The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)

by Toland, John

  The precise course to the launching site now had to be worked out. On the basis of information from Hawaii, Kusaka expected U. S. Navy flying boats to patrol an area five hundred miles out of Pearl Harbor while other PBY’s covered five hundred miles south of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. The Striking Force, he concluded, would have to navigate undetected through this neglected part of the ocean by heading almost due east to a point approximately eight hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor. Here, the day before the attack, the ships would refuel for the last time and at dark steam south toward their target. At first light the planes would take off.

  Ordinarily the training and operation of planes was the responsibility of each carrier’s captain or squadron commander, but this attack had to be co-ordinated by a single flight commander. The man selected was the squadron leader on Akagi, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, whose flying skill was exceeded by his ability to lead. A thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the China War, he had already logged 3,000 hours in the air. Not all of the carrier captains could accept Fuchida’s commanding their planes, however, and it took Kusaka himself to bring them into line.

  The primary target, according to Genda’s plan, was Battleship Row, the two lines of battleships moored off Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor. First, torpedo planes would swoop down and launch their cargo at the outside row, then the inside line would be attacked by high-level (horizontal) and dive bombers.

  Kusaka didn’t believe this second assault could succeed without an accurate bombsight—the Japanese knew of America’s Norden bombsight but had been unable to acquire the plans—or a bomb capable of piercing a battleship’s thick armor without detonating. The answer to the first problem was constant practice with the erratic Type 97 bombsight, a copy of a German model; for the second, Genda, Fuchida and the engineers finally hit upon a simple solution: reconstruct battleship shells into bombs, with their outer faces so reinforced that they would not explode on impact.

  Not until the outbreak of hostilities in Europe had the Japanese Army General Staff thought in terms of a major war. Previously their operations had been limited to the Asian continent, but once England became one of the belligerents, they made preparations for action against her and possibly America. They dispatched one of their shrewdest officers, Major Kumao Imoto, to investigate the strategic feasibilities of Southeast Asia. He worked his way from Hong Kong to Hanoi, Saigon and on to Singapore. Upon his return he drafted invasion plans for both Hong Kong and Singapore.

  The following year other officers went farther south to probe possible invasions of Java, Sumatra and the Philippines. But the plans that evolved were vague and no practical spy network was even established. A smattering of Japanese nationals and retired officers was willing to serve on a volunteer basis, and there was some help from natives. Many Filipinos still carried bitter memories of Emilio Aguinaldo’s unsuccessful but heroic attempt to overthrow American rule around the turn of the century, and in British and Dutch territories the vast majority was in favor of an overthrow of white domination.

  In December 1940—about the same time Yamamoto was seriously pondering the attack on pearl Harbor—three divisions in China were ordered to start training for operations in the tropics. A special unit, the Formosan Army Research Department, was established to collect all data on tropical warfare in Southeast Asia within a period of six months. It was a small group, commanded by a Colonel Yoshihide Hayashi, but the driving force was provided by the controversial Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who made a commonplace of eccentricity; once he had burned down a geisha house filled with fellow officers in a fit of moral indignation. With his roundish face, bald head and small, blinking eyes, he looked like the typical staff officer, but his brilliant maverick spirit inspired fanatic devotion in the younger staff officers. They revered him as Japan’s “God of Operations,” the hope of the Orient. Some of his superiors, however, had grave reservations. General Hitoshi Imamura, one of the most respected figures in the Army, saw the genius in Tsuji—but also the madman. A number of his peers, such as Colonel Takeo Imai, regarded him as a clever, fanatic idealist with a one-track mind who thought, like the legendary Kanji Ishihara, that he alone was right. Tsuji was, in fact, a protégé of Ishihara’s. He, too, was determined to make Manchuria into a Buddhist paradise of five nationalities living in harmony, but he wanted to go much further; he dreamed of making Asia one great brotherhood, an Asia for the Asians.

  Yoshio Kodama (who would be inveigled by Tsuji to plan to assassinate Prince Konoye by dynamite) first met him at the Nanking Army headquarters. He had a letter to Tsuji from Ishihara, and was told by Colonel Imai, “Oh, that crazy man lives in a filthy little room behind the stable.” Kodama asked Tsuji why he lived alone in such squalor.

  “These headquarters officers are all rotten,” Tsuji answered with disgust. “They are only working for their medals. Every night they go to parties and play with geishas. Since the China Incident, all the military have gone bad. They hate me because I know all this and speak out.” He did more than speak. He turned one fellow staff officer over to the kempeitai for “corruption,” who then committed suicide.

  On January 1, 1941, this colorful figure found himself in Formosa—exiled there, according to rumor, by Tojo, who had always opposed Ishihara—and involved in a seemingly useless project. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he threw himself wholeheartedly into his personal assignment, the Malayan campaign. Within two months, through various sources, he learned that the island of Singapore, connected to the tip end of the Malay Peninsula by a 1,100-yard-long causeway, was a fortress impregnable from the sea but practically defenseless from an attack in the rear.

  One of Tsuji’s chief assistants was a fellow eccentric, Captain Shigeharu Asaeda, an agile, muscular six-footer of twenty-nine. He had always wanted to be an engineer, but since his father was poor, he had drifted into the Military Academy because it was free. After graduating from the War College, he fought in China so recklessly that Tsuji sought him out. The two took to each other at once, for both burned with the same idealism and spirit of adventure. When Asaeda was transferred to a desk job in the War Ministry he became so bored that he abandoned not only the Army but his wife and family as well. He disguised himself in civilian clothes, took a new name, wrote a letter informing his wife and parents that he was “going to commit suicide in the Inland Sea,” and left Tokyo. He was actually off to join the Indonesian fight against Dutch colonialism.

  On his way south he asked Tsuji for help. Though Tsuji promised to keep his friend’s whereabouts a secret, within hours a disgruntled Asaeda was on his way back to Japan under guard. He expected to be court-martialed, but the Army, which did not want the public treated to a scandal, simply retired him from the service; perhaps his heroism in China tempered a harsher sentence. In any case, he again left his family and returned to Formosa to confront the man who had betrayed him. Such was the force of Tsuji’s personality that Asaeda found himself volunteering as a secret agent. He was to assemble firsthand information on Burma, Malaya and Thailand. With fanatic intensity Asaeda immersed himself in round-the-clock studies of the language and geography of each country he was to infiltrate.

  About the time Yoshikawa began operations in Hawaii, Asaeda set off for Thailand pretending to be an agricultural engineer. Judicious bribes enabled him to photograph key areas; and talks with hundreds of natives, some of high rank, convinced him that Thailand was the best springboard for operations against Burma, and could be taken over bloodlessly.

  The Burman border was closely guarded by the British, but after several months he managed to slip through and collect the material Tsuji wanted. By the time he returned to Formosa he had discovered terrain and climate peculiarities that changed the accepted theories of tropical warfare.

  In June, secret maneuvers were held on Japanese-controlled Hainan—a large island just off southern China in the Gulf of Tonkin—under the supervision of Hayashi and Tsuji. New concepts, based on information from Asaeda and re
search in Formosa, were tested. It had been regarded as suicidal to send transports jammed with men and horses through the suffocating heat of the tropics. Tsuji was certain it was solely a matter of training and discipline. His method of proof was uniquely his own. He packed thousands of fully equipped soldiers into the sweltering holds of ships, three to a tatami (a mat about six by three feet), and kept them there for a week in temperatures up to 120 degrees with little water. These wilted men, along with horses and heavy equipment, were successfully landed on open beaches under the worst (simulated) circumstances. A final mock landing was made under combat conditions by a battalion of infantry, a battery of artillery and a company of engineers.

  Now all that was needed was accurate information about the terrain and tides of the invasion beaches. To get this, Tsuji sent his one-man spy ring, the ubiquitous Asaeda, into Malaya itself.

  Though the Navy had always opposed a drive to the south on the grounds that it would lead to a clash with America, Admiral Nagano had submitted an official proposal in mid-June advocating an advance into southern Indochina whether it would take force or not. As it happened, no force was needed against the Vichy government, but the act led to the freezing of Japan’s assets in the United States and made war against the West appear inevitable. At first Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama disapproved plans to prepare operations at once to seize Southeast Asia but on August 23 he succumbed to pressure.

  There was similar resistance in the Navy high command to Operation Z, led by the chief of the Operations Section, Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka. Late that summer he debated the risks involved with Yamamoto’s “foggy staff officer,” Captain Kuroshima. Tomioka charged that the southern campaign was being short-changed; too much was being thrown into Operation Z, which might be a totally wasted effort. What if the attack planes found Pearl Harbor empty? His blood was as hot as Kuroshima’s and their differences almost led to a fistfight but they parted friends, with the latter beginning to doubt his own arguments.

  Yamamoto had no doubts whatsoever and the opposition from Tokyo made him more steadfast. One day he remarked to his chess partner, Watanabe, “I will just have to resign.” Watanabe grinned. But this was not a passing mood. The admiral had made up his mind to use the threat of resignation as a last resort.

  Training for the air attack on Pearl Harbor continued at an accelerated pace on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four major islands, famed for its active volcanoes, men of warlike spirit, and pornography. Except for those involved in the planning, no one, not even the captains of the carriers, knew what the target would be. The fighter pilots at Saeki Air Base only knew they were being prepared for some great air assault involving all the fighter planes of four carriers. The dive bombers were located some 150 miles down the coast at Tominaka Air Base. Here the men were specializing in night attacks and accuracy, using as targets towed rafts which made a heavy wake.

  The other fliers were near the mouth of Kagoshima Bay in the south. They had to double as high-level and torpedo bombers. Torpedo practice was more exhilarating, for they had instructions to do what almost every pilot longed to do—buzz civilians and stunt around buildings. Each plane had a crew of three: pilot, observer (who also acted as bombardier) and radioman (who doubled as gunner). It would fly over a mountain some 5,000 feet high behind Kagoshima City, then zoom down, playing tag with the Yamagataya Department Store and the railroad station and dodging between telephone poles and smokestacks before suddenly dropping to an altitude of 25 feet when it reached the piers. Here the observer pulled a toggle which supposedly launched a torpedo at a breakwater (Battleship Row) about three hundred yards away. Then the plane made a sharp right turn to avoid slamming into Mount Sakurajima, an active volcano on a little island in the bay, and continued, skimming the water, scaring the wits out of every fishing-boat skipper who had the misfortune to be nearby. It was great fun and it was legal. But the people of Kagoshima made numerous complaints. Couldn’t the Navy control its young hotheads who were practically tearing the roof off the Hirano restaurant just to impress the geishas?

  Genda had picked Kagoshima City—home of the lusty hero, Saigoǁ —because it presented most of the problems the torpedo bombers would have to face at Pearl Harbor. They would have to fly over a number of smokestacks and buildings, just as at Kagoshima City, and then drop down at suddenly reduced speed to launch their torpedoes at Battleship Row from an extremely low altitude. The reason why Genda insisted that they practice at such a suicidal height was that the waters of Pearl Harbor were shallow, and if dropped from the usual height, a torpedo would plow straight into the bottom. But even a drop from 25 feet would not solve the problem and Genda was deviling the experts at Yokosuka Naval Base to come up with a shallow-running torpedo.

  Several hundred miles to the northeast on the rugged, spectacularly beautiful coast of Shikoku Island, a detachment of Navy men was carrying out another phase of Operation Z that completely mystified the inhabitants of Mitsukue. Every morning a dozen spirited young ensigns sailed out into Mitsukue Bay in fishing boats towing canvas-covered cigar-shaped objects about eighty feet long. Late in the afternoon the boats, mysterious canvas-covered objects and all, would return and the ensigns congregate at the Iwamiya Inn for dinner.

  The canvas-draped objects were two-man midget submarines which their pilots were slipping through the mouth of Mitsukue Bay in a mock torpedo attack on American warships, but even their instructors did not know this was supposed to be Pearl Harbor.

  On September 2 all fleet commanders and their key staff officers, as well as important personnel from Combined Fleet, the Navy General Staff and the Naval Ministry (about forty in all), gathered at the Naval War College in Meguro, a suburb of Tokyo, to conduct final tabletop maneuvers in the presence of several Army observers who had just been advised of Pearl Harbor. There were two general problems to be solved: first, to work out final details for a successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor; and, second, to make a detailed schedule, from the naval point of view, for occupying Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, the Solomons and the central Pacific islands, including ultimately Hawaii.

  Umpires were selected from the Navy General Staff and Navy Ministry and the rest were divided into three teams. Yamamoto himself led the N-team (Nippon); Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo of the Second Fleet led the E-team (England); and Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi the A-team (America). On September 5—the day before the Emperor recited his grand-father’s poem—the war games got under way. Yamamoto set his Striking Force on its way to Hawaii over the huge game board, but before the carriers reached launching position, Takahashi’s “American” search planes from Pearl Harbor had discovered them. With the surprise element gone, a third of Yamamoto’s planes were shot down and two carriers sunk. Despite these “losses,” Yamamoto’s plan was not dropped lest he make good his threat to resign and because Hitler’s attack on Russia had made the Japanese position in Manchuria more secure.

  Within a week the Navy planners completed a staff study setting November 16 as X-Day (their D-Day). An officer handed over about a hundred mimeographed copies of the forty-page study to Yeoman Second Class Mitsuharu Noda, a staff clerk on Nagato, and simply told him to take them to the flagship anchored off Kure. Each copy was in a black manila folder; curious, Noda glanced through one. It opened with the words: “Japan is declaring war on the United States, Great Britain (and the Netherlands).” Fascinated, he read the details of an attack on Pearl Harbor, complete with charts and codes.

  Noda and an assistant wrapped the studies into four bundles and clambered aboard a train at Tokyo station. They spent that night on a third-class sleeper to Kure, using the bundles as head and foot rests.

  The study called for four carriers and this brought protests from every staff officer in Combined Fleet and the Striking Force. At least six carriers were needed. Kusaka alone, however, was willing to do more than register a formal request for another two ships. He flew to Tokyo to fight for his convictions. After a
day of frustrating argument with the Navy General Staff, he sent a telegram direct to Yamamoto, without consulting anyone, complaining about the lack of support from Combined Fleet.

  Kusaka’s efforts were in vain and, moreover, his was the painful task of deciding which two carriers to leave behind. He selected the two smallest—Soryu and Hiryu. Their commander was an old friend, Tamon Yamaguchi, whose temper was only matched by his courage. Kusaka asked Genda to transmit the unwelcome information in person, but he showed such reluctance that the admiral summoned Yamaguchi to Akagi.

  The volatile Yamaguchi, a Princeton man, seemed to accept the decision, and sought solace in sake. He downed half a dozen shots and then, before Kusaka could stop him, charged into Admiral Nagumo’s private office with a bellow. Such behavior was not unique in the Japanese Navy on this level, and Nagumo tried to calm him by saying that although Soryu and Hiryu had to be left behind, their well-trained crews could be switched to Shokaku and Zuikaku. This still left Yamaguchi out of the battle and he shouted, “I insist on taking Hiryu and Soryu!” The burly Yamaguchi lunged at Nagumo from behind and hooked the little admiral in a headlock.

  Kusaka appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?” He tugged at Yamaguchi’s arm.

  Nagumo, face red but composed, said, “I’m good at judo so I can handle a drunk like this. Don’t worry.” He struggled to get free. Yamaguchi squeezed tighter. Nagumo got redder. Finally Kusaka got a headlock on Yamaguchi, pried him loose, pushed him into the next room and said, “Do what you like in here.”

  Yamaguchi’s anger dissipated. A cherubic smile appeared on his round face and he began prancing around the room singing “Tokyo Ondo,” a popular song.