Days of Infamy (3 page)

No, he had to give an even more crippling blow, a far more crippling blow, and in so doing hammer the Americans into so resigned a mood that only negotiation made sense, in spite of what he expected would be their towering rage.

Perhaps, he thought shrewdly, that rage can be turned to our advantage. An opponent in cards, when losing, tends to become reckless in his desire to win back what he has already lost. I must play to that and must take the risks as well.

Yamamoto stubbed out his cigarette and leaned over, looking at the charts spread out on the table. He traced his finger around the waters south and west of Oahu.

“I am convinced that their three carriers,
Enterprise, Lexington
, and
Saratoga
, are somewhere out here,” and then he drew a vague outline across nearly a million square miles of ocean, the vast triangle from Oahu northwest to Midway, over 1,100 miles away, and then down to Wake, which stood sentinel over the approaches into the Japanese-held waters of the Marshalls.

“Tomorrow we shall hunt for them there.”

There was an uncomfortable stirring, and he looked over at Nagumo’s chief of staff, whom he had retained, at least temporarily, for this mission.

“You object?”

“Sir, though I expressed concerns about your third strike on Pearl Harbor, I now bow to your wisdom. But this?”

“Go on.”

“As Commander Genda already pointed out, we are down to less than three hundred aircraft. Their three carriers, which we know carry more planes than our carriers, might be able to marshal three hundred in reply. They might very well be anticipating even now our moving toward them and be ready, aided by what aircraft survived on Oahu to provide scouting reports. We could be at a serious disadvantage tomorrow. They can surmise where we are; we might not be able to do the same.”

He paused.

“We don’t know where they are; they can guess where we are.”

“Not a single American scout plane followed us back from three strikes,” Fuchida said softly, voice hoarse from exhaustion, the hours of flying, and the smoke inhaled after crash landing. “On the island of Oahu they have, at best, a score of planes for scouting or any other purpose. We have annihilated their land-based aviation for the moment.

Admiral Yamamoto nodded for him to continue.

“I suspect they still do not know where we are, and their own radio broadcasts indicate panic on the island.”

“If we present them with a challenge they cannot refuse,” Genda interjected, “I would venture that by dawn their carriers might very well be in range of Oahu to provide support and to seek us out. In fact we might be able to force them into placing their carriers close to the island and revealing their position.”

“Go on,” Yamamoto said with the slightest trace of a smile, already anticipating what his trusted lieutenant was going to offer. The two of them were so often in synch with each other’s thinking.

“You mentioned an idea earlier today, sir,” Genda replied, his voice now edged with excitement as he pointed at the charts. “During the night, send our two fast battleships
Hiei
and
Kirishima
down along the east coast of the island. They can be in position before midnight. Bombard their bases on the east coast, swing around Diamond Head, and then attack their fortifications and then finally Pearl Harbor itself. The firing mission would take three or four hours at most, but render yet more damage and panic. It would seem to indicate, as well, a traditional move prior to an amphibious assault come dawn.

“I have read the reports on their Admiral Halsey. He is highly aggressive, bombastic, and pride alone will drive him forward into our net. He will launch in reply and thereby reveal his position not in a strike against our carriers but against the battleships as they withdraw from Oahu after bombarding Pearl Harbor. Once his position is revealed by that strike we then counterstrike, catching their carriers
as they are still recovering their planes from the attempt on our battleships.”

He smiled.

“We hit them turning their planes around on deck and below in their hangar, planes that are being loaded with gas and bombs; if but one of our bombs strikes them at that moment,” he paused for effect, “that carrier is destroyed.”

They had run simulations and war games based on such a scenario. What would happen if a strike could be launched against an enemy carrier while its deck and hangar bay were fully loaded with aircraft, fueling up and arming? The calculation was always the same: utterly catastrophic. It had been, as well, the argument of the battleship admirals against deploying carriers into the front line of action—they were simply too vulnerable if caught by surprise, while a battleship could withstand relentless pounding and continue to fight.

Well, that would be put to the test come morning, he thought.

There was murmuring from several in the room. It was one thing to be battleship sailors and talk about the glory of a ship-to-ship action at sea, but to risk such precious assets in a shore bombardment, when an enemy fleet might be farther out to sea, boxing them in? To use battleships as bait? It was a very unsettling and unnerving concept. Only an airman could have proposed it.

Yamamoto smiled in reply. It was, of course, exactly what he had been thinking most of the afternoon. Such a bold and open challenge, a nighttime bombardment by two battleships, which could indeed inflict yet more punishing damage… such an act could not go unchallenged. The American carriers would have to reveal themselves. And to risk a battleship, even two, if by so doing he could bag the three American carriers… that was a risk well worth taking.

“To place two of His Majesty’s battleships at such risk?” Nagumo’s chief of staff replied, the shock evident in his voice.

Yamamoto looked over at him. The response, of course, was expected. So many in the navy were still emotionally linked to battleships. The ships were so big, so expensive and precious, that though admirals of all fleets talked about the moment of encounter, all actually
shied from it, frightened of the risk even to one ship. The British and Germans had demonstrated that clearly at Jutland, when both at different stages of that battle back in 1916 threw away a chance for a stunning victory, out of a fear of potential loss.

It was not how Nelson, or most definitely for that matter, the legendary Togo, would view this moment. Nor how he himself would view it. At Tsushima, Togo had annihilated the entire Russian Imperial fleet by taking risks and being daring. Victory, not caution, was the goal of Togo, and it would be the goal of Yamamoto.

If disaster should unfold, if in fact all three American carriers did launch together and both battleships were lost, but in turn he could sink those three carriers and render yet more damage to the American bases on Oahu, the exchange would be worth it.

He stubbed out his cigarette.

“A task group then. Our two fastest battleships, escorted by our two lightest carriers,
Soryu
and
Hiryu
, which will remain farther out to sea in direct support of the battleships, are to attack the island throughout the night. The cruiser
Tone
will go as well, with her scout plane pilots trained in night observation and in marking targets with flares.”

No one spoke. They had repeatedly war-gamed night battles at sea, and the use of well-trained pilots, launched by catapults from two cruisers specifically designed to carry six seaplanes each,
Tone
and
Chikuma.
But never had it been actually tried for real, and in addition, against land targets off a hostile enemy coast. It would be a risky operation.

“The two escorting carriers will remain concealed farther out to sea, but ready to provide effective air cover for the battleships while the rest of our carriers will race to the west of the island during the night and be in position at dawn a hundred fifty miles to the northwest of the island, ready to react. If their carriers are to the south,
Hiryu
and
Soryu
will have the honor of the first strike. If to the west, our main task force will deliver the killing blow. When they move against our battleships it will reveal their positions first, as long as we evade any search planes from either their carriers or Oahu. If we can achieve that, we will sink all three without danger to ourselves. It will be a victory as significant as that we have already achieved.

“Regardless of outcome, the entire task force will then move to reunite by midday, farther to the west of Oahu.”

“And the ships still in Pearl Harbor?” Rear Admiral Kusaka, Nagumo’s chief of staff, asked. “They still pose a threat.”

“Try to raise contact with our submarines to move to block the channel,” Yamamoto replied disdainfully. “They have done precious little so far. Perhaps during the night and tomorrow morning they can prove their worth and tackle any ships that try and sortie.”

“Our oil supplies?” Kusaka asked.

Yamamoto looked over at his chief of staff. Rear Admiral Kusaka had originally been Admiral Nagumo’s man. Yamamoto had kept him on after replacing Nagumo and taking direct command of the attack on Pearl Harbor. There were times in these last few days he regretted that decision, wishing he had made a clean sweep of it, replacing these older men of caution with men of audacity like Genda. But on the other side of the issue, perhaps he did need a man like Kusaka at times. His concerns about oil still available were well justified. In one sense, after all, it was one of the reasons for this war in the first place, to be able to seize the Dutch oil fields in the East Indies. On a strategic level it was Japan’s greatest worry, and on this tactical level, of day-to-day operations, it was a key point of concern as well.

They had on board one day’s supply for high-speed battle maneuvers, three to four days at standard speed. Night refueling was a very risky operation. No. He had to move now. He would order the fleet oilers up to a rendezvous. Once topped off, his fleet would have enough fuel to make it to where additional oilers, civilian tankers pressed into service, waited to rendezvous in the Marshalls. The tankers with the fleet would then run to the Marshalls to take on fuel and join other tankers he had sent there for this very contingency. It could get tight, especially if enemy subs or surviving aircraft located the oilers, but he was always the gambler, and it seemed worth the risk to him even if the battleship traditionalists could not understand it.

He looked at his staff.

“Signal the battleships at once, and the carriers
Soryu
and
Hiryu
,
with their appropriate escorts. Mission signal is clear and simple. Proceed to the east coast of Oahu, bombard their Kaneohe airbase, then Fort Bellows,” and as he spoke he traced the positions on the map, “but reserve most of their shells for positions along the south coast and then general area bombardment of Hickam and Pearl Harbor. If that does not bring out Halsey, I do not know what will.”

He scanned his staff with an icy gaze.

“To your duty, gentlemen. It will be a long night.”

COMMANDER JAMES WATSON
sat back in the chair, closed his eyes, and tried not to think about what was coming next. His wife and mother-in-law were whispering in the next room, debating if they should treat his wounded arm or not.

Don’t think about it, think about something else, anything else, anything but today and the war.

And yet his mind would not cooperate. He had been in the Navy for over twenty-five years, nearly all that time without ever hearing a shot fired in anger, his job as a cryptanalyst, a code breaker, almost clerklike. Random chance seemed to have placed him aboard the ill-fated
Panay
, the American gunboat sunk by the Japanese in China. One could almost say he was one of the first casualties of this war, even though that wounding was nearly four years ago, back in 1937, a wound that had cost him his left hand. Retired out as disabled, he thought his life would be one of peace, teaching higher math at the University here in Oahu, until called back to service eleven months
ago, lured back into the world of code breaking in the basement of CinCPac, Commander in Chief, Pacific, where he and his comrades had labored away tracking and trying to break the secrets of Japanese military signals. If war came again, he believed, he would experience it in the monastic basement office where never a shot would be heard.

Some dream, he thought, flinching as another wave of pain shot up his arm. He and his CO, Captain Collingwood, had suspected an attack might be coming toward Pearl, in fact he had actually written an urgent “eyes only” memo up to the top of the command chain, warning that a Japanese fleet might be in range of the Hawaiian Islands on the morning of December 7. And of course no one had listened.

Incredible, he thought, wounded yet again, in nearly the same spot, the stump of my left hand, hit when
Arizona
blew up. Damn, if I had not been hit while on the
Panay
four years ago, chances are I’d have lost the hand today. Is Fate trying to tell me something?

Another thought flashed through: the last Japanese strike plane departing the target area after their third attack—an attack which had devastated the oil tank farms, shattered the main dry dock, and truly rendered Pearl Harbor ineffective as a base for months to come—the way that plane was flown: audacity, courage. He wondered. Could it possibly be his old friend Fuchida at the controls? Strange he should think of him now, at this moment. They had only met once, at the Japanese Naval Academy ten years ago, when he had paid a courtesy call there and given a brief talk. Their correspondence had stopped as the crisis between their two nations deepened. He found himself wondering if Fuchida was out there, even now, planning another attack. So strange. I’d kill him if given the chance, and yet I still do think of him as a friend. It made him think of the poem by Thomas Hardy, about killing an enemy soldier but if you met him in a pub you’d buy him a drink or “help [him] to half a crown.”