Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Japanese dive-bomber pilots normally cruised at thirteen thousand feet before diving to release their ordnance at around two thousand feet. Takeshige Egusa, who would lead the divers in the second attack, suggested dropping to fifteen hundred feet before releasing the bombs. This increased the chance of a direct hit, but also increased the danger of a pilot’s failing to pull out of the dive. Shortly after this change in technique, one of the dive-bombers in training crashed, resulting in serious discussions over Fuchida’s head. But the change in the release point proved so effective that regardless of the danger, Nagumo agreed to it; men would be sacrificed to kill ships.

  Dive-bomber pilot Zenji Abe would provide an astonishing coda in Pearl Harbor history. “I was in command of a bomber company on board the carrier Akagi. One day in October, all of the officers above the grade of company commander in our task force were assembled. . . . Commander Minoru Genda, the operation staff officer, came into the conference room and without formality opened the curtain on the front wall to reveal models of Pearl Harbor and Oahu Island, constructed on the full space of the wall. . . .

  “One day before leaving [training in] Kyushu, a party was held in a restaurant in Kagoshima. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, commander in chief of the task force, exchanged cups of wine with each of the officers, shaking hands with them. I thought that I perceived the sparkle of a tear in his eye.” The tear was from Nagumo’s deep and continuing pessimism about the prospects of the mission he had been ordered to lead, and the foreboding that he would never again see these young men.

  Back in Tokyo on September 5, Prime Minister Konoye met at the palace with Hirohito to prepare him for the next day’s imperial conference where, following Japanese tradition, he would bless the “Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire’s Policies,” which the government had approved two days before. The emperor was stunned when Konoye told him that Japan needed to prepare for war since, if diplomacy didn’t succeed by the first week of October, at the end of that month, the country would attack Britain, Holland, and the United States. Konoye then tried to describe the military’s plans for how this war would be won: “By occupying the necessary areas to the south . . . we should be able to consolidate an invincible position; by taking advantage of conditions in the interim, we can entertain hopes of being able to bring the war to an end.”

  When the emperor said he wanted the policy’s priorities reversed to emphasize diplomacy, Konoye said “that would be impossible.” The emperor then asked how war could be so close and yet he knew nothing of it. The prime minister said it was the fault of the two chiefs of staff. The emperor immediately summoned the navy’s Osami Nagano and the army’s Hajime Sugiyama to the palace.

  “If something happens between Japan and the United States,” Hirohito asked his military chiefs after they’d arrived, “how long does the army really believe it will take to clear things up?”

  “If limited to the South Seas, I would expect to clear things up in three months,” Sugiyama replied.

  “You were army minister at the time the China Incident broke out,” Hirohito pointed out. “I remember you saying, ‘The Incident will be cleared up in about a month.’ But it still hasn’t been cleared up after four long years, has it?”

  Sugiyama: “China opens a [vast] hinterland, and military operations could not be conducted as planned.”

  Emperor: “If the hinterland of China is vast, isn’t the Pacific even more vast? What convinces you to say three months?”

  Sugiyama bowed his head, refusing to answer.

  Emperor: “The high command understands that as of today the objective is to emphasize diplomacy, correct?”

  Sugiyama and Nagano: “That is correct.”

  At the next day’s imperial conference, Hirohito reclined on his throne on a platform far from the table where the ministers conferred, his divine and silent presence serving to bless the undertaking. After Konoye and the four leaders of the army and navy ministries each presented their views, the president of the Privy Council interrogated them with the emperor’s concerns: “Am I right in believing that everything is being done diplomatically at present to save the situation in that war will be resorted to only when diplomatic means fail?” Oikawa said yes, but Nagano and Sugiyama said nothing, prompting the emperor, for the first time in known history, to break the tradition of the imperial conference and shock the assembled leaders by saying aloud, “President Hara’s question just now was truly appropriate. It is regrettable that both chiefs of the general staff are unable to answer it.”

  Nagano finally admitted that Japan had a 70 to 80 percent chance of winning its first battles, which might mean a long-term peace, and that, echoing Tojo, “the government has decided that if there were no war, the fate of the nation was sealed. Even if there is war, the country may be ruined. Nevertheless a nation which does not fight in this plight has lost its spirit and is already a doomed nation.” Nagano later explained the militarists’ thinking: “Japan was like a patient suffering from a serious illness. . . . Should he be let alone without an operation, there was danger of a gradual decline. An operation, while it might be extremely dangerous, would still offer some hope of saving his life.”

  As their discussion veered more and more toward a declaration of war, the meeting was shockingly halted, as never before in history, when Hirohito unfolded a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his uniform. In his quavering, high alto, the emperor of Japan recited verse by his grandfather Mutsuhito, the great Meiji:

  The seas of the four directions—

  all are born of one womb:

  why, then, do the wind and waves rise in discord?

  The emperor had hoped the words of his legendary ancestor, so revered by the nation, would sway the government away from war and admitted later that he had read this waka “over and over again . . . striving to introduce into the present the emperor Meiji’s ideal of international peace.” After what seemed like hours of silence, Nagano said as an apology that he was “filled with trepidation at the prospect of the Emperor’s displeasure with the Supreme Command [who were] conscious of the importance of diplomacy, and advocated a resort to arms only when there seemed no other way out.”

  Meiji had ridden the revolutionary fervor of his people to build a modern nation, but his grandson was not as talented, or as forceful, or as lucky. In fact, when War Minister Hideki Tojo, his eyes wet with tears, later recounted the reading of the waka to his staff, he said its meaning was to encourage Japan’s soldiers and sailors to valor, even when the outcome was uncertain.

  • • •

  Prime Minister Konoye was now becoming desperate, as Ambassador Joseph Grew recalled. He “arranged a meeting with me on September 6 in order to discuss a meeting with President Roosevelt. . . . He, I think, saw the handwriting on the wall and realized that Japan was on the brink of an abyss and wanted, if possible, to reverse the engine. That is only opinion. Anyway, on September 6 he asked me to dinner, and he was very much afraid of any possibility of the military extremists learning of that meeting.

  “Ordinarily, a Japanese Prime Minister does not consort with diplomats. The contact is always with the Foreign Minister. Most prime ministers stay off it completely. But in this case Konoye wanted to talk the thing over directly. So we proceeded to the house of a mutual friend, and automobile tags on diplomatic and official automobiles were changed so nobody could recognize us. We had the dinner. All the servants were sent out and the dinner was served by the daughter of the house. We talked for three hours.” Konoye would only meet with Grew in secret because on August 15 an ultranationalist had tried to assassinate Home Minister Kiichiro Hiranuma, who publicly argued against war with the Anglo-Saxons. Even after taking six bullets from his assassin, though, Hiranuma survived.

  Grew concluded his memo to State of the meeting by saying that, if a summit between Konoye and Roosevelt could not change the two nations’ relationship, “The logical outcome of this will be the downfall of the Konoye Cabinet and th
e formation of a military dictatorship which will lack either the disposition or the temperament to avoid colliding head-on with the United States.”

  Hirohito was upset by a newspaper headline he read the following week, on September 10: “The British Museum Set on Fire by a German Bomber.” The emperor called his lord keeper of the privy seal, Marquis Kido, to ask if “there was any possibility that Japan might intervene as mediator between Germany and Britain in order to avoid any further destruction of Britain’s cultural assets.” Kido patiently explained that doing so would be somewhat difficult at this time.

  • • •

  From September 12 to 16, fleet officers gathered at Etajima, the Naval Staff College, to war game the opening salvoes of the Great East Asia War. It was a startling rehearsal. While the Third Fleet began its attack against Borneo and Celebes, the Eleventh Air Fleet based on Formosa attacked MacArthur’s air forces in the Philippines, and the Second Fleet left Mako in the Pescadores and the Southern Expeditionary Fleet left Hainan island off China’s coast to attack Singapore and other cities in British Malaya, eventually landing in Hong Kong. The Twenty-Second Air Flotilla, based in Indochina, would provide scouting and air cover, while invasion units would leave Indochina to attack British Borneo. The Gilberts, Guam, and Wake would be taken by the Fourth Fleet, keeping the United States out of Japanese waters.

  The whole of the sixteenth was devoted to a Pearl Harbor table run, which was universally judged a disaster. In round one, half of Japan’s carriers and half of her planes were lost; in round two, the Americans lost 4 battleships and 2 carriers, but Japan lost 127 aircraft. These results were based on everything going well—that the fleet would not be detected as it approached the Hawaiian archipelago; that the weather would be favorable to Japan’s aircraft and watercraft; that the US Fleet would indeed be present in total and at anchor.

  One of the participants taking the role of an American defender had attended the 1930s US war games simulating an attack on Pearl Harbor. He logically sent out a reconnaissance screen, which discovered the attack force. The Japanese airmen fell to an onslaught of antiaircraft fire and US fighter planes, while the Japanese navy lost a third of its armada.

  The answer, the chiefs realized, was a perfectly timed arrival near sunset at a spot 450 miles north of Oahu, followed by a mad-dash run to the south for the launch point, and then an equally brisk getaway. Success would require inadequate US reconnaissance, and a complete Japanese surprise. Minoru Genda: “The war games cut through the year 1941 like the sharp edge of a dividing line. They clarified our problem and gave us a new sense of direction and purpose. After they were over, all elements of the Japanese Navy went to work as never before, because time was running out.”

  • • •

  On September 24. Tokyo ordered spy Takeo Yoshikawa to divide the geography of Pearl Harbor into five sections and report on which warships were anchored in each:

  Henceforth, we would like to have you make reports concerning vessels along the following lines in so far as possible:

  1. The waters (of Pearl Harbor) are to be divided roughly into five sub-areas. (We have no objections to your abbreviating as much as you like.) . . .

  2. With regard to warships and aircraft carriers, we would like to have you report on those at anchor (these are not so important), tied up at wharves, buoys, and in docks. (Designate types and classes briefly. If possible we would like to have you make mention of the fact when two or more vessels are alongside the same wharf.)

  Why such interest in vessels docked next to each other? One pertinent reason: a torpedo could only strike the outer ship’s hull, so horizontal bombers and dive-bombers would be needed to destroy the inner targets. Because the details provided by Yoshikawa could be so useful for an aerial attack, this cable later became known as the “bomb plot” message during Washington’s various Pearl Harbor investigations. When MAGIC deciphered and translated the bomb-plot message on October 9, it caught the attention of army intelligence officer Colonel Rufus Bratton. He thought it meant “the Japanese were showing unusual interest in the port at Honolulu,” but his army counterpart, General Miles, didn’t consider it anything out of the ordinary, since Japan ran constant surveillance on American capital-ship movements, as did the United States on Japanese warships. Miles thought the most it could mean was a “Japanese intent to execute a submarine attack on these ships.” The director of naval intelligence, Captain Theodore Wilkinson, among others, thought that the Japanese could have been interested in these berthing details in order to analyze how quickly the US Fleet was ready to sortie. Bratton forwarded the memo to Stimson, Marshall, and Gerow, but no one seemed unduly alarmed. The US Navy’s plan, after all, was that, when war struck, “the fleet is not going to be there.” It would have weighed anchor to storm the seas.

  • • •

  At the liaison conference on a cold, wet, and gloomy September 25 in Tokyo, chiefs of staff Sugiyama and Nagano insisted a deadline must be set for diplomacy to end and war to begin. Konoye asked, “Is the October fifteenth deadline a very rigid demand?” Tojo replied that the imperial conference had marked early October as the deadline, so the fifteenth was already a compromise. Later the prime minister met with Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Koichi Kido, whom he’d known since childhood. “If the military insists on the October fifteenth deadline to begin war, I do not have any confidence,” Konoye said. “I have no other choice but to think of resigning.”

  His lifelong friend was shocked. “You are the one who called the September sixth imperial conference. You cannot leave that decision hanging and just disappear. That’s irresponsible. Why not propose a reconsideration of the resolution? You cannot start talking like that before crossing swords with the military. To leave the mess this way is irresponsible.”

  Konoye decided that, instead of immediately resigning, he would exile himself to Kamakura, a seaside resort thirty miles outside Tokyo. In the middle of a great crisis, the prime minister of Japan ran away from home.

  On September 27, Foreign Minister Matsuoka called American ambassador Grew to his office to pressure him over the Konoye-Roosevelt summit and Washington’s embargoes. “The key to peace or war lies in the hands of Japan and the United States,” the foreign minister began. “Should these two countries go to war, it would mean the destruction of world civilization and a dire calamity to mankind. The very idea that the head of my government should meet the president of the United States is liable to give rise to [Nazi and Fascist] misunderstandings regarding Japan’s ties. Such a step would entail really a great sacrifice on the part of the Japanese government. . . . From Japan’s domestic standpoint, it will be an event unprecedented in history for the prime minister to go out of the country on a diplomatic mission. . . . Eager as we are for peace, we will not bow under the pressure of another country, nor do we want peace at any price. It is a characteristic trait of our people to repel, rather than submit to, external pressure.”

  On September 29, the navy’s commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto, who had spent ten months planning a surprise attack on America, sent a warning to his service’s chief of staff, Nagano: “It is obvious that a war between Japan and the United States will become protracted. So long as the war continues to Japan’s advantage, the United States will not give up the fight. As a result, our resources will be depleted over the course of several years of fighting and we shall face enormous difficulties in replacing damaged fleets and ordnance. In the end, we shall not be able to stand up to them. The commanders of the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Fleets are virtually unanimous on this. . . . A war with so little chance of success should not be fought.”

  In Washington that same day, Ambassador Nomura gave Secretary Hull a memorandum from Tokyo saying that a meeting between the president and the prime minister would “mark an epochal turn for good in Japanese-American relations,” while refusing to have that meeting could lead to “most unfortunate” repercussions. Nomura told Hull that a Ko
noye-Roosevelt summit would make a tremendous impact on the Japanese public, diminishing the pro-Axis faction and encouraging the pro-American one. Nomura added that “if nothing came of the proposal for a meeting between the chiefs of our two Governments it might be difficult for Prince Konoye to retain his position and that Prince Konoye then would be likely to be succeeded by a less moderate leader.”

  Just a few months before, Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka had dreamed that his global diplomacy with the Nazis and the Soviets would leave Japan with no real threats to its imperial dreams, and she would vault into the ranks of the world’s great powers. Now her biggest allies were attacking each other, very likely driving Moscow into the arms of London and Washington, while constant contact between American, British, Chinese, and Dutch officials was creating an alliance countering Japan’s imperialism in Asia. When Matsuoka’s Tripartite Pact and treaty with Stalin were ascendant, Konoye had used him to quell the too fervid of the army’s generals. Now, he would use the military against Matsuoka. He dissolved his cabinet and formed a new one, leaving out the foreign minister. But, for Konoye to remain in power, the army’s supreme command insisted that he accept the status quo and reaffirm the Axis pact. He had no choice but to agree.

  • • •

  Matsuoka’s replacement as foreign minister, Admiral Teijiro Toyoda, came to an agreement with navy minister Osami Nagano at a meeting on October 2 that a US war needed to be circumvented. With the navy’s show of support for his moderate position, Konoye announced the end of his exile. But at nine that night in Washington, Hull told Nomura that, before Konoye could meet with Roosevelt, Japan would have to agree to Hull’s Four Principles, as well as provide “a clear-cut manifestation of Japan’s intention in regard to the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and French Indochina” and “further study to the question of possible additional clarification of its position” on the Tripartite Pact.