The Battle of Midway (17 page)

There was general agreement in Japan that to bring about the kind of stalemate that they hoped would trigger negotiations, at some point it would be necessary to establish a defensive perimeter around her new possessions and dare the Americans to assail it. The question was, where? Initially they assumed that this defensive barrier would run from the Kuriles in the
northern home islands, through captured Wake Island (which the Japanese renamed
Ō
torijima) in the central Pacific, then south to the Marshalls and Gilberts. But after the easy triumphs of January to March of 1942, they considered an expanded perimeter that might include Australia, Hawaii, or the Aleutians—or all three. There was also discussion about Japan’s obligations to Germany under the Tripartite Pact. The Army in particular pondered both the wisdom and the timing of an attack on the Soviet Union. And finally, there was Yamamoto’s determination to eliminate the threat of more American carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all. All of these options were contemplated by a Japanese decision-making architecture that depended less on clear lines of hierarchy and authority than on subtle and constantly shifting political and personal relationships between power centers, relationships that were frequently jealous and competitive.
³

In theory at least, the principal decision-making body in the Imperial Japanese Navy was the Naval General Staff. Until 1933, it had been subordinate to the Navy Ministry, but a “reform” that year—in effect a coup by the fleet faction—elevated the Naval General Staff to a position of de facto superiority, giving its members responsibility for armament, education, training, personnel, and command. The head of the staff was Admiral Nagano Osami, a 61-year-old career officer who had preceded Yamamoto in command of the Combined Fleet. Nagano was a battleship-and-cruiser man, a stolid, taciturn officer who had graduated from Eta Jima in 1900 and had been a staff officer in the Russo-Japanese War. Physically, Nagano (whose nickname was “The Elephant”) could hardly have been more different from the diminutive Yamamoto, but their career tracks were strikingly similar. Both men had served tours of duty in the United States and attended Harvard—in Nagano’s case, Harvard Law School. Both had been members of the treaty faction before the war and participated in the 1922 Washington conference and the 1930 London conference. They had both opposed Japan’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. After that, however, Nagano adjusted his outlook. By April of 1941, when he became chief of staff, he had concluded that war had become inevitable. In light
of this fact, Nagano actively supported a thrust southward to occupy the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, at least in part to prevent the Army from dominating the decision-making process.
⁴

Admiral Nagano Osami (nicknamed “the Elephant”) headed the Naval General Staff in the spring of 1942. At a series of meetings in April, he and the rest of the staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s insistence on conducting Operation MI. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The first open split between Nagano and Yamamoto came over the wisdom of striking at Pearl Harbor. Nagano believed that it would be possible to seize the British and Dutch possessions in the South Pacific without drawing the United States into the war. He argued that the Pearl Harbor gambit was unnecessary and risky, and that it would pull resources away from the all-important strike southward. Yamamoto saw this as timidity. He opined to an associate that Nagano was “the kind of man who thinks he’s a genius, even though he’s not,” and told another, “Nagano’s a dead loss.” In the end, Yamamoto got his way concerning Pearl Harbor by threatening to resign unless his plan was accepted. It was a particularly audacious piece of extortion, and Yamamoto was bold enough to tell Nagano “not to interfere too much and thus set a bad precedent in the Navy.” It is unimaginable that Chester Nimitz would have made such a suggestion to Ernie King, or that he would have kept his job if he had. A bad precedent was indeed set: a fleet commander could make strategic plans on his own and force those plans onto his putative superiors by threatening to resign. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the rampage of the Kid
ō
Butai elevated Yamamoto’s prestige higher, though the admiral himself had remained aboard his flagship in Hashirajima Harbor near Hiroshima.
⁵

Now in March, with most of the war’s goals already achieved, Nagano and the Naval General Staff considered the next step. Their first instinct was to look southward. Nagano believed that when the Americans began their inevitable counteroffensive, they would use Australia as their base, and that could be forestalled at the outset by occupying the continent. Despite a successful raid by the Kid
ō
Butai on the Australian naval base at Darwin in February, the Japanese Army was appalled by the notion of invading Australia. Because General T
ō
j
ō
Hideki was both war minister and prime minister, the Army had a virtual veto over any plan that called for the participation of ground troops, and the Army had no interest in such an open-ended commitment. Australia was sparsely defended, as most of her soldiers had been sent to other theaters of war, but it would nonetheless take a minimum of ten divisions—some 200,000 men—to seize and hold just the northern coast, and Japan did not have ten divisions to spare, or the ships to transport and supply them.
⁶

Nor was the Army interested in another proposal of the Naval General Staff: the invasion and occupation of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The expectation was that such a move would provoke an uprising by the restive native population of India and threaten the British Empire where its stability was most precarious. According to one member of the Naval General Staff, a principal purpose of the operation was to “carry out Indian independence.” In addition, a move across the Indian Ocean toward the Persian Gulf offered the possibility of linking up with Axis forces, as well as access to the oil fields of the Middle East. Though the conquest of Ceylon would require only two divisions rather than ten, the Army was not interested. Its main concern continued to be the festering conflict in China, where four-fifths of its active divisions were concentrated. If the Army looked anywhere for new fields to conquer, it was to the north rather than the south or the west. In the late fall and early winter of 1941, as the Wehrmacht drove toward Moscow, many Japanese generals anticipated the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and they did not want to miss out on the spoils when that happened. They concluded that it was necessary to hold troops in readiness “to share a victory when the Germans succeed.”
⁷

The Army’s obstructionism bred resentment not only within the Naval General Staff in Tokyo but at Combined Fleet Headquarters on board
Yamamoto’s flagship, where one of his staff officers complained: “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to! We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the Army will not agree to release the necessary forces.” Yamamoto’s logistics officer recalled that, “since the Army-Navy could not come up with a common agreement of effort on the second phase operations, the Navy looked more and more toward what it could do alone.”
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Faced with the Army’s refusal to support invasions, Nagano and the General Staff fell back on their plans to send the Kid
ō
Butai on a hit-and-run raid against British bases in Ceylon. In late March, Nagumo took five carriers and their escorts westward, south of Sumatra, and into the Indian Ocean. (The
Kaga
, having struck a submerged reef, went to Sasebo, near Nagasaki, for repairs.)

Thanks to a warning from Allied intelligence, the British knew they were coming. In anticipation of the Japanese strike, Admiral Sir James Somerville mobilized his fleet, which included four old and slow battleships, but also two modern carriers—the
Indomitable
and the
Formidable
—and took up a position south of Ceylon, from where he hoped to threaten the flank of the Japanese fleet as it approached. He knew he could not slug it out toe-to-toe with the Kid
ō
Butai; he hoped he might be able to inflict some damage with night torpedo attacks. For three days he waited. When the Kid
ō
Butai didn’t appear, he sent two heavy cruisers—
Dorsetshire
and
Cornwall
—to the naval base at Colombo on Ceylon’s western coast, and withdrew the rest of the fleet to Addu Atoll in the Maldives, six hundred miles southwest of Ceylon, to refuel.

Two days later, on April 5, Easter Sunday morning, 315 planes from the Kid
ō
Butai struck Colombo. The British commander there, Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, had sent most of the shipping to the north to get it out of harm’s way, and the two heavy cruisers sent to him by Somerville headed back for Addu Atoll. Layton also ordered out a squadron of Hawker Hurricane fighter planes—older cousins of the more famous Spitfire—plus half a dozen Fairey Swordfish biplanes armed with torpedoes for a counterattack. The Swordfish had performed well during a Royal Navy torpedo attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto the previous November, but they were helpless against the nimble Zeros. The Hurricanes, too, got much the worst of the encounter. In barely half an hour, the British lost twenty-seven aircraft, including fifteen Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost only seven bombers. The rest of the Japanese strike force, piloted by their superbly trained enlisted pilots, flew through the intercept and attacked the naval base, dropping their bombs on ships and yard facilities. They sank three British warships and wrecked the repair shops and the rail yard (something they had neglected to do at Pearl Harbor). The Kid
ō
Butai was never threatened. It was not as decisive a blow as the one against the Americans, but once again the Japanese had demonstrated their air superiority over the West.
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