World Battlefronts: Yamamoto v. the Dragon

(See Cover) A humble wireless set trembled last week with quasi-divine vibrations as the Son of Heaven himself sent Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Imperial Fleets, congratulations for the daring execution of a brilliant treachery.

Congratulations from Emperor Hirohito fix upon their recipient an incredible joy; but also a certain uneasiness. This is because they not only bestow praise; they also adjure the congratulatee to continue the good work—or else.

Isoroku Yamamoto had made a wonderful beginning. The four syllables of his name may in future be pronounced twice as reverently as the two of Togo. Japan’s greatest previous naval hero, victor of Tsushima, humiliator of the Russians. But if they are, it will be because Yamamoto, like Togo, follows through and makes his wonderful beginning just a beginning.

That will not be easy. Though he has depleted the forces arrayed against him, Admiral Yamamoto knows that his enemies are still great, that their regenerative powers may soon seem (compared to Japan’s) as formidable as those of the mythical dragon which, when his tail was cut off, grew not only a new tail on his body but a new body on his tail.*

But Isoroku Yamamoto is not fighting U.S. production. It is his job to consume the product. If he can consume it fast enough, he will have accomplished his mission.

His First Step. In order to drive the white man from Greater East Asia, Admiral Yamamoto must drive away, or preferably destroy, the white man’s bridge to Asia: his fleets.

Surveying his assignment, Isoroku Yamamoto saw that his greatest permanent necessity would be to keep British power and U.S. power from effecting a junction. If, with the help of the Army, he could break off the rungs by which the U.S. Navy has to climb over the shoulder of the Pacific to Singapore, his job would be much easier. Therefore the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake, Midway and Guam were important; but the penultimate rung, the Philippine Islands, was most vital to his cause.

Perhaps even more vital was the attempt, in which Admiral Yamamoto could be only an abettor, to neutralize, by a land attack down Malaya, the spot at which the great Navies would join—Singapore.

In these great projects, air power was the key and Admiral Yamamoto has a Navy which can turn that key for a short time. By this week his air power had either done or helped to do the following things:

> Sunk one U.S. battleship, capsized another, sunk three destroyers, perhaps one submarine; sunk two British battleships.

> Partly knocked out U.S. and British air power in Hawaii, the Philippines and Malaya by surprise bombardments.

> Established landings in northern Malaya and northern Luzon which promised to provide air bases (especially good in Malaya).

> Captured Guam.

On its own, his sea power had:

> Captured a claimed 200 U.S. and British merchant ships, including the 10,509-ton S.S. President Harrison.

> Cut the U.S. undersea cable somewhere west of Midway Island.

He had, in these initial projects, paid a not-too-exorbitant price:

> One battleship (a second damaged and perhaps sunk), one cruiser, one destroyer, perhaps 75 planes.

His Next Steps. To secure a quick knockout in the South Pacific the Imperial Fleet has a hard and dirty way ahead. It must at all costs maintain the two principal operations in Malaya and the Philippines. This means a hazardous and endless duty of convoying, supplying, transporting troops, a duty subject to raiding by U.S., British and Dutch submarines, planes and surface craft. The Japanese Fleet must also continue to harass the U.S. lines of communication. It must, above all, be wary of Allied offensive action, which might take many forms.

The first U.S. offensive action would doubtless be a splicing of the raveled lifeline. The U.S. Navy would doubtless try to relieve Wake & Midway, retake Guam. The first attack was probably already on the way. It may have been, and probably was, slowed by the losses at Pearl Harbor. Even if the U.S. Navy had to draw on some of its Atlantic strength, it would have to try to fight its way to the Philippines. The southern supply route, by way of New Zealand and Australia, might do for a time but not for long.

That job done, U.S. armed forces might raid Formosa, clamp down the blockade of Japan that strategists have long envisioned, and, if Russian air bases were put at U.S. disposal, might bomb Japan’s main naval and industrial establishments. From Alaska the U.S. Navy might punch air raids into Japan’s northern advance base at Paramoshiri Island, south of the Kamchatka peninsula. From Guam and Wake, regained, U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces could bomb the Japanese mandated islands and begin to forge a chain that would be stout and confining.

His Animus. In every way, by feeling, by training, by detailed experience, Isoroku Yamamoto has all his life been bent to one task: defeat the U.S. and Britain in the Pacific.

Isoroku Yamamoto is not the grinning, bowing, breath-sipping little man with horn-rimmed glasses, eager mustache and super-buck teeth which U.S. cartoonists have selected as Mr. Japan. He is not a monster who enjoys killing babies and takes rape after dinner instead of coffee. He is, instead, a hard-bitten professional man with a sixth sense—hatred.

He hates, and all his colleagues hate, the U.S. and British attitude toward Japan, and especially toward Japan’s Navy. He has heard for years the U.S. Navy’s boast that the Japs would be a pushover.* He knows how the cruiser Mogami, some of whose welded seams parted when she fired a full salvo on her trials, was exaggerated into a kind of saltwater One Hoss Shay. He knows how the little torpedo boat Tomoduru, which, because it was overloaded with guns and torpedo tubes and had insufficient displacement, tipped over on steam trials, was exaggerated into a great turtle-turning dreadnought, built from stolen plans.

He has long hated, and did much to fight, the imputation of inferiority which Britain and the U.S. made in insisting on maintaining the 5-5-3 ratio in 1934. Referring to a dinner in London, he says: “I was never told there that being much shorter than the others I ought to eat only three-fifths of the food on my plate. I ate as much as I needed.”

Unlike the Japanese Army, which has built itself a pretty sordid record in China, Isoroku Yamamoto’s Navy displaces better than its own weight in pride, and he has grown up with that pride. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in time to lose the first and second fingers of his left hand aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa in the great battle off Tsushima in 1904. Down the years he has absorbed and fostered the morale of Japan’s Navy, the crafty conservatism of Japanese naval statesmanship, pride in such things as the superiority of Japanese Navy bombings over Army bombings of Chungking, 600 miles from the sea.

His Men. Besides rice, the main staple of Japanese diet is fish. To catch enough fish for 72,000,000 Japanese to eat, both raw and cooked, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is inevitable that a huge number of Japanese should have got a sense of the sea. Like the isle-bound British, the isle-bound Japanese are primarily seafarers.

Admiral Yamamoto’s men, used to negotiating the rip channel tides and foul weathers of their islands, are fine navigators. They work round the clock. They service their ships smartly. They submit to living conditions at which U.S. sailors would mutiny: Japanese ships have super structures which look like pagodas piled on Shinto shrines astraddle Buddhist temples, and in these great upper horrors the crew lives, to save space, in quarters so crowded that most officers enjoy less room than U.S. enlisted men.

His Theories. “Japan,” says Yamamoto, “has always regarded the aircraft carrier as one of the most offensive of armaments.” How Admiral Yamamoto developed and perfected this concept was demonstrated all too clearly in his opening moves in the Pacific. The exact number of Japan’s carriers is not known: estimates vary between eight and 13. Japanese carriers are small, with space for from 24 to 60 planes, compared with U.S. carriers’ 80 to 100. They are fast, running to 30 knots. And they are daringly designed, with no island above the flight deck and funnels aimed astern like huge exhaust pipes.

Admiral Yamamoto subscribes also to the Japanese predilection for the torpedo as an attacking weapon. He considers the gun an ancillary weapon to be used mainly to create opportunities for decisive torpedo attack. The Japanese service torpedo is larger and more powerful than most (only equals: those fired by Britain’s Nelson and Rodney), and Japan boasts an unusual number of small torpedo-bearing craft.

The use of torpedoes launched by aircraft has been developed by both Britain and the U.S., but Pearl Harbor and the sinkings off Malaya (see p. 20) testify to the skill with which Admiral Yamamoto has taken up the idea. This idea, extraordinarily enough considering what it has accomplished, has not been used with any great success by the German Air Force, which prefers dive-bombers.

Admiral Yamamoto must have been trying a little Japanese wool-pulling when he surprised everyone at the London Naval Conference by defining the torpedo as a “defensive weapon.” “Doesn’t it depend, sir,” asked a U.S. naval technician, “at which end of it you are?”

His Person. The Admiral is an adversary who does not want underrating. Yamamoto means Base of a Mountain, and the Admiral is solid. He is deliberate, positive, aggressive. His passion for winning has made him the bridge, poker, chess, and go* champion of the Japanese Navy. Once an American asked him how he learned bridge so quickly. He explained: “If I can keep 5,000 ideographs in my mind, it is not hard to keep in mind 52 cards.”

Admiral Yamamoto is wily as only the Japanese can be. When he crossed the U.S. in 1934, reporters noted that he was short on English, that he answered them through an interpreter. Actually he spoke excellent English then; he used the interpreter to brush off embarrassing questions.

At 57, he is at the top of his powers. He smokes, drinks with gusto, works like a dog, ashore lives a Spartan life in a modest house in Tokyo’s suburbs. He has firm control of his heavy-lipped, firm-jawed face, and crops his hair short to look more like the man of action that he is.

His Wrath. The tasks which confront the Japanese Navy will not provide pleasant afternoon outings for Isoroku Yamamoto and his subordinates. But they will be sustained in them by a deep resentment, something which hurts down around the breastbone. The Japanese have not known an easy life, and they think that this is so because Britain and the U.S. have kept them from their ease.

This feeling is nothing new. It was over a decade ago that the Japanese General Kiokatu Sato wrote a credo to which Admiral Yamamoto would certainly lend his every nerve:

“If we do not break the ambitions of the American people and do not punish it for its unfairness, our souls will know no peace, even when they leave this world. We fought China for Korea. We fought Russia for Manchuria. The circumstances will oblige us to fight America. The war between Japan and the United States is the inevitable fate of our nation….

“The fury rises in our hearts….”

* This week Congress acted to expand the U.S. Navy by 150,000 tons. This amounts to more tonnage than was lost by both the U.S. and British Navies in the first disasters of the war.

* Actually, by no means all U.S. top naval commanders took a light view of Japanese power, especially under the conditions of a two-ocean struggle.

* A type of Japanese checkers in which the aim is to surround the enemy’s pieces, called go-stones, of which as many as 200 may be in play at one time. It is considered great practice in tactics.