The Moscow Option (12 page)

Yamamoto himself, though theoretically subordinate to the Naval General Staff, was in practice the decisive voice in Japanese naval circles. And to him all these options evaded the real issue. In his opinion the strategic situation in March 1942 could be usefully compared with that existing in March 1905. In both cases a surprise blow delivered at the end of the previous year (Port Arthur/Pearl Harbor) had proved disabling but not decisive. In the former case the disabling had opened the way for the decisive battle - Tsushima. So it should be in the latter case; the Japanese Fleet should seek out and destroy the American Pacific Fleet while it was still weak from the losses suffered at Pearl Harbor.

For when all was said and done Nagumo’s dawn strike had given the Americans a severe shock, but little else save a thirst for revenge. The oil-storage facilities had not been damaged, the American carriers had not been in port. And it was carriers that held the key to the Pacific. For the moment the Japanese had a numerical superiority of more than two to one, but this would swiftly vanish as the more productive American dockyards swung into top gear. In six months to a year the Americans would have enough carriers to build an impenetrable screen of their own across the Pacific; another year and a new fleet could be built behind that screen which the Japanese could never hope to match. The conclusion to be drawn was obvious. This American snowball effect must never be allowed to gather momentum; those carriers now afloat must be destroyed without delay. The Japanese Navy should strike east, in search of another Tsushima.

In February 1942 Admiral Ugaki, Yamamoto’s Chief of Staff, shut "himself away with an endless supply of green tea and meditated on the problem. He emerged four days later with the word - ‘Hawaii’. This choice of target was, like all the others, disputed. The Army refused to supply the necessary troops. Ugaki’s naval colleagues considered the difficulties involved to be almost insuperable. The Naval General Staff disliked the whole idea, and put forward a new plan for cutting the Australia-America sea-route by seizing Fiji and Samoa. It seemed as if the Japanese Navy would never make up its mind.

Yamamoto decided to cut the Gordian knot. Ugaki’s plan, for all its over-ambition, was at least a step in the right direction - east. Yamamoto forcibly declared his backing for a diluted version of the plan. It was not necessary to invade Hawaii; the tiny island of Midway, a thousand miles to the west, would prove a sufficiently certain bait for the US carriers. These, and not a few extra acres of sand and coral, were what concerned Yamamoto. He was ready to allow a minor operation beforehand to clear the Coral Sea and secure Japanese communications with the Solomons and New Guinea; he also promised Kuroshima that a westward move would be contemplated after the destruction of the American fleet. But he was adamant that the Midway operation should have top priority, and his prestige was enough to decide the issue. The Naval General Staff huffed and puffed and eventually acquiesced. For the rest of March and most of April planning went ahead for the decisive encounter with the US Pacific Fleet.

The size of the forces to hand seems to have gone to the heads of the Japanese planners. In nearly every department they possessed a numerical superiority over the enemy, and in many the qualitative advantage as well. Ten aircraft carriers against four or five, ten modern battleships against the none-too-modern survivors of Pearl Harbor, twice the number of cruisers and destroyers. Moreover most of the crews - particularly the air crews - had by far the greater experience of combat.

The Japanese planners were all too aware of these facts. It was almost as if the certainty of victory encouraged the securing of it in the most complex and interesting manner. The vast armada at their disposal was split into no less than nine combat groups, all of which would perform separate roles in the unfolding of the masterpiece. Two groups, an occupation force and its support, were to attack the Aleutian Islands and thus provide a diversion in the northernmost reaches of the Pacific. This would draw off, it was assumed, a substantial portion of the US forces. They would be ambushed by a third Japanese group waiting in the north-central Pacific. Meanwhile the remaining six groups would be proceeding towards Midway. A submarine cordon would arrive first, followed by the main carrier force. The latter’s planes would bombard Midway and then wait for the Americans to come charging up from Pearl to their doom. Behind the carriers would come the Midway occupation force, its support, an independent cruiser squadron, and the main battle-force under Yamamoto himself. By the time the Americans reached Midway most of the Japanese Navy would be waiting for them.

It does not, now, take much acumen to spot the fatal flaw in this plan. The whole detailed process rested on the one assumption, that the Americans would be surprised. To assume the opposite - something the Japanese refused to do until it was impossible not to - would have produced some very different conclusions. If the Americans were not caught unawares then the Aleutian diversion merely dispersed Japanese strength, and it would be the Americans rather than they who would do the pouncing around Midway. On carriers, moreover, three hundred miles ahead of any possible support.

Some of these fears were expressed when Ugaki put the plan through a series of war-games in mid-April. In one exercise a number of Japanese carriers were sunk by an unexpected American strike, but Ugaki, in his role as umpire, hastened to undo this decision by rewriting the rules. Some of the participating admirals were not so easily put off. Vice-Admiral Kondo, just back from the Java Sea, and Rear-Admiral Yamaguchi, who had commanded carriers at Trincomalee and Pearl Harbor, were not impressed by the plan. They disliked the widespread dispersion of forces, and argued that at least the carriers should be wielded as a cohesive force. Nagumo’s Air Operations Officer, Commander Genda, strongly endorsed their views. The plan should be rooted in a carrier-centric premise. As it now stood a few carriers had merely been appended to a plan rooted in the traditions of the battleship era.

This was perceptive thinking, but Yamamoto’s haste had blunted his receptivity. He remained adamant; Operation Midway would commence on 25 May. The die had apparently been cast. Captain Kuroshima, however, had been much interested by the criticisms, which had served to focus some of his own dissatisfaction with the plan. He began to ponder an alternative of his own, merely, so he thought, as an enjoyable recreation.

But Kuroshima’s scribblings were to be of greater value than he guessed. For in late April Yamamoto was reluctantly forced to abandon Ugaki’s plan. The reason - the only conceivable reason - was the Japanese discovery that their staff code had been broken by the Americans. Certain circles had suspected as much for several weeks, but only at this late date had they received confirmation.

The first hint had been vouched to Admiral Nagumo during his sojourn in the Indian Ocean. An aide had pointed out to the Admiral that the marked course of the two British warships just sunk by his planes suggested that they were heading for the precise point at which the Japanese Fleet had agreed to rendezvous. Nagumo had studied the chart and agreed that it was a strange coincidence. It had to be, or the staff code had been broken, an unbelievable hypothesis. Nagumo tucked his moment of concern into a small corner of his report and thought no more about it. Neither did two other commanders in different theatres who noticed similar ‘coincidences’. Only an eagle-eyed young staff officer in Tokyo, one Captain Yorinaga, drew the possible connection as he sifted through the various reports. He too thought it inconceivable that the code had been broken. But could it have fallen into enemy hands?

Each Japanese warship carried a codebook weighted with lead to take it swiftly to the bottom should disaster strike. Yorinaga went conscientiously through the record of those few Japanese ships sunk since the war’s beginning, and had soon narrowed his attention down to one. Submarine I-124 had last broadcast its position on 19 January, as standing sentry outside Darwin harbour in northern Australia. It had been assumed sunk, but where? Suppose it had been depth-charged either in or just outside the harbour? Yorinaga examined the available oceanographic charts and found that the water in-harbour was a mere 140 feet at the deepest point, quite within the limits of a thorough salvage operation.

In the middle of April Yorinaga took his suspicions to Rear-Admiral Fukudome, the Naval General Staff Chief of Operations. The latter was impressed and, without informing Yamamoto and the Combined Fleet Staff, decided to test Yorinaga’s theory. Information was relayed in code by Japanese warships in the Pacific pertaining to imaginary problems with the water-distillation plant on Guam. A week later one of Japan’s agents in Hawaii reported that the information had come through. The code had indeed been broken.

Yamamoto was informed of this by Fukudome on 28 April. He had no choice but to accept that the details of the Coral Sea and Midway operations, which had been flooding the Pacific radio waves for several weeks, were now known to the enemy. The former was postponed indefinitely, the latter would have to be rethought. Or so Yamamoto believed. But to this surprise it was discovered that Kuroshima had an alternative plan half-drafted. With the Coral Sea operation off, Yamamoto decided to advance the schedule for the Midway operation.

Berchtesgaden

He is a giant who has many dwarfs about him.
Yiddish proverb

In January 1942 the German military leadership had a new variable to consider: the recovery of its supreme commander, Adolf Hitler. For over twenty weeks, since the crash-landing on Rastenburg airfield, the Führer of the German Reich had lain in a fluctuant coma, oblivious to the war raging on his behalf. Now apparently the lesions were fully healed and Hitler, though still physically weak, was mentally ready to take up the reins he had let fall the previous August.

But he was determined to take no unnecessary risks. Once before, in late November, he had seemed on the verge of a complete recovery, and had attempted, against Dr Soden- stern’s advice, a premature comeback. There had been a recurrence of haemorrhaging in the medulla area, and he had succumbed once more to the coma. This time the Führer was determined to take things more slowly. His recovery offered further proof of that path marked out for him by destiny, but the narrowness of the escape had emphasised the frailty of the physical form which destiny had selected as its vessel. With so much still to accomplish it would not do to tempt the fates a second time.

Convalescing at the Berghof, amidst the Wagnerian splendour of the winter mountains, Hitler had a superabundance of time in which to think about the war and the way it had been conducted in his absence. He was not completely dissatisfied. Naturally certain errors could have been avoided had he been personally at the helm, but overall his service chiefs had performed as well as could have been expected. They were, after all, with the exception of Goering, only professional soldiers. And by and large they had only needed to implement the plans bequeathed by himself.

On 17 January Hitler was informed of the broad strategic decisions taken at Karinhall the previous September, and of the subsequent implementation of specific measures relating to those decisions. He agreed with the general line of strategic thought. Had he not suggested as much himself in the June conversations with Raeder and in Führer Directive 32? Certain details jarred slightly, as he informed Goering on 23 January. Hitler did not fully share OKH’s conviction that the Soviet Union had been comprehensively defeated. It would, he noted in passing, have been better to conquer the Ukraine before advancing on Moscow. He was also rather surprised that operations on the Eastern Front had been suspended in December. Could not the German soldier fight better in any weather, any terrain, than the
untermenschen
? Clearly the Army’s education in the National Socialist spirit was far from complete. When fully recovered he intended to take the matter firmly in hand.

As for Africa, the Führer agreed to the transfer of 39th Panzer Corps, but would countenance no further reinforcement of Rommel’s army. All the remaining panzer strength would be needed for the drive to the Urals and the conquest of the Caucasus. As for Malta, Hitler admitted to the gravest doubts about an operation which rested on such a high level of Italian involvement. Particularly as regards the Italian Fleet. At the first sight of the British Navy the Italian ships would scuttle back into their harbours and leave the Germans isolated on the island!

Goering was very reassuring. He agreed with everything the Führer had said concerning Russia. But what could you expect? Brauchitsch was a clown, Halder a conceited prig. And none of the generals knew how to take orders, even when they were the correct ones! But there was no need to worry about Malta. The Luftwaffe had fully learnt the lessons of Crete, and the force involved was much larger and much better equipped. He had just returned from a meeting with Generaloberst Student in Rome, and Student had assured him that the Italian troops were excellent, far superior to the rabble in North Africa. As for the Italian Navy - even they would find it hard to run away from the British forces still afloat in the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy had too many problems in the Atlantic, the Pacific and Indian Oceans to reinforce the Mediterranean. No, the only real problem as regards the Malta operation was the lackadaisical Italian attitude towards fuel and other supplies. It would be useful if Hitler could prod the Duce into more dynamic action when the two leaders met in February.

Goering was not Hitler’s only visitor. As was his usual practice, Hitler preferred to see his acolytes one at a time, just in case they all disagreed with him. Raeder was the next military chief to ascend the Berghof road, and he was full of grandiose plans to cheer the Führer on his road to complete recovery. After tactfully reminding Hitler of his decision to settle accounts with the British in the Middle East once
Barbarossa
was completed, the Grand-Admiral eagerly outlined his ‘Grand Plan’ for the conquest of that region through concerted German and Japanese offensives.