MEN, ORGANIZATION, AND STRATEGIC VISIONS, 1931–41
Anatomy of the Naval Establishment
In the 1930s the Japanese naval establishment underwent momentous transformations that go far to explain its road to Pearl Harbor. The process may be studied as a breakdown, under mounting challenges from within, of its tradition of reason, moderation, and unity.
Several factors had defined the Japanese naval tradition. Originally patterned after the British model and subsequently influenced by the American strategic doctrine based on Alfred T. Mahan’s sea power theory, the Japanese navy long retained traces of an “Anglo-American” orientation. Its officers prided themselves on their cosmopolitan and modern outlook, fostered by tours of duty at sea and abroad, that distinguished them from the more parochial army officers. Life on board ship tended to put a premium on the technological and professional aspects of seamanship.
The traditional navy was a relatively well-ordered and unified organization. While operational and tactical problems fell within the jurisdiction of the chief of the Naval General Staff, policy-making functions lay with the navy minister. Through clear lines of authority the navy minister controlled the naval establishment in peacetime, an arrangement that ensured internal harmony and a fraternal spirit among officers and men.
All this changed in the turbulent, crisis-ridden thirties. Beginning with the domestic crisis engendered by the London Naval Conference of 1930, the decade witnessed dissensions within the navy and the usurping of the navy minister’s authority by high-command and middle-echelon officers (captains or commanders holding section-chief rank). As in other branches of the Japanese government, in the navy the policy-making process became decentralized.
The navy became increasingly influenced by anti-American, anti-British, and pro-German elements, especially in the middle echelons. The navy’s policy became dominated by an emotional mode of thinking and myopic strategic preoccupations. By the mid-1930s the “moderate” leadership holding on to the legacy of Katō Tomosaburō had been decidedly reduced to a minority. Perhaps the most significant change during the 1930s was the self-inflicted deterioration of naval leadership that failed to prevent the war with the United States in 1941.
The naval historian Robert G. Albion, in Makers of Naval Strategy, distinguished between the internal and external policies of the navy. Internal policy revolved around what the navy should be—that is, how large the navy should be and what types and quantities of weapons it ought to have. Internal policy also dealt with the navy’s organization, structure, and personnel administration.1 External policy dealt with what the navy should do. It pertained to what role the navy ought to play in foreign policy. Operational matters were subsumed under external policy. In the context of Japanese naval history, external policy included most importantly national policies that the navy pressed on the government.
This chapter analyzes the internal policy of the Japanese navy during 1930–41 by examining (1) the various groupings of elite naval officers and (2) the institutional framework for naval decision making. While the topic does not strictly pertain to “internal” policy, I will also discuss (3) the conflicting images, values, and strategic visions that conditioned the navy’s attitudes and policies toward the United States.
Traditionally, gunnery officers were the elite of the Japanese navy, and despite the growing importance of aviation during the 1930s, few flying officers occupied sufficiently senior positions to influence naval policy. The navy’s mainstream was officers who built their careers on battleships. Institutionally, the elite officer corps consisted of top-ranking graduates of the Naval Academy in Etajima, the Japanese Annapolis. Class standing at the academy virtually determined promotion.2 Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, who graduated second in his class, testified that a student’s record at the academy had influence comparable to twenty-five years of service after graduation.3 After attaining lieutenancies, ambitious officers usually applied for the Naval Staff College, the counterpart of the Naval War College in Newport; about 16 percent of applicants were admitted. (For the period under consideration, only two admirals had not graduated from the Naval Staff College—Katō Kanji and Nomura Kichisaburō.) But graduates of the Naval Staff College did not enjoy anything like the privileged position of their army counterparts.
Salient characteristics of the navy’s educational system must be noted here. Admiral Inoue, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1909, reminisced that although rigorous discipline was the order of the day, “there was time for poetry and dreaming, too.”4 Starting around World War I, the academy increasingly emphasized rigorous training, regimentation, and memory work at the expense of originality, individuality, and creativity. Rear Admiral Takagi Sōkichi, who graduated in 1915, remembered his education at the Naval Academy as “Spartan and thrashing.” The unimaginative emphasis on cramming and rote memory ended any original thinking. Rear Admiral Tomioka, who graduated in 1917, recalls that the Naval Academy was regimented and standardized. “It was a forcefully disciplined life with no leeway whatsoever.”5
The Naval Staff College, though designed to train high-ranking commanders, functioned as a nursery for staff officers. Its curriculum emphasized narrowly strategic and tactical subjects to the neglect of a comprehensive “science of war.” Ōi Atsushi, a student at the Naval Staff College in 1934–36, had understood strategy as a comprehensive study of the role of the military in relation to political, economical, and diplomatic factors, but the strategy lectures he attended hardly differed from lectures on tactics. Student officers were schooled in the tradition of Mahan. Taking a leaf from Mahan’s Influence, their manual, the Kaisen yōmurei, (Naval Battle Instructions) held that “war once declared must be waged offensively, aggressively.”6 Day in and day out they conducted war games against the American fleet that culminated in a decisive Mahanian engagement in the manner of Tsushima. In commencement exercises officers conducted war games in front of the emperor, simulating a magnificent main-fleet battle based on the principle of “big battleships and big guns.” Mesmerized by Mahan’s strategic doctrines, officers developed an obsession with the decisive fleet battle that would annihilate the enemy armada at one stroke. Their bible was the aforementioned Naval Battle Instructions, initially developed by Lieutenant Commander Akiyama Saneyuki at the Naval Staff College and sanctioned in 1910. Reflecting Mahan’s doctrine, it stated, “The battleship squadron is the main fleet, whose aim is to attack the enemy’s main fleet.” “The key to successful naval operations is initiative and concentration.” This manual, though revised five times, essentially remained intact until the mid-1930s. The result was unfortunate.6 After the Pacific War, Rear Admiral Nakazawa Tasuku, head of the Operations Section in 1939–40 and the Personnel Bureau in 1942, testified that “Japan lost the war because the navy was dominated by the top graduates of the Navy Staff College who blindly followed its instructions and were void of originality.”7
The navy’s system of personnel policy, based on class standing at the Naval Academy and “semi-automatic promotion,” tended to accentuate bureaucratization of the navy. Seniority rewarded mediocrity over brilliance and often placed and kept in positions of importance older officers left behind in the march of technological progress and strategic innovation. As they became bureaucratized, their perspectives became narrow and preoccupied with promotion. Those with individual, untraditional, or unorthodox views, and a tendency to be outspoken, were shunned. The leadership of Japanese admirals steadily deteriorated after the days of Katō Tomosaburō. As the naval intellectual Rear Admiral Takagi Sōkichi wrote, outstanding leaders became few and far between, supplanted by “institutionalized authority” resting on organization.8 A related problem was the aging of the admirals.9 (Rear admirals should ideally be forty years old and full admirals fifty; this approximately coincided with the ages of those who commanded the battle of Tsushima. In 1941 flag officers were from five to eight years older than the ideal ages.)
Another feature of the navy’s personnel policy was rapid turnover and constant reshuffling of officers, especially abler ones, which was bound to preclude consistent, well-thought-out policies. This was particularly the case with the so-called super-express group, who frequently rotated among posts in the Operations Division of the Naval General Staff and command positions in the Combined Fleet.10
THE TREATY FACTION VERSUS THE FLEET FACTION
The most apparent grouping of naval officers from 1930 to 1941 was along functional or organizational lines—the “administrative group” in the Navy Ministry and the “command group” in the Naval General Staff.11 Officers were generally classed in these groups according to their relative length of service in each branch in the early stages of their careers. Important posts in the Naval General Staff—heads of the Operations Division or Section—required extensive previous experience as staff officers. (The outspoken Admiral Inoue called it “an incestuous relationship.”) Appointments to these “command” posts tended to be separate from “administrative” positions. For example, Admiral Suetsugu, who together with Katō Kanji was a leader of the “command group,” was a gunnery officer (later, submarine commander) in the fleet and never served in the Navy Ministry except for a brief stint as head of the Education Bureau. Admiral Yamamoto, though rich in fleet, aviation, and administrative experiences, never served on the Naval General Staff. A few admirals, such as Toyoda Soemu, urged more interchange between the two branches of the service, warning that officers would become one-sided in outlook. Rear Admiral Nakazawa, head of the Personnel Bureau, also pointed out that the skewed personnel policy made mutual understanding between the two branches difficult and precluded full cooperation between the Naval Ministry and the Naval General Staff. But their advice seems to have had little effect.12
Traditionally, key policy-making posts in the Navy Ministry, especially the Naval Affairs Bureau, went to brilliant officers, top graduates of the Naval Academy who excelled in politico-administrative ability. Pivotal positions in the Naval General Staff were occupied by “sea officers,” often dubbed “sea warriors” (“old sea dogs” in Anglo-American parlance). As early as 1922 Captain J. P. R. Marriott, British attaché in Tokyo, had observed, “There is no question about it but that the higher ranks in the Imperial Japanese Navy are of two distinct types: (1) the Sea Officer; (2) the bureaucrat. . . . It is quite a common saying when one enquires the ability of a post-Captain in high position to be informed that he is a bad Captain of ship but very good in the office.”13 Until the late 1920s the “administrative group” represented the elite establishment in the Navy Ministry. The smoldering discontent of the “command group” at suffering from what it regarded as an inferior position finally erupted during and after the London Naval Conference.
As already noted, differences between the two groups in their attitudes toward the United States were brought out in full relief by the issue of naval limitation. The navy’s factionalism during the 1930s was defined in terms of antithetical stands on the Washington and London treaties. Their supporters were labeled the treaty faction and their opponents the fleet faction. Most of the supporters of the Washington and London naval treaties—heirs to Katō Tomosaburō’s legacy—were systematically “purged” in 1933–34 by Navy Minister Ōsumi Mineo, who was backed by the anti-treaty group, including especially Katō Kanji. Even after he had resigned as chief of the Naval General Staff in the bitter aftermath of the London Conference, Katō remained politically influential as a vocal member of the Supreme Military Council and the leader of the fleet faction. The navy was now under the control of the fleet faction. In February 1932, Katō pressured the navy minister to appoint his protégé Takahashi Sankichi vice chief of the Naval General Staff, in which capacity he virtually controlled the naval high command. In November 1933, Suetsugu was appointed Combined Fleet commander, and the following year he was succeeded by Takahashi. Admiral Ōsumi Mineo (Navy Minister in 1931–32) may also be regarded as a kindred spirit.
But Katō and Suetsugu wielded their greatest influence on the spirited younger officers of the line and the Naval General Staff. Some had fallen under Katō’s sway as students when he was vice principal of the Naval Academy (1911–13), president of the Gunnery School (1916–18), and president of the Naval Staff College (1920–21). One graduate of the staff college could never forget how Katō, on his return from Washington, addressed student officers on the American “imposition” of the 60 percent ratio, tears rolling down his cheeks. Young officers acclaimed him to the point of idolization when he boasted about the invincible navy. Similarly, Suetsugu was greeted with cheers by young officers when appointed commander in chief of the Combined Fleet.14 With the exception of Yamamoto Isoroku, Suetsugu was the most popular admiral to command the Combined Fleet.
THE RISE OF THE GERMAN FACTION
A new division of naval officers arose in the mid-1930s based on differences in foreign policy: an American (or Anglo-American) faction and a German (later, Axis) faction. This division was largely based on officers’ experiences abroad as language officers, assistant attachés, and attachés. Traditionally the navy had sent promising young officers—top graduates of the Naval Academy—to the attaché’s office in Washington and the ablest naval constructors to Greenwich, England, to train at the Royal Naval College for three years. But in the course of the 1930s, Germany became the preferred nation. This shift can be traced to the years immediately after World War I, when many officers resented what they saw as Britain’s sudden abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance at the Washington Conference after exploiting Japan during the war as a “watchdog of the British Empire.” (During World War I the Japanese navy, upon British request, had expelled German submarines from the South Pacific.) Young officers, susceptible to such resentment, had risen to captains or commanders by the outbreak of World War II. Britain ceased to extend privileges and assistance to the Japanese navy after the termination of the Yamamoto-Fisher agreement that accompanied the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and after 1923 the Royal Naval College in Greenwich refused to accept Japanese naval architects. Consequently, Berlin became a much sought-after post for technical personnel. Japan increasingly turned to Germany for technical and scientific cooperation and assistance.
In 1919 the navy sent to Europe and the United States an investigative mission, headed by Rear Admiral Katō Kanji. While in Germany, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz arranged for Katō’s party to visit ports and inspect state-of-the-art naval technology. Impressed with Germany’s technology, especially in submarine and optical equipment, Katō submitted a report upon his return stressing that the navy would gain much by introducing German weaponry.15
An episode during this tour characteristically showed Katō overstepping his authority, almost ruining his career. On his own initiative he clandestinely concluded with German Chief of the Naval Command Admiral Adolph von Trotha what amounted to a secret German-Japanese submarine agreement. It stipulated that (1) Germany would hand over all its submarine plans to the Japanese navy; (2) Germany would place two of its submarine officers on reserve and send them to Japan; and (3) Japan would transfer all its technical improvements back to the German navy when Germany was allowed to possess a navy again. Germany, which had been forbidden by the Versailles Peace Treaty to have submarines, wanted to use Japan to maintain and develop its submarine technology. Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō was afraid that such an agreement violated the Versailles treaty and, that, if disclosed, would antagonize the United States, Britain, and France, so he peremptorily ordered Kanji to cancel the agreement. To take responsibility for his unauthorized action, Kanji submitted his tentative resignation, and some in the Navy Ministry demanded that he be placed on the reserve list, but somehow he survived. Whereas Katō Kanji was preoccupied with technical-military advantages, Katō Tomosaburō was guided by a broad international viewpoint.16
In 1919 Japan received as war prizes seven German submarines, five of which were of the latest design, and they contributed much to submarine technology in Japan. In 1924–25 the navy invited to Japan German engineers who had designed U-boats during World War I. After 1934, when Japan issued a note to nullify the Washington treaty, Germany became an increasingly attractive source of naval technology. During the mid-1930s German-Japanese naval technical exchange became a part of the navy’s efforts to counter Anglo-American power.17
During the latter half of the 1920s the Japanese navy sent more naval architects to Germany than to Britain or the United States. After 1936, the year the Anti-Comintern Pact was concluded between Japan and Germany, naval officers stationed in Berlin as attachés, assistant attachés, and members of the attaché office outnumbered those in Washington or London. Upon their return these officers formed the nucleus of the pro-German, anti-American faction in the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff.18 In March 1940, German naval attaché Paul Wenneker reported from Tokyo: “For some time opinion of the Navy officer corps up to the rank of captain has been practically 100% pro-German. . . . The spirit of the junior officers would sweep away on the tide.”19 A likable and sociable man, Wenneker made close friendships with many middle-ranking officers, especially those who had served in Berlin. In July 1940, he wrote in his diary, “Reception for 140 Japanese officers. . . . A very interesting evening, as was evidenced by the large number of younger officers. Bearing in mind that in Japan much of the pressure comes from below, it is of the utmost importance to influence this circle.”20 The observation was quite astute. Ambassador Eugen Ott did his best to undermine the Japanese navy’s “overestimation” of Anglo-American sea power.
With their enthusiasm for Nazi Germany, the German faction stood out in contrast to the older generation that had served in Berlin. Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa had spent two and a half years in Germany after World War I but became convinced of the danger of aligning with Germany, a conviction reinforced by his study of Mein Kampf. When younger officers took Mein Kampf as an oracle, Yonai cautioned that Hitler despised the Japanese as an inferior and unimaginative race—an unflattering depiction that had been carefully deleted from the Japanese translation.21 Admiral Inoue, who was stationed in Europe from 1918 to 1921, also said that Japan must never line up with Germany, because that country had no hesitation in breaking treaties.22
In 1936 Commander Ishikawa Shingo, Katō Kanji’s disciple and a leading member of the anti-American faction, took a ten-month fact-finding tour of Europe, Asia, and the United States. In Germany he was briefed by the assistant attaché, Commander Kami Shigenori, who was strongly impressed by Hitler’s success in the Rhineland Crisis, and became a fanatic German admirer. Ishikawa came to believe that “Germany would rise in arms around 1940 and this would be Japan’s golden opportunity to break through the encirclement around it.”23 By 1940 the German faction had come to occupy some of the navy’s key middle-echelon posts (section chiefs) that provided a driving force in naval policy.
The German faction was lucky to have an old Germanophile as chief of the Naval General Staff during 1933–41: Fleet Admiral Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, a cousin of Emperor Hirohito and the oldest officer on active duty. He had spent his impressionable years from ages sixteen to twenty-one in Germany, graduating from the naval academy and naval staff college in Kiel. He had served for many years as a sea officer in the fleets.24 At the time of the London Naval Conference, he had supported Katō Kanji in his opposition to the treaty. (Katō was close to Prince Fushimi, having been an “official companion” in their Naval Academy days.) His appointment as chief of the Naval General Staff had been engineered by Fleet Admiral Tōgō, Vice Admiral Ogasawara, and Katō Kanji. During his incumbency for eight crucial years, Fushimi tended to side with the fleet faction and hard-liners. He presided over the Naval General Staff at such critical junctures as the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, the advance to southern Indochina in July 1941, and the fateful decision for war in late fall of 1941. Some officers of the moderate persuasion secretly called him “the cancer of the navy.”
The antagonisms between these overlapping groups—the “administrative group” versus the “command group,” the treaty faction versus the fleet faction, and the Anglo-American faction versus the German faction—were deep-rooted. Admirals Yonai and Suetsugu, leaders of the opposing groups, reportedly refused even to speak to each other.
THE ASCENDANCY OF THE NAVAL GENERAL STAFF
The upshot of the London treaty was a divided navy. According to an estimate by the naval intellectual Rear Admiral Takagi Sōkichi, the navy’s political influence in national affairs, which normally amounted at most to one-third that of the army, was reduced to a fourth or a fifth.25 Yet from this weakened position, the navy contended with the army to increase its share of the budget and war matériel. After the mid-1930s, Japan’s national policy was increasingly influenced by army-navy rivalry.
The navy’s division after the London Conference gave the Katō-Suetsugu group a chance to expand its influence, with the backing of disgruntled senior officers. Behind Katō were Fleet Admiral Tōgō—the naval demigod—and his minion, Vice Admiral Ogasawara (Ret.). Both had strenuously opposed the treaty. In January 1933 the fleet faction was strengthened when Admiral Ōsumi, a hard-liner and opponent of naval limitation, was appointed navy minister with the backing of Tōgō, Ogasawara, and Katō Kanji. The first step to strengthen the fleet faction was to install imperial Prince Fushimi, the only remaining fleet admiral after Tōgō died, as chief of the Naval General Staff in February 1932. Already at the time of the London Naval Conference, Prince Fushimi had sided with the fleet faction. Admiral Okada, a senior naval leader of moderate persuasion, and Prince Saionji worried that Prince Fushimi might become a “robot” of his subordinates.26 They also feared that his words might be regarded as reflecting the emperor’s wishes. During his long and undistinguished tenure as chief of the Naval General Staff, February 1932 to April 1941, his vice chiefs invoked the august name of the prince to press the navy minister into acquiescing in the demands of the Naval General Staff. Further, as a member of the imperial family, Fushimi was not to be held accountable for any error or misjudgment. Because nobody could restrain him, he tended to be dogmatic, which only impeded the navy’s policy making. As relations with the United States deteriorated, he displeased the emperor with his hard-line recommendations. In October 1941, Fushimi presented “extremely belligerent arguments” about policy toward the United States, profoundly disappointing the emperor.27 In April 1941, Navy Minister Oikawa Koshirō told Vice Admiral Inoue, head of the Naval Aviation Department, that the ailing Fushimi wished to retire and asked his opinion. Inoue supported his retirement. As he explained, a prince of the blood was simply not brought up to assume such a position at such a critical time. But even after he retired in April 1941, Fushimi retained the right to have his say in the appointment of top leaders, especially navy ministers.28
A second important move to strengthen the fleet faction was to restructure the Naval General Staff after the manner of the army. Traditionally, the power of the chief of the Naval General Staff had been subordinate to that of the Navy Minister. Even regarding high-command matters (operations), the chief had customarily sought the consent of the minister before making a presentation to the throne. This tradition of the Navy Ministry’s primacy over the Naval General Staff had prevailed until the London Naval Conference.29
As already noted, Rear Admiral Satō Tetsutarō, Vice Chief of the Naval General Staff, attempted in 1915 to enhance the authority of the chief of the Naval General Staff and angered Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō, who demoted him. Again in 1922, Katō Kanji, then vice chief and absolutely opposed to a system of civilian navy ministers, planned to revise the regulations of the Naval General Staff to expand its authority. He ordered his protégé, Captain Takahashi, a leader of the fleet faction, to draft a plan, but he did not dare present it as long as Katō Tomosaburō was alive. The plan was revived when Takahashi became vice chief of the Naval General Staff in February 1932. Fushimi ordered Takahashi to revise the Naval General Staff regulations to enlarge its power. Disgruntled with the Washington and London treaties, Prince Fushimi believed these treaties were a result of the weak-kneed policy of Navy Minister Katō Tomosaburō and his successors. The only way to rectify the deplorable situation, Prince Fushimi believed, was to strengthen the Naval General Staff.
This time, circumstances were far more favorable. The London treaty controversy had given rise to a demand, inside and outside the navy, to establish the right of the supreme command. The 15 May (1932) Incident, in which a group of young naval officers played a leading role in the assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi, had an electrifying effect upon the navy, dramatizing the need to placate young malcontents. A revision of the Naval General Staff regulations would help appease hot-blooded young officers.30 Japan’s external situation also favored the revision. In a postwar reminiscence, Takahashi admitted that one of his aims was to be prepared for war with the United States; he feared that the Shanghai Incident of 1932 might cause a Japanese-American war.
The main aim of strengthening the Naval General Staff was to transfer jurisdiction over the size of armaments from the Navy Ministry to the Naval General Staff. Already on 23 January 1933, Navy Minister Ōsumi Mineo and Prince Fushimi had met with Army Minister Araki Sadao and Chief of the Army General Staff Prince Kan’in and signed a secret document titled “Decision on the Size of Armaments.” It stated that the size of armaments was “an absolute condition for national defense and strategy” and therefore a decision on it must be made by the chiefs of the Navy and Army General Staffs.31
Acting on Prince Fushimi’s orders, Takahashi, a foremost leader of the fleet faction and generally regarded Katō Kanji’s successor, presented to the Navy Ministry the demands, designed to “reduce the navy minister’s authority to a minimum” (Inoue’s words). The Naval General Staff demanded sole jurisdiction not only over command matters but the size of armaments, education and the training of the fleets, even personnel policy.32 The Navy Ministry tried to oppose this. Captain Inoue, who as Chief of the First Section of the Naval Affairs Bureau negotiated with the Naval General Staff’s representative, stoutly resisted. He later wrote that the Naval General Staff’s demand was “a most outrageous act, tantamount to raising a standard of revolt against the navy minister.” Inoue held that the problem of armaments, involving budget, must remain under the jurisdiction of the Navy Ministry. He felt that expansion of the authority of the Naval General Staff would only increase the danger of war.33
With Inoue refusing to budge, the negotiations were taken over by Terashima Ken, head of the Naval Affairs Bureau, and Shimada Shigejirō, head of the Operations Division. The matter had come to look like a feud between the fleet faction and the treaty faction. When a deadlock again ensued, Vice Chief Takahashi played his trump card with Navy Minister ōsumi: he threatened that unless the demands of the Naval General Staff were met, Fushimi would resign. Katō Kanji also put pressure on Ōsumi.34 When Fushimi himself confronted Ōsumi, the navy minister hastily complied. He was already inclined to side with the hardliners in the Naval General Staff. This was not the last time Prince Fushimi abused his status as a member of the imperial family to impose his and the naval high command’s will that ran contrary to the emperor’s wish. The Naval General Staff had its way even though naval elders—former Navy Minister Okada, Saitō Makoto (prime minister), and Suzuki Kantarō (grand chamberlain)—all opposed it. Okada said he had “never seen such an outrageous plan.”35
The revised regulations of the Naval General Staff broke with the navy’s tradition by establishing primacy over the Navy Ministry. With command over naval forces in peacetime transferred to the chief of the Naval General Staff, the regulations sharply reduced the navy minister’s control over the naval establishment. Captain Iwamura Seiichi, Senior Adjutant to the Navy Minister, farsightedly confided to his friend Inoue that he feared the new regulations increased the danger of war by weakening the navy minister’s ability to put “brakes” on the Naval General Staff.36
When the new regulations, after being sanctioned by the navy minister, came up for the emperor’s approval in September 1933, they encountered unexpected opposition. The emperor sharply questioned Ōsumi, expressing fear that “a slight misapplication of the new regulations could cause excessive intervention by the Naval General Staff in budgetary and personnel matters that are under the government’s jurisdiction.” The emperor ordered Ōsumi to prepare a memorandum pledging that the Naval General Staff would not unduly intervene in government affairs. Only after Ōsumi submitted the required document four days later did Hirohito approve the proposed revision.37 The London treaty would expire in 1935, and two years’ notice of the nullification of the Washington treaty could be issued in 1934. The Naval General Staff now controlled the fate of the Washington and London system.
On 1 October 1933, the day the revision went into effect, Prince Fushimi addressed his assembled subordinates: “This revision is a great reform for the regeneration of the Imperial Navy.” It proved to be, in the words of official naval historian Nomura Minoru, “an important milestone on the navy’s road to the Pacific War.”38 Withdrawal from the Washington-London system in 1953–56, conclusion of the Tripartite Pact in 1940, and the determination to go to war—these were strongly supported by the Naval General Staff. During the crises of 1940–41, the Naval General Staff would take a more risk-taking stance than Naval Ministry leaders.
THE ŌSUMI PURGE
A third attempt to strengthen the fleet faction and to decimate the treaty faction was the so-called Ōsumi purge. During 1933–34 senior officers of the treaty faction who had supported the Washington and London treaties were systematically retired or placed on the reserve list. Navy Minister Ōsumi had the backing of Fleet Admiral Tōgō, Prince Fushimi, and Katō Kanji. Among the victims of the purge were some of the ablest officers known for their moderate views. Admiral Yamanashi Katsunoshin was fifty-six years old at the time of his forced retirement; of the vice admirals, Hori Teikichi was fifty-one, Sakonji Seizo fifty-five, and Terashima Ken fifty-two. (Normal retirement age for admirals was sixty-five, for vice admirals, sixty-two.)
The forced retirement of Hori was a great loss to the navy. Celebrated as “the finest brain ever produced by the Naval Academy,” a greater brain than even Akiyama Saneyuki, he was a brilliant administrator.39 A devoted disciple of Katō Tomosaburō, he carried the now-famous “Katō message” to Tokyo at the time of the Washington Conference. Hori had also attended the Geneva Conference and played a crucial role in concluding the London treaty as head of the Naval Affairs Bureau. Yamamoto Isoroku, then attending the preliminary naval talks in London, thought the loss of his friend and Naval Academy classmate was more costly to the Japanese navy than, say, a division of cruisers.40 From London, where he was Japan’s delegate at the preliminary naval talks of 1934, Yamamoto wrote Hori about his purge: “It will be in vain to attempt to save the navy. Perhaps there is no way left but to rebuild the navy after it has wrought its own ruin by such an outrage.”41
The consequences of the Ōsumi purge cannot be overemphasized. It decimated the navy’s finest leadership and weakened the moderate forces that might have exercised rational restraint over the Katō-Suetsugu group and, later, their fire-eating disciples in the middle echelons. Admiral Shimada Shigetarō, Navy Minister at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, later reflected, “Had Hori been navy minister before the outbreak of the war, he would have coped with the situation more aptly.”42 In a similar vein, Inoue said that if Hori and Yamanashi had stayed in the navy, the history of Japan would have been quite different. Such lamentations bespeak the dearth of leadership that crippled the navy in 1940–41. Captain Takagi Sōkichi said he could now count only four first-rate admirals—Yonai Mitsumasa, Yamamoto Isoroku, Inoue Shigeyoshi, and Koga Mine’ichi—who “miraculously” escaped the purge; their “good fortune” was not being involved in naval limitation.
With revision of the Naval General Staff regulations, the “command group,” which for years had chafed under the control of the navy minister and the “administrative group” now would have its day. One indication of the interest that the Naval General Staff had begun to take in “war guidance”—national defense policy and war preparations—was the creation of a post designated as the war guidance officer. Under direct control of the head of the Operations Division and holding section chief rank, the war guidance officer was to push for a hard-line policy toward the United States in 1940–41.
Within the Navy Ministry the locus of political functions was the Naval Affairs Bureau; its chief joined the vice minister in assisting the navy minister. The official directly in charge of state policy matters was the chief of its First Section, but he was handicapped by a vastly understaffed office. In 1936 the Japanese navy confronted a crisis following the nullification of the Washington treaty and withdrawal from the 1935 London Conference. Expansion into Southeast Asia was alluring. To bolster the navy’s policy-making functions, lead national policy in the critical years ahead, and better cope with the army and its much larger staff, the navy in the spring of 1936 created three ad hoc committees for naval policy (the First Committee), organizational restructuring (the Second Committee), and the naval budget (the Third Committee). Because these committees were mainly staffed with key section chiefs (and also some bureau and division heads) of the Navy Ministry and the Naval General Staff, they enhanced the influence of middle-echelon officers on the making of national policy.43
Of the committees set up in 1936, the most important was the First Committee, charged with formulating “the Empire’s national policy and concrete naval policy and its implementation in light of changes in the international situation, especially after the expiration of the naval treaties.”44 The results of its investigation and recommendations filtered into deliberations in the upper echelons that culminated in the now-famous “Fundamentals of National Policy” approved by the Five Ministers Conference on 7 August 1936, which for the first time incorporated the navy’s policy “to advance to the South Seas.”
ISHIKAWA AND THE FIRST COMMITTEE
On the Second Committee’s recommendation, the Naval Affairs Bureau was restructured in November 1940. This organizational reshuffle was aimed at enhancing the navy’s ability to cope with the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The chief of the First Section of this bureau was in charge of state policy matters and naval armaments, but his office was understaffed. The navy needed to raise its voice to vie with the army in national and defense policy. It therefore decided to divide its Naval Affairs Bureau and create a Naval Ordnance Bureau, to which many of its tasks were transferred. This new bureau, headed by Rear Admiral Hoshina Zenshirō, was in charge of fleet mobilization, munitions, and ships.
At the same time, the navy created the Second Section of the Naval Affairs Bureau, to which its First Section relinquished jurisdiction over political, diplomatic, and defense policy. Underlying this reshuffling was the navy’s conviction that “to tide over the unprecedented national crisis attendant to the Tripartite Pact,” it must now abandon the navy’s traditional stance of nonintervention in politics and “resolutely venture into the hub of state activities.” The Second Section was to be “a powerful organ of policy guidance” and its main task was to “strengthen the Imperial Navy’s influence in national affairs from the broad viewpoint of war guidance.”45 By the very nature of its assigned task—to negotiate with the army to counter its demands as well as to make war plans—the Second Section assumed an extremely bellicose posture toward the United States and Great Britain.
The chief of the Second Section from November 1940 to June 1942 was Captain Ishikawa Shingo, regarded as “the direct heir to the Katō-Suetsugu line” and the foremost leader of the fleet faction. In 1931 he published, under the pseudonym Ōya Hayato, a book titled Nihon no kiki (Japan’s Crisis) in which he frankly set forth his ideas.46 He wrote, “American ambition in the Far East had revealed its caustic nature as early as Commodore Perry’s arrival in Uraga in 1853. . . . When John Hay devised the Open Door policy, America fired the first gun of the war of invasion upon China.” After listing America’s ambitious designs that led to the Washington and London Conferences, Ishikawa declared that “all this is a systematic program formulated by the United States for the invasion of China and Manchuria.” After describing America’s Far Eastern policy in lurid colors, he appealed for “a grand national strife to secure our right of existence.” This book was essentially a tract to justify occupation of Manchuria and inner Mongolia. That an active officer would write such a book even under an assumed name was irregular to say the least.
A resourceful and hyperactive man with a lust for power and a touch of fanaticism, Ishikawa was the most influential and most hawkish of the middle-echelon officers during the crisis of 1940–41. The Personnel Bureau had misgivings about his appointment because of his reputation for overpowering his seniors by “pressure from below [gekokujō].” Such reservation not withstanding, he was appointed thanks to the recommendation of Rear Admiral Oka Takazumi, Chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau, with whom he had been on close terms, and the intervention of Navy Minister Oikawa Koshirō himself. That an officer of such a description was appointed to an important new position showed how far the navy had departed from its customary personnel policy.
At the forefront of hard-liners, Ishikawa took a belligerent position toward the United States. In 1936 he had predicted that “Germany would rise in arms around 1940 and this would be Japan’s golden opportunity to break through the encirclement around it.”47 Styling himself “the most politically minded officer in the navy,” he maintained extensive contacts not only with radical army officers but political, bureaucratic, and right-wing circles—Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke and Prime Minister Konoe among them. General Hasunuma Shigeru, grand military chamberlain to the Emperor, told the newly appointed Navy Minister Shimada Shigetarō in October 1941, “In June both the army and the navy were opposed to war, but they changed their policy overnight because of the opposition of a certain section chief in the Navy Ministry” and decided to advance into southern Indochina. Hasunuma added that the emperor “expressed deep apprehension about the state of Japanese-American relations.” That section chief was Captain Ishikawa.48 Later in 1943, when commanding an air squadron at the Kendari base in the Celebes, Ishikawa boasted to his staff, “I am telling you, it was I who brought Japan to war.” Admiral Yamamoto bitterly remarked that the navy was “overindulgent and spoiled Ishikawa.”49
Another institutional factor that added to the influence of middle-echelon officers was the establishment in late 1940 of the new First Committee (not to be confused with the First Committee of 1936). As its senior member, Ishikawa dominated this committee. A controversy exists over the role this committee played in the coming of the war. Official naval historians of the War History Department of the Defense Agency, notably Nomura Minoru, minimize the influence of this committee in the navy’s policy making. He regards this committee merely as Ishikawa’s niche for his warlike assertions, or, more succinctly, “a synonym for Captain Ishikawa.”50 On the other hand, Tsunoda Jun, author of the final volume of The Road to the Pacific War, emphasizes the role played by the First Committee.51
Examination of the existing documentary evidence points to the importance of this committee. Like the Second Section of the Naval Affairs Bureau, the First Committee was created because the navy realized that “as the result of concluding the Tripartite Pact, Japan had established a national policy of opposing Britain and the United States.” For this purpose the First Committee became “the nerve center” and “the pivotal organ” for establishing “a maritime national defense state.” Aiming to complete armaments for total war, the committee was to press for a naval buildup, conduct strategic planning, and guide naval defense policy. Its tasks were to create a consensus of views about these matters among the key section chiefs, draft policy recommendations, and submit them to its superiors.52
The First Committee sought dynamic “collective leadership” on the middle-echelon level. The central figure was, of course, Ishikawa. Other members were Captain Tomioka Sadatoshi, chief of the Operations Section; Captain Ōno Takeji, war guidance officer of the Naval General Staff; and Captain Takada Toshitane, chief of the First Section of the Naval Affairs Bureau. There were three “secretaries” or associate members: Commanders Shiba Katsuo (the First Section of the Naval Affairs Bureau) and Fujii Shigeru (the Second Section of the Naval General Staff), and Onoda Sutejirō (war guidance officer). In their mid-forties, they were the crème de la crème of officers of their generation; five of them had graduated at the top of the Naval Staff College or received imperial awards. The First Committee was “a powerful task force that cut across the naval establishment,” but because it lacked a chairman, its locus of responsibility was unclear, and no member could restrain Ishikawa. Admiral Inoue, a moderate senior leader, was sharply critical of the First Committee for these reasons. He also severely criticized allowing members of Naval General Staff to participate in policy planning on the same footing as Navy Ministry representatives.53
These energetic middle-echelon officers tended to view Japanese-American relations from the strategic perspective of war planning and preparations. None of the committee’s members except Fujii had any firsthand knowledge of the United States. Shiba, Kami, and Takada had returned from Germany. But their preoccupation with war preparations was not necessarily an excessively warlike stance, especially at a time of mounting tension with the United States. They may be said to have been attending to their duties. The First Committee simply formulated and recommended policies; it never became involved with decision making. The problem was that its bellicose recommendations met with little opposition from superiors. Because the navy’s ranking officials failed to control subordinates, policy making came, as one of its members admitted, to “revolve around the First Committee.”54 When important policy papers circulated, he recalls, “superiors asked whether they had been cleared by the First Committee and if so, almost automatically approved them.” As will be seen later, the committee’s crucial document of 5 June 1941, arguing for an advance into southern Indochina and demanding “the determination to go to war” bore the seals of Chief of the Naval Affairs Bureau Oka, Navy Vice Minister Sawamoto Yorio, and Navy Minister Oikawa. The views of these supremely self-confident middle-echelon officers, whether voiced collectively or individually, carried more weight because the Ōsumi purge had decimated the navy’s upper-echelon leadership. After the war, Admiral Inoue went as far as to say that ranking leaders were “merely robots who were overruled by their subordinates.”
THE KATO-SUETSUGU GROUP AND THEIR STRATEGIC THOUGHT
The idea of the inevitability of war with the United States that pervaded the thinking of the middle-echelon officers in 1941 can best be understood by turning again to Admiral Katō Kanji and the negation of the Washington treaty system that he personified. At the center of Katō Kanji’s doctrine lay the Mahanian dictum that “the rise and fall of sea power determines the destiny of nations.” Katō maintained that the “irresistible lure of the Pacific” spelled a showdown between Japan and the United States in which each side would vie with the other for domination in China. Echoing neo-Mahanian economic determinism, Katō asserted that as the foremost “capitalistic-imperialistic nation,” the United States would find the outlet for its productive and expansive energies where it would meet the least resistance—the Pacific Ocean. Naval limitation was a humanitarian veil to hide America’s desire for domination over East Asia, and the Washington and London Conferences were steps in this direction. The Washington treaty system was an instrument for perpetuating America’s naval supremacy and preserving the status quo in East Asia.55
These ideas, of course, were not original with or even peculiar to Katō, but the way in which he related them to his Weltanschauung brought out ideological strains that were alien to the Japanese naval tradition. According to his reading of history, the westward advance of American civilization, with poisonous effects on Japan, was the culmination of four centuries of expansion of “materialistic Western civilization” since the battle of Lepanto in 1571, from its Mediterranean origins to the Atlantic, then across the American continent, finally to the Pacific. In this framework his anti-Americanism merged into a revulsion against Westernism, capitalism, and materialism——“isms” he identified externally with the Washington treaty system and domestically with the established political and social order. His doctrine came to be associated with an ultraright “spiritualism” or “Japanism.” His speeches during the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s abounded in semi-mystical exhortations of the “unparalleled Yamato spirit,” “bushido” (the way of the warrior), and “Japan’s great mission to purify world thought.”
Katō combined his Mahanian navalism with Japan’s continental expansionism in China. The navy shielded Japan’s continental program, protecting its oceanic flank and preventing intervention by the U.S. Navy. This nicely served the bureaucratic need for increased naval appropriations.
Like Katō, Suetsugu, in a manner reminiscent of Mahan in another context, argued that the United States, the center of Western material civilization, and Japan, the champion of Eastern spiritual civilization, were bound to be pitted against each other. He agreed with Katō in his denunciation of the status quo. “The status quo is a stock phrase of ‘have-powers’ like Britain and the United States already occupying advantageous positions, and Japan must destroy it. To solve its population problem Japan must expand in China—a policy which has led to economic warfare with the United States.”56 Behind Japanese-American antagonism was China’s anti-Japanese attitude, instigated and aided by Americans. Japan’s China policy boiled down to relations with the United States. In a June 1934 memorandum to Katō Kanji, Suetsugu wrote that issues of naval limitation and the Manchurian venture were “the two sides of the same coin.” “The formidable presence of the Imperial Navy controlling the western Pacific” enabled Japan to defy America and its intimidation while the army was free to conquer Manchuria.57
Commander Ishikawa, Katō’s disciple, similarly combined his anti-Western, ultranationalist spiritualism with revulsion against the Washington and London system. In a memorandum addressed to Katō in October 1934, he wrote that after World War I the Japanese people were inundated with Western liberal ideas that threatened to undermine the Japanese spirit. Japan seemed on the verge of national ruin as a result of the Washington and London Conferences when the Manchurian Incident broke out, reawakening the Japanese people.58
From a strategic viewpoint, the spiritualism that characterized Katō, Suetsugu, and Ishikawa maybe regarded as psychological compensation for the inferior fleet ratio of 60 percent “imposed” upon Japan at the Washington Conference. To prevail, Japan would have to pit quality against quantity. In Katō’s words, Japan must mobilize its “willpower” against America’s physical superiority, “turning an impossibility into a possibility.” After the Washington Conference, Katō ordered the Combined Fleet to engage in relentless drills and maneuvers “more heroic than under actual battle conditions.” Its target, of course, was the United States. These drills “went beyond all rational bounds,” in the words of the naval historian Ikeda Kiyoshi, and resulted, as already noted, in a double-collision accident off Mihogaseki in 1927. In time such spiritualistic obsession bred a mental habit of slighting the material basis of national power, so crucial to total war.
The navy’s answer to its dilemma—confronting the U.S. fleet with a 60 percent battleship ratio—was a submarine strategy that offset the deficiencies of the Washington treaty ratio in capital ships. The submarine was “the weapon of the weak party.” In the attrition strategy that preceded interceptive operations, the submarine’s mission was to whittle down the enemy’s fleet on its transpacific passage and join fleet operations in the decisive battle. Developed by Admiral Suetsugu when he was commander of the First and Second Submarine Divisions in 1923–25, this doctrine “aimed at transforming the submarine from a weapon of passive, short-range defense to one of long range, active offense,” as succinctly summarized by Evans and Peattie.59 Suetsugu perfected this submarine strategy after he became commander in chief of the Combined Fleet in 1933. This attrition strategy was restated in the operational plan of 1936, the oldest existing plan, as follows: “At the opening of hostilities a portion of the submarine force of the Combined Fleet must speedily proceed to Hawaii and the Pacific Coast area of the United States, serve as an outpost of our entire operations and scout the movements of the enemy’s main fleet, and seize an opportunity to operate in conjunction with the Combined Fleet.”60 Use of the submarine against the battleship was a unique feature of Japanese strategy. Other powers used the submarine for commerce raiding, but the Japanese navy paid scant attention to it because it banked on battleship encounter and also because of the Mahanian slightening of convoy operation.61
After 1924 Japan built large, high-speed fleet submarines with a large cruising radius—cruise submarines. From 1928 it led the world in construction of 1,800-ton submarines with a surface speed of 20 knots (8 knots submerged) and a radius of 10,000 miles (later extended to 20,000 miles). Between 1931 and 1934 the navy acquired eight 2,200-ton fleet submarines with a surface speed of 23 knots. Because the fastest American battleships had a maximum speed of 20 knots, Japan’s cruiser submarines were believed capable of scouting and attacking the American fleet. Admiral Suetsugu declared that “The decisive battle would entirely depend on our attrition [submarine] strategy.”
Japan’s submarine drills were so rigorous that they simulated combat conditions. Overconfident about its own spiritualism, the navy underestimated American submarines. Assuming that the Americans by their national character were unsuited to submarine duty, naval planners saw two weeks as the limit of endurance for American crews. As Admiral Toyoda Soemu wrote after the war, there was a saying in the navy: “Because Americans are spoiled by their luxurious life, they could hardly withstand long-term operations in the cramped and hot quarters of the submarine.” In a similar vein Admiral Yamamoto Eisuke wrote, “Americans are accustomed to a comfortable life, so they cannot endure the dangers and severity of drills aboard the submarine. When their submarine is berthed in Tsintao, its officers live in the Grand Hotel with their families and commute to their ships.”62 Hollywood had its influence on such imagery.
It is interesting to contrast Japanese confidence with American submariners’ confidence. Commander Holloway H. Frost, a brilliant planner, stated that the submarine was a weapon “peculiarly fit for use by Americans, because Americans are possessed of all the requisite qualities to handle them—alacrity, decisiveness, initiative, etc.”63 As it turned out, in the Pacific War, the American navy used the submarine to devastating effect, playing havoc with Japan’s marine transportation and cutting its sea communications. (Sixty-three percent of Japanese merchantmen were destroyed by American submarines, which was one of the greatest causes of Japan’s defeat. In contrast, Japanese submarines were a great disappointment: they could not sink even a single American battleship.)
Despite advances in weaponry and technological breakthroughs, the basic premise of the decisive fleet engagement remained intact during the 1930s. The anticipated theater moved eastward as ranges of ships and planes increased. In 1934 it lay in the vicinity of the Bonins and Marianas; in 1936 it moved west of the Marianas; and in 1940 it advanced to the line of the East Carolines and Marshalls.63 Embodying the “principle of big battleships and big guns” and deriving perceived lessons from Tsushima and Jutland, Japan’s interceptive operations hardened into a dogma that continued to govern strategic thinking until 1941. Building programs, fleet formation, war games and maneuvers, and education were all based on this premise. Flying units were never meant for more than an auxiliary role in the fleet engagement; at most, aircraft would provide cover for battleships.
In the 1930s the strategy of interceptive operations continued to raise questions that had disturbed some Japanese naval planners earlier. Would the U.S. Navy speedily throw its main fleet into a decisive engagement in the western Pacific? Or would it refrain from dashing westward until it had built up overwhelming superiority and logistic support? The questions had been raised in the 1920s, but they had now become more urgent. If the conflict turned into a protracted war, Japan would be at a mounting disadvantage in confronting America’s industrial superiority. During the 1930s, America’s shipbuilding capacity was estimated to be three to four times, possibly ten times, that of Japan; aircraft productivity six times; and steel productivity ten times. Japan would not be able to defeat such a formidable enemy by victory in one decisive battle or two.
Strangely, such a prospect did not receive attention until hostilities loomed. The General Plan for Strategy, revised in 1936, emphasized the importance of quick encounter, quick showdown, and taking the initiative and the offensive.”64 The annual operational plan (Nendo sakusen keikaku) of the same year, the oldest existing plan, provided for three stages of operations: (1) annihilate America’s Asiatic Fleet in Far Eastern waters and capture and occupy the Philippines and Guam; (2) thereby compel the American fleet to advance to the western Pacific; and (3) seek a decisive battle on the Bonins-Marianas line, destroying the enemy fleet.65 The subsequent phase of a protracted war was dismissed with an almost nonchalant statement that “such expedient measures as the occasion demands shall be taken.” Although the revised National Defense Policy of 1936 stated that “future wars are likely to be protracted ones and we must be determined and prepared for this,” there was no sign that Japanese naval planners seriously considered the realities of total war. The annual operational plan of 1941 remained essentially the same: “First annihilate the enemy fleet [the Asiatic Fleet] in the Far East and control the Far Eastern seas, then in cooperation with the army capture the enemy bases and occupy Guam and other enemy air bases. As to the main fleet of the United States, scout it and attack in the Hawaii area or enemy homeland, and when it stages transpacific passage, gradually reduce it on its passage, intercepting and annihilating it.”66 This operational plan could hardly be called a war plan. Year after year the navy tirelessly repeated this formula of a limited war. It certainly was no recipe for total war.
Katō, Suetsugu, and their heirs based their strategy on their perceived lessons of World War I, the importance of “quick encounter, quick showdown.” (No decisive Mahanian engagement took place in World War I.) To prevail, Japan must seek a decisive engagement early in the war. However, even if a decisive fleet engagement materialized, within seventy-five days as was widely anticipated, the chance of victory remained moot. Naval planners in the mid-thirties expected that a devastating victory in a decisive fleet engagement would damage U.S. battleships enough to cripple America’s will to keep fighting. The Mahanian fixation with the decisive battle caused the mainstream of the Japanese navy to forget Mahan’s real teaching, namely that the decisive battle was a means to securing command of the sea and that it alone could ensure victory. Above all, the fixation with the decisive battle blinded the conservative majority of Japanese officers to the extent to which technological innovations, especially in air power, had transformed conventional warfare.
YAMAMOTO—“THE FATHER OF JAPANESE NAVAL AVIATION”
In contrast to the mainstream and their obsession with a main-fleet encounter stood Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku and Rear Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, who had readjusted their strategic thinking to the air age. Yamamoto’s perceptions of the United States were radically different from those of the Katō-Suetsugu group. His views were informed by a realism derived from firsthand experience in the United States. Yamamoto never served on the Naval General Staff, so he was completely free of the “big battleships, big guns” ideology. In advocating the primacy of naval aviation, he was a heretic. His study and investigation in America went very far to mold his strategic vision.
During 1919–21 he was registered at Harvard, taking an English course for foreign students and auditing courses in American history and politics. In 1923–24 he accompanied Admiral Ide Kenji on his fact-finding tour of the United States, and in 1925–27 he served as naval attaché in Washington. His observations and experiences in the United States became the foundations of his strategic thinking. He devoted his full energy to the oil question, inspecting major oil fields and refineries, perusing all available literature on oil, and scanning some forty newspapers daily.
On the basis of his firsthand experience, Yamamoto warned against dismissing the American people as “weak-willed and spoiled by material luxuries”; on the contrary, they were infused with “a fierce fighting spirit and an adventurous temperament.” He cited the exploits of Admiral David G. Farragut of “Damn the torpedoes!” fame, the blockading of Santiago, and the advance through a minefield in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. Contrasting the Yamato spirit with the Yankee spirit, he pointed out that while the former often degenerated into daredevilry, the latter was grounded on a rational and technological mindset, a case in point being Charles A. Lindbergh’s recent transatlantic solo flight. Like Admiral Katō Tomosaburō at the Washington Conference, Yamamoto was deeply impressed with America’s industrial might and resources. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he used to say, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.” With such a country, a naval race, not to mention total war, was out of the question. As for the Washington treaty, he declared that “the 10:10:6 ratio works just fine for us; it is a treaty to restrict the other parties [the United States and Britain].”67 Although Yamamoto had taken a hawkish position at the London Conference, he supported naval limitation after returning from that gathering.
Yamamoto has been rightly called the father of Japanese naval aviation. He had specialized in gunnery, like so many officers, but after the Washington Conference he saw that the future of naval armaments lay in aviation and in 1924 asked to be appointed executive officer of the new air-training base at Kasumigaura (the Japanese Pensacola), forty miles northeast of Tokyo. Kasumigaura became a base transformed, with a high level of training and a strong sense of mission. Thus began his lifelong identification with naval aviation, although he never learned to fly. In 1928–29 he commanded the carrier Akagi, one of the earliest and largest Japanese carriers, later lost at the Battle of Midway. About this time Yamamoto predicted that in the near future air power would become the mainstay of the navy. While in America he had likely fallen under the influence of Winged Defense (1924) by Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell, a fanatical advocate of air power. Upon his return from the London Conference in 1930, he requested appointment as chief of the Technical Division of the Naval Aviation Department. The navy was trying to offset the deficiencies of the treaty navy by enhancing its air power. Yamamoto trained carrier fliers for offensive operations. In 1933–34 he commanded the First Aircraft Carrier Division. During these years he seized the opportunity to make the fleet air arm an efficient part of the navy and won a huge following among fliers. Promoted to vice admiral in 1935, he became head of the Naval Aviation Department, and in the ensuing three years he laid the foundations to make Japanese naval aviation a first-rate force. He developed a generation of new carrier aircraft and issued an order to double aircraft procurement in two years. He saw to it that Japan’s carrier-based aviators were the best trained in the world, averaging 700 hours in the air, compared to 305 for American carrier pilots in December 1941.68
Totally rejecting the doctrine of “big battleships and big guns,” Yamamoto argued that however big the battleship might be, it was never unsinkable. In the future the striking power of aircraft would make it possible to destroy battleships before they fired a gun. Critical of “hardheaded gunners” (the Gun Club) and Suetsugu’s attrition-interceptive strategy, he argued that a frontal engagement of battleships in the manner of a grand naval review was a thing of the past. Yet as late as 1936 he was admonishing naval aviation enthusiasts against calling the battleship a white elephant because the battleship was still regarded as the mainstay of the major powers and as such had “intangible political effects internationally as the symbol of naval power.”69 And he had enough political sense not to aggressively demand naval aviation for fear of creating friction.
INOUE, RADICAL ADVOCATE OF AIR POWER
While Yamamoto was still a transitional figure in this sense, Vice Admiral Inoue, head of the Naval Aviation Department from October 1940 to August 1941, was a zealous advocate of air power. Since the mid-1930s he had taken an interest in air power, and by 1937 he had concluded that Japan had no chance of winning a naval race with the United States. Building battleships would also be a waste of money, because decisive fleet engagement would never take place and aircraft would decide the issue of war. He proclaimed as early as 1937, “The days of the battleship are gone; it has been replaced by the aircraft.” In 1940 he asked to be transferred from chief of staff of the China Area Fleet to the head of the Naval Aviation Department. Iconoclastic and outspoken, he envisioned nothing short of conversion of the navy into an air force.70 In January 1941 he submitted to Navy Minister Oikawa a tightly and brilliantly argued long memorandum. It deviated so sharply from the prevailing view that he was aware he was risking his position, even his life. In this memorandum he pointed out how anachronistic Japan’s armaments had been rendered by the “great revolution” in weapons technology. He derided the navy’s fixation with fleet ratios—“ratio neurosis” he scathingly called it—and pointed out that the battleship was no match for aircraft. There would never be a “quick encounter, quick showdown” involving a decisive fleet engagement. “Who commands the air commands the sea” was his dictum. American admirals would not be “so foolhardy or reckless” as to mount offensive operations in the western Pacific as long as Japan controlled the air. And mastery of the air required adequately fortified air bases on the mandated islands in Micronesia. These were “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” War with the United States would revolve around protracted air and amphibious contests for those islands. Unless Japan’s armament plan was drastically changed, the nation was sure to lose the war, followed by American occupation of the entire country, including Tokyo, and a lack of daily necessities brought about by an American naval blockade. The forecast was remarkably prescient about the island-hopping campaign of the Pacific War.71
No less prophetic, Inoue urged the importance of convoy escorts to protect ocean transport from American submarine attacks so that resources from the southern region could be shipped to Japan. The Japanese navy did not fully recognize the importance of protecting sea communications, because it never had been threatened by submarines in the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, or the China War.72
In conclusion, he urged armament plans based on redefinition of the nature, form, and objectives of a war with the United States. He liked to recall that his drastic proposal fell like “a one-ton bomb on top naval leaders,” but in reality it did not make any dent on the conservative mainstream, which was committed to the doctrines of “big battleships and big guns.” His proposal came too late to have any effect, and Inoue regretted that he had not submitted his memorandum a few years earlier.73 Japan’s admirals were too-faithful students of Mahan to put faith in any weapon except the battleship. Construction of the superbattleship Yamato, to be completed on the eve of the Pacific War, reinforced this mindset.
While they did not always possess the broad outlook of men such as Yamamoto and Inoue, Japanese naval aviators had become convinced that the battleship was superfluous and must give way to aircraft. In April 1936, when Lieutenant Commander Genda Minoru, “a Japanese Billy Mitchell,” was a student officer in the Naval Staff College, he was assigned a paper on armaments against the United States. He wrote, “The main strength of a decisive battle should be air arms, while battleships will be put out of commission and tied up.” His proposal was sheer heresy and his “mental sanity questioned.” But Genda was not alone in claiming the primacy of air power.74 Some in aviation circles had adopted the concept of an air offensive against the United States. As early as 1936 the Naval Staff College produced a “Study of Strategy and Tactics in Operations against the United States.” It contained this striking passage: “In the event that the enemy’s main fleet units, particularly his aircraft carriers, are at anchor at Pearl Harbor prior to hostilities, sudden and unexpected attacks should be launched on those forces by carrier aircraft and flying boats.”75 In July 1937 the Naval Aviation Department declared that “a navy without strong air power is impotent.” It asserted, “The creation of powerful land-based air power is the absolute precondition and the ratio of fleet strength would hardly come into the picture.” The study suggested reduction of the fleet, on the grounds that a large part of its tasks could be performed by air power with greater effect and less cost.76 But the aviation-oriented strategy failed to make headway because there were still too few flying officers of seniority occupying key positions.
Considering that in both the United States and Britain the battleship was regarded as the monarch of the sea and the index of naval power, and that in both countries the naval air arm during the 1930s remained an auxiliary service, the aviation-centered Yamamoto-Inoue group must be credited with unusual foresight. But it was a minority, its ideas too advanced to find acceptance by the Naval General Staff and the fleet commanders, which remained committed to the Mahanian decisive battle, a concept validated by Tsushima and seemingly confirmed by Jutland. In April 1941, Yamamoto asked the Naval General Staff to reconsider building a third superbattleship of the Yamato class (two were already being built under the Third Replenishment Program of 1937), but the head of the Operations Division would not listen. The outspoken Inoue became an embarrassment to the devotees of mammoth battleships, and Oikawa and Nagano sent him to Truck as commander in chief of the Fourth Fleet, whose mission was to defend the mandated islands, a definite demotion. Having built careers on battleships and gunnery, the mainstream—the Gun Club—remained committed to those weapons. The furthest the Japanese navy would go was a main-fleet encounter, with coverage by fighter planes.