The Conquering Tide (23 page)

The admiral liked his food and ate with gusto. Finding little opportunity for exercise, he grew portly, as any man must who carries extra weight and stands just five feet three inches tall. But he had the sturdy build and bull-necked confidence of an athlete. His salute was famous in Japan, often captured in wartime newsreels. It was a casual gesture, almost laconic—his meaty right hand raised, straight up at the elbow, to the right edge of the visor on his uniform cap. His orderlies kept his uniforms in scrupulous condition: in the tropics he always appeared in whites, starched and pressed, with gold buttons and chrysanthemum-crested epaulettes reflecting the sun. He was not a dandy, but he had a part to play. Yamamoto was a warm man, always kind and considerate to his officers, yet he maintained an Olympian distance from the crew of his flagship, who snapped to attention at his appearance and did not twitch until he was out of sight. Only occasionally did Yamamoto show himself on deck, usually to raise his cap for a departing ship or a flight of aircraft overhead.

In the West, Yamamoto is best remembered as the prime mover behind Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the disastrous attempt to seize Midway six months later. In Japan, his legacy is more multifaceted. It owes more to his prewar career as a subcabinet minister and diplomatic representative. In the militarist regime of Japan's “dark valley” period (1930–45), there was no such thing as civilian control of the military; rather, the military directly controlled all domestic, economic, and international functions of government. Military leaders suppressed the political parties, stripped the Diet (parliament) of its power, placed the media under state supervision, and controlled the appointment of cabinet ministers. In both fact and effect, generals and admirals became politicians, civilian ministers, and foreign diplomats. Western historians are predisposed to evaluate Yamamoto's career using the same standards, benchmarks, and gauges one would apply to any professional naval officer in such nations as the United States or Britain. To do so misses the point. Quite apart from his naval career, Isoroku Yamamoto was a major player in Japanese politics from the mid-1930s through the outset of the Pacific War, and probably the nation's most revered public figure after the emperor himself.

Disdainful of the army and the ultranationalist right, Yamamoto had consistently opposed the Japanese radicals who used revolutionary violence and assassinations to achieve their ends. He was a leading figure in the navy's moderate “treaty faction,” known for its support of unpopular disarmament
treaties. His rivals charged him with courting fame and celebrity, cultivating newsmen to ensure favorable press coverage, and maneuvering for his own advantage in politics. There is undoubtedly some truth in these charges. If Yamamoto had not been so politically adept, he could not have survived the repeated purges of like-minded officers in the turbulent 1930s. But it is also true that he put his life on the line to prevent the slide toward war with the United States and Britain.

Yamamoto had represented Japan at the 1935 London Naval Conference, and advocated ratifying an extension of politically unpopular arms-control limitations. These and other positions had placed his life in jeopardy, as right-wing zealots explicitly threatened to assassinate him and attempted to do so on at least one occasion. In August 1939, he was transferred from the Navy Ministry in Tokyo to command of the Combined Fleet; the move was intended, at least in part, to place him beyond the reach of his would-be murderers. From his flagship, often moored in Hiroshima Bay, Yamamoto continued to insert himself into national policy debates. He opposed signing the Tripartite Pact (allying Japan to Nazi Germany and Italy), and had called for a withdrawal of Japanese troops from China.

Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese of that era who found the courage to oppose war with the United States. As a younger man, he had twice been posted to America (once as an English student at Harvard, once as naval attaché in Washington), and he had made a close study of the country's vast economic resources and industrial base. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”
⁹
He foresaw that the Pacific War was likely to become a long, drawn-out conflict in which titanic American production would overwhelm Japan's much smaller and less advanced war industries. Under no circumstances could Japan hope to inflict a total defeat on the United States. A war against the United States could be “won” only by a negotiated settlement favorable to Japanese interests. Against such odds, Yamamoto could “see little hope of success in any ordinary strategy.”
¹⁰
When it became clear that war was coming whether he liked it or not, he groped for a way to force it to a quick conclusion. His proposed raid on Pearl Harbor, he admitted, was “conceived in desperation.”
¹¹
The raid was an all-or-nothing gambit, a throw of the dice, designed to prompt a political calculation in Washington that war with Japan was not worth
the cost: “We should do our best to decide the fate of the war on the very first day.”
¹²

The raid was a spectacular tactical success. All eight battleships of the Pacific Fleet were knocked out of action, and more than 180 American planes were destroyed, mostly on the ground. The Japanese carriers escaped with the loss of just twenty-nine planes. That success, and the rapid conquest of Pacific and Southeast Asian territories in the early months of the war, lifted Yamamoto to new heights of popularity and prestige. With the power to dictate his wishes to the Naval General Staff (NGS), he forced through a plan to hurl the entire force of the Japanese navy against Midway Atoll in June 1942. The Midway operation, like the raid on Pearl Harbor, was an attempt to force the war to a premature conclusion by inflicting a knockout blow on the U.S. Navy. Instead, the gambit ended with the loss of four Japanese aircraft carriers and all of their aircraft, one of the most cataclysmic defeats in the history of war at sea. Though the debacle was carefully hidden from the Japanese people, Yamamoto lost his leverage over the NGS. The Tokyo admirals recovered their primacy in strategic policy-making.

The debacle at Midway left a mark on Yamamoto. His outlook grew gloomy, detached, and fatalistic. Japan was now engaged in precisely the war of attrition he had often warned against, without any means of escaping it short of abject surrender. Although he could never say so, Yamamoto must have known, by mid-1942, that his country was careening toward an apocalyptic defeat. In a sense, he would be vindicated by that defeat, but that could come as no comfort. He could no longer make his influence felt in Tokyo; he could do nothing but revert to his proper place as the navy's top seagoing commander. It was his duty to wage war against the enemies of Japan. He would do so until the bitter end, whatever that might be and whenever it might come. He did not expect to survive it: “Within a hundred days,” he predicted in September 1942, “I will wear out my life entirely.”
¹³

In the ranks of the fighting navy, there was a good deal of irritated chatter about the
Yamato
's long sojourns in port. She and her sister, the equally enormous
Musashi
, were the two largest warships in the world. Each weighed more than 70,000 tons when fully loaded, each carried a complement of 2,700 men, and each was armed with nine mammoth 18.1-inch guns. They had been constructed at grand expense by battleship admirals who believed that they would be the key to destroying the
American battleships in a traditional naval gun duel, and thus winning the naval war. But neither of the leviathans had engaged in combat, and neither would until 1944. They had spent most of the war at anchor, first in Hashirajima anchorage in the Inland Sea, and now at the great southern fleet base of Truk.
Yamato
was derided as the “Hotel Yamato.” An officer of a freighter later observed, “We were always being sent to the very front lines, and those battleships never even went into battle. People like us . . . were shipped off to the most forward positions, while those bastards from the Imperial Naval Academy sat around on their asses in the
Yamato
and
Musashi
hotels.”
¹⁴
The truth was that neither of the big battleships was of much use as a combatant vessel. In any theater of the war, they would likely come under air attack long before they could bring their guns to bear on an enemy ship. More significantly, the two superbattleships drank so much fuel (each had 6,300-ton tanks) that operating them at sea would strain the navy's resources, especially as the American submarines were beginning to take a bite out of the seaborne oil-supply line.

Admiral Ugaki left a running daily assessment of the war in his personal diary, which fortuitously survived the war. The invaluable document is a candid firsthand account of the Guadalcanal campaign as viewed from the flagship. In earlier pages, covering the beginning of the war through the Midway operation, Ugaki often recorded Yamamoto's decisions and directives. By the summer of 1942, however, the commander in chief appears to have taken a step back from the management of daily operations, leaving his chief of staff to pick up the slack. Ugaki began to write in the first person (“I decided . . . ,” “I ordered . . . ”) and often issued directives in his own name rather than Yamamoto's.

On August 7, Ugaki fretted over the news that marines had landed on Guadalcanal, and opined in his diary that they must be driven off at once. But a month passed before he grasped that the struggle for Guadalcanal was the decisive campaign of the Pacific War, and that it must take precedence over every other operation, even if it required suspending the offensive against Port Moresby in New Guinea. He complained of poor radio communications, which caused delays in orders sent and reports received aboard the
Yamato
. All along, he was plagued by a recurring toothache, which seemed to multiply his despair at the repeated failures to recapture Henderson Field.

Was the key to Guadalcanal the air war, the ground war, or the naval
war? In Ugaki's rolling analysis, he vacillated. On August 13, six days after the invasion, he wrote, “The most urgent thing at present is to send a troop [
sic
] there to mop up the enemy remnant, rescue the garrison, and repair the airfield.”
¹⁵
A week later, on August 20, he was convinced that the “most urgent thing” was to “render the airstrip unavailable by launching air raids and night bombardments.”
¹⁶
Four days later, he concluded that air reinforcements for Rabaul were “as urgent” as troop reinforcements for Guadalcanal, because the Japanese must “destroy the enemy air arm on the island as soon as possible.”
¹⁷
He grasped that the great distance from Rabaul to Guadalcanal was encumbering the air campaign, but he was willing to accept heavy air losses. On September 1, however, he concluded that the American forces must be defeated on the ground: “In the end, Guadalcanal must be secured by land warfare, even with sacrifices. There is no other way.”
¹⁸

After the indecisive carrier skirmish of August 25, Ugaki wanted the Japanese fleet to remain in the forward area so that it could engage any new American attempt to resupply Guadalcanal by sea. He noted that Tokyo had finally “become aware of the gravity of the situation” and was rushing ships, aircraft, and troop reinforcements into the theater. But the supply problem was growing more critical, especially with respect to oil—tankers were in short supply, and the major fleet movements into the lower Solomons had consumed a tremendous quantity of fuel. Truk did not yet have any fuel storage capability ashore. Ships sometimes drew alongside the
Yamato
and drank from her cavernous tanks.

Betraying a naval officer's archetypal disdain for the army, Ugaki blamed a lack of aggressiveness on the ground for the repeated failures to break through Vandegrift's lines. When Ichiki's forces were wiped out on August 20–21, he assumed that the men had fallen under attack on the beachhead and should have “advanced recklessly.”
¹⁹
The admiral had it exactly wrong. Ichiki had indeed advanced recklessly, against a heavily fortified riverbank, and his 800 men had been annihilated by the marines' withering defensive fire. After what the marines called the Battle of the Bloody Ridge in mid-September, when General Kawaguchi's forces were repulsed, with heavy losses, and forced to retreat to the west, Ugaki's army liaison seemed “at a loss about what to do.” Ugaki surmised that the army had “made light of the enemy too much,” which was true enough.
²⁰
But neither he nor his army counterparts suspected that their estimates of American troop strength on Guadalcanal were too low. The Japanese believed that about
7,500 marines were on the island; actually there were more than 11,000, and another 4,000 arrived on September 18.

With growing naval and army forces at their disposal, the Japanese commanders prepared an all-out campaign to break the six-week deadlock and seize the airfield. The pressure for a decisive victory emanated from the throne itself. After the war, Hirohito would portray himself as a powerless figurehead, but in September and October of 1942 he continually goaded his army and navy ministers to take the offensive and drive the Americans off Guadalcanal. Appeals from the
Showa Tenno
(“Emperor of the Era of Illustrious Peace, Light, and Harmony”) were tantamount to commands handed down from heaven. But neither the army nor the navy needed much encouragement. The struggle for the island had become an issue of national will. The Japanese army, in particular, had suffered an intolerable loss of face. Two elite Japanese army detachments had been defeated by enemy troops that they had insisted on holding in contempt. In early October, Imperial General Headquarters committed a full division of the Seventeenth Army, some 20,000 troops, to the campaign. The navy's Eleventh Air Fleet was heavily reinforced; a new fighter strip at Buin, on southern Bougainville, was made operational; and a new commander in chief, Vice Admiral Jinichi Kusaka, was dispatched to assume command in Rabaul. The navy would redouble and intensify its night bombardments, dispatching the battleships
Kongo
and
Haruna
with a large escort of cruisers and destroyers, to pulverize Henderson Field with 14-inch anti-personnel shells.