The Battle of Midway (7 page)

Yamamoto himself devoted much time and energy to the development of a long-range, land-based bomber. First in 1935 came the Mitsubishi G3M, which the Allies dubbed the “Nell,” a big two-engine bomber that at 200 knots (230 mph) had an impressive range of over 3,500 miles, so
that it could patrol widely over the central Pacific to search out American warships and damage or sink them. Then in 1939 came the G4M1, which the Allies called the “Betty.” The Betty had better armament than the Nell and at 230 knots (265 mph) was slightly faster, but both planes were vulnerable, for in order to increase range, the designers sacrificed both armor and self-sealing fuel tanks. A few Japanese advocates of air power, such as Rear Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, believed that land-based aircraft could successfully defend Japan’s island empire without the assistance of the fleet. Inoue went so far as to argue for the abolition of both battleships
and
carriers and for investing the nation’s treasure exclusively in land-based bombers. Yamamoto would not go that far. He supported the development of land-based aircraft, but he also backed the production of more and bigger aircraft carriers.
¹³

Organizationally, Japan’s aircraft carriers were grouped into carrier divisions (CarDivs) of two carriers each. CarDiv 1 was composed of Japan’s two biggest carriers, the
Kaga
and
Akagi
. Both were accidents of circumstance. The terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty had allocated the United States and Great Britain a maximum of 525,000 tons of battleships each, while Japan was limited to 315,000 tons. Quite apart from the perceived national humiliation of those limits, one practical problem was that Japan had several new battleships and battle cruisers under construction at the time, and their completion meant Japan would exceed the limits imposed on her by the treaty. That treaty, however, allowed both Japan and the United States to convert two of their big ships into carriers.
*

Until then, carriers had been relatively small, displacing 10,000 to 12,000 tons each and carrying only enough airplanes to provide cover for the battleships. But these new carriers were constructed on top of capital-ship
hulls, and they were enormous. Displacing over 40,000 tons each when fully loaded, they had flight decks over 800 feet long. Together these two behemoths could carry as many as 182 airplanes. One drawback was that because of their large armored hulls, they were also relatively slow. The sleeker battle-cruiser hull of the
Akagi
allowed her to make a respectable 31 knots, but the heavy armored battleship hull of the
Kaga
kept her to a top speed of 28 knots. This compared unfavorably with the 33-knot speed of America’s big carriers.
¹⁴

The 1922 treaty also affected the size and capability of Japan’s next carrier, though in a different way. Because
Kaga
and
Akagi
took up such a large percentage of Japan’s available tonnage for carriers (81,000 tons), Japanese designers tried to build a carrier that displaced less than 10,000 tons in order to squeeze it in under the treaty’s definition of a capital ship. It didn’t work. The
Ry
ū
j
ō
, laid down in 1929 and commissioned in 1933, simply could not accommodate all the necessary functions with so small a hull, and during construction her displacement crept up to 12,500 tons, though this was kept a secret at the time so that Japan would not be found in violation of the treaty.

In December of 1936, when the government formally renounced the Washington Treaty, Japan embarked on a naval expansion program that produced four new big-deck carriers in as many years: the
S
ō
ry
ū
and the
Hiry
ū
, each of them displacing just under 20,000 tons when fully loaded and capable of carrying sixty-three airplanes each, and the
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
, at 32,000 tons and capable of carrying seventy-two planes each. These last two were commissioned in 1941, only four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By the end of 1941, the Japanese had a total of ten carriers, which were collectively capable of carrying over six hundred airplanes.
*

The idea that Japan’s six biggest carriers should operate as a single task group may have originated with Genda Minoru, a precocious and outspoken advocate of air power, who claimed that he got the idea while watching a
U.S. Navy promotional film of all four of America’s carriers steaming together. The film was merely a publicity shot for the movie-house newsreels, but Genda saw at once that deploying carriers that way for battle would allow a naval power to apply Mahanian principles of fleet concentration to air warfare. The formal proposal came from Genda’s superior, Rear Admiral Ozawa Jisabur
ō
, commander of Carrier Division 1, who proposed in 1940 that all Japanese naval air assets, both land-based and sea-based, be placed under a unified command as the First Air Fleet. Yamamoto was initially cool to the idea, and he was a bit miffed when Ozawa went over his head to propose it directly to the Navy Ministry. But after the Naval General Staff approved it in April, 1941, Yamamoto willingly implemented the new organization. Five months later, when the new
Sh
ō
kaku
and
Zuikaku
joined the fleet, he grouped all six of the big carriers into a single command—the Kid
ō
Butai.
¹⁵

The commander of this awesome concentration of naval air power was Vice Admiral Nagumo Ch
ū
ichi. Four years younger than Yamamoto (the same age difference as between Ernie King and Chester Nimitz), Nagumo was a graduate of the Torpedo School, and for most of his career had been affiliated with the fleet faction, less because of a strong commitment to its ideology than because it was the dominant faction of the Navy leadership and therefore helpful to him professionally. That put him on the opposite
side of most interservice arguments from Yamamoto and contributed to a strained command relationship with his boss. Moreover, unlike the austere and stoic Yamamoto, Nagumo was a worrier by nature who fretted over even small details. Occasionally he would call junior officers into his office to solicit reassurance from them that things were progressing as they should. His official photograph depicts him staring rather perplexedly into the camera lens as if he were unsure why he was there. Genda was unimpressed with him and asserted that although Nagumo “was thought to be very gallant and brave[.] actually he was very cautious.” Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Ugaki Matome, agreed, confiding to his diary that Nagumo was insufficiently bold to be a successful commander. “He is not fully prepared yet to advance in the face of death and gain results two or three times as great as his cost by jumping into the jaws of death.” Nagumo, in short, was no gambler.
¹⁶

Vice Admiral Nagumo Ch
ū
ichi commanded the six big carriers of the Fleet Striking Force—the Kid
ō
Butai—from the attack on Pearl Harbor through the Battle of Midway. (U.S. Naval Institute)

If Nagumo was not prepared to “jump into the jaws of death,” Yamamoto was. It was the gambler Yamamoto who conceived of, and then insisted upon, the Pearl Harbor operation. The government made the decision for war in October of 1941. While it was true enough that “those damn fools in the Army” (to repeat Yamamoto’s phrase) were the initial champions of war, junior and middle-grade officers of the Imperial Navy’s fleet faction proved enthusiastic partners. By 1941 opposing war within the Navy had become, in the words of one admiral, “like rowing a boat against the current … above Niagara Falls.” To gain access to the resources of South Asia, the plan was to strike south and occupy not only the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, including its citadel at Singapore, but also the American-held Philippines. The planners accepted the fact that this meant war with Britain, Holland, and the United States, but they were not deterred.
¹⁷

Yamamoto insisted that since Japan was to fight the United States, it was essential to begin with a preemptive strike against the American battle fleet. “The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S.,” he wrote to the Navy Ministry in January 1941, “is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the U.S. Navy and her people goes down to such an extent that it cannot be recovered.” When members of the Naval General Staff balked at so dramatic
a move, Yamamoto let it be known that unless his plan was adopted, he and his entire staff would resign. That settled the matter. Though the strategic objective was the resource base in South Asia, the war would begin with an attack on Pearl Harbor, and the instrument of that strike would be the Kid
ō
Butai under Nagumo Ch
ū
ichi.
¹⁸

When the six carriers of the Kid
ō
Butai departed the Kurile Islands in the far north of Japan for Pearl Harbor, their hangar decks were packed with some of the best combat aircraft in the world. Airplane development in Japan had come a long way in a short time. Though Japan had begun designing and building her own battleships as early as 1910, she did not cast off her dependence on foreign designers and begin to produce her own combat aircraft until 1932. All-metal monoplanes replaced the cloth-covered biplanes that had been the mainstay of Japanese (and American) naval air power. Though the aircraft industry in Japan was putatively private, the government asserted more and more control over production after the beginning of the China Incident in 1937.
¹⁹

The war in China proved both a blessing and a curse for Japanese aircraft design. It gave Japanese designers and engineers a vital testing ground for their combat aircraft. However, the experience also led the Japanese to underestimate the importance of armor protection and to place undue emphasis on range and maneuverability. Most technologies are a product of the culture that spawns them. The decision to minimize the importance of armor derived from a Japanese worldview that valued attack over protection. As a result, Japanese airplanes carried heavy armament but little armor; they could fly long distances on a single tank of fuel, but those fuel tanks were not self-sealing, which meant that a single bullet could ignite an explosion. Japanese combat aircraft were lighter and more nimble and had greater combat range than their Western counterparts, but they were also much more vulnerable.

Another weakness was that even in 1941 much of the work in Japan’s aircraft factories was still done piecemeal, by hand. One modern expert estimates that “half of all riveting and one-third of all sheet-metal processing in the Japanese aircraft industry was done by hand.” That was due in part
to the fact that Japan was still industrializing in the 1930s, but another major factor was the Japanese preference for quality over quantity. It seemed more important to them to have one hundred airplanes of the highest quality than two hundred that were merely adequate.
²⁰