The First Air Fleet was a revolutionary and potentially formidable instrument of sea power. Thus, its command was no ordinary post. One would expect the Navy Ministry to appoint a genuine air admiral or at least someone who understood naval aviation. But seniority and protocol dictated that the position fall to one Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who throughout a long and honorable career had had no connection whatever with air power.
Born in Yamagato Prefecture in northern Honshu on March 25, 1887, Nagumo graduated from Eta Jima in the top ten of his class. From the beginning he embarked upon a varied service aboard battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. In the mid-1920s he traveled in Europe and the United States. Returning to Japan, he went to sea once more, then taught at the Naval Staff College, where he made the coveted promotion to captain. Then he was back at sea as commander first of the light cruiser Naka, next of the Eleventh Destroyer Division. After that the Naval General Staff claimed him for two years. But although he appreciated the experience and the tribute to his ability, Nagumo was never really at ease except at sea. His old associates recall that after shore duty Nagumo always returned with joy and relief to the element he loved.
On November 15, 1934, he boarded the battleship Yamashiro as her skipper. Exactly one year later Nagumo became a rear admiral at the age of forty-eight—just about par for the course in the Japanese Navy. Steady progress upward marked the next few years. He kept a diary, but it is maddeningly sparse. He was not introspective, and he preferred action to words. Yet brief, revealing flashes come through. “I will continue to ask difficult things of them,” he wrote on May 3, 1936, of his officers and men, “and be firmly resolved to accept any responsibility at any time.” There speaks the perfectionist who expected much of himself and his subordinates. And his orders to Shanghai as commander of the Eighth Cruiser Division roused him to a fine glow of militant patriotism on July 15, 1937: “I solemnly swear here and now to participate in the war against China at the risk of my life. . . . I will give the Chinese some real shot and shell. My only regret is that I am not going off to battle at sea. . . .”1
The outbreak of World War II in Europe found Nagumo afloat as commander of the Third Battleship Division, and on November 15, 1939, he attained the high rank of vice admiral. A year later he had to come ashore again as president of the Naval Staff College in Tokyo. He was serving there when the call came to command the First Air Fleet.
A picture taken at the height of his career shows Nagumo resplendent in his blue uniform, sitting confident and composed, his left hand gripping his sword. His round cannonball of a head is bald in front, with the rest of his hair cropped in cadet style. A thoughtful forehead broken by two furrows blends into well-marked brows shadowing big, diagnostic eyes. Two sharp clefts in the skin between them as well as the deep lines running from his large nose to firmly set mouth tell a story of ready smiles and equally ready frowns of concentration. High cheekbones, solid jaws, and a rocklike chin complete the strong yet sensitive face of a man who seems to have accepted the irreversibleness of history.
A man of husky physique, Nagumo outwardly “gave the impression of being a Japanese Bull Halsey.”2 He wore his hat at a jaunty angle, paid little attention to his clothes, thrust out his chest arrogantly, and swaggered perceptibly when he walked. He was generous and outgoing, the sort to greet a friend with a shout of welcome and a stunning clap on the shoulder. He had one of the kindest hearts imaginable and took an absorbed interest in his officers and men.3
He accepted his new command with a heavy strike against him. “Nagumo was an old-line officer, a specialist in torpedo attack and large-scale maneuvers,” explained his longtime friend Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara, Commander in Chief of the Eleventh Air Fleet. “He was wholly unfitted by background, training, experience, and interest for a major role in Japan’s naval air arm. He had no conception of the real power and potentialities of the air arm when he became Commander in Chief of the First Air Fleet.”4
In retrospect, it is all too easy to overplay the points against Nagumo. True, he was a stranger to naval aviation, but the world’s navies in the 1940s did not expect every admiral to be a specialist. The very fact that a man had reached such eminence indicated that he must be a highly capable officer of varied experience.
The seniority system which put Nagumo in command had its virtues. It gave the officer corps a sense of security and stability, the knowledge that a man’s career was not entirely at the mercy of politics, favoritism, or caprice in high places. It also obviated the necessity for the service to make an arbitrary choice among many admirals of almost equal worth when it selected a high-level commander—always a delicate business fraught with pitfalls. Of course, the system had its drawbacks and often hammered a square peg into a round hole or rewarded mediocrity over brilliance.
Ironically, while Nagumo’s selection by seniority has cropped up against him, no investigating committee ever let the U.S. Navy forget that it tossed seniority overboard to appoint Kimmel Commander in Chief. As the cynical proverb says, nothing succeeds like success. On this basis the Japanese should have no complaints against Nagumo. In the six months Yamamoto had promised Premier Konoye, Nagumo did indeed “run wild.” Throughout the course of World War II no other Japanese admiral matched his record.
To reinforce the chinks in Nagumo’s professional armor, the Navy Ministry gave him as chief of staff Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, a truly excellent choice. Although not a pilot, Kusaka came to his task with a good record of assignments in the air arm, including command of the small carrier Hosho and the big flattop Akagi. Kusaka’s sturdy, slightly bowed legs carried a short, pyknic, well-shouldered frame. When he smiled, he beamed warmly and indulgently. His mind, like his body, moved slowly, with measured deliberation, focusing solidly on facts and disdaining illusion.
Kusaka possessed both purpose and courage. To the author’s knowledge, he was the only man in the Japanese Navy who stood up to Yamamoto and told him what he honestly thought about the Pearl Harbor plan.* The son of a wealthy family, Kusaka had the unassuming self-assurance that only a sunny, carefree childhood can give. A devoted student and practitioner of Zen Buddhism, he had a calm confidence and inner security such as few men ever attain. Nothing short of a major upheaval of nature ever disturbed Kusaka.
Not only did his carrier know-how balance Nagumo’s lack of experience in that area, but Kusaka’s placidity also helped ease the many worries that would plague Nagumo in the months to come. The commander often saw the dark side of any proposition, less out of pessimism than realism. Sea warfare deals in absolutes, and the admiral carried on his shoulders the lives of thousands of men and the force of his nation’s aerial striking power. Naturally his responsibilities weighed upon him. He turned gratefully to Kusaka’s steadfast, sober optimism, and Kusaka became his good right arm.
Nagumo drew Commander Tamotsu Oishi as his senior staff officer to ride herd over the other staff members and see that they carried out all orders and work assignments efficiently. A good organizer, punctual as clockwork, Oishi had been on the staff of the First Carrier Division since October 1940. In later days Genda said of him, “Oishi was originally a navigator. He was half-conservative and half-progressive. He had no special characteristics. He was not a pilot and knew little about air power and its uses. But he was not obstinate and would listen to reason. Oishi did his best to understand air operations; however, his entire background operated against him.”5 Like many outstanding people, Genda regarded his own brilliance as the norm and was impatient of those who could not follow his swift mental forays. So his judgments of his colleagues never erred on the side of charity. But Oishi’s strong, serious face reflected his sense of duty, and he plunged with zeal into his new assignment.
Genda rejoiced to be the air officer of the newly hatched organization with a tough job ahead of him and no weight of tradition to cramp his style. As Nagumo’s engineering officer, Lieutenant Commander Goro Sakagami, pointed out, “A heavy burden fell on Genda because he was actually the only one of us who understood air power.”6 Nagumo, Kusaka, and Oishi had brains enough to realize their limitations in that field and relied on Genda for expert advice and counsel. As time went on, they placed increasing trust in him and his judgments. Yamamoto’s plan soon became virtually Genda’s entire life.
Sakagami was a man of average size, soft-spoken and very gentle, “almost like a Japanese woman.”7 But he had a good, practical brain and an excellent record in naval engineering. He described himself as “somewhat of an outsider in the planning of the actual air attack,”8 but his work on the vital refueling problem would more than earn him his due. He came to the First Air Fleet the day it was organized.
Two others completed the inner circle of Nagumo’s staff: Lieutenant Commander Kenjiro Ono, the communications officer, who went about his work with quiet competence, displaying no distinguishing qualities, and Lieutenant Commander Otojiro Sasebe, the navigation officer, who had a good grip on meteorology but little to say in staff conferences.
Take two seasoned, competent flag officers, their rather colorless assistant, three experienced, if somewhat pedestrian, specialists, and one scintillating mind. Add them together, and you get the brain and nerve center of the task force destined to attack Pearl Harbor—no sinister band of geniuses, and certainly kindly, worrisome Nagumo was no Fu Manchu. It was just another staff typical of the Japanese Navy of its day—and perhaps of any armed force.
In addition to running the First Air Fleet, Nagumo and his staff headed its First Carrier Division, consisting of the flagship Akagi and her sister, Kaga. These two fine ships of about 26,900 tons each carried a complement of 2,000 men. The smaller flattops Soryu and Hiryu, around 20,000 tons, constituted the Second Carrier Division, which steamed under the flag of the unforgettable Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi.9 He came to the naval air arm in January 1940 as commander of the First Combined Air Corps in China and transferred to the Second Carrier Division in November of that year. So, in all, he had little naval air experience when he joined Nagumo’s command.
Over a medium-sized, well-stuffed body Yamaguchi’s oval face wore a deceptively sorrowful expression. Unlike Nagumo, he was neat, precise, and always well groomed. An impulsive, devil-may-care type, he loved a good fight, and if careful consideration ever tempered his fire, nobody noticed it. Although he was a keen advocate of Spartan training who demanded much, his airmen thought him the greatest invention since the airplane and considered him one of themselves. He brought to his new assignment an unusually broad, varied background of experience at sea and ashore. He knew the United States well, having served three tours of duty there, the last as naval attaché in Washington from June 1934 to August 1936. The Ivy League was well represented in the Japanese Navy in 1941. Not only had Nagano and Yamamoto attended Harvard, and Arima Yale, but Yamaguchi was a Princeton man.
He was close to Yamamoto, who “had great confidence in him and respected his knowledge, experience, and judgment.”10 They spent long hours together aboard Nagato swapping yarns and ideas. The Commander in Chief showed his regard for Yamaguchi so clearly that the cognoscenti began to speak of him as Yamamoto’s heir apparent.
Commander Kyozo Ohashi, who had been with the Second Carrier Division since October 15, 1940, served as Yamaguchi’s senior staff officer until late August, when he joined the Fifth Carrier Division in the same capacity. Ohashi’s replacement on Yamaguchi’s staff at that time was Commander Seiroku Ito. Although capable enough, Ohashi knew little about aviation, having specialized in gunnery. He had been to Hawaii in 1929 and 1934. During the latter visit he procured pictures of U.S. vessels in Pearl Harbor as well as information on the Fleet, which he submitted as a report to the Naval General Staff upon his return to Japan.11
Like Nagumo, Yamaguchi had a top-notch air officer, Lieutenant Commander Eijiro Suzuki. An Eta Jima classmate of Genda’s, Suzuki had long been one of his disciples in the cult of naval aviation and had more than 2,000 hours of flying time to his credit. He was somewhat the same type as Genda—thin, wiry, aggressive, with a bright, intelligent face, ready tongue, and quick mind. No one from Yamamoto on down could issue any order, however hazardous, even rattlebrained, that Yamaguchi and Suzuki would not jump to carry out with positive joy.
Lieutenant Commander Susumu Ishiguro, an officer with a fine record in his field, had filled the post of communications officer aboard Soryu since October 1940.12 Lieutenant Commander Takeo Kyuma, the engineering officer, completed Yamaguchi’s staff.
Toward the end of April Kusaka visited Fukudome in the general headquarters in Tokyo. During their talk Fukudome tossed over his desk a booklet entitled “Pearl Harbor Attack Plan.” However, its contents consisted mostly of intelligence concerning U.S. installations on Oahu. Kusaka looked at the material, then said to Fukudome, “This is very precise information on the enemy situation, but we cannot launch an operation on this basis alone because it is not an operational plan.” Thereupon Fukudome replied, “That is what I want you to develop.”13
Fukudome also showed Kusaka the Onishi-Genda draft. He explained that Yamamoto’s proposal was still in the idea stage and that the Combined Fleet Staff was working on it. Although Fukudome displayed little enthusiasm, he asked Kusaka to study the project. Kusaka wondered whether Yamamoto had not received the idea from Onishi, a notion he entertained even in the postwar years. Kusaka thought from the outset that the plan presented serious difficulties. He believed that it would have to be studied thoroughly, and a training program established for the First Air Fleet, which naturally would carry out such a mission. He also realized that as chief of staff of the First Air Fleet he would shoulder a heavy load of personal responsibility for its success.
Upon returning to Akagi, Kusaka briefed Nagumo on Yamamoto’s explosive design. From the moment Nagumo heard that his primary mission might be an attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, he “had a negative attitude.”14 At first he could not believe that Yamamoto would actually go through with such a zany undertaking. All other conditions aside—and he could enumerate plenty of them—Nagumo thought that the mere feat of sailing to Hawaii undetected, refueling en route, and arriving at the target according to a pinpoint schedule posed insuperable obstacles. Moreover, he would have to execute this attack with an instrument unfamiliar to him—naval air power. Nagumo consistently opposed the scheme until the last moment, even after Yamamoto made his irrevocable decision.15
The more Kusaka thought of Yamamoto’s design, the more he shared Nagumo’s doubts. He also added a few of his own. He wondered if the refueling problem could ever be solved. He considered the whole notion an unnecessary elaboration of Japan’s grandiose but fundamentally clear-cut naval strategy and a flagrant violation of the military principles of simplicity, mass, and objective. “The Japanese fleet should be like a lion in a fight,” Kusaka argued. “It should concentrate on the most important and immediate objective”—conquest of Southeast Asia—and not go dashing off like an Oriental Atalanta after elusive golden apples.
If anyone plunged off into the distance, let Kimmel be the one to lead his ships deeper and deeper into hostile waters! By the time he reached the combat area his crewmen, who had never fired a shot in anger and who trained only in the most pleasant of waters, would be jaded, exhausted. And Japanese submarines would have whittled the American Fleet down to size long since. That was the time to strike the enemy—in his hour of weakness, on Japan’s terms, in Japan’s naval hunting ground. To Kusaka it made no sense to bait the U.S. Pacific Fleet in its own stronghold, its own waters, far from Japan’s lines of communications and supply.
After putting Nagumo in the picture, Kusaka set Oishi and Genda to work on the project. So, through devious channels, the Pearl Harbor operational plan wound up right where it started—in the capable hands of Minoru Genda.16
Oishi also had little liking for the idea, which technically and psychologically was far out of his league. He did not bring Sakagami into the plan until around the end of May or early June, when he pledged him to strict secrecy. Oishi explained that if the attack should be carried out, refueling would be one of the knottiest problems. “Would it be possible to replenish the ships of the First Air Fleet in the northern Pacific?” he asked anxiously. But Sakagami could not answer at a moment’s notice a question so fraught with difficulties, and that nagging problem remained open.
Oishi likewise wanted to know about the fuel capacity and fuel consumption of the ships. With a long cruise to Hawaii and back of about 7,000 miles, these factors were absolute fundamentals upon which they must work. Sakagami’s job was to calculate fuel capacity and consumption down to the last decimal point.17 This would not be easy because it would depend on the speed of the task force and the condition of the sea.
Sometime in April Sasaki, Yamamoto’s staff officer for air, confided to his good friend Suzuki, his opposite number on Yamaguchi’s staff, that the Combined Fleet was considering the Hawaiian venture. Suzuki immediately grasped both the difficulties and the daring of the plan. Therein, he thought, lay its possibilities. He believed it might succeed because of the surprise factor and because it soared far beyond the conception of the ordinary strategist. Nevertheless, he counted the cost to Japan—probably three carriers, possibly four. It would come down, he thought, to a duel between the United States’ land-based planes and the Japanese carrier-based aircraft. He figured that if the enemy sent up 100 bombers, the task force’s fighters and antiaircraft could take care of about 40; that meant 60 could get through to wreak their will on the lightly armored carriers.18 This estimate appears to be a frightful price to pay, but the Japanese originally calculated that the Pearl Harbor operation would cost them about one-third of their task force.19
Suzuki immediately informed his admiral. Whether this was the first time Yamaguchi heard of the scheme one cannot say, because Yamamoto may well have told him in person.20 The Commander in Chief liked to thrash out ideas with Yamaguchi, and this one was after his own heart. Its flamboyance, its challenge to the fighting spirit, its flirtation with death—all these Yamaguchi took to himself. His senior staff officer, Ohashi, recalled that all sorts of rumors were flying around the First Air Fleet at the time of its founding in April 1941. Quite soon Ohashi suspected what was afloat, although he claims he did not get the word officially until September.21
Suzuki also passed his information along to Ishiguro shortly after he spoke with Yamaguchi.22 No one who has ever served aboard a Navy ship or on a military post can doubt that Yamamoto’s supersecret was by now fairly well known within the official family.
Many striking ironies raise the Pearl Harbor saga above the story of a unique naval operation to the level of a great human drama. None of them is more incongruous than these: Of the three admirals thus far assigned to the First Air Fleet, not one was an airman in the true sense of the term. And the most outspoken, ingrained opposition in the entire Combined Fleet to Yamamoto’s grand design would come from within the First Air Fleet itself, especially from the two admirals upon whom, whether he liked it or not, Yamamoto must depend to carry it through.