by Craig Nelson
After the war, when asked by congressional investigators about this conversation, Kimmel claimed no memory of it, while another man at this meeting, Captain W. W. “Poco” Smith, said there was no talk of air attack, and that Zacharias was suffering from “clairvoyance operating in reverse.”
When Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura arrived in Washington on February 11, meanwhile, Roosevelt at a press conference tried to be welcoming: “Nomura is an old friend of mine. . . . There is plenty of room in the Pacific area for everybody. It would not do this country any good nor Japan any good, but both of them harm, to get into war.”
An American with a great deal of business interests in Tokyo at this moment was Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Wall Street banker Lewis Strauss. Strauss decided it would be a good idea to introduce three of his friends—the postmaster general of the United States, Frank C. Walker; the vicar general of the Roman Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America at Maryknoll, James M. Drought; and James E. Walsh, the superior general of Maryknoll (which to this day has extensive missionaries and charities in Asia)—to Japanese business colleague Tadao Ikawa, a banker who himself had many friends in high places, notably Prince Fumimaro Konoye. Calling themselves the John Doe Associates, this American group thought they could succeed in bringing peace to Asia where the US State Department and the Japanese Foreign Ministry had failed.
In January 1941, the John Doe Associates met with Hull and Roosevelt to insist that, if Washington restored trade, Tokyo would withdraw from China and renounce Hitler. FDR and Hull didn’t believe it, but asked the JDA to get a treaty offer in writing. On April 9, 1941, a draft said to be supported across the whole of Japan’s leadership was delivered to Cordell Hull. It was far from what had been promised, including such provisions as American recognition of Japanese rule in Manchukuo; Japanese troops remaining in China; and the halt of US aid to the Chinese Nationalists until Chiang agreed to merge his leadership with that of Japan’s Manchukuo governor, Pu Yi.
At a meeting at Hull’s Wardman Park apartment, Ambassador Nomura explained that he was a collaborator on this plan and eagerly hoped it would be the beginning of a new dialogue with the United States. Hull replied that Washington could accept neither Japanese troops ruling the Chinese by force, nor the demand to halt further American aid to China. Additionally, Japan had to agree on Hull’s four points: respect for the territorial integrity of all nations; noninterference in their internal affairs; equality of opportunity including trade; and nondisturbance of the status quo, except by peaceful means. The secretary then “said that I had observed every phase of Hitler’s conduct and utterances . . . and that I, in common with many others, have absolutely no faith in any statement or promise that he makes, but any world, subjected to his methods and his philosophies, which are rooted largely in barbarism, would be an unthinkable world in which to live; that he has no real friends anywhere and that he is not a real friend to anyone; that he would abandon overnight the most solemn obligation taken the day before, if it suited his purpose in the least. I then added that this Government cannot conscientiously sit still and see this unthinkable brand of government fastened on the world.”
In Japan, the JDA treaty draft was received on April 15 with great joy since, when Ambassador Nomura sent it to Tokyo, he left out Hull’s four points, making it more palatable to the government’s right wing. Only Foreign Minister Matsuoka realized something was wrong, telling an underling, “The draft understanding that came from America is appalling. . . . That thing has been written by Japanese. Everyone, including Prince Konoye, seems to think that the hardest part is over, that we just need to give the United States a positive reply. What fools! . . . I guarantee you, once we start negotiating, all sorts of problems are bound to emerge. . . . With the China Incident still going on, we cannot negotiate [with Washington] properly. . . . And if the negotiation fails, that will have given the military an excuse to start a war.”
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I. Panay’s launch, on November 1, 1927, had been ominous. Chinese bandits had stolen the grease to be used to slip her from Shanghai’s Kiangnan Dockyard and Engineering Works into the water, substituting a cheap replacement. Instead of launching stern-first, Panay slid sideways out of dry dock, coming to a stop halfway down the rails. This, as any sailor knows, is a dark portent.
II. In a year’s time, the army would meet its quota of 900,000 and retire the fishbowl, but eventually, 9,818,977—one-sixth of America’s males—would serve in World War II.
CHAPTER TWO
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A SINISTER WIND
At the same time that Tokyo’s Foreign Ministry was arranging for Admiral Nomura to become the newest Japanese ambassador to America, Admiral Yamamoto began planning to attack Pearl Harbor. On January 7, 1941, from his cabin aboard the thirty-two-thousand-ton battleship Nagato in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto composed a letter to Navy Minister Koshiro Oikawa that predicted “A conflict with the United States and Great Britain is inevitable.” After his cross-country American travels, the admiral concluded that Japan could not win a traditional war against a nation so mighty with industry, and so he could “see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy.” His plan, which he called Operation Z or Operation Hawaii, was “conceived in desperation.”
The admiral wanted a naval blitzkrieg to “fiercely attack and destroy the US main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the US Navy and her people [will] sink to the extent that it cannot be recovered.” Japan’s navy must “decide the fate of the war on the very first day. . . . In case the majority of the enemy’s main force is at Pearl Harbor, attack it vigorously with our air force, and blockade the harbor . . . on a moonlight night or at dawn.” All of Japan’s forces would have to be “firmly determined to devote themselves to their task even at the sacrifice of their lives,” including himself: “I sincerely desire to be appointed commander in chief of the air fleet to attack Pearl Harbor so that I may personally command that attack force [and thereby] devote myself exclusively to my last duty to our country.” As for any of his fellow naval officers who might criticize this plan as too risky, they needed to consider “the possibility that the enemy would dare to launch an attack upon our homeland to burn down our capital and other cities,” a devastation for which the navy’s cowardice would be blamed. Combined with the pressing need to fight Hitler on the opposite side of the world, this devastating strike, he was certain, would convince America to forfeit Asia to Japan.
Yamamoto’s plan was so inconceivably daring that it met with tremendous criticism from his fellow officers. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo summarized that, taking into account the enormity of America’s fleet, the great distance of Oahu from the Japanese mainland, and Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters, Yamamoto’s scheme was absurd. Instead, the Imperial Japanese Army should first invade Southeast Asia, then wait patiently for the Anglo-Saxons to draw nigh, where they would be annihilated in the battle that Japanese sailors had spent their lives training for, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s decisive confrontation of dreadnoughts, the Kantai Kessen.
Nagumo’s position was widely supported, even by Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome. When Yamamoto first told Fukudome of his Operation Z thinking in the spring of 1940, the vice admiral said that a much better strategy would be a decisive maritime battle between the fleets of Japan and America, followed by an air attack on Oahu. Some Imperial Japanese Navy leaders, though, considered Yamamoto’s scheme so crazy that it would come as a stunning surprise to the Americans—who in their right mind could ever imagine such a thing?—and therein lay its only chance for success. Even so, they expected their task force to lose a third of its ships to counterstriking US bombers.
Coincidentally on that same January 7 that Yamamoto wrote Oikawa, Pearl Harbor’s commander Admiral Richardson memoed CNO Stark on the subject “Situation Concerning the Security of the Fleet and the Present Ability of the Local Defense Forces to Meet Surprise Attacks,” which included, “Aircraft attacking the base at Pe
arl Harbor will undoubtedly be brought by carriers. Therefore, there are two ways of repelling attack. First, by locating and destroying the carrier prior to launching planes. Second, by driving off attacking bombers with anti-aircraft guns and fighters. The Navy component of the local defense forces has no planes for distant reconnaissance with which to locate enemy carriers and the only planes belonging to the local defense forces to attack carriers when located would be the Army bombers . . . [of which] neither numbers nor types are satisfactory for the purpose intended. . . . To drive off bombing planes after they have been launched will require both fighting planes and anti-aircraft guns. The Army has in the Hawaiian area 36 pursuit planes, all of which are classified as obsolete. . . . The ideal defense against submarines would be conducted by patrol vessels and aircraft working in conjunction. The district has no aircraft for this purpose.”
Navy Secretary Frank Knox sent a similarly alarming January 24 letter to War Secretary Harold Stimson, which predicted a carrier strike of bombs or torpedoes attacking the fleet “without warning prior to a declaration of war.”
Isoroku Yamamoto then followed up his original thoughts to the ministry with a more detailed proposal sent to the Eleventh Air Fleet chief of staff, Rear Admiral Takijiro Onishi, aboard aircraft carrier Kaga: “If we are to have war with America, we will have no hope of winning unless the US Fleet in Hawaiian waters can be destroyed. . . . This will not be easy to carry out. But I am determined to give everything to the completion of this plan, supervising the aerial divisions myself. I would like you to research the feasibility of such a plan in detail.”
Echoing the thrashing back and forth in the mind of Japanese leaders, however, the same Yamamoto planning this belligerent and unexpected attack on the United States wrote an anti-war letter on January 26 to the ultranationalist Ryoichi Sasakawa, pointing out exactly how foolish he and his political colleagues urging the fight against America were: “Should hostilities break out between Japan and United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.”
Moving forward with Operation Z, Onishi turned to his expert in aerial torpedo warfare, Commander Kosei Maeda. Maeda said that it would be extremely difficult for a great fleet to travel all the way from Japan to Hawaii without notice, and that it was technically impossible to use torpedoes in Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters, concluding, “Unless a technical miracle can be achieved in torpedo bombing, this type of attack would be altogether impractical. Such a difficult operation might conceivably be possible if parachutes could be fastened to the torpedoes to keep them from sinking too deeply into the water and lodging in the soft mud below, or if they could be launched from a very low level.”
In February, Onishi revealed Yamamoto’s plans to Kaga’s First Aerial Division staff officer Minoru Genda. As famous as any movie star, the thirty-six-year-old Genda was both an ace of the wars with China and the featured attraction of Genda’s Flying Circus, a squadron of stunt fliers that performed breathtaking feats of aerial derring-do. If Yamamoto was the most magisterial of the Japanese military leaders in this history, and lead pilot Mitsuo Fuchida the most indicative, Minoru Genda, as important to Japan’s victory as anyone else, was the most interesting, the wild card, and the man who would become, even beyond Isoroku Yamamoto, the key architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Fuchida called Genda “reckless,” and though he was first in his class at Etajima Naval Academy, more than a few of his fellow cadets thought him insane; his nickname among naval aviators was Mad Genda. Like Yamamoto, Genda believed the potential of airpower was woefully underestimated by the navy, which to take one example, employed Zeros only to defend. Genda thought fighters should fight—defending carriers, accompanying bomber sorties, and strafing the enemy with their machine guns. This naval use of aggressive airpower, combined with an offensive posture focusing on carriers, destroyers, and submarines, would become famous in Japan as Gendaism.
When Onishi handed over Operation Z’s orders, Genda immediately recognized the distinctive lyrical brush of calligraphy as Yamamoto’s. The pilot finished reading the admiral’s scheme and didn’t know what to say, so he politely commented, “What an idea!” and in true Japanese fashion, praised “Yamamoto’s daring plan and brave spirit.” When Onishi then said, “I want you to find out if it could be done or not,” Mad Genda had an immediate answer: “The plan is difficult but not impossible.”
Onishi and Genda then remembered a conversation from 1936, when both were at the Yokosuka Air Corps base. Genda had brought up the idea of attacking Pearl Harbor with flattops, having been inspired by a newsreel of four American carriers sailing in concert: “A new concept suddenly hit me. If several carriers were concentrated in one group, the time necessary for all of [their] planes to join up in a giant formation would be relatively short. . . . I saw this concentrated grouping as a rather good policy in order to prove a decisive blow against the enemy.” If the Japanese navy massed its carriers, it could launch “two big attack waves” of “about eighty bombers and approximately thirty fighter planes for protection.”
Genda wanted every carrier in Japan’s navy assigned to Operation Z, as he planned to include all three types of bombing—high-level horizontal; torpedo; and dive—as well as fighters. Such a great task force traversing the western Pacific without drawing notice, however, seemed an insurmountable problem—absolute secrecy, he realized, would be a necessity—and equally problematic was refueling at sea, a practice then still in its primitive stages. Genda also wanted, like Yamamoto, to re-create the great victory of Tsushima with a surprise dawn attack, since Japanese bombing technology wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to strike under cover of night. His plan was to begin with a devastating aerial assault, followed by a full Imperial Japanese Army invasion of Hawaii. He and Yamamoto were both fervently opposed to the one-way attack strategy then popular among Japan’s naval officers—notably the nonflying branch—which would keep their prized carriers five hundred miles away from the target and let any surviving air crews be recovered by submarines or destroyers.
Genda immediately ran into an argument over targets—“Aviation experts considered enemy carriers to be the primary targets,” he said, “while the gunnery staffs emphasized going after enemy battleships”—as well as the insurmountable engineering problem Maeda had warned about. The waters of Pearl Harbor averaged thirty-nine feet deep, but Japan’s best torpedoes dropped by its ace pilots needed ninety-eight feet of clearance before they leveled to begin their run to target. In shallow depths, torpedoes would propel themselves into the mud and be useless.
Two months after receiving Yamamoto’s orders, Onishi replied in March with Genda’s recommendations, which gave up on torpedoes and relied solely on dive-bombing and high-altitude level bombing. Yamamoto was deflated, telling his staff, “Since we cannot use a torpedo attack because of the shallowness of the water, we cannot expect to obtain the results we desire. Therefore, we probably have no choice but to give up the air-attack operation.” The commander said none of this to Genda and Onishi, though; instead, he criticized their shortsightedness, insisting that torpedoes could be adjusted, and pilots could be trained.
Under Genda’s plan, the Imperial Japanese Navy created the First Air Fleet on April 10. Gendaism had carried the day, with over two hundred planes assigned to his one strike force, which united the first carrier division of Akagi and Kaga (each weighing just shy of twenty-seven thousand tons and sailed by two-thousand-man crews) with the second carrier division of Soryu and Hiryu. Each division included four destroyers.
That same month, Japanese navigators studied which ships had crossed the Pacific over the past ten yea
rs. They discovered that not one had traveled in November and December at latitude forty degrees north because the seas on that route were so rough.
Yamamoto’s staff officer, Captain Kameto Kuroshima, would be the third key to Operation Z’s success. The son of a poor Hiroshima mason, Kuroshima was tall, gaunt, and bald, with such a severe mien that his fellow officers called him Ganji (Gandhi). He rarely bathed, smoked until he left a trail of ash everywhere he went, and when he needed to concentrate, Ganji spent days, naked, in an incense-filled room. But these eccentricities were part of a mind unlike others in the Japanese navy, and Yamamoto prized Kuroshima for his creativity and his refusal to be just another saluting yes-man. When it came to Operation Z, Kuroshima was nearly alone in sharing Yamamoto’s unbridled enthusiasm and would prove essential in working the political levers of the navy’s senior hierarchy. The newest obstacle they faced was the admiral given command of the First Air Fleet that would execute Operation Z; a staunch traditionalist who had indeed been one of the harshest of Yamamoto’s critics: Chuichi Nagumo
In April, Kuroshima went to Tokyo to discuss the plan with the operation section headed by Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka, who was wholly negative, telling Kuroshima that Yamamoto’s scheme was an inadmissible risk, and that Operation Number One could not spare the ships required for an attack on Hawaii, especially considering that Japanese carriers had no experience in refueling on the high seas. The Naval General Staff instead planned a modified version of the great all-out battle that would ensue when the US Pacific Fleet sailed westward to block Japan’s southern advance. This included sending a sizable submarine force to Hawaiian waters to pick off pieces of the American fleet as she journeyed across the Pacific.