Many years ago, while on a summer tour of the Caroline Islands for research on a book on the rise and passing of the Japanese in Micronesia, I thought I heard the roar of fighter engines. On the high island of Ponape, I was driving along a paved road southwest of Kolonia, the main town, looking for what I had been told had been one of the Japanese navy’s two air bases on the island. It was high noon, still, and incredibly hot as I slowed the car about five kilometers out of town—about the distance I had been told that I should find the airfield, or what was left of it. Across the taro patches and through clusters of trees I saw the ribs of what I took to be a ruined aircraft hangar. After a rough and prickly trek through the weeds, I came upon the foundations of what must have been a barracks, some small construction locomotives, trenches, concrete bunkers, and other detritus of war.
I knew that fighter planes had been based on the island during the Pacific War. Indeed, during the course of the hour or more I spent at the site, I stumbled across the twisted remains of a Mitsubishi Zero more than a hundred meters from one the airfield’s runways. Vines and grasses had pulled a shroud over the wrecked fuselage, and only the tail section, broken off from the fuselage, remained uncovered. I walked back to the airfield. All was heat and sun and somnolence. I looked out across the broad expanse of weeds and grass that had once been the runway, trying to make out the faded markings on fuselage and tail assemblies, wondering what the Zero must have looked like when, with its fellows, in full fighting trim and still bravely bearing its air group and pilot markings, it had touched down on this remote tropical airfield with the same airy lightness it would have brought to the flight deck of a carrier.
As I strained to imagine what must have been here, I began to catch the cough, the choke, and then the roar of engines as the fighters sped down the runway and lifted off to hurl themselves against the waves of the approaching aerial enemy. What had it been like here at this air base during those desperate months when the Japanese navy sent its men and planes to defend outlying defenses such as this, only to have them consumed in the furnace of American air power like moths drawn to a candle? What had been the nature of the combat unit of which they had formed a part, and what of the skills and fighting qualities of the pilots who had flown with it? What of the assumptions that had gone into the conception and design of this abandoned relic? How, indeed, had it figured in the plans of a navy fixated on the idea of great battleships and titanic surface battles at sea? I climbed back into my car that hot afternoon in the Carolines, believing that someday I would follow the prop wash of the Zero but recognizing that, for the time being, I had a different book to research and write.
A year later, chance offered a liftoff to my interest in Japanese naval aviation, though it was to take it across the oceanic expanse of a greater subject. I had returned to my teaching duties at a public university in New England when the Naval Institute Press proposed that I undertake a history of Japanese naval strategy in the Pacific War. With the late David Evans as my invaluable collaborator, I spent the next decade and more in this effort, during which time the focus of my research shifted once again. Concern with the wartime strategy of the navy gave way to a study of the prewar navy in its strategic, tactical, and technological aspects. The result was Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Naval Institute Press, 1997).
Because of my continuing enthusiasm for the subject and because of its major importance in the rise and fall of the Japanese navy, our original manuscript had included four long chapters on the Japanese naval air service. But upon completing our work, we had concluded, along with the press, that such extensive attention to the rise of Japanese naval aviation made for too bulky a manuscript, and that in any event the story deserved to stand on its own. In the published work, therefore, the four chapters were excised and the subject summarized in one.
The core of this present book thus comprises the original treatment of Japanese naval aviation in the earlier work, plus additional chapters added to describe its prewar origins and wartime destruction. It is important to emphasize the genesis of this present study, since Kaigun provides the broader institutional and historical context of the Japanese navy. I thus refer the reader to Kaigun for much that has been left out of this present work concerning the evolution of the Imperial Japanese Navy as a whole, particularly matters of strategic planning and decision prior to and during the great conflict in the Pacific. The present work is an attempt to provide an outline history of the evolution of the organization, doctrine, tactics, training, and technology of Japanese naval aviation—its aircraft, its ships, and its personnel—from its inception up to the beginning of the Pacific War. I conclude the story with a chapter that sketches the victories of Japanese naval air power early in that conflict and analyzes the progress of its utter destruction by 1944. While this work makes no attempt to be encyclopedic in the coverage of its subject, I have added a number of appendices that deal with the personalities, organization, technology, and tactics of Japanese naval aviation. The individuals and aircraft listed in appendices 1 and 6 are identified, respectively, with the symbols † and • where first discussed in the text.
In the introduction to Kaigun David Evans and I attempted to outline the difficulties of writing and researching Japanese naval history. I shall not readdress these issues here in detail, but since they are relevant to the present study and serve to explain why it is not always possible, when writing about the Japanese navy, to answer with certainty all the questions of “how” and “why” and “by whom,” they deserve summary repetition, at least.
There is, to begin with, the problem of the ambiguity of the Japanese language, which often obscures sharply delineated meaning. Further, the absence of adequate documentation because of the wholesale destruction of files and documents at the end of the war means that numerous issues of major importance about the Japanese navy may never be resolved. Nor can one turn to a large body of biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, and reminiscences by knowledgeable Japanese naval personalities for “the final inside story” of prewar and wartime naval affairs, since the norms of Japanese culture and society in general, and the reluctance of the survivors of a defeated navy in particular, often blanch such documents of controversy and incisive judgments. Finally, there is the reality that the authors and editors of some of the major multivolume studies I have used for this work—the Senshi sōsho (War history) series published by the Japanese Self-Defense Agency, the Nihon kaigun kōkūshi (History of Japanese naval aviation), and the Shōwa zōsenshi (History of shipbuilding in the Shōwa era), for example—are voluminous in detail but often omit questions of primary importance to the Western historian. All these difficulties challenged the completion of this work as well as of the earlier study.
A few technical points mentioned in the introduction to Kaigun need to be repeated here for the sake of clarity, particularly those dealing with my use of systems of spelling and measurement. In writing Japanese I have used the Hepburn system of transliteration, and in writing Japanese personal names I have followed the Japanese word order—that is, family name first, given name second (the exceptions being adherence to Western word order in the case of American citizens and in cases where English-language publications provide authors’ names in Western word order). For place names in China, I have generally followed the Wade-Giles system except for those prominent cities—such as Hankow, Canton, and Tientsin—whose names in the period between the world wars were usually transliterated according to the old Chinese postal system. For major places in Korea and those major places in China (mainland China and Taiwan) that were under formal Japanese administration between 1909 and 1941, I have given the Japanese name and have sometimes added the indigenous name in parenthesis. I have also used a few common Western names that had general acceptance before World War II, such as Port Arthur and the Pescadores Islands.
The problem of measurement is a complicated one in writing about the Japanese navy, since the navy itself was not always consistent, sometimes using the English system of measurement for length, distance, and weight, and sometimes the metric system. My recourse, in most cases in the text, has been to use the system of measurement used by the navy at the time and to put in parentheses the equivalent conversion in the other system, with the figure given in round numbers.
Unless otherwise indicated, displacements are given in long tons (English tons of 2,240 pounds) and denoted simply as tons. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 introduced “standard” displacement, which indicated the displacement of a ship fully loaded and ready for sea, but without fuel. I have used standard displacement as a general rule. I have attempted to be accurate, but displacements sometimes changed as ships were modified, and sources are often ambiguous and occasionally disagree. I have resolved such issues by using my best judgment.
For distances, in most cases I have followed the Japanese practice of measuring longer distances in nautical miles. I have defined range of aircraft as the total distance an aircraft could fly on a given supply of fuel, for a given speed. By “radius” I mean the distance an aircraft could fly, perform its mission, and return to base with sufficient fuel to land safely.