Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Nomura pointed out that Hull was asking for a great deal on short notice, and that such statements of high moral grounds, coming from a country with a history of allying with imperialist powers and treating its people of color poorly, seemed hypocritical to the Japanese. Troop withdrawal from China, meanwhile, was complicated by the threat of imminent Soviet invasion. Why couldn’t these difficult and important issues be discussed at the Roosevelt-Konoye summit? Nomura later told Hull in regard to the Tripartite Pact, “Many Japanese, and he himself, had not much liked it, but the Japanese Government of the day had felt that in face of the situation with which they were confronted, they must collect some friends somewhere.”

  While in Tokyo, war fever was infecting Japan’s military leaders, so, too, was doubt as to whether a war with the Anglo-Saxons could be won. The navy’s chief of operations, Shigeru Fukudome, released his assessment on October 5, which concluded, “I have no confidence . . . operations. As far as losses of ships are concerned, 1.4 million tons will be sunk in the first year of the war. The results of the new war games conducted by the Combined Fleet are that there will be no ships for civilian requirements in the third year of the war. I have no confidence.” Rear Admiral Takijiro Onishi said he was against Yamamoto’s Operation Z because, no matter what strategies she employed, Japan was certain to lose a Pacific war with the United States. He argued that Operation Number One’s attack on Southeast Asia, which included the Philippines, would make the Americans angry and perhaps even fight, but they might still be open to negotiations. If Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, however, that would make the United States “so insanely mad” that it would destroy any hope for the compromise peace that everyone else insisted would be the result. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, the man selected to lead the First Air Fleet against Hawaii, was so relentlessly negative about Yamamoto’s scheme that Fukudome tried to cheer him up by pointing out, “If you die in this operation, special shrines will be built in your memory.”

  Yamamoto’s behavior during the whole of 1941, with his insistent demands to attack Hawaii whipsawed by qualms that a war with the United States was unwinnable, inspired American historians to call him “the reluctant admiral.” In fact, his vacillation between belligerent pushes for war and impassioned arguments for peace was characteristic of nearly every Japanese leader at this moment. Two days after insisting that he wanted to avoid a fight with the Anglo-Saxons, for example, the navy’s Nagano wholly reversed course, announcing at the October 4 liaison conference, “It is no longer time for discussion. We should [set a timetable for war] right away!” Possibly this flip-flopping was due to another cultural tradition, that of having different opinions in private and in public, known as honne to tatemae—“true voice and façade.” It allowed personal disagreements to be overcome for public consensus, but also seemed to allow for everyone to agree with everyone else all the time. It made the Americans, reading their MAGIC intercepts and then listening to Nomura’s equitable statements, think the Japanese were as trustworthy as the Nazis.

  On the night of October 4, War Minister Tojo met Prime Minister Konoye at Tekigaiso, the prince’s magnificent villa in the Tokyo suburbs, where they dined against a postcard vista of Mount Fuji. “The United States demands us to leave the Tripartite Pact, to embrace [Hull’s] Four Principles unconditionally, and to stop our military occupation. Japan cannot stomach all these,” Tojo began.

  “The central issue is troop withdrawal [out of China]. Why not agree to withdrawal in principle but leave some troops for the purpose of protecting resources?” Konoye asked.

  The war minister huffed. “That sort of thing is called scheming.”

  Two days later, a joint army/navy meeting of midlevel officers concluded, “The army is saying that there is no hope [for diplomacy]. The navy still thinks there is hope, saying that if [the army] would only reconsider the question of military occupation, there would be hope.” Naval officers were developing the consensus that the army was forcing them into a pointless war against Washington to avoid taking the blame for its continuing failures in China.

  The exact same debate was reflected in a cabinet meeting a day later on October 7, when Tojo told Oikawa, “I know it is painful to your ears, but I must say this. Today’s economy is not a normal economy. Nor is the current state of diplomacy. . . . It should be our top priority now to fight our way through.” When Oikawa said the army was being intransigent, Tojo asked if the navy had gone back on the commitment its leaders had made at the September 6 imperial conference. “No, our mind hasn’t changed,” Oikawa insisted. “As far as our resolve for war is concerned, we’ve still got it.” Tojo pressed, Was the navy chief certain of victory? “That, I am afraid, I do not have,” Oikawa replied, in a brief moment of public honesty. “If the war continues for a few years, we do not know what the outcome would be.” Surprisingly, the always-belligerent War Minister Tojo now turned conciliatory: “If the navy is not confident, we must reconsider it. What must be reversed must be reversed, though it of course has to be done with the humble admission of our greatest responsibilities.”

  On that same day, the two chiefs of staff met, and Nagano was just as bellicose as he had been on the fourth: “I don’t think matters can be settled diplomatically. But if the Foreign Ministry thinks that there is still hope, I am in favor of continuing negotiations.”

  General Sugiyama brought up the rumors that had been swirling for weeks: “But am I to understand that the navy is not confident about war?”

  “What?” Nagano exploded. “Not confident about war? That is not true. Of course, we have never said that victory is assured. I’ve told the emperor this, too, but we are saying that there is a chance of winning for now. As far as the future is concerned, the question of victory or defeat will depend on the total combination of material and psychological strengths. . . . As far as the deadline for deciding between war or no war is concerned, the navy wouldn’t mind extending it a bit. But that’s not the army’s position, is it? You seem to be charging right ahead.”

  “That’s not true,” Sugiyama insisted. “We are going about it very cautiously.”

  Nagano then threw everything back onto the imperial system, arguing, “It’s not for nothing that the emperor reached the September sixth decision. We mustn’t now hesitate to pour more soldiers into southern French Indochina.”

  “I agree with you completely,” Sugiyama said.

  Tojo met that night with Konoye, again at Tekigaiso. The prime minister delicately asked once more, Couldn’t the army agree in principle to withdraw from China, with the details to be determined by the commander’s needs? Tojo flatly refused. Konoye tried to ease the war minister into a less rigid stance, so that peace could be found: “As far as the Four Principles are concerned, we should accept the principle of equal opportunities,” Konoye began. “There are, of course, special interests in China due to our geographical proximity, but that could be acknowledged, I believe, by the United States. As for the Tripartite Pact, to pledge [withdrawal from the pact] on paper would be difficult, but I am optimistic that something could be worked out in a direct meeting with the president. There remains only the question of military occupation [in China]. Could one not go easier on military occupation and not call it that? What would you do if this question alone became the stumbling block of the negotiations? Can we not find a way to stick to the substance of military occupation and still agree to troop withdrawal?”

  Tojo thought the Americans would never honor a Japanese right of special interests in China, and besides, why should the army make this huge concession with everything else about foreign policy, including this meeting with Roosevelt, being up in the air? Konoye was exasperated: “Military men take wars too lightly!”

  “You say that military men take wars too lightly,” an angry Tojo bellowed. “Occasionally, one must conjure up enough courage, close one’s eyes, and jump off the balcony of the Kiyomizu!” (Kiyomizu, a famed Buddhist temple built in 778, lent its architecture to a phrase tha
t means “taking the plunge.”)

  “Jumping into the abyss was all well and good if one were talking only about oneself,” Konoye tried to reason, “but if I think of the national polity that has lasted twenty-six hundred years and of the hundred million Japanese belonging to this nation, I, as a person in the position of great responsibility, cannot do such a thing.”

  Meeting with Oikawa the next day, however, Tojo admitted, “We’ve lost two hundred thousand souls in the China Incident, and I cannot bear to give it all up just like that. And yet if we do go to war with the United States, we will lose tens of thousands more. I am thinking about withdrawing troops, but I just cannot decide.”

  • • •

  That autumn, Minoru Genda began investigating how the immense First Air Fleet would covertly travel across the Pacific. A southern advance with a rendezvous at the Marshall Islands would mean fairly calm seas, less volatile weather, and nearness to Japanese military bases, which could provide safe haven in case of trouble. But Kimmel’s task forces trained in the south, and sunny skies meant lack of cloud cover to shield the armada from US patrol planes. Going straight from Japan to Oahu on a middle route, meanwhile, meant passing the waters of Midway and a guaranteed run-in with American warships.

  Genda’s solution was a route across the forty-second-degree latitude a thousand miles north of Oahu, significantly distant from the popular merchant route that sailed closer to the arcing shores of China, Russia, Alaska, and Canada. Additionally, Yoshikawa had reported that American patrols were meager to the north of Pearl Harbor—regardless of the countless memoranda given Kimmel suggesting this as the obvious route for an enemy attack—and the erratic weather of the North Pacific in late autumn/early winter would make any American patrols even more difficult.

  But that route came with a serious hardship. While the US Navy had bases across the Pacific to service its fleet—the perfect arc of Johnston Island, Midway, Palmyra, American Samoa, Wake Island, and Guam—the forty-two-degree northern route meant no bases at which Japan’s ships could refuel. In 1941, ships were capable of refueling at sea, but it was not common practice, on top of which, the Japanese would have to master refueling technique against a forecast of rough winds and waves at that latitude.

  Genda solved this with the same management technique he had used on every other Operation Z problem; he assembled the navy’s best—in this case, tanker captains—outlined the problem, and ordered them to solve it. The captains soon realized that the standard method—of tankers sailing before the ship to be refueled and floating hoses back to it—was fine for destroyers and cruisers, but not for dreadnoughts and flattops, which weren’t maneuverable enough. The tanker crews had to learn how to trail the bigger ships, with tanker crew aboard carriers and battleships to maneuver the hoses.

  Nagumo’s chief of staff, Ryunosuke Kusaka, decided to personally look into other solutions. He realized that seven ships of the task force—the biggest carriers, battleships, and destroyers—could travel from the northeast tip of Japan all the way to Oahu without refueling. Since a carrier had to drive into the wind hard enough to achieve thirty knots of wind to lift her planes, though, they needed to be fully fueled at all times. He added drums and trim tanks to every free space aboard the bigger ships, and he trained his destroyers to be refueled three at a time.

  The chosen route also created a puzzle for Operation Z’s supply officer, Commander Shin-Ichi Shimizu. Everyone in Japan’s army and navy was, during that autumn of ’41, preparing to invade the south for Operation Number One, and therefore ordering tropical supplies. Shimizu needed to requisition cold-weather gear for his northern voyage, while keeping the journey a secret. His solution was to order everything for every season and explain that, if war came, who knew where they would go?

  • • •

  The Imperial Army had conducted Operation Number One tabletop maneuvers from October 1 to 5 at its war college to analyze various permutations of attack and defense. Now the navy’s Combined Fleet held their tabletops from October 9 to 11 on Yamamoto’s flagship, Nagato, to iron out final details before formally issuing Combined Fleet Operation Order Number One, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s master war plan. The whole of October 13 was a conference devoted to Hawaii. The conclusion was that Operation Z needed to be finished and done with before Japanese forces heading to invade the whole of Southeast Asia were detected.

  Opinions and suggestions were welcome at this conclave up to a point, Yamamoto made clear; “I realize that some do not think well of my plan, but the operation against Hawaii is a vital part of Japan’s grand strategy. So long as I am commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Pearl Harbor will be attacked. I ask you to give me your fullest support. Return to your stations, and work hard for the success of Japan’s war plan. Good luck!”

  • • •

  Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye called his foreign, army, and navy ministers to a 2:00 p.m. meeting on October 12, his fiftieth birthday, at Tekigaiso’s art deco reception hall. The prime minister had decided he now needed to be as staunch as the war minister and used the threat of resignation to stop the militarists’ rush to war: “We must continue to seek a diplomatic settlement. I have no confidence in a war such as this. If we were to start a war, it has to be done by someone who believes in it.”

  Previously, the navy’s Oikawa had told Konoye if he really wanted peace, he had to be “prepared to swallow” America’s demands, and that the navy would support him. Now, Oikawa threw the decision back onto the prime minister. “We are at the crossroads of pursuing a diplomatic approach or war. The deadline is approaching. The prime minister has to decide. If he decides not to go to war, that would be fine by [the navy].” The discussion raged on, until Oikawa suddenly reversed course and announced that if Konoye was not ready to lead Japan into global war, he needed to step aside and be replaced by a prime minister who was.

  Konoye met again privately with Tojo just before an October 14 cabinet meeting—one day before the deadline for the end of diplomacy, and the start of war—and used everything he had to convince the war minister to withdraw from China, admitting, “I am greatly responsible for the China Incident. After four years, the Incident has not ended. I simply cannot agree to starting yet another great war whose outlook is very vague. . . . In order to make a great leap, we must sometimes concede [to greater forces] so that we can preserve and nurture our national strength.”

  But Tojo adamantly refused to concede: “I believe the prime minister’s argument is too pessimistic. That’s because we know our country’s weak points all too well. But don’t you see that the United States has its own weaknesses, too?”

  “It comes down to a difference in our opinions,” Konoye said. “I would insist that you reconsider.”

  Tojo: “I would say it’s a difference in our personalities.”

  At the cabinet meeting, Tojo passionately described how, if Japan acceded to the American demands, it would mean turning back the clock twenty years, becoming once again “Little Japan.” “For the past six months, ever since April, the foreign minister has made painstaking efforts to adjust relations,” he concluded. “Although I respect him for that, we remain deadlocked. . . . The heart of the matter is the imposition on us of withdrawal from Indochina and China. . . . If we yield to America’s demands, it will destroy the fruits of the China Incident. Manchukuo will be endangered and our control of Korea undermined.”

  The navy now refused to give its formal approval, which procedurally meant that the September 6 imperial conference decision had to be overturned. Tojo said this meant the responsible cabinet should resign, and insisted that Konoye make a decision once and for all if he was ready to lead his nation into war or step aside.

  The next day, the prime minister was enjoying a lunch of grilled eel with his closest advisers when the discussion turned to Hotsumi Ozaki, a Japanese newspaperman deeply knowledgeable on the subject of China, who was late for the meal. As they began eating without him, Konoye’s se
cretary hurried into the room: “I’ve got some awful news! Ozaki’s been arrested. They say he’s been charged with spying.”

  The unraveling of a Tokyo nest of Soviet spies had begun five days before with the arrest of Yotoku Miyagi, a painter who’d spent his teenage years in California, where he’d joined the Communist Party of the USA. After his arrest by Japan’s secret police, Miyagi tried to commit suicide by jumping out the interrogation room’s window, but as this room was on the second floor, he failed and was forced instead to confess everything, including that he worked for a Russian spy ring, which is now known to have involved at least thirteen men and three women and was epically cinematic, including a Prussian radio engineer, a Serbian Jewish journalist, Okinawa painter Miyagi, and Tokyo intellectual Ozaki. Its master, Richard Sorge, was born to a German father and a Russian mother; Sorge used his Nazi Party membership and service to the fatherland in the Great War to perfectly cover his encyclopedic acumen as a Soviet spy. His cover was working as a German newspaper correspondent in Tokyo, an assignment from which he could develop close friendships in both the Nazi foreign office and the Konoye cabinet.

  In May 1941, Richard Sorge tipped off Stalin that between 170 and 190 Nazi divisions would invade the Soviet Union beginning on June 20 (they were in fact two days late). Even as the Nazi consulate in Tokyo was hounding the Japanese to attack the Russians, and even on October 15 as his clandestine network was now falling apart, Sorge was able to tell the Kremlin that the Japanese were invading Southeast Asia instead of taking on the Red Army. Forty Soviet divisions, no longer needed to counter the Japanese threat, were shipped via the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Manchurian border to help defend Moscow.