Pearl Harbor Betrayed (8 page)

In the last section of his letter to Oikawa, Yamamoto asked to be relieved of his position as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, since he “earnestly desired” that “I should be appointed C. in C. of an air fleet, so that I would have direct control of the attacking units.”
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But that was not to be.

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Yamamoto was born on 4 April 1884, the seventh child of a schoolmaster named Sadakichi Takano in the small Japanese village of Kushigun Sonshomura, inland from the east coast ports of Yokohama and Kobe. His father, aged fifty-six, gave the infant his age as a name—Fifty-six—Isoroku in Japanese. Yamamoto, meaning “base of the mountain,” would be added thirty years later when Isoroku was adopted by a prominent family of that name. At age sixteen the youth successfully passed the examination for entrance to the naval academy at Eta Jima. Four years of spartan training followed, and Isoroku was graduated seventh in his class in 1904, the same year in which his future adversary Husband E. Kimmel was graduated from Annapolis.

Like Kimmel, Isoroku was sent directly to the fleet, in his case as an ensign on the cruiser
Nisshin
. Earlier that year, on 8 February, the warship had participated in a surprise night attack on the much larger Russian Far Eastern fleet at Port Arthur, where destroyers badly damaged three Russian battleships, sank a cruiser, and blockaded the harbor. But the larger naval battle of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 loomed ahead, as Admiral Togo Heihachiro, whose flagship
Mikasa
was guarded by a screen of vessels that included
Nisshin,
awaited a twenty-seven-ship Russian fleet from the Baltic that was bent on relieving Port Arthur. On 27 May 1905, Togo, outnumbered five to two, met the Russians in the Straits of Tsushima and routed them, sinking or causing the surrender of ten of the twelve Russian capital ships. During this engagement the five-foot-three-inch and 130-pound Isoroku was wounded when one of the
Nisshin
's own guns exploded, fragments from which severed at their roots the middle and index fingers of his left hand and caused 120 scars on the lower half of his body. “Whenever I go into a public bath,” he would say afterward, “people think I am a gangster.”
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Isoroku's career followed predictable lines for an officer who graduated seventh in his class and distinguished himself in battle. By 1914, as a lieutenant, he was chosen for a two-year course of study at the Naval War College in a suburb of Tokyo, where, among other studies, he familiarized himself with the principles of naval warfare articulated shortly before the turn of the century by the American naval theorist Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. Using the British Empire as his template, Mahan had argued that sea power was the key to the rise of imperial nations. The nation that would rule, Mahan said, was the nation that concentrated its ships and firepower on a contender's main fleet and forced the issue of dominance in a decisive battle
à toute outrance
, as the Royal Navy had done at Quiberon Bay (1759), the Nile (1798), and Trafalgar (1805).

In 1916, now a lieutenant commander, Isoroku registered as an adopted son of Yamamoto Tatewaki, whose surname he adopted. Two years later, at thirty-four years of age, he married Reiko Mihashi, from his home province. They would produce four children, two boys and two girls. Between the two assignments in the United States already mentioned, Yamamoto was promoted to captain and, in 1924, was named second in command of the Kasumigaura Aviation Corps. Until that date, his professional interests had been mainly directed to gunnery. From this point forward he concentrated his focus on naval aviation, then in its infancy. In 1928 he was assigned briefly to gunships as captain of
Izuzu,
a light cruiser used for training. In December of the same year, he reached his dream command as skipper of the 36,000-ton, twenty-eight-knot carrier
Akagi,
which, converted from a battle cruiser, was one of the largest carriers in the world's navies. In November–December 1941 she would be the flagship of the six-carrier task force that attacked Pearl Harbor. But, here again, Yamamoto's sea command was cut short, when it was decided by the Navy Ministry, less than a year later, that he should accompany the Japanese delegation to the London Naval Disarmament Conference, scheduled to begin on 21 January 1930, where he served as an aide to Vice Admiral Sakonji Seizo. The conference was called to review naval limitations and Pacific area security compacts agreed to by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921–22. Intent on ending a naval arms race, the five powers had agreed then to a strict proportionality in their respective strengths in capital ships, that is, in those ships of more than 10,000 tons or in ships mounting guns exceeding eight inches in caliber (effectively battleships and aircraft carriers). The ratios of such ships were established at 5 each for the United States and Great Britain, 3 for Japan, and 1.67 each for France and Italy. Other provisions required the scrapping of some warships that were already afloat or under construction, and a ten-year moratorium on capital ship construction. In another effort to maintain peace in the Pacific, signatories who held island possessions, such as the Japanese mandates and the U.S. Philippines and Guam, accepted restrictions on their further fortification.

Prior to 1921, the Japanese Navy had hoped to build and sustain a fleet of eight battleships not older than eight years and eight cruisers. But the expenditures required, it was discovered, would consume one-third of the overall national budget—an impossible burden. The Washington Conference provided a rationale for abandoning the 8-8 dream, which, in turn, meant giving up for the time being a developed strategy. That strategy held that with an 8-8 fleet Japan would possess 70 percent of America's naval strength, thus making it possible to oppose an attacking American fleet in the western Pacific. But with only 60 percent of America's strength, which the 5-5-3 ratio imposed, Japan would have to pull back from her assumption that the United States was the hypothetical enemy, and content herself with a “nonbelligerent” navy. That view was put forward, on returning home from the conference, by Navy Minister Kato Tomosaburo:

One cannot, very broadly speaking, make war without money.… Even supposing Japan's armaments were to rival those of America in strength, the nation could not, as it did in the Russo-Japanese War, fight on a shoestring. Where then would the money come from? The answer is that there is no country other than America that could oblige Japan with the foreign credit required—and this would obviously not be forthcoming if America were the enemy.… The conclusion is that a contest between Japan and America is unthinkable.
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Those in the Navy and the public who agreed with the minister that the Washington treaty both saved Japan economically and advanced her stature internationally came to be called the “treaty faction.” Those, on the other hand, who thought that the third greatest naval power in the world had been shamed by the pusillanimity of its conference delegates became known as the “fleet faction.” Leadership of the latter group was seized by Fleet Admiral Kato Kanji, who, as a naval adviser at the conference, had argued vainly for a ratio permitting Japan seven-tenths of America's strength in tonnage. Upon accession to the office of chief of the Navy General Staff, Kato further characterized the inferior ratio allotted Japan as an insult to Japan's standing as a major power, as a sign to China of Japanese weakness, and as a stain of subservience to the “Anglo-American hegemony.” The indignation stirred up by Kato found its most ready audience among junior officers, but over time, Kato was able to rally a number of important flag officers to his side. It bears mention that no one, in high station or low, was so hawkish as to demand hostilities with the Americans just yet. But the fleet faction kept that prospect fresh in its mind (as did the Orange Plan theorists at the U.S. Navy War College in Newport, Rhode Island).

At the London Conference of 1930, which Yamamoto attended, the five powers reviewed what had been accomplished in disarmament during the past eight years and entertained motions for new action. Various refinements to the 1922 document were adopted, including new limitations on heavy cruisers, in which category Japan had heavily invested during the decade. The Japanese delegation demanded a 10:7 ratio in cruisers, but was permitted only 10:6. Furthermore, the conference imposed a halt on Japanese construction in that category for a five-year period so that the United States could pull even. Japan also was required to reduce its tonnage in submarines, a category in which she had also built heavily.

The reaction in the fleet faction was one of resentful anger. Navy Chief of Staff Kato resigned in protest, but his allies in the fleet faction drove all the major leaders of the treaty faction into retirement or onto the reserve list. In a stroke, the navy lost much of its moderate leadership at the upper level. One of the victims of this purge was Yamamoto's closest friend in the service, Vice Admiral Hori Teikichi, head of the Naval Affairs Bureau. Many thought that he possessed the most brilliant mind in the Navy. Another Yamamoto friend, Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, on the Aviation Section of the Navy General Staff, who narrowly missed being purged himself, stated that the loss of a man of Hori's stature and gifts was more costly to the service than a 10 or 20 percent reduction of its fleet ratio. Yamamoto, whose sympathies were clearly with the treaty faction, also escaped the purge unharmed. He called the action taken against Hori an “outrage.” By 1933, the direction of the Imperial Navy was fully in the hands of the fleet faction. In the same year, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, another post–World War I international effort to maintain peace.
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Yamamoto, who returned from the London Conference a rear admiral, took up new duties as head of the Technical Division of the Navy's Aeronautics Department. In 1933 he was back on board the
Akagi
as commander of the First Carrier Division. Not without continuing opinions on armament controls, he considered a 10:7 and even a 10:6 treaty better than no treaty at all. With no restrictions to control her, the United States would vanquish everyone in an arms race: given her industrial capacity, she would have Japan reduced quickly to 10:5 or 10:4, or to an even lower ratio. In his mind, Japan must keep the fetters on America that the treaty system provided, while working through diplomatic channels to secure terms as favorable to Japan as possible.
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Such a channel opened in 1934. The London Naval Treaty would expire in 1935 and the Washington treaty in 1936. In anticipation of those lapses, the five powers agreed to meet in London for preliminary talks on how to proceed past those two dates.

Yamamoto, who was then back to shore duty with the Naval General Staff and the Navy Ministry, was appointed chief naval delegate at the preliminary talks, where he would work hand-in-glove with Ambassador Matsudaira Tsuneo in representing Japan's interests. He was reluctant to go, and numerous times tried to duck the assignment. Certainly, he was an unlikely choice, given his pro-treaty views, since the Navy that assigned him that delicate and critical position was dominated by the fleet faction, headed by the Navy Minister, Admiral Suetsugu Nobumasa. On 8 June 1934, Suetsugu told his principal active and retired admirals that the best policy for Japan was to “abrogate the existing treaties and have no treaties and no restrictions.” The next best policy was to insist on parity with the West. The second was a policy Yamamoto could support. In either event, Suetsugu contended, Japan should not fear an armaments race with America. A number of reasons for such a dauntless stance have been suggested: the U.S. economy was in the grip of a long-standing depression, and funds for new naval construction were scant. Japan's economy, at the same time, was strong, and thus in the near term she could probably stay abreast of the United States in a naval construction race. Too, as Mahan and the battles of Tsushima and Jutland suggested, Japan should not quail before future dangers but, instead, if she truly wished to grow in imperial power, she must be willing to cast all her resources into the contest. In doing so, she could take confidence in the fact that not only had her naval engineers and technicians created ship and weapons designs on a parity with or better than those found in the Western navies, but the Navy's past experiences in battle had led to the development of better tactics, including surprise night attacks, faster and more limber ship maneuverability, and superior firepower.
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While Yamamoto did not in any way share that confidence, he was gamely committed to winning parity for Japan in all weapons categories under the rubric of a “common upper limit” on overall tonnage. When the London talks opened on 23 October, he startled the British by further arguing that all offensive weapons, such as battleships, carriers, and heavy cruisers, should be destroyed or radically reduced in number—in effect, “heaping burning coals upon their heads.” In that bold move to position the other powers in a corner, Yamamoto was closely following his instructions. (His words must have seemed all the more impertinent since they came from a mere rear admiral, when the chief naval delegates of the other powers were full admirals. During the course of the talks, on 15 November, he was promoted to vice admiral.) Overcoming their shock, the British responded coolly that since they had to defend colonies in many more seas than the Pacific, Yamamoto's second proposal was unacceptable on its face. When Yamamoto presented the same propositions to the Americans on the next day, the U.S. delegates responded in similar fashion, stating that they had two coastlines to defend, and as for the parity matter, the ratios fixed at Washington twelve years before had, they said, served the cause of peace very well. On those grounds, by and large, the talks foundered, and remained deadlocked for over two months, with Britain stymied in her attempt to work out a compromise, with many bluffs and counterbluffs exchanged, and with each of the three major powers calculating how to avoid blame for the talks' collapse, which came on 30 December, when the Japanese government in Tokyo gave notice that it was abrogating the Washington treaty.