The Battle of Midway (6 page)

It is impossible to understand the origins of the Pacific War without appreciating both the extraordinary influence the Army had on Japanese government policy, and the intensity of the rivalry between the Army and Navy over the direction of that policy. Because the cabinet ministers representing the armed services had to be active-duty officers, the Japanese Army or Navy could topple a government merely by withdrawing its minister. Though the Navy seldom availed itself of this gambit, the Army did—or at least threatened to do so—unless its policies were adopted. The practical result was that by the mid-1930s, the Army effectively controlled the government. Most Navy officers resented this. Yamamoto himself once incautiously referred to “those damn fools in the Army,” and as a result some marked him as an obstacle to Japan’s emergence as a great power.
⁴

Virtually all Japanese Army officers sought to strengthen the armed forces and increase their role in national politics. There was disagreement, however, about how to bring this about. The dominant Army faction was
the
T
ō
seiha
(Control Faction), whose members sought to work within the existing framework of government. But an extremist element known as the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
(Imperial Way Faction) was impatient with the slow pace of change and the perceived obstructionism of the bureaucracy. These “Spirit Warriors” sought to lead the nation to glory by championing an idealized, mythological past. While claiming to revere the emperor, they were also determined that he adopt their expansionist views. They were perfectly willing, even eager, to take unilateral action. In 1931 Japanese soldiers detonated a small explosion near the Japanese-controlled railroad in Manchuria, and the Army used that “attack” as a justification for the occupation of Manchuria. In July 1937 a brief exchange of fire between Chinese and Japanese soldiers near the Marco Polo Bridge provided a pretext for what was called “the China Incident”—in fact, a full-scale war of conquest. Many Army officers also admired the vitality and ambition of Hitler’s regime in Germany and advocated a military alliance with the Third Reich. Those who opposed these views risked public criticism and disparagement—or worse, for members of the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
did not shrink from assassinating government ministers whom they saw as trying to thwart their aspirations. More often than not, the assassins were merely chastised rather than punished, as if extreme patriotism somehow excused their actions.

On February 26, 1936, a group of junior Army officers forced their way into the office of the minister of finance and murdered him. They also killed the lord privy seal and the inspector general of education. They invaded the home of Prime Minister Okada Keisuke, intending to assassinate him, too, though in their fervor they inadvertently killed his brother-in-law instead. Their goal, they insisted, was patriotic: to protect the emperor from ministers who did not understand the Imperial Way as Army officers did.
*

This time there were consequences. After a series of trials, seventeen of the killers were executed, and other members of the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
were purged
from the Army. Even so, the episode did not slow the Army’s growing control over policy; having punished the leaders of the February 26 coup, the Army now argued that it had to be even stronger to protect the government from future coup attempts.
⁵

The Imperial Army’s increasing domination over government policy had disastrous consequences for Japan. Army leaders insisted on resolving the China Incident—that is, completing the conquest of China, an ambition that was jeopardized by a growing scarcity of strategic materials, especially oil. Because Japan’s traditional source of oil—the United States—was increasingly unreliable, Japanese leaders convinced themselves that it was necessary to move southward to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. In August 1936, the government formally adopted a document entitled “Fundamental Principles of National Policy,” which established the goal of becoming “in name and in fact a stabilizing power for assuring peace in East Asia, thereby ultimately contributing to the peace and welfare of humanity.” The Japanese presented this to the Americans as a kind of Japanese Monroe Doctrine, though in practice it signaled their intent to dominate East Asia and the western Pacific. To prepare for wars in two directions, both the Army and Navy were to be expanded. For the Army this meant more active divisions; for the Navy it meant formal abandonment of the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty. The Imperial Japanese Navy had long resented this agreement, which restricted the Japanese to a battleship force only 60 percent as large as that of either Britain or the United States. Its abandonment now made possible the construction of a new and greatly enlarged fleet, including new battleships and aircraft carriers.
⁶

The rivalry in the Army between the
T
ō
seiha
and the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
was mirrored in the Navy by competition between the so-called treaty faction and the fleet faction. Members of the latter embraced two ideas almost as articles of faith. The first was that the United States was Japan’s logical, even inevitable, enemy; and the second was that because war with America was inevitable, it was essential for Japan to maintain a battle force that was at least 70 percent as large as the American battle force. Many officers believed that the 60 percent ratio imposed on them by the Washington Treaty was not only
a national insult but also undermined Japan’s security, and even her sovereignty. So widespread was this view among junior and middle-grade officers that some admirals feared that taking a contrary position would incite mutiny. The emperor himself worried that the Navy would “no longer be able to control its officers” and was “jeopardizing vital diplomatic issues for the sake of placating subordinate officers.”
⁷

Because the British and Americans did not build their own navies up to the limits imposed on them by the 1922 treaty, Japan was able to maintain her fleet at a level that was roughly 70 percent that of the United States Navy despite the treaty. It was evident, though, that if the Americans did suddenly decide to expand their Navy to the treaty limits, any serious effort to match that expansion would bankrupt Japan. Therefore, members of the fleet faction sought to overcome America’s quantitative advantage by focusing on quality—that is, by building ships of such size and power that they could outrange or overwhelm American battleships. They supported the secret construction of four Yamato-class battleships, which, at 73,000 tons each when fully equipped, would be more than twice as big as the largest American battleship. The project was hugely expensive and commanded a disproportionate share of the national budget, but it allowed the champions of the fleet faction to argue that they had an answer to America’s numerical and industrial superiority.

Yamamoto was skeptical. Speaking to a class of air cadets in 1934, he compared battleships to the expensive artwork that wealthy Japanese families displayed in their living rooms: they had no particular function, he said, except to serve as “decorations.” Yamamoto’s rivals in the fleet faction were infuriated. They hadn’t forgotten that he had been a delegate to two naval arms limitation conferences, and his two tours as Japan’s naval attaché in Washington made him suspect in their eyes. His apostasy concerning the utility of battleships was simply one more reason to distrust and even despise him.
⁸

Yamamoto himself was a member of the treaty faction, which also included Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa. Yonai and Yamamoto held that the key overall effect of the 1922 treaty was to restrain the United States from using its overwhelming industrial superiority to outbuild the Imperial Navy, which would have placed Japan at a far more disadvantageous position than the treaty did. With the backing of the emperor, Yonai served as prime
minister for six months in the first half of 1940. His efforts to promote an accommodation with the Americans were anathema to the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
, however, and he was the target of several assassination attempts. In July 1940, he was replaced by Prince Konoe, who was more sympathetic to the ambitions of the
K
ō
d
ō
ha
and the fleet faction.

The Army was suspicious of Yamamoto, too, and officially assigned a group of men to “guard” him, though their real task was to keep an eye on him. As vice minister of the Navy, Yamamoto lived in constant expectation of being murdered, and he avoided one assassination attempt only by leaving town at the right moment. Indeed, his appointment to command the Combined Fleet in 1939 was engineered by his friends in the hope that sending him to sea would save him from being killed in his bed. The appointment satisfied his enemies in the Army and the fleet faction because it got him out of Tokyo. Yamamoto was aware of the motives behind his appointment, but he did not protest. “I can turn my back on everything else,” he wrote to a friend, “and devote myself entirely to naval matters.”
⁹

Yamamoto took up his new duties as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet on September 1, 1939, the very day Germany invaded Poland marking the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. To those pushing for closer ties with Germany, this was more evidence of the vigor and clear-sightedness of the Nazi regime, and they renewed their advocacy of an alliance with Hitler’s government. It had the opposite effect on Yamamoto. Only three days after assuming command, he wrote a fellow admiral, “I shudder as I think of the problem of Japan’s relations with Germany and Italy.” He was convinced that an alliance with Germany meant war with the West, including the United States, and insisted that “a war between Japan and the United States would be a major calamity.” His concerns fell on deaf ears. One year later, Japan signed what became known as the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, and a year after that the Army’s domination of the government became complete when General T
ō
j
ō
Hideki became both war minister and prime minister. By then the descent into war had generated its own unstoppable momentum.
¹⁰

Yamamoto was realistic enough to see that, whatever his own views, once Japan signed the Tripartite Pact war became inevitable, and it was
his professional duty to prepare for it. As the government’s statement of fundamental principles put it: “Since war with the United States may become unavoidable, sufficient preparations must be made for this eventuality.” Just as American naval officers designed their war games around Plan Orange and modeled their summer exercises on imagined confrontations with the Japanese fleet, so, too, did Japanese officers—Yamamoto included—conduct their war games and fleet exercises in the assumption that the U.S. Navy was the likely enemy. As early as 1934, Lieutenant Genda Minoru, who was already emerging as one of the Imperial Navy’s most original thinkers, wrote a paper at the Navy Staff College with the title “Naval Armament Essential for the Effective Prosecution of War with the United States.”
¹¹

For Yamamoto, Genda, and other Navy planners, the question was how to structure the Navy so that it could win such a war. The traditional assumption, in Japan as well as in the United States, was that the war would culminate in a classic battleship engagement somewhere in the western Pacific. What the Japanese needed was a way to whittle down the American fleet as it moved toward this inevitable confrontation so that the smaller Japanese battle fleet could emerge victorious. To do that, Japan counted heavily on its fleet submarines and on land-based aircraft. The Japanese vastly improved their submarine capability in part by studying German World War I submarines, and they simultaneously focused on building a new generation of long-range, multiengine aircraft. According to the Japanese war plan, the American warships would be picked off one by one by submarines, or damaged by land-based aircraft operating from a web of island bases, until the opposing fleets were near parity. Massed torpedo attacks by destroyers and cruisers the night before the battle would weaken the Americans further, and in the final battle, superior Japanese fighting spirit (
Yamato damashii
) would determine the outcome.
¹²