Vice Admiral Yamamoto in London
WW II Database/public domain
REAR ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO SET SAIL FOR THE UNITED States aboard Hie-maru, departing Yokohama, the port city south of Tokyo, on the afternoon of September 25, 1934. The ocean liner followed a route to Seattle, where, for the second leg of the journey, he and his small entourage boarded the Great Northern Railway’s transcontinental train to Chicago. In some ways, Yamamoto had been there, done that—meaning he’d already traveled the United States extensively and witnessed firsthand its breathtaking vastness and natural resources. On those excursions in the prior decade he had been merely a midlevel Japanese military man, unknown beyond Washington, DC’s military and diplomatic circles. Things were different now; he was Japan’s chief delegate to the preliminary tri-power talks on arms control, to be held in England, that were shaping up as a showdown. Whereas Great Britain and the United States were looking to extend the London Naval Treaty of 1930, which had maintained a 5:5:3 ratio for naval shipbuilding, Japan was signaling that going forward, nothing less than naval equality among the three nations was acceptable.
The assignment was a breakout moment for Yamamoto, thrusting him for the first time into the international spotlight. Press interest in the fifty-year-old commander was constant, attention that grew during the train trip as Yamamoto rebuffed reporters and, even more mysteriously, rarely appeared in public. He was content staying inside his compartment indulging in the card games he so enjoyed: bridge, shogi, and poker. During a weekend layover in Chicago, he did venture out to watch big-time college football. On Saturday, October 6, he joined thousands of fans at Dyche Stadium in Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago, where the Northwestern University Wildcats lost to the visiting Iowa Hawkeyes by a score of 20 to 7. But even at that highly public outing the admiral had no comment for reporters.
Yamamoto ended his press blackout once he reached New York City. He met with reporters the day after checking in at the upscale Astor Hotel. His main talking point confirmed all of the press speculation: Japan, he said, must be on the same naval footing as the United States and Great Britain in any new treaty. But he insisted that Japan was open-minded as to how equality could be achieved. He said, for example, that it could be reached not by addition but through subtraction; instead of redoing the ratio for new naval shipbuilding from 5:5:3 to 5:5:5, the nations could decide to scrap their existing naval armament. Whatever the way to parity, Yamamoto said, “My belief is that all nations are entitled equally to enjoy a sense of national security.”
The admiral spent three hurried days in New York City prior to his departure for Southampton, England, aboard the luxury liner Berengaria, the flagship of the Cunard Line, which featured lavish suites, a grand ballroom, and a “Pompeyan” swimming pool. He huddled for hours during the day with fellow Japanese diplomats, among them the naval attaché from the Japanese Embassy, who’d ridden a train up from Washington, DC, just to see him. Pleasure followed business, as he dined one night at the town house of the Japanese consul general on the Upper East Side, and on his second night, he was honored at the private Nippon Club on West Ninety-third Street by throngs of fellow nationals living in the city. Reporters tracked his every move, writing glowingly that Yamamoto “is known as one of Japan’s most brilliant naval officers. He has won remarkably rapid promotion.”
On his second day in New York, Yamamoto felt the need to respond to news out of Washington, where retired brigadier general William “Billy” Mitchell was making headlines forecasting future troubles with Japan. Mitchell, an outspoken advocate of airpower, was no relation to young Johnny Mitchell from Enid, Mississippi, who earlier in 1934 had left Columbia University for Hawaii as a new army enlistee. The general, testifying before a congressional committee, had asserted that the United States was ignoring at its peril Japan’s relentless military buildup, especially that of its Imperial Navy, and that the Pacific power should now be seen as the United States’ greatest threat. It was not a dream, he said, to imagine a Japanese plane landing in Alaska, which “might be followed with disastrous results to New York, or some other important city.” He said that the United States must commit to rapidly strengthening its own air forces.
Questioned by reporters the next day about the general’s inflammatory testimony, Yamamoto calmly sought to reassure. “I do not look upon the relations between the United States from the same angle as General Mitchell,” he said, “and I have never looked upon the United States as a potential enemy. The naval plans of Japan have never included the possibility of an American-Japanese war.”
That was true at the moment, technically speaking. But it was the kind of comment that later would be cited as proof that Isoroku Yamamoto had been a conniving, treacherous foe all along, one who had smiled graciously while concealing a gestating war scheme.
ON OCTOBER 16, 1934, TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS AFTER LEAVING TOKYO, Yamamoto checked into a sixth-floor suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel in central London, his home away from home for the next three months. Japanese delegations tended to stay at the Grosvenor, and the hoteliers, ever gracious, hung out a rising sun flag upon the admiral’s arrival. Formal talks were not expected to begin for another week, but Yamamoto immediately began making the rounds the next day, exchanging handshakes and niceties with representatives from the Western powers. The whole purpose of the Preliminary Naval Limitation Conference was preparatory—to lay the groundwork for the extension of the London Naval Treaty before its expiration the next year. That was the hope, but on his first day Yamamoto effectively drew a line in the sand when he reiterated to reporters that Japan would never submit to any continuation of the 5:5:3 ratio system. “I don’t think there is any possibility of compromise on any plans based on a ratio,” he said. “Japan objects to the ratio system and wishes to keep off the question of ratios altogether.” For his hard-line comments, reporters began referring to Yamamoto as the “outspoken seadog.”
The weeks that followed saw a round robin of diplomacy. Yamamoto spent his days conferring with the US delegates, then the British, then the Americans again, and so on. The international press covered each day’s news—which, in effect, was that there was no news. “Deadlocked” and “inaction” emerged as the go-to terms in newspaper headlines and stories. Though each country’s representatives projected a spirit of cooperation and appeared to be open to compromise, all were working to gain an edge without budging an inch. The Americans and the British insisted on the status quo—a naval building ratio of 5:5:3 for the three nations—to which Yamamoto found a myriad of ways to object. He quipped at one point, for example, “I am smaller than you, but you do not insist that I eat three-fifths of the food on my plate.” He nonetheless continued to attend the daytime sessions in all earnestness, evidenced by the fact that he relied on an interpreter despite knowing English. “It takes twice as long when you have an interpreter,” he explained to an associate, “and gives you time to watch the other man and consider your next move.” And despite the difficulties, the negotiations remained cordial. “We sailors get on admirably together,” Yamamoto told a reporter at one point. Evenings were often spent socializing at official dinners or less formal cocktail parties. Yamamoto did not drink but was hardly shy, always ready to initiate a poker or bridge game with William H. Standley, the US chief of naval operations, and Ernle Chatfield, Great Britain’s first sea lord. He returned to his hotel one night with twenty pounds he had won from Chatfield.
Yamamoto received a promotion to vice admiral on November 15, which enhanced his standing at the talks as the face of Japan, particularly in terms of his strident opposition to naval quotas. But behind the facade of Japanese unity things were more complicated. Yamamoto was indeed firmly against the treaty’s ratio system; he bristled at its inequity, which put him into sync with the so-called militarists back home who dominated the army and included a number of younger naval officers. But their reasoning differed. Though Yamamoto opposed the current treaty, he was genuinely interested in finding new ways to extend its purposes: arms control and world peace. In London he spoke firmly but hardly as a hawk. In fact, he’d proposed that the three nations downsize their navies to achieve parity, retiring their destroyers and cruisers. As an alternative to ratios, he favored what negotiators called an “upper tonnage limit,” meaning that the overall tonnage of each of the three countries’ fleets would not exceed an agreed-upon maximum. For him, a strong Imperial Navy—which he fiercely supported, especially its aerial capability—was for defensive purposes, a deterrent to dissuade the United States or any other country from eyeing the Pacific region for expansion. But the militarists saw the talks quite differently; not only did they seek an end to a demeaning 5:5:3 ratio that was insulting to every Japanese citizen, but they advocated an abrogation of all treaties to unshackle Japan to set it free to build, flex its military muscle, and challenge other world powers.
Privately, Yamamoto began to feel exploited, basically a pawn for the militarists, misgivings he shared later with his lover Chiyoko. “I couldn’t help feeling very unpleasant,” he wrote about the talks, “as it seemed to me I was being used just as a tool.” Even so, he continued to represent Japan’s interests as best he could, wary of the rising tide of jingoism at home but always loyal to his country. His position in London created an impossible dilemma. For years he’d helped to build a new and stronger Imperial Navy—and would continue to do so—but whereas he saw the navy mainly as a peacekeeping deterrent, he increasingly understood that the militarists viewed it as an offensive asset against the United States. He understood, therefore, that it was his duty to consider the Imperial Navy as a strike force—and to plan for that future possibility. For several years now, he’d been tossing around options for a hypothetical war with the United States, first mentioning in a lecture to cadets in 1928 the idea that attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor might be Japan’s best shot at victory.
When Yamamoto agreed to meet with a reporter one night in early December, those matters were certainly in play, if not explicitly, then as subtext. Hector C. Bywater, covering the London talks for the Daily Telegraph, was no run-of-the-mill reporter; he was the acclaimed author of The Great Pacific War, the best-selling 1925 novel dramatizing an imaginary surprise Japanese naval attack against an unsuspecting United States, with the aim, in Bywater’s view, to build an empire.
Yamamoto welcomed the journalist into his hotel suite at Grosvenor House. They settled into easy chairs, and a butler served drinks—Bywater favored scotch, while Yamamoto went with seltzer water. Bywater’s thinking about a hypothetical Pacific war had altered somewhat in the decade since the novel’s publication. In fact, when he met with Yamamoto he was working on an article for Pacific Affairs, a scholarly journal, which had asked him to update his analysis. In the article, published a few weeks later, Bywater wrote that the broad contours of a Japanese-US war imagined in his novel had not changed—namely, Japan’s surprise attack and the United States’ eventual victory. But he now thought that Japan would radically alter its means of a first strike and rely on a growing fleet of aircraft carriers and bombers instead of the warships of old. It was a revision that certainly would have pleased Yamamoto, the leading voice in Japan’s navy for airpower. Moreover, when Bywater said that the Philippines and Guam would “no doubt be gobbled up by Japan in the first weeks of war,” he was speaking to the choir, for Yamamoto’s own thinking was evolving along similar lines.
Whether the admiral and the journalist actually discussed The Great Pacific War remains unclear. The only record of their December 3 meeting is the article Bywater wrote for the newspaper. The story’s focus, not surprisingly, was the treaty talks, and it reflected cold pessimism. Yamamoto left little doubt about Japan’s immovable rejection of the ratio system, which, to Bywater, guaranteed that the treaty talks would go nowhere. Worse, Bywater foresaw failure as triggering a tri-power arms race with an increasingly belligerent Japan in the pole position.
Pessimism indeed hardened as days passed. Fed up by the fruitlessness of the negotiations, the US delegation left several days after Christmas. Norman H. Davis, a US ambassador-at-large, decried the eventual end of the naval arms treaties that dated back to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and had contributed to world stability. Pointing the finger at Japan, he said, “Abandonment now of the principles involved will lead to conditions of insecurity, of international suspicion, with no real advantage to any nation.” Yamamoto managed to maintain his outward amicability and even met with Admiral Standley for a friendly lunch prior to the latter’s departure aboard the steamship Washington. But it was clear that the talks were useless and, in hindsight, had actually always been so—dead on arrival in October. “The luncheon itself was a pleasant occasion,” one reporter wrote, “as the two admirals have struck up a warm personal friendship regardless of their differences on naval questions. But after coffee they had a half hour’s talk that again showed that Japan and the United States are far apart.”
WHEN YAMAMOTO LEFT LONDON BY TRAIN IN LATE JANUARY 1935, German officials were hoping that as he passed through Europe he would meet with Adolf Hitler. The Nazi leader had seized power the previous summer by abolishing the offices of president and chancellor and declaring himself Germany’s leader—der Führer. The thinking was that Yamamoto and Hitler could discuss the failed disarmament talks and their nations’ mutual interests. It was a nonstarter, however. Yamamoto had displayed cordiality toward US and British military officials but felt nothing of the kind toward the Nazi dictator. Though he stopped overnight in Berlin, dined at the Japanese Embassy, and even met with the German foreign minister, he declined to see Adolf Hitler or talk of a possible alliance. First thing the next morning, he resumed his trip, passing through Poland and switching to the Trans-Siberian Railway once he reached Moscow. Then came the long last leg across Siberia, smack in the middle of the Siberian winter, during which Yamamoto occupied his time with marathon bridge or poker games with his aides, all the while heavily smoking the popular Cherry brand cigarettes he’d come to favor.
Yamamoto arrived in Tokyo on the afternoon of February 12. Gone five months, he returned home to newfound fame for his unyielding stance at the London talks. He now seemed to embody Japan’s muscle-flexing might—for Japan first and Japan strong. Crowds greeted him at the station. Two days later, he presented his official report to the navy minister, in which he wrote that given the three nations’ differences, it had been “impossible to reach any agreement.” But although a growing majority in the military, the media, and the public cheered the breakdown in talks, Yamamoto did not, writing that he “deeply regretted that it was not possible to persuade Britain and America to accept the imperial government’s views, and was convinced of the necessity for still further efforts in this direction.” Yamamoto’s concluding words were at odds with his popular image as strongman. Simply put, he favored arms control to belligerence. Most missed the point—except the militarists, who were openly cool to Yamamoto in the days after his return. They watched his approval ratings spike, but they knew he was not one of them.
Beyond public view, the military establishment had for years been splitting into two competing groups. There was the so-called treaty faction, to which Yamamoto and like-minded naval comrades belonged, and there was the hawkish “fleet faction,” which controlled the army and parts of the navy. The balance of power throughout the 1930s tilted increasingly to the warlike fleet faction, so much so that within weeks of Yamamoto’s return, its leaders managed to sideline him. He was assigned to the Naval Affairs Bureau, where he had a new job, and an office in Tokyo but was given little to do. They hoped he might resign and disappear.
The admiral faced a midcareer crisis. He was unaccustomed to being ignored and did consider calling it quits. He told a few close friends that maybe he should just “go to Monaco and be a gambler.” To help sort things out, he traveled in the spring of 1935 to his birthplace, the remote village of Nagaoka. His parents were dead by then, but an elder brother and sister were still living there. To them, the younger sibling was affectionately known by “Iso-sa.” The visits revitalized him. The heavy snows had melted, and the flowering cherry trees along the Kaji River were in bloom. Yamamoto reunited with boyhood friends and spent a day with them in a boat on the river. He also enjoyed his favorite treats, broiled dumplings sold by vendors in the village. During the first visit in April, he stayed two weeks; he returned twice more before the summer was out. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, he had his mistress, Chiyoko, their budding romance not even a year old. He confided his frustrations to her. “To be honest, I feel utterly wretched working in Tokyo,” he said. He also opened his heart further, breathlessly referring to her as “beguiling and beautiful.” As he traveled between Tokyo and Nagaoka during the spring and summer of 1935, he spent most of his free time with Chiyoko and rarely with his wife, Reiko. “If it’s really true that you miss me and have faith in me,” he wrote to his lover, “then in practice I consider myself really fortunate.” In another note he wrote about a dream. “I dreamed that we were driving along the coast of Nice, in the south of France. I thought how happy I’d be if only it were true.”
Friends and supporters in the fleet faction lobbied Yamamoto to stay the course, insisting that the navy would be rudderless without him, and by late in the year, they managed to arrange his appointment as chief of the navy’s Aeronautics Department. It was a midlevel position, but an important one that was right in his sweet spot. The department was responsible for all air programs in the navy: its carriers, seaplanes, and land-based airplanes. Japan was rapidly building its military, and he’d have a job where he could push his agenda. He took it.
THE LEADERS OF THE IMPERIAL NAVY MIGHT DEBATE THE POINT of its fleet—whether for offensive or defensive purposes—but naval expansion won support across the board. Working within the hierarchy, Yamamoto sought to build a fleet composed of ships carrying planes. In the early 1930s, he had had a hand in developing new attack planes, most notably the speedy, single-engine Zero fighter, and now he persuaded such leading aircraft manufacturers as Mitsubishi and Nakajima to devise newer aircraft of all kinds: fighters, torpedo planes, and long-range bombers. He also imposed tougher training for combat pilots. It was no longer enough for fighter pilots to learn to land on a carrier; Yamamoto insisted that training be ongoing, with the pilots constantly drilled in takeoffs, landings, and flight patterns, so that they would become the envy of the world. His efforts pitted him against “battleship admirals,” who still measured sea strength in tonnage, big guns, and ever-larger ships. And those senior naval officials hardly sat still. Plans were well under way for the construction of two new giant battleships: Yamato and Musashi. Yamato, weighing 72,000 tons when loaded to capacity and requiring a crew of three thousand men, was set to become the pride of the Imperial Navy and to serve as the flagship of its Combined Fleet. Though Yamamoto argued for airpower as being central to the navy’s future, his opponents saw planes as merely complementary to the new and supposedly unsinkable mighty warships.
In December 1936, after a year spent serving as chief of aeronautics, Yamamoto was offered the job of vice minister of the navy, a prestigious post that would strengthen his hand. But he was hardly thrilled about taking up what was mainly a political post. “What is there for a naval man to be pleased about in being suddenly shifted to political duties just when he’s been trying his best to get naval aviation going?” he complained. To refuse the promotion would be a breach of military etiquette, however, and so he not only accepted the job but held it for the next two years and nine months, until the late summer of 1939.
He was now based mainly in Tokyo, and as he was largely a creature of habit, his days took on a predictable routine. He liked to start his workdays at dawn, arriving at the ministry before nearly everyone else. He’d work through the morning, often then conferring with his boss, Naval Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, a veteran admiral whose policies straddled a middle ground of sorts. Like Yamamoto, Yonai worried about the militarists’ nationalism and warmongering, but, contrary to Yamamoto’s fervent views on airpower, Yonai supported the building of mighty warships.
Given his early start, Yamamoto left work before many others—departures that were shrouded in mystery, as he rarely revealed his evening plans to his staff. Sometimes he could be found at the Navy Club playing shogi, but it was Chiyoko and their affair that accounted for his discretion. The couple typically rendezvoused at her geisha house in a downtown shopping area known as the Ginza District. They’d have dinner and perhaps attend an art exhibition or some other cultural event. As his feelings continued to deepen, a potential conflict arose. Yamamoto learned that he was not the only important man in Chiyoko’s life. A Tokyo real estate mogul was similarly enchanted with her; he spent money on her in ways an admiral could not. Chiyoko was skilled at juggling a love interest and a benefactor—or, as others at the geisha house observed, “keeping her heart and body separate.” Yamamoto, married and the keeper of a longtime friendship with the geisha Masako Tsurushima, could hardly protest, and, sustained by Chiyoko’s love, accepted the troika.
Becoming the navy’s vice minister put Yamamoto squarely in the crosshairs of the conservative nationalists demanding control of Japan’s military policy and practice. By 1936, the army junta had achieved dominance, and its agenda was focused on preparing to do battle to rule the Pacific region, which meant conquering first China and then all of Southeast Asia. The goal was access to other countries’ rich natural resources—particularly oil—that Japan lacked but required to be economically independent and strong. “Without oil,” noted one historian, “Japan’s pretentions to empire were empty shadows.” Over the next several years, the army more than doubled in size, from 20 to 50 divisions, while its air squadrons tripled from 50 to 150. Japanese newspapers and radio, increasingly falling under government sway, stoked a war fever. When Japan did instigate fighting with China in 1937, radio programs delivered cheerleading daily updates about the war front, while Nippon News newsreels that were jingoistic and less about the news than propaganda began playing nightly in movie theaters.
It was not Yamamoto’s style to soften his positions. The navy was growing stronger but not necessarily in the best ways. He continued to argue forcefully and with moral courage against the admirals who belittled airpower and persisted in claiming that only a battleship could sink another battleship. “The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants,” he retorted, using the ancient saying to stress the value of developing squadrons of planes flying from aircraft carriers. As if that comeback weren’t enough, he mocked the admirals’ obsession with building bigger warships as obtuse and backward looking. “They are like elaborate religious scrolls which old people hang in their homes—a matter of faith, not reality,” he said. Further, he insisted, “In modern warfare battleships will be as useful to Japan as a samurai sword.”
For those and other remarks, the number of Yamamoto’s enemies in government grew. He was outspoken in opposing the war in China, for example, which quickly became a drain on the military at a time when so much emphasis was being placed on building, not depleting, it. The United States immediately condemned Japan’s aggressions and demanded the complete withdrawal of its troops from China. In Europe, meanwhile, as Hitler ramped up for war, he and Italy’s ruler, Benito Mussolini, invited Japan to join them in a tripartite pact. Yamamoto, along with Navy Minister Yonai, resisted, arguing that aligning with Nazi Germany and Italy was tantamount to a public proclamation that Japan now saw the United States as its enemy. To Yamamoto a pact would mark a big step toward a war with the United States, which his antagonists in the army might welcome but he saw as calamitous. “For Japan it would mean, after several years of war [with China] already, acquiring yet another powerful enemy—an extremely perilous matter for the nation,” he wrote. “Japan should under no circumstance conclude an alliance with Germany.” Given that the press portrayed Japan’s leaders as unified in the war with China and for a pact with Germany, the nasty discord escalated with little public notice, a phenomenon Yamamoto complained about. “One can gain absolutely no information from the press or other such publications as to the true state of the nation’s affairs,” he wrote. “Personally, I feel that the crisis threatening the nation could not be graver.”
By the spring of 1939, his personal safety was also a grave matter. His enemies in Japan were certainly capable of taking deadly action. Earlier in the decade, a bungled, ill-fated coup attempt by a cabal of young army officers had been crushed, resulting in the execution of thirteen rebels for treason. Now that Yamamoto was a leading voice for moderation, the worried navy minister, Yonai, wanted to assign him a bodyguard. Yamamoto, not one to flinch and fiercely protective of his privacy off duty, balked, but Yonai insisted. It seemed as though Yamamoto had a target on his back, and rumors continued to spread. He received a steady stream of hate mail and, worse, death threats. By midsummer, navy leaders believed that a plot to assassinate him—to blow up a bridge as he crossed it—was in the works. Yonai acted quickly, arranging for his deputy to be reassigned. Yamamoto was appointed commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. The thinking was to get him out of Tokyo and a possible assassin’s line of fire and onto the safety of the open sea.
The promotion was big news. One headline announced, “Setting Sail Again on the Seven Seas After Six Years Ashore: Yamamoto, the Stern, Silent Admiral.” During the press conference held at the ministry, a reporter described Yamamoto as “a sturdy frame clothed in spotless white uniform; manly features, solemn with emotion and resolve; confident stride.” Yamamoto said that the new post was “the greatest honor possible” and pledged to do “my humble best in the service of His Imperial Majesty.” In short order, he would be challenged to fulfill that very promise.
He left Tokyo by train to join the fleet on August 31, 1939. The next day Germany invaded Poland, a blitzkrieg signaling that World War II had begun.
YAMAMOTO’S DEPARTURE FROM TOKYO HAPPENED TO FALL ON HIS twenty-first wedding anniversary. His wife, Reiko, did not see him off, however; she was out of town. But Chiyoko was with him, although unknowing observers mistakenly thought she was his “maid.” She stood among the well-wishers at the station—friends, military and government officials, and reporters—who watched as he boarded the train. Discreetly, she then climbed aboard, and together they traveled south to the port city of Osaka. From there Yamamoto continued southwest to Wakanoura Bay, where the entire Combined Fleet—the third most powerful fleet in the world with its seventy or more ships—was anchored, awaiting its new commander.
From that moment on, Yamamoto was essentially sea based. In the months to come, he’d visit Tokyo multiple times on business, but he’d never again call the city home. Instead, he lived mainly aboard the flagship, Nagato, and, once it was seaworthy, the mighty Yamato. Chiyoko went to see him when the fleet docked at Yokosuka, the port city thirty-seven miles south of Tokyo. Whenever Yamamoto went to Tokyo, he stayed at the Navy Club rather than with his family at their home, but his stays at the Navy Club soon became a cover for the fact that he actually stayed with Chiyoko. To accommodate their affair, she had moved out of the geisha house she’d been managing and rented a small home from a friend that was near the club. That gave the lovers the privacy they coveted for their trysts.
Yamamoto, as the fleet’s top commander and with a promotion to admiral in the offing, was at the pinnacle of his powers. He was fifty-five years old (nearly his father’s age when Yamamoto had been born) and, despite ongoing controversies, was the naval officer best prepared and better suited than any other to oversee the navy’s development. He threw himself into sculpting the fleet to his vision, centering on aircraft carriers stocked with fighter planes, torpedo planes, and high-flying bombers. Tracking the war in Europe, for example, he paid special attention to Great Britain’s use of new torpedo planes, and when torpedoes dropped from British planes sank three Italian battleships, he demanded detailed reports from the Japanese attachés stationed in Rome and London. For him, the feat validated his view that big warships were vulnerable, contrary to those who championed their invincibility.
Besides pushing for torpedo planes, Yamamoto imposed a new training program for bomber pilots. When he assumed command of the fleet, he was appalled by their poor performance in a bombing exercise; thirty-six planes trying to destroy an old decoy ship in the ocean a thousand feet below had hit the target only once. He spelled out his high expectations for fliers in a training pamphlet: “With tenacious and timeless spirit we are striving to reach a superhuman degree of skill and fighting efficiency.” In the spring of 1940, he personally oversaw from the flagship, Nagato, war games he’d ordered to assess the outcomes of the more rigorous training. He witnessed an impressive turnaround, so much so that having for years contemplated a war plan against the United States in case war was ever necessary, he mused to his chief of staff, “An air attack on Hawaii may be possible now, especially as our air training has turned out so successfully.” The tantalizing comment hung in the air, nothing more said. Except for a rare mention during a lecture to cadets years earlier or in conversations with the writer Hector Bywater, he had never presented the idea to peers and held out hope that he’d never have to.
But that hope was shattered September 27, 1940, when Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Yamamoto angrily called the signing “irrational” and “impulsive,” an alliance certain to pit Japan against the United States. Indeed, the United States immediately imposed sanctions and soon halted oil exports to Japan entirely. That all but ensured a direct confrontation, given that Japan was dependent on imported oil and its stockpiles could last only a year. Yamamoto called out other navy officials for assuring the emperor’s advisers that their navy was superior and could win a war, even a protracted one. He kept up his unvarnished criticism of the army leaders he despised, most of whom had never been to the United States, telling them that they were foolishly underestimating the United States’ will. “It is a mistake to regard Americans as luxury loving and weak,” he would say in a talk in Tokyo a year later. “I can tell you that they are full of spirit, adventure, fight and justice. Their thinking is scientific and well advanced.” Knowingly, he warned, “Remember that American industry is much more developed than ours, and—unlike us—they have all the oil they want. Japan cannot vanquish the United States. Therefore we should not fight the United States.”
His remarks caused an uproar, with some accusing him of favoring the United States and Great Britain. Yamamoto did not back down. “I am Japanese,” he replied forcefully. “I do only what is best for my country.” He spoke with equal frankness when Japan’s prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, who’d signed the Tripartite Pact, asked for his take on a war with the United States. To be sure, the navy had made huge strides in modernizing and expanding, but Yamamoto had always believed that strength was to deter war, not instigate it. He said, “If we are told to fight, regardless of consequences, we can run wild for six months or a year, but after that I have utterly no confidence. I hope you will try to avoid war with America.”
Yamamoto was torn; though he was against a war, his country was on a crash course toward one. But overriding everything was the fact that he was pro-Japan and supremely loyal, which meant it was his duty to devise a battle plan. “This moment is the critical time upon which the fate of the country depends,” he wrote an old friend on November 4, 1940. He was ready to answer the call, and in order to give his beloved Japan a fighting chance, he began work on no ordinary strategy.
YAMAMOTO DISCLOSED HIS APPROACH LATE THAT FALL OF 1940 TO a few trusted senior staff, but it was early in January 1941 that he actually sat down at his desk aboard the flagship, Nagato, and composed a letter that, for the first time, outlined his long-considered idea. Titled “Opinions on War Preparations,” the letter was addressed to Japan’s new navy minister, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, who, like Yamamoto, had served as a junior naval officer during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Oikawa, who was sympathetic to Yamamoto’s antiwar position, continued in the coming months to push for maintaining peace through diplomacy—until the hawks dominating the government managed to oust him. Letter in hand, Oikawa hardly disputed Yamamoto’s New Year’s assessment, which was that conflict with the United States and Great Britain seemed “inevitable” and thus “the time has come for the Navy, especially the Combined Fleet, to devote itself seriously to war preparations.”
Yamamoto got right to the point. He saw little hope for Japan following any traditional warship-based strategy. “The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S., I firmly believe, is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the U.S. Navy and her people goes down to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.” He continued, “Only then shall we be able to secure an invincible stand in key positions in East Asia, thus being able to establish and keep the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” The latter was a reference to Japan’s one-sided initiative to exploit the natural resources of countries it controlled—by no means a “coprosperity” plan.
The unprecedented approach was now possible tactically speaking, given the advances of the previous few years: the greater distances the newer bomber planes could fly from aircraft carriers; the increased prowess of the fleet’s pilots due to their relentless training; and advances in aerially delivered torpedoes, particularly one nicknamed “the long lance.” The plan was basically a distillation of old lessons—including the surprise attack in the Russo-Japanese War—with the new: Yamamoto’s reshaping of the Imperial Navy as carrier based. It echoed parts of Hector Bywater’s tactics in the novel The Great Pacific War as well, albeit updated.
Given the opponent, Yamamoto wrote, “We should have a firm determination of deciding the fate of the war on its first day.” Pearl Harbor should be hit hard, fast, and by surprise with a raid by a huge fleet of carrier-based planes. Nothing would come easily, of course, and there was no guarantee of success, “but I believe we could be favored by God’s blessing when all officers and men who take part in this operation have a firm determination of devoting themselves to their task, even sacrificing themselves.”
The mission became known as Operation Z, and Yamamoto entrusted the operational details to three top subordinates: Rear Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, Rear Admiral Takijiro Ohnishi, and Captain Minoru Genda. Genda served as chief planner for the massive task force that would employ six of the fleet’s ten major aircraft carriers, two of its faster battleships, two cruisers, and a number of destroyers, tankers, and other supporting ships. The plan, revolving around the carrier fleet rather than the battle fleet as the central strike force, flew in the face of conventional wisdom. No navy in the world was thinking that way at the time, including Japan’s. The mind-set for more than a decade had been “the great all-out battle,” in which Japan would beat the bigger US Navy by first using its submarines to pick off US ships and then defeating the slimmed-down US fleet in an ultimate warship face-off in the Pacific. No surprise, some military leaders were initially dismissive of Yamamoto’s bold plan, worried that it recklessly put too much of Japan’s fleet at risk on one roll of the dice. Moreover, the skeptics believed that they already had a winning formula: the mano a mano approach of “the great all-out battle.”
The reaction featured the hubris that had alarmed Yamamoto for years, what he viewed as the warmongers’ ignorant miscalculation of the United States’ resolve. A few weeks after submitting his Pearl Harbor plan to the navy minister, he addressed his concerns in a letter to an acquaintance who was one of the leading belligerents, an ultranationalist named Ryoichi Sasakawa. Yamamoto’s main point was cautionary, a warning that too many decision makers did not seem to grasp the meaning of going to war with a nation as industrially powerful as the United States. It was folly to think that if Japan simply took Guam and the Philippines, or even Hawaii and San Francisco, it would convince a weak-willed United States to fold and leave Japan to its own devices, creating an empire in the Pacific. To the contrary, Yamamoto said, the United States would retaliate with all its might, which meant a bloodbath that could be won only by defeating the United States utterly and completely. “We would have to march into Washington and sign a treaty in the White House,” he wrote. That was the cold reality the sword rattlers needed to confront.
Yamamoto left out one major point, though: he did not believe that crushing the United States was remotely possible. But to say that would come off sounding defeatist and perhaps even traitorous, so he kept his plan’s true goal to himself. Others could think whatever they wanted about an illusory complete victory; his objective was to land a preemptive blow against US naval forces at Pearl Harbor so impactful that the United States’ leaders, among them a potent bloc of isolationists, might prefer to negotiate an early peace before an all-out war got real traction. If the United States roared back from the opening punch, Yamamoto believed, Japan would not survive the enemy’s superiority over the long haul. He struggled with that tension throughout the remainder of 1941, between his private beliefs and the duty to devise a plan putting Japan on its strongest war footing. “What a strange position I find myself in now,” he confided to an old friend and classmate at one point during the year. “Having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my personal opinion, with no choice but to push full speed ahead in pursuance of that decision.”
BY MAY 1941, YAMAMOTO, A DRAFT PEARL HARBOR PLAN IN HAND, ordered his fleet to commence training. The combined fleet used Kagoshima Bay, whose entrance resembled Pearl Harbor’s, on the island of Kyushu for its main exercises. Pilots piled up fifty and more practice runs taking off from and landing on carriers. High-altitude bombers worked on their accuracy, dropping dummy bombs onto a faux battleship drawn in a sandy inlet near the bay. Dive-bombers, meanwhile, worked on hitting targets in the bay with shallow-draft torpedoes. The extensive drills continued throughout the summer. In May, Germany ended months of bombing England to turn its sights on invading Russia, further escalating debate among Japan’s leaders about whether to stay on the fence or advance its Pacific agenda. While one arm of a divided government continued developing war options, another continued negotiating with US diplomats to avoid war. Unknown to the Japanese, US intelligence agencies, having broken certain Japanese codes dating back to the 1920s, were able to monitor much of the internal turmoil. President Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were briefed on the intelligence, which revealed a cumulative if conflicted swing toward war, although US code breakers never managed to detect the navy’s secret Pearl Harbor plan.
Yamamoto, bolstered by months of successful training, presented the plan’s feasibility through a series of “tabletop maneuvers” at the Naval War College in Tokyo in mid-September. To justify targeting Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto even played to the militarists’ bellicosity, characterizing the US fleet there as a “dagger pointed at Japan’s heart.” But the dress rehearsal met with stiff opposition, most notably from the navy general staff and its chief, Admiral Osami Nagano. Nagano and others preferred targets closer to home than Hawaii—in Burma, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines, for example—given the ever-present worry of oil and fuel shortages. Ignoring the opposition, Yamamoto continued to train the fleet. By the next month, though, he’d had enough. He sent word to Tokyo that he and his entire staff would resign if he were not given the official green light. Whether a bluff or not, the move made by the consummate player of games of chance worked. The pressure for war was reaching a boiling point, and a reshuffling in government resulted in the militant war minister, Hideki Tojo—who was an unalloyed fan of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler—being named as the new premier. The navy general staff swiftly came around and finally adopted Yamamoto’s plan for a surprise carrier-based raid on Pearl Harbor. Nagano said that the naval leaders would put their trust in the commander of the Combined Fleet as the one who knew best how to tackle the US problem.
In private, Yamamoto continued to despair. Writing to a friend at the end of October, he expressed deep worry about his country and its “risky and illogical” fixation with confrontation. He hoped for a last-minute peace but was resigned that war, not peace, was in the cards. Less than two weeks later, on November 5, 1941, he distributed to his fleet commanders the plan that he and senior staff had been secretly working on aboard the Nagato. The 118-page document spelled out in every detail the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and simultaneous attacks on Malaysia, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong. It was titled “Combined Fleet Top Secret Operational Order Number 1.” Final approval from Emperor Hirohito was still required, but for the fleet to be in position for the early-December target date, he ordered the strike force anchored in the Inland Sea to set sail.
Yamamoto stayed behind, aboard the fleet’s flagship, Nagato, from which he would monitor and oversee the Pearl Harbor attack. In charge of the fleet assembling stealthily about eight hundred miles north of Japan in Hitokappu Bay in the remote Kuril Islands was Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. Nagumo had not been Yamamoto’s first choice; he had little experience in aviation and was an early doubter, a believer in warships not aircraft carriers. But Nagumo’s seniority and the navy’s strict adherence to protocol had given Yamamoto little option. Yamamoto did, however, surround Nagumo with his own trusted commanders, notably Captain Mitsuo Fuchida and Minoru Genda, the latter being one of the mission’s key planners.
By the third week of November, the strike force was gathered in the isolated bay surrounded by snow-covered hills. The target date for the start of hostilities was December 7, and although Yamamoto’s days were consumed with operational matters, he found time for a reprieve from the imminent war with the love of his life. Chiyoko traveled by train from Tokyo to join him on the scenic island of Itsukushima in Hiroshima Bay, where the couple spent the night of November 25 at an inn. The next day the Japanese Carrier Strike Force departed from its rallying spot and began the four-thousand-mile journey to the Hawaiian Islands. Events were unfolding at a hurried pace. Yamamoto left the Nagato, anchored in the Inland Sea, and traveled to Tokyo for a flurry of high-level conferences. Behind closed doors, the Imperial Council voted on December 1 to declare war on the United States and Great Britain.
Yamamoto, meanwhile, attended at once to his professional and personal affairs. On December 2, he issued the official order to his units traveling on the high seas: “Climb Mt. Niitaka,” code for “Proceed with attack on Pearl Harbor.” The next day he appeared in full uniform and medals at the Imperial Palace to hear Emperor Hirohito ratify the war and assert the nation’s faith in Yamamoto’s ability to secure “victory over the enemy.” Yamamoto, the “humble servant,” promised that the “officers and men of the Combined Fleet will swear to do their duty” and “with confidence we face operations.” That was Yamamoto at his most dutiful and professional self—as one historian later described him, “the picture of hatchet-faced solemnity.” His sentimental side showed afterward, when he surprised his wife, Reiko, and family by arriving unannounced at their home and, a rarity, staying the night. The next day, December 4, he hurried to the navy minister’s official residence in the morning to toast the mission’s success and then met up with Chiyoko in the afternoon. They strolled together in the Ginza District, the shopping area that included Chiyoko’s former geisha house. Yamamoto bought her a beautiful bouquet of roses. He told her he must return to his ship immediately. He asked that she send him a photograph that he could keep close at hand, the way seamen and soldiers do when they don’t expect to see their sweetheart for a while—just as Johnnie Mitchell had done with Annie Lee Miller. Bound to secrecy, Yamamoto could not tell Chiyoko why he was leaving, and so he spoke in a code of sorts, hinting at the shock that was about to hit the world. He said, “Watch for the time when the petals of these flowers fall.”