Yamamoto on a US propaganda poster
WWII Database/public domain
EARLY ONE EVENING IN LATE FEBRUARY 1942, AN OIL FIELD WORKER by the name of G. O. Brown spotted a Japanese submarine surfacing off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Though it was a mile offshore, Brown was taken aback by the size of the dark mass as it floated idly atop the ocean. “It was so big I thought it might be a destroyer or cruiser,” he later told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “I have seen many submarines and this was larger than any of those in the United States Navy.” It was as if Brown was describing the Moby Dick of subs—a frighteningly huge and dangerous ship the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Brown watched helplessly for the next thirty minutes as the submarine’s deck guns fired a dozen or so five-inch shells at the Ellwood oil refinery near the seaside community north of Los Angeles. None of the oil wells was hit, and many of the shells fell into a nearby pasture where horses were grazing. “They went mad,” Brown said. “Shells were exploding in their pasture and the horses screamed and raced about.”
No one was hurt and the damage was minor, but the attack further fueled a skittish nation’s fears that the Japanese were mighty fighters possessing stunningly powerful weaponry—giant submarines, no less. (In reality, Japanese submarines, although differing in certain features, were comparable to US subs.) Ever since Pearl Harbor, any movement on the high seas off the West Coast—ranging from fishing boats to floating logs to sharks and whales—was frequently mistaken for attacking Japanese ships. And Secretary of State Henry Stimson warned the anxious citizenry that it must buckle up and brace for “occasional blows” from the enemy.
Then, just thirty-six hours after a Japanese sub had actually attacked Santa Barbara and put all of southern California on edge, the skies over Los Angeles were lit up. Trigger-happy coastal artillerymen pumped more than 1,400 rounds of antiaircraft fire at what they thought were incoming Japanese bombers. Sirens blared as the region went into a blackout. For the next hour, searchlights sliced up the night sky while US gunfire burst in midair. One artilleryman later said he had spotted six planes, while another said he had seen two dozen. Civilians reported seeing Japanese paratroopers descending from the sky, and there was even a story of a damaged Japanese fighter plane crashing on a Hollywood street.
The city was under siege—except that it wasn’t. There were no enemy bombers, no paratroopers. In the light of day, it was determined that there had been no attack. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox concluded that jittery nerves had resulted in a false alarm. It was also revealed that weather balloons had been released earlier and, seen on radar, had likely been mistaken for planes. The mirage attack was not without consequences, however. Five people died of heart attacks during the blackout, while shrapnel and unexploded shells that had fallen to earth broke windows, damaged homes, and caused multiple injuries, including slicing a six-inch cut into one man’s head. Further, local police had detained more than fifteen Japanese Americans believed to be signaling enemy aircraft using flares or other lights.
The enemy was everywhere and nowhere. Rage and paranoia had erupted in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, a manhunt for a Japanese pilot who’d put down there after the December 7 aerial attack resulted in the burning of residents’ homes and the apprehension and even the shooting of Hawaiians suspected of shielding the pilot. On December 8, US attorney general Francis Biddle, citing national security, had directed the FBI to round up 737 Japanese Americans in California who had been determined to be “enemy aliens”—the first roundup of many more to come. Japanese all over the country, many of whom were citizens and had been born in the United States, were targeted as possible spies feeding information to the enemy or, worse, as saboteurs and terrorists. “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats,” Chase Clark, Idaho’s governor, said. Racist stereotyping abounded. In a stab at grisly satire, quasi-official-looking “Japanese hunting licenses” began circulating, while Time magazine tried a more serious means of being helpful: Its editors published a handy guide titled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” containing ten tips for patriots to differentiate Japanese from Chinese immigrants. Japanese men were said to walk “stiffly erect,” for example, while Chinese men were more relaxed. Facial expressions could be especially revealing: “Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant.”
Compounding the fear, the submarine attack of February 23 revved into overdrive the removal of Japanese living on the West Coast that President Roosevelt had authorized the prior week—an executive order the US Supreme Court would uphold as constitutional. Families up and down the coast were forcibly removed from their homes—120,000 people in all, taking with them only what they could carry—and taken to internment camps that were being hastily constructed. Their new “homes” would consist of barracks-style structures surrounded by barbed-wire fences and towers manned with armed guards. “Don’t kid yourselves and don’t let someone tell you there are good Japs,” California congressman A. J. Elliott told his House colleagues in a speech following the attack. “We must remove the Japanese in this country into a concentration camp somewhere, some place, and do it damn quickly.”
For all the widespread fear of the Japanese everyman, first and foremost the face of Japanese evil became that of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Until Pearl Harbor, few outside of US military and government circles had known of him, even though he’d spent considerable time in the United States, most recently traveling cross-country by train en route to the London disarmament talks in 1934. He had lost that anonymity virtually overnight. Once the Japanese press released for domestic propaganda purposes the falsified Yamamoto letter that had him boldly predicting total victory, the American press pounced on his alleged inflammatory statements. “‘I’ll Capture White House,’ Jap Admiral Bragged Year Ago,” read a Washington Post headline on December 17, 1941. For most Americans the news coverage was a first look at the Japanese admiral who’d devised the Pearl Harbor attack—a preening warrior making jingoist pronouncements. “I am looking forward to dictating peace in the United States in the White House in Washington,” the Post story quoted him as saying in its second paragraph. From that point on, the quotation—or some form of it—was attached to Yamamoto like a middle name whenever he was mentioned in the war’s press coverage.
Time magazine made Yamamoto its top story in the pre-Christmas issue of 1941. The demonic sketch of Yamamoto on the cover was more fitting for Halloween, however: yellow skinned; dark slits for eyes; misshapen head; lips pursed and turned downward, as if readying to spit; cannon looming over each shoulder, aimed directly at readers. Every man, woman, and child could study the repulsive-looking face of the foreign fiend who’d promised to take the White House and imagine a bull’s-eye in the center of the caricature. Yamamoto was, as the caption read, “Japan’s Aggressor,” the evil mastermind of Pearl Harbor, “a hard-bitten professional with a sixth-sense—hatred.” Then came the major profile of Yamamoto in prestigious Harper’s Magazine by Willard Price, the writer who had dusted off his notes from his meeting with the young Yamamoto in 1915 to produce a seething, bigoted portrait that built upon the Time magazine account. Yamamoto, wrote Price, was a “hard chunk of man, hair cropped as short as the bristles on a beaver-tail cactus, lips thick, jowl heavy.” He had been a hater since boyhood with a “conquest complex”; according to Price, his principal motivation in life was to hate and destroy the United States.
Yamamoto was the United States’ archvillain. He’d exploded into the national consciousness in the weeks and months following the Pearl Harbor attack. As one historian noted, “For no other enemy, not even Hitler, did Americans hold such a bitter hatred. Yamamoto was the man who had planned the treacherous blow at Pearl Harbor. And as if this were not enough, he had added insult to injury by boasting that he planned to dictate peace in the White House. To all Americans he was a peculiarly personal foe.”
MEANWHILE, IN JAPAN DURING THE REMAINDER OF DECEMBER 1941 and continuing into the new year, Yamamoto was applauded, honored, and idolized. He’d become a supreme national hero. The smashing success of the Pearl Harbor raid, followed by the string of quick victories elsewhere in the Pacific, had elevated him to the status of the nation’s foremost naval icon Heihachiro Togo, a forerunner as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, who had decisively defeated the larger and more powerful Russia in the Russo-Japanese War at the start of the century. The raw numbers told the story: the US Navy had lost 21 ships at Pearl Harbor, 7 of which had been battleships either sunk or seriously damaged. Ninety-two of the Navy’s 169 planes had been wrecked; another 39 needed significant repair. The Army Air Forces’ three major installations had been ravaged, with another hundred planes allocated to the Hawaiian Air Force also ruined. The total count of American dead and wounded had come to more than 3,400. In contrast, the Japanese losses had turned out to be minimal—and much lower than Yamamoto’s planners had predicted. Just 29 of the strike force’s 353 planes had been downed and one submarine and five midget submarines lost. Going in, Yamamoto had been prepared to lose half of the mission fleet’s six aircraft carriers, but all had remained unharmed. In terms of fatalities, the Japanese had lost fifty-five airmen and nine submarine crewmen. In a way, the admiral had achieved by brute force an end to the despised 5:5:3 ratio for naval armament that he’d failed to obtain as chief delegate to the tri-power talks in London in 1934. The new calculus showed not just parity but actual superiority for Japan’s Imperial Navy. To the Japanese public, Yamamoto was invincible.
He was the hate-filled warmonger in the United States and the indomitable naval patriot in Japan, but neither caricature truly captured Yamamoto. He was, above all else, a reluctant warrior. But in Japan the news coverage was gushing day after day, reporting the fall of Manila in the Philippines on January 4, 1942; the paratrooper assault on Celebes, an Indonesian island in the western Pacific, on January 11; the fall of Singapore on February 15. The last was heralded as a huge victory and led to yet another rescript, or official accolade, for Yamamoto, this one including a banner the empress had embroidered picturing an airplane against the rising sun. In late February, he received word of the Imperial Navy’s success in the Battle of the Java Sea, a prelude to the invasion of the Dutch colony. Over several days of fighting, enemy Allied forces had lost three destroyers and two light cruisers, including the USS Langley, a carrier transporting a group of veteran pilots trying to reach Java to man P-40 Warhawks to defend the island. But they had never made it. They had been among the roughly 2,300 men killed by the Japanese during the fighting. Yamamoto would not have any particular interest in thirty-odd pilots, but a squadron now stationed on Fiji did. The dead were the pilots who’d left San Francisco in December ahead of the less experienced fliers in the squadron that was commanded by Major Henry “Vic” Viccellio and Captain John Mitchell. The flyboys on Fiji were shaken. Vic and Mitch knew it could have been them on the Langley and were left to think “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Japanese radio stations began playing music to accompany the nationalistic news updates—rousing military pieces such as “Battleship March,” the official march song of the Imperial Navy. The patriotic song was the equivalent of the “Navy Hymn” in the United States. In January, when the text of the Imperial Declaration of War was broadcast again from the Yoyogi parade grounds in Tokyo, as the emperor reviewed troops, the nation listened with undivided attention. “The town was filled with rising-sun flags,” one woman wrote in her diary later that day, “and the sky was clear. We passed a day with deep gratitude.” Yamamoto continued to receive a steady stream of adoring fan mail aboard his flagship, so much so that his aides, knowing their commander’s preferences, began to prioritize the stack so he’d find on top anything arriving from his favorite and most cherished correspondent—his mistress, Chiyoko. “When your letter reached me to make me so happy I wrote kwu kwu [bell of fawn],” he said affectionately in one of their frequent exchanges.
With few exceptions, the war continued going great guns for Japan during the winter of 1942. Its forces chased General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines in March and then by May had overrun the remaining US Army troops there. Military leaders began talking up new and ever-more-ambitious actions: Go for India? Australia? Hawaii? Maybe Alaska? Why not? In one strike after another, Japan had defeated every European colony in Southeast Asia. By springtime the Imperial Empire in the Pacific had bulged so that it now extended east from China to Wake Island and south from the Aleutian Islands near Alaska to Indonesia atop Australia. With the Imperial Navy flexing its muscle, many of Yamamoto’s officers urged more, as the national government had succumbed to what later was labeled a “victory disease.”
Yamamoto had a different perspective. “It is easy to open hostilities, but difficult to conclude them,” he told a friend. Others may have begun to see the world as their oyster, but Yamamoto’s position had not changed; the war’s aim, he felt, should not be to take over the world but to secure a Pacific cordon protecting Japan’s regional interests. The surprise Pearl Harbor attack had not been intended to start a slugfest continuing until the very last man was standing but to stun a United States caught off guard into settling for an early peace. He was therefore deeply dismayed that the political leaders in Tokyo seemed more interested in making new conquests than in pushing for peace talks through diplomacy. Well before the December 7 attack, he’d predicted that “for a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles.” But he’d also predicted that Japan’s good fortune would last a year at best, and “we’ve just got to get a peace agreement by then.”
Key tactical shortcomings had come into focus in the raid’s aftermath. By chance, the three US aircraft carriers based at Pearl Harbor—the Enterprise, the Lexington, and the Saratoga—had not been in their berths at the time of the attack. That meant that even though Yamamoto’s strike force had ravaged several hundred thousand tons’ worth of US naval shipping, the critical pieces of the US fleet—the aircraft carriers—remained at large. In addition, the strike force, which had focused on ships and planes, had not gone after the base’s repair facilities, power stations, and above-ground fuel storage tanks. Had that been done, ship repair at Pearl Harbor would not have been possible. Tugboats would have had to tow the damaged US fleet to California, a procedure that would have consumed months and further delayed a US rebound. Even if some ships could have been fixed at the Hawaiian base, there would have been no fuel to power them had the oil tanks been destroyed. In a sense, the attack force had gone after the tools—the ships—rather than the basis—the support systems—of the navy’s sea power. It meant that the US Pacific Fleet’s recovery could happen faster, especially since six of its eight battleships had not been entirely wrecked. Finally, even the timing of the attack could have been such to make it more damaging. Though on Sunday a plethora of battleships and destroyers was generally on hand, a majority of the men were not; most were on weekend leave. If the strike force had hit on another day, the casualties would likely have soared well beyond several thousand dead and injured.
The way Yamamoto saw things, there was unfinished business that too many people were ignoring while caught up in the hoopla of war. In a letter to his older sister in hometown Nagaoka he confided, “The war has begun at last, but in spite of all the clamor that is going on we could lose it. I can only do my best.” Not helping matters was the way the war was being hyped by Japan’s politicians and militarists, as well as by the press, which was under their control. “All they need do really is quietly let people know the truth,” he said. “There’s no need to bang the big drum.” The wartime propaganda, which included the distortion of his letter so that it contained his now-infamous promise to march into the White House to dictate peace, disgusted him. “All this talk of guiding public opinion and maintaining the national morale is so much empty puff,” he complained to his staff. “Official reports should stick to the absolute truth—once you start lying, the war’s as good as lost.”
YAMAMOTO SENSED, TOO, FROM A MIX OF PRESS ACCOUNTS AND military intelligence, that the United States was waking up—that following the deadly Pearl Harbor debacle, instead of curling up into a fetal position, she was climbing to her feet, raring to fight and seek vengeance. Yamamoto had no way of knowing its full extent, but the winter of 1942 saw the United States hastily and effectively establish its wartime footing. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion,” President Roosevelt had said the day after the raid, “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” He’d already initiated the first peacetime draft in the fall of 1940, and by the time of Pearl Harbor the active military personnel—airmen, seamen, soldiers, and marines—totaled nearly 2.2 million. Then that winter came the push to expand the military on every possible front while overhauling the US economy and changing the nation’s way of life to accommodate a global war. The president said that fifty thousand new aircraft were needed annually—at first a shocking number to many in Congress—yet within a few years more than double that number had been produced. Likewise with ships, tanks, submarines, and guns—all the myriad weapons of war were needed in great quantities and as fast as possible. Americans went to work, and they also began rationing and recycling—salvaging scrap metal from old pots and pipes, bed frames, and beat-up cars to help meet the war machine’s insatiable need for steel and aluminum. “The average American cannot buy a new car, or a new tire, or a reconditioned old tire, or be sure of repairs of those he has,” observed the journalist Arthur Krock, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist at the New York Times whose “In the Nation” column was a must read. “He cannot repair his broken plumbing with copper. Steel, his own contribution to industrial science, is denied him. In the six months since Pearl Harbor the national spirit has shown itself ready and able to counter the hardest blows of destiny. The sacrifices made thus far, and the cheerful manner in which they have been made, are impressive.”
To pay for it all, federal defense spending skyrocketed—from $1.5 billion in 1940 to $81.5 billion by 1945. And to subsidize the increase, the government began to sell “war bonds” to the public, even utilizing the demonic Yamamoto to promote sales. “The Knight of the Double Cross!” barked the headline of one such advertisement beneath a cartoonish portrayal of the treacherous Japanese admiral: thick lipped, with hanging jowls, looking rodentlike. The ad continued, “There’s only one effective way to fight this type of Skunk. Take a good firm grip on your nose, haul out your checkbook, and lay your money on the line: BUY WAR BONDS.” Most Americans loyally responded to the plea—indeed, the Pacific fighter pilot John Mitchell, like so many others away at war, began sending money home with instructions to buy as many as possible. “We should have a right nice nest egg when this is all over,” he told Annie Lee that April about their wartime investment in their country.
For Yamamoto, there was a feeling of urgency, and amid the overall success of the war’s initial phase, he spent the winter considering his next operational moves. “The ‘first stage of operations’ has been a kind of children’s hour, and will soon be over,” he wrote a friend. “Now comes the adults’ hour, so perhaps I’d better stop dozing and bestir myself.” Some navy leaders argued for advancing westward across the Indian Ocean; others thought driving south would be the best idea—to capture Fiji and then Noumea in New Caledonia and, by doing so, cut Australia off from the United States. But by late winter, Yamamoto had his mind set on an altogether different target—Midway Island—and assigned trusted staffers to devise a plan of attack. As the Japanese had taken over the US islands of Guam and Wake within a few days of the Pearl Harbor raid, the tiny atoll of Midway—two small islands, actually—was now the closest US military base to Japan, at 2,800 miles away. It was a decent-sized one, with an airfield and a naval port providing anchorage to submarines and aircraft carriers. Yamamoto favored Midway for several reasons. For one thing, by eliminating the nearest enemy outpost, he’d be expanding Japan’s defensive perimeter in that region. More important, he saw a sea battle for Midway as a way to complete the leftover work from Pearl Harbor, decimating the remains of US naval power in the Pacific, the aircraft carriers and other ships that had gotten away. He knew that for the United States, the stakes were sky high. Midway was just a thousand miles west of Hawaii; the Americans would fear that if they lost Midway, Japan would use it as a stepping-stone to attack a battered Hawaii and, from there, use Hawaii as a base to attack the West Coast of the United States. But conquest of that sort was not Yamamoto’s primary intent; he was still preoccupied with his original Pearl Harbor logic—of winning an early peace, a goal now more urgent than ever given the enemy’s massive military buildup. The way he saw it, Midway could be the tipping point. Crushing the US Navy might induce the United States to settle for peace with Japan. He’d achieve the early finish to war that had been his aim for Pearl Harbor but that had proved elusive, even though his forces had destroyed more US ships in that raid than had been lost by all other nations up to that point in the war. Yamamoto even confided to a close underling, Mitsuo Fuchida, the navy captain who had led the first wave of bombing attacks on Pearl Harbor, that that was the purpose of the Midway operation. Once completed, he promised to “press the nation’s political leaders to initiate overtures for peace.”
The plan Yamamoto and his staff drew up was initially met with opposition, mainly from the army but also from a navy general staff troubled by its bold, offensive orientation, a departure from the traditional naval strategy of having the fleet stick close to home and await an enemy. Yamamoto spelled out his rationale forcefully, arguing that Japan’s success in the Pacific would hinge on finishing what it had started at Pearl Harbor, “destroying the United States fleet, especially its carrier task forces.” The Midway plan, not any of the other proposals under consideration, would accomplish that goal. “The proposed operation against Midway will draw out the enemy’s carriers and destroy them in decisive battle.” If it turned out that the enemy did not take the bait and engage its fleet in the so-called decisive battle, Japan would still come away having taken over Midway, a key Pacific asset.
The haggling continued throughout March but ended quickly after the unexpected US bombing attack on Tokyo and other locations—the Doolittle Raid of sixteen B-25 bombers on April 18. The nation was shocked and shaken by the attack. Yamamoto wrote, “Even though there wasn’t much damage, it’s a disgrace that the skies over the imperial capital should have been defiled without a single enemy plane shot down.” He was so unnerved by the news of the raid that he spent the day alone in his cabin taking stock. He knew that the US bombers had flown from an aircraft carrier—which would have been impossible had the US carriers been at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese raid instead of at sea. The navy general staff and army leaders, suddenly worrying about the security of the homeland’s borders, gave the green light to Yamamoto’s Midway plan.
Yamamoto and his staff began working toward an early June date to attack Midway, rehearsing the ways their ships would engage the residuum of the US fleet. In the meantime, the admiral kept up with several other actions in the Pacific that were focused to the northeast of Australia, including an occupation of one of the Solomon Islands—Guadalcanal—to construct an air base there. But the action Yamamoto was monitoring most closely was Operation MO, the invasion of Port Moresby on the south coast of New Guinea that was planned for early May. After taking Port Moresby, Japanese bombers and fighter planes would have only a short flight across the Coral Sea to Australia. The idea was for an occupying force of troops to take over the island, protected by ships from the Imperial Fleet in the surrounding Coral Sea. Yamamoto had committed two large aircraft carriers loaded with highly trained navy fighter pilots to be part of the covering force.
Operation MO did not unfold as expected, however. The Japanese were met by an Allied task force consisting mainly of US and Australian ships and planes. Japan’s troop transports were bombed relentlessly by US planes from nearby aircraft carriers, and then for two days, May 7 and May 8, the navies squared off on the high seas. The confrontation became known as the Battle of the Coral Sea, and it marked the first air-sea battle ever, meaning that the warring ships never saw or fired on each other. The fighting involved aerial strikes from the respective carriers. The US resistance proved so unexpectedly fierce that the Japanese commander pulled back, and Yamamoto, realizing that his carriers could not provide the necessary cover for an occupation force, called off the invasion on May 18. They’d have to try again another time.
Yamamoto and his commanders were flummoxed. Tactically speaking, Japan had come out on top. Its planes had sunk the US carrier Lexington, heavily damaged the carrier Yorktown, sunk a destroyer, and damaged a fleet oiler. But Japan’s invasion had been rebuffed, the country’s first setback in the Pacific. Yamamoto had lost the small aircraft carrier Shoho, which had sunk during the fighting, and, more important, the larger carrier Shokaku, so badly damaged that it limped into dry dock in Japan. Lost, too, were forty-three aircraft and their crews, most of whom were seasoned—flying experience that was difficult to replace. They could no longer be part of the equation in planning for the upcoming Midway operation.
Yamamoto was not happy. The turn in events heightened the importance of Midway. He was going to direct the attack himself and be completely hands on, unprecedentedly for him. And as he turned his full attention to finalizing the preparations, one had to wonder. The enemy had seemed ready and waiting in the Coral Sea. Had they somehow known the Imperial Navy was coming?