The Battle of Midway (8 page)

This mindset helped make Japan’s carrier airplanes among the best in the world, and this in turn contributed to the decision to go to war with the United States in the first place. It also meant that once the war began, Japan would be unable to produce replacement airplanes quickly or in large numbers. During 1941, even as Japan prepared to start a war that had already been decided upon, its aviation industry was producing only about 162 airplanes a month. By contrast, Roosevelt called for the construction of 4,000 planes a month in 1942, and by the following year U.S. plants were turning out 10,000 planes a month. Japanese industry was simply incapable of matching such productivity.
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In December of 1941, however, Japan’s leaders ignored this inherent weakness. Like Confederate soldiers in 1861 who believed that one Reb could whip five Yanks, they were convinced that
Yamato damashii
could overcome both numbers and industrial superiority. “You could quote them figures till you were blue in the face,” one officer remembered later of the Japanese high command, “but they’d have none of it.” This is what Navy Captain
Ō
i Atsushi meant when he wrote after the war, “The Japanese people are romantic and illogical.”
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Japan’s 1,800 frontline carrier aircraft in 1941 were divided into three types: dive-bombers, carrier attack planes (which could carry either bombs or a torpedo), and fighters. The dive-bomber was the Aichi D3A1 Type 99, nicknamed the “Val” by Allied naval intelligence.
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A two-seat monoplane, with a pilot in front and a radioman/gunner in the rear seat, the Val carried one 250-kilogram (551-pound) bomb and two smaller (60 kg) bombs under
the wings. It borrowed some design elements from Japan’s new ally, having an elliptical wing like the German Heinkel and fixed landing gear like the Stuka. It proved a very reliable weapon in China against ground targets and weak opposition, but its indifferent speed of 205 knots (242 mph) would make it vulnerable to American fighters in the war to come.

More impressive, and more central to Japanese doctrine, was the Nakajima B5N2 Type 97 carrier attack plane, which the Allies dubbed the “Kate.” The Kate could function as a level bomber, but it was deadliest when used as a torpedo plane. Indeed, it was very likely the best torpedo plane in the world. It had a crew of three and could handle a bomb load of over 800 kilograms (1,764 pounds), which meant that it could carry either a heavy fragmentation bomb for attacks against land targets or the new Type 91 aerial torpedo. Though the Americans had not used live torpedoes in peacetime training because of the expense, the Japanese did, and this led to improvements that paid off in wartime. The Type 91 torpedo boasted wooden tailfins that kept it stabilized during the air drop and then broke away when it hit the water. It traveled at a speed of 42 knots (nearly 10 knots faster than American torpedoes) and had great accuracy thanks to an internal gyroscope. The one weakness of the airplane that carried this powerful weapon was that, like most other Japanese combat airplanes, the Kate was mostly unarmored, so that while it packed an impressive offensive punch, even minor damage was often fatal.
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The Japanese B5N2 Type 97 carrier attack plane, called the “Kate” by the allies, was the best torpedo plane in the world in 1942, especially when carrying the big Type 91 aerial torpedo, seen here. (U.S. Naval Institute)

The third component of the Japanese carrier triad was the Mitsubishi A6M2 Type 00 fighter. Officially the Americans named this the “Zeke,” but nearly everyone called it by the name that is remembered by history: the Zero. This iconic airplane of the Pacific war came about because of Japan’s desire to provide bombers in China with long-range fighter support. In the fall of 1937, the Japanese set out to build a monoplane fighter with both longer range and heavier weapons. When it debuted in 1940, the Zero was a zippy little sports car of a fighter. It had not only a longer range than any other fighter—even land-based fighters—but it could climb faster and turn sharper. Moreover, in addition to its two machine guns, it carried two 20 mm cannon in the wings, which meant that like the Kate it packed a terrific offensive punch. One problem was that these cannon fired only sixty rounds before running out, making extended combat operations difficult unless the pilots hoarded their ammunition. On some occasions, the Zeros had to land to reload after a relatively short flight. And while the Zero had an impressive maximum speed of 287 knots (330 mph), its light airframe meant that it could not dive as fast as the sturdier American fighters; American pilots learned that the best way to escape a Zero on their tail was to dive straight down. Nonetheless, Japanese pilots reveled in the acrobatic abilities of their nimble little fighter plane, and early in the war they had an unmistakable advantage over their American counterparts, especially at low altitudes. But once again their lack of armor made them vulnerable. Like so many Japanese combat planes, the Zero was all offense and no defense.
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It is noteworthy that the men who flew these planes off the decks of Japanese carriers were mostly enlisted men—warrant officers and petty officers—and not commissioned officers, as was common in the U.S. Navy. This is
especially curious because the Japanese Navy had a higher overall percentage of officers than the U.S. Navy. Yet until 1938, the number of graduates from the Japanese naval academy at Eta Jima who chose aviation was quite small. Pilots were thought of mainly as technicians, and such technical skill was held to be only marginally relevant to the burden of command. This changed after 1938. By then most Eta Jima graduates who were physically qualified were being reserved for aviation service. When war began in late 1941, these officers were still relatively junior, and, during the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a dearth of middle-grade officers—lieutenant commanders and commanders—who had both flight training and combat experience. The few who did became squadron commanders. Most of the pilots they commanded, however, were warrant officers or petty officers.
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For an enlisted sailor, there were two paths to becoming a carrier pilot. One was the Pilot Trainee System, in which petty officers or seamen under the age of 24 could apply for flight training. The acceptance rate was very small. As in the production of the airplanes themselves, the selection of young men for pilot training focused on ensuring quality rather than quantity. To those who ran the programs, it seemed more important to keep out the undeserving than to encourage the marginal. The historian John Lundstrom notes that for the class of 1937, of fifteen hundred applicants, only seventy were selected for training, and only twenty-five graduated.
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The other source of Navy pilots was the Flight Reserve Enlisted Trainee System. In the mid-1930s the Japanese concluded that taking sailors who were already trained in surface warfare and making pilots of them wasted valuable training. As a result they began to draw aviation candidates directly from civilian life, often teenagers from the equivalent of junior high or high school. In addition to flight training, these candidates got three years of classroom education, so that their experience resembled that of students at Eta Jima, though they graduated as petty officers rather than as commissioned officers. Moreover, their numbers remained small. As in the Pilot Trainee Program, until 1938 the Japanese focused on making flight training as fierce as possible in order to wash out marginal performers. Pilots trained in small classes of only four men each. After 1941, with war looming, instructors were allowed to teach eight at a time, and by 1943 they were
teaching twelve. By then, however, it was too late to make up for lost time. By then, too, many of the best instructors were either at sea operating with the carriers or had already been lost in combat. The result was that while Japan began the war with a cadre of very highly skilled and intensively trained pilots, there was no established program to add large numbers of new pilots to the fleet as the war went on. In part this was another result of the commitment to quality over quantity, and it was also the product of the Japanese assumption that the war with the United States would not last very long. That assumption led to the conclusion that it was more important to have this cadre of highly skilled pilots at the outset than to have large numbers of indifferent pilots for the long run. When the war began, the Japanese had a total of about 3,500 superbly trained and experienced naval aviators, about 90 percent of them enlisted men. (The American pool of aviators was larger, but many of them were still in training programs, and none had the combat experience of their Japanese counterparts.) The Japanese thus bet on quality triumphing over quantity, but they also gambled that the war would be a short one, for they had very little in reserve.
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This, then, was the Kid
ō
Butai: the ships, the planes, and the pilots that struck at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Throughout the country, the Japanese celebrated the apparent success of that raid, though Yamamoto was disappointed that Nagumo had been content to hit and run instead of “completely destroying Pearl Harbor.” Not only had the attack missed the American carriers, it had left untouched the American submarine base and especially the oil-tank farm—valuable resources that the Americans would have found it difficult to replace—though such targets were not part of Nagumo’s initial assignment. Despite misgivings about him, Nagumo remained in command of the Kid
ō
Butai because, as Ugaki put it, “the navy had no other adequate candidate.”
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