, which among other benefits would protect the eastern flank of the Southern Operation.
Yamamoto was born in 1894 in Nagaoko, the son of a schoolmaster. In 1904 he passed out of the Japanese Naval Academy just in time for the Russo-Japanese War. He fought at the Battle of Tsushima Strait; he lost two fingers from his left hand and was wounded in the leg. In 1919 he was sent to the US to study English. Living in Boston he learned to play poker with its ‘mixture of bluff, luck and anticipation’.63 The game influenced his views on naval strategy.
In 1926 Yamamoto returned to the US as naval attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington. In his two years there he came in contact with numerous US Navy officers, and while he never held illusions about American industrial power, he developed ‘a low opinion of the US Navy which he described as a club for golfers and bridge players.’64 In contrast his participation at the 1930 London Naval Conference as a rear admiral brought him in contact with numerous Royal Navy officers, and he seemed to hold the Royal Navy in a higher regard than the US Navy because prior to the First World War the former had been something of a role model for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
In October 1933 he took command of the 1st Carrier Division and in 1935 he became vice admiral and vice-minister of the Japanese Navy. By then he was an ardent supporter of air power and unlike some of his colleagues he lacked faith in battleships. In 1939 Yamamoto was promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, and by 1 January 1941 he was the single most influential admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy. In 1989 historian H.P. Willmott wrote:
Since the end of the Second World War western histories have for the most part carried as an unquestioned fact the relative moderation of the Imperial Navy, its being dragged unwillingly into war by a boorish army and its misgivings about the outcome of a war with the US. This portrayal of the Imperial Navy has rested in large measure upon the known views of its Combined Fleet Commander … but the process whereby the opinions of Yamamoto have become the alibi of the Imperial Navy is distinctly misleading.65
While few archives of the Imperial Japanese Navy survived the war, some of Yamamoto’s private letters did. The American historian Gordon W. Prange found a letter dated 10 December 1940, which Admiral Yamamoto wrote to one of his closest confidants, Vice Admiral Shigetaro Shimada.
The probability is great that the launching of our operation against the Netherlands Indies will lead to an early commencement of war with America, and since Britain and Holland will side with America, our operations against the Netherlands Indies are almost certain to develop into a war with America, Britain and Holland before those operations are half over. Consequently we should not launch out on the southern operation unless we are at least prepared to face such an eventuality and are, moreover, adequately equipped …66
Prange was arguably the leading American scholar on the Pearl Harbor disaster. During the Second World War he served as an officer in the US Naval Reserves and from October 1946 to June 1951 he was chief of General Douglas MacArthur’s G-2 Historical Section. While teaching at the University of Maryland, he devoted 37 years of his life to researching and writing his magnum opus, At Dawn We Slept – The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, for which Prange had personally interviewed virtually every surviving Japanese officer who took part in the attack. He was rewarded for his diligence when he learned from Japanese sources that it was Admiral Yamamoto’s custom to write and sign both an original draft and a final letter in communicating with most of his colleagues. Prange also learned that Yamamoto never dictated these letters; he invariably brushed out both the original draft and the final letter in his own hand, writing in a style which virtually amounted to a code.
In 1964 the family of Captain Shigeru Fujii, a member of Yamamoto’s staff, found a draft of one of Yamamoto’s letters among Captain Fujii’s personal effects. They presented it to the Historical Department of the Japanese Self-Defense Force. Inevitably, it came to Prange’s attention.
An intensely serious man sat at his desk in his cabin aboard the 32,000 ton battleship Nagato as she swung at anchor at Hashirajima in Hiroshima Bay on January 7, 1941. One can picture this man as he placed a piece of paper before him, grasped his brush, and marshalled his thoughts. Then when the spirit moved him, he wrote in quick, bold strokes one of the most historically revealing letters in the annals of the Imperial Japanese Navy …67
So bearing in mind that this man was a law unto himself, let us return to that cold winter’s day of January 7, 1941. In his cabin Yamamoto sat composing a long letter to Oikawa. [Admiral Koshiro Oikawa was appointed Navy Minister on 4 September 1940. He controlled personnel appointments for the Pearl Harbor striking force.] As he wrote an observer might note that his left hand lacked the fore and middle fingers – lost in the Battle of Tsushima against the Russians in May 1905.
The brush splashed forcefully across the paper. In view of the bleak international situation, wrote Yamamoto, the time has come for the Navy ‘to devote itself seriously to war preparations’ because ‘a conflict with the United States and Great Britain is inevitable.’
Yamamoto emphasised that the Japanese Navy should ‘fiercely attack and destroy the US main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the US Navy and her people’ would ‘sink to the extent that it could not be recovered.’
…Gathering momentum, he insisted that ‘we should do our very best at the outset of the war with the United States … to decide the fate of the war on the very first day.’ Next, Yamamoto outlined his two-part ‘operational plan’: ‘1. In case the majority of the enemy’s main force is at Pearl Harbor, attack it vigorously with our air force, and blockade the harbor. 2. If the enemy remains outside the harbor, apply the same method as above.’
He also informed Oikawa what forces he had in mind and their assignments: the First and Second Carrier divisions, or the latter alone at a pinch, in order ‘to launch a forced or surprise attack with all their air strength, risking themselves on a moonlight night or at dawn’ …68
Nor did Yamamoto lose sight of Japan’s principal objective. A ‘forestalling and surprise attack on enemy air forces in the Philippines and Singapore should definitely be made almost at the same time as the attack against Hawaii.’69
Admiral Yamamoto’s two largest battleships, Musashi and Yamato, which were the most massive battleships ever built, were still being completed at the time the Pearl Harbor strike force left Japanese waters. Even without these two super battleships, Yamamoto commanded a large and balanced fleet to carry out his plans to destroy the US Pacific Fleet. The Oxford Companion to World War II itemises the Japanese Navy’s strength in ships on 7 December 1941 as follows.
| Battleships | 10 |
| Aircraft Carriers | 10 |
| Heavy Cruisers | 18 |
| Light Cruisers | 20 |
| Destroyers | 112 |
| Submarines | 65 |
| Others | 156 |
| Total | 39170 |
This same source states that it had ‘a front line strength of about 1,750 fighters, torpedo-bombers, and bombers, and some 530 flying boats and float planes for reconnaissance missions.’71
For both the Royal and US Navy the Imperial Japanese Navy presented a formidable adversary. Before the Second World War the conventional wisdom was that the decisive battle would be fought in the Western Pacific between the main Japanese battle fleet and that of the US, and it was assumed that the battleship would have the dominant role. The risk that Japanese carrier aircraft posed to American battleships at their moorings in Pearl Harbor was therefore terribly underestimated, and the risk that land-based Japanese torpedo bombers posed to British battleships operating in the South China Sea was barely considered.
In January 1941 England stood alone. She could (probably) repulse any German invasion, but she could not hope to defeat Germany on the Continent without either Russia or America as her ally. Stalin had no intention of coming to England’s aid. He loathed British capitalism as much or more than he loathed Germany’s National Socialism, and before 1941 his secret agents had already penetrated MI5. His most valuable agent was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge.
In the US, Franklin Roosevelt had just been elected president for an unprecedented third term. He was prepared to do everything in his power to help Britain prevail, but he could not act without the consent of Congress. Because Roosevelt wanted a first-hand report on the situation in England and above all whether her people had the will to win, he sent his most trusted adviser to London. Churchill had never heard of Harry Lloyd Hopkins, but he soon forged a remarkable friendship with this frail, ill American. The two men spent time together at 10 Downing Street and at Chequers. In the middle of January Churchill took Hopkins to Scapa Flow to inspect the Home Fleet. It was one of the coldest winters on record in Scotland and Hopkins suffered terribly from the cold; he never complained.
On the night of Wednesday 15 January, Hopkins was the guest of honour at a dinner in the wardroom of the battleship HMS Nelson. The Royal Navy officers whom he met that freezing night included Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland and Captain William George Tennant. Captain Leach knew both men and before the year was over he would witness the destruction of each friend’s ship in separate engagements at opposite ends of the earth.
Churchill and Hopkins spent their last night in Scotland in Glasgow. Before that night was over Churchill would learn Hopkins’ true feelings about the British nation. Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, later Lord Moran, heard every word that Hopkins spoke. He recorded the following in his diary:
On the return journey, Tom Johnston dined us at the Station Hotel at Glasgow, and I sat next to Harry Hopkins, an unkempt figure. After a time he got up and turning to the P.M. said: ‘I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well, I am going to quote you one verse from the Book of Books, in the truth of which Mr Johnston’s mother and my own Scottish mother were brought up: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God!’ Then he added very quietly, ‘Even to the end.’
I was surprised to find the P.M. in tears. He knew what it meant. Even to us the words seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man.72