5
The first phase of the war had gone well for Japan—so well, in fact, that four months into it, her leaders faced the unexpected dilemma of not knowing what to do next. By March of 1942, virtually all of Japan’s prewar goals had been achieved: British Malaya and its great bastion of Singapore were in Japanese hands, as were the Dutch East Indies, including the oilrich islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. Most of the Philippines, too, had fallen. Some American and Filipino soldiers still held out in Bataan, but they would surrender on April 9, after which only the tiny island of Corregidor still held out, and it was only a matter of time until it fell. Thailand had capitulated early. Rangoon, the capital of Burma, fell on March 8, and Japanese forces chased the British back toward the border with India. All this had been accomplished with a total loss to the Imperial Japanese Navy of only five destroyers, three patrol boats, seven minesweepers, seven submarines, and several transports. Not a single capital ship had been seriously damaged, much less sunk. It had been so easy that in some quarters it led to what has been dubbed “victory disease”: an expectation that every new initiative would automatically result in triumph. It was not at all clear, however, what those new initiatives might be. Though the Japanese had planned the “First Phase of Operations” with close attention to detail, their notions of what might come next were vague at best.1
From the beginning, the Japanese had never imagined that they would be able to conquer the United States and dictate peace terms to the White House.* Rather, their goal was to demonstrate that it would be equally impossible for the Americans to conquer Japan. When the Americans launched their inevitable counterattack and attempted to fight their way westward across the Pacific, the Japanese planned to make their progress so painful that the Yankees would eventually decide that the cost of subduing them—in both blood and treasure—was unacceptable. Once that happened, a negotiated settlement was the only possible outcome, and in the course of those negotiations the Japanese would argue that they should be allowed to keep their Southeast Asian conquests. Their assumption that their Anglo-American opponents could be brought to the negotiating table after suffering reversals at sea was based in part on their experience in the war against Russia in 1904–5, when the Russians had accepted negotiations because they feared internal unrest at home more than defeat abroad. Such an assumption did not apply to the British or the Americans, however, especially after Pearl Harbor.2
There was general agreement in Japan that to bring about the kind of stalemate that they hoped would trigger negotiations, at some point it would be necessary to establish a defensive perimeter around her new possessions and dare the Americans to assail it. The question was, where? Initially they assumed that this defensive barrier would run from the Kuriles in the northern home islands, through captured Wake Island (which the Japanese renamed Ōtorijima) in the central Pacific, then south to the Marshalls and Gilberts. But after the easy triumphs of January to March of 1942, they considered an expanded perimeter that might include Australia, Hawaii, or the Aleutians—or all three. There was also discussion about Japan’s obligations to Germany under the Tripartite Pact. The Army in particular pondered both the wisdom and the timing of an attack on the Soviet Union. And finally, there was Yamamoto’s determination to eliminate the threat of more American carrier raids by engineering a climactic naval battle somewhere in the central Pacific that would destroy those carriers once and for all. All of these options were contemplated by a Japanese decision-making architecture that depended less on clear lines of hierarchy and authority than on subtle and constantly shifting political and personal relationships between power centers, relationships that were frequently jealous and competitive.3
In theory at least, the principal decision-making body in the Imperial Japanese Navy was the Naval General Staff. Until 1933, it had been subordinate to the Navy Ministry, but a “reform” that year—in effect a coup by the fleet faction—elevated the Naval General Staff to a position of de facto superiority, giving its members responsibility for armament, education, training, personnel, and command. The head of the staff was Admiral Nagano Osami, a 61-year-old career officer who had preceded Yamamoto in command of the Combined Fleet. Nagano was a battleship-and-cruiser man, a stolid, taciturn officer who had graduated from Eta Jima in 1900 and had been a staff officer in the Russo-Japanese War. Physically, Nagano (whose nickname was “The Elephant”) could hardly have been more different from the diminutive Yamamoto, but their career tracks were strikingly similar. Both men had served tours of duty in the United States and attended Harvard—in Nagano’s case, Harvard Law School. Both had been members of the treaty faction before the war and participated in the 1922 Washington conference and the 1930 London conference. They had both opposed Japan’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. After that, however, Nagano adjusted his outlook. By April of 1941, when he became chief of staff, he had concluded that war had become inevitable. In light of this fact, Nagano actively supported a thrust southward to occupy the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya, at least in part to prevent the Army from dominating the decision-making process.4
Admiral Nagano Osami (nicknamed “the Elephant”) headed the Naval General Staff in the spring of 1942. At a series of meetings in April, he and the rest of the staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s insistence on conducting Operation MI. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The first open split between Nagano and Yamamoto came over the wisdom of striking at Pearl Harbor. Nagano believed that it would be possible to seize the British and Dutch possessions in the South Pacific without drawing the United States into the war. He argued that the Pearl Harbor gambit was unnecessary and risky, and that it would pull resources away from the all-important strike southward. Yamamoto saw this as timidity. He opined to an associate that Nagano was “the kind of man who thinks he’s a genius, even though he’s not,” and told another, “Nagano’s a dead loss.” In the end, Yamamoto got his way concerning Pearl Harbor by threatening to resign unless his plan was accepted. It was a particularly audacious piece of extortion, and Yamamoto was bold enough to tell Nagano “not to interfere too much and thus set a bad precedent in the Navy.” It is unimaginable that Chester Nimitz would have made such a suggestion to Ernie King, or that he would have kept his job if he had. A bad precedent was indeed set: a fleet commander could make strategic plans on his own and force those plans onto his putative superiors by threatening to resign. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the rampage of the Kidō Butai elevated Yamamoto’s prestige higher, though the admiral himself had remained aboard his flagship in Hashirajima Harbor near Hiroshima.5
Now in March, with most of the war’s goals already achieved, Nagano and the Naval General Staff considered the next step. Their first instinct was to look southward. Nagano believed that when the Americans began their inevitable counteroffensive, they would use Australia as their base, and that could be forestalled at the outset by occupying the continent. Despite a successful raid by the Kidō Butai on the Australian naval base at Darwin in February, the Japanese Army was appalled by the notion of invading Australia. Because General Tōjō Hideki was both war minister and prime minister, the Army had a virtual veto over any plan that called for the participation of ground troops, and the Army had no interest in such an open-ended commitment. Australia was sparsely defended, as most of her soldiers had been sent to other theaters of war, but it would nonetheless take a minimum of ten divisions—some 200,000 men—to seize and hold just the northern coast, and Japan did not have ten divisions to spare, or the ships to transport and supply them.6
Nor was the Army interested in another proposal of the Naval General Staff: the invasion and occupation of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean. The expectation was that such a move would provoke an uprising by the restive native population of India and threaten the British Empire where its stability was most precarious. According to one member of the Naval General Staff, a principal purpose of the operation was to “carry out Indian independence.” In addition, a move across the Indian Ocean toward the Persian Gulf offered the possibility of linking up with Axis forces, as well as access to the oil fields of the Middle East. Though the conquest of Ceylon would require only two divisions rather than ten, the Army was not interested. Its main concern continued to be the festering conflict in China, where four-fifths of its active divisions were concentrated. If the Army looked anywhere for new fields to conquer, it was to the north rather than the south or the west. In the late fall and early winter of 1941, as the Wehrmacht drove toward Moscow, many Japanese generals anticipated the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and they did not want to miss out on the spoils when that happened. They concluded that it was necessary to hold troops in readiness “to share a victory when the Germans succeed.”7
The Army’s obstructionism bred resentment not only within the Naval General Staff in Tokyo but at Combined Fleet Headquarters on board Yamamoto’s flagship, where one of his staff officers complained: “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to! We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the Army will not agree to release the necessary forces.” Yamamoto’s logistics officer recalled that, “since the Army-Navy could not come up with a common agreement of effort on the second phase operations, the Navy looked more and more toward what it could do alone.”8
Faced with the Army’s refusal to support invasions, Nagano and the General Staff fell back on their plans to send the Kidō Butai on a hit-and-run raid against British bases in Ceylon. In late March, Nagumo took five carriers and their escorts westward, south of Sumatra, and into the Indian Ocean. (The Kaga, having struck a submerged reef, went to Sasebo, near Nagasaki, for repairs.)
Thanks to a warning from Allied intelligence, the British knew they were coming. In anticipation of the Japanese strike, Admiral Sir James Somerville mobilized his fleet, which included four old and slow battleships, but also two modern carriers—the Indomitable and the Formidable—and took up a position south of Ceylon, from where he hoped to threaten the flank of the Japanese fleet as it approached. He knew he could not slug it out toe-to-toe with the Kidō Butai; he hoped he might be able to inflict some damage with night torpedo attacks. For three days he waited. When the Kidō Butai didn’t appear, he sent two heavy cruisers—Dorsetshire and Cornwall—to the naval base at Colombo on Ceylon’s western coast, and withdrew the rest of the fleet to Addu Atoll in the Maldives, six hundred miles southwest of Ceylon, to refuel.
Two days later, on April 5, Easter Sunday morning, 315 planes from the Kidō Butai struck Colombo. The British commander there, Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, had sent most of the shipping to the north to get it out of harm’s way, and the two heavy cruisers sent to him by Somerville headed back for Addu Atoll. Layton also ordered out a squadron of Hawker Hurricane fighter planes—older cousins of the more famous Spitfire—plus half a dozen Fairey Swordfish biplanes armed with torpedoes for a counterattack. The Swordfish had performed well during a Royal Navy torpedo attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto the previous November, but they were helpless against the nimble Zeros. The Hurricanes, too, got much the worst of the encounter. In barely half an hour, the British lost twenty-seven aircraft, including fifteen Hurricanes, while the Japanese lost only seven bombers. The rest of the Japanese strike force, piloted by their superbly trained enlisted pilots, flew through the intercept and attacked the naval base, dropping their bombs on ships and yard facilities. They sank three British warships and wrecked the repair shops and the rail yard (something they had neglected to do at Pearl Harbor). The Kidō Butai was never threatened. It was not as decisive a blow as the one against the Americans, but once again the Japanese had demonstrated their air superiority over the West.9
Worse was to come. The two heavy cruisers Layton had sent back toward Addu Atoll were en route there on April 6 when a Japanese search plane found them and radioed their location back to the Kidō Butai. Within twenty minutes, Nagumo had eighty-eight planes in the air winging their way toward the reported coordinates.10
The cruisers never had a chance. Like the Prince of Wales and Repulse the previous December, they had no air cover and were therefore sitting ducks. Gun crews on the cruisers threw up all the antiaircraft fire they could muster, and the ships twisted and turned in the hope of confusing the dive-bombers, but with so many planes attacking—and from different directions at that—it was hopeless. The Dorsetshire went down first. Hit by ten bombs and concussed by several near misses, she sank in minutes. The Cornwall, hit by nine bombs, followed her a few minutes later. Once again, aircraft had proved their dominance over surface warships.11
The Kidō Butai was not finished. Three days later, on April 9, the Japanese struck again, this time at the British naval base at Trincomalee on Ceylon’s east coast. Again, the British put up all the planes they had—twenty-three altogether, including seventeen Hurricane fighters—but they were brushed aside or sent spinning toward the sea in flames by the Zeros. The British also sent nine land-based Blenheim bombers to attack the Japanese carriers. Five were shot down over the target by the patrolling Zeros; the others limped back with serious damage. None scored a hit.
As he had at Colombo, Layton sent most of his ships to sea to get them out of the way. The small aircraft carrier Hermes, with an escort of one destroyer, steamed southward along the coast. The Japanese found her nonetheless, and Nagumo sent ninety planes to the attack. The Val dive-bombers blanketed her with bombs, and the Hermes virtually disappeared under a rainstorm of hits and near misses. Within ten minutes, she and her escorting destroyer were dead in the water and sinking. After that, Somerville decided to send part of his force to Kenya on the east coast of Africa and took the rest, including the two carriers, north to Bombay, effectively surrendering the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal to the Japanese. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that it is not good policy to take excessive chances with the Eastern Fleet for the sake of Ceylon.” Having secured Japan’s southern flank, Nagumo turned the Kidō Butai back toward the Pacific.12
Even as the big carriers and their escorts steamed through the Straits of Malacca back into the South China Sea, the Japanese high command feuded over their next assignment. One option was to complete the isolation of Australia by seizing the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa—exactly what Ernie King and Franklin Roosevelt feared they would do. Even Japanese Army leaders supported these limited moves because they required fewer troops than the proposed alternatives.
Another claimant on the Kidō Butai was Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi, commander of the South Seas Force. Inoue until recently had been head of the Naval Aviation Division, and he was a ferocious advocate of air power, especially land-based air. For most of his career, he had insisted that airplanes had made much of the Navy obsolete. “The days of the battleship are gone,” he had declared in 1937. “It has been replaced by the aircraft.” Inoue even argued that the effectiveness of long-range land-based airplanes made carriers obsolete. If that were not sufficiently heretical, he had declared in January of 1941 that it was “impossible … for Japan to defeat America,” and that the United States could “wipe out Japanese forces.” After that bit of apostasy, he was dispatched to the South Seas command, with his headquarters on the isolated island of Truk in the Carolines. In part, his reassignment was an aspect of the reshuffling of commands in anticipation of war, but in addition, like Yamamoto, he was banished to sea duty for his unwelcome ideas and his unwillingness to keep quiet about them.13
It was Inoue’s Fourth Fleet, with support from the Kidō Butai, that had seized Rabaul back in January. He had been shocked on February 20 when only two of the seventeen bombers he had sent out against Wilson Brown’s Lexington task force had returned. After all, the ability of land-based aircraft to defend the perimeter of the empire was at the heart of his strategic vision and the foundation of Japan’s entire defensive strategy. Inoue’s shock turned to alarm after the Allied raid on Lae and Salamaua left him without enough shipping to continue the campaign. He notified both the Naval General Staff (Nagano) and Combined Fleet (Yamamoto) that before he advanced any further, he would need carrier support. He requested two carriers, but, given that the Kidō Butai was still in the Indian Ocean when he submitted this request, he declared that he would settle for the damaged Kaga, then undergoing repairs in Sasebo.14
Another demand on the Kidō Butai soon arose in connection with a plan to occupy at least some of the Aleutians, the long chain of frozen rocky islands that trailed out from Alaska across much of the North Pacific. The westernmost of those islands was within theoretical bombing range of the northernmost of Japan’s home islands; the occupation of at least some of them would serve as an early-warning system in Japan’s defensive perimeter and also prevent the Americans from using them to stage air raids against the homeland. Thus by the end of March, even before the Kidō Butai had returned from the Indian Ocean, Japan’s naval leaders were considering two separate initiatives that would require its participation: one to break communications between Hawaii and Australia by seizing Port Moresby, the Australian base on the south coast of New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, followed by an attack on Fiji and Samoa; and another to extend the defensive perimeter of the empire and protect Japan’s northern flank by seizing the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands.15
Complicated as this was, it would soon get much more so, for none of this took Yamamoto into account. The apparent success of his calculated gamble at Pearl Harbor and the string of naval victories that followed had added greatly to his prestige and had given him unprecedented informal authority in crafting Japanese strategy for the “Second Operational Phase.” Once the Kidō Butai returned from the Indian Ocean, Yamamoto knew exactly what he wanted to do with it, and it did not involve Australia, New Guinea, or the Aleutians. He wanted to finish the job that Nagumo had left uncompleted at Pearl Harbor.
Even before the Americans began their series of carrier-based raids on Japanese bases in the Marshall Islands and elsewhere, Yamamoto had concluded that it was essential to eliminate the danger of such raids by finding and sinking the American flattops. Though the Japanese public had celebrated Pearl Harbor as a great victory, Yamamoto himself, as noted above, had been hugely disappointed that Nagumo had not remained in the area long enough to wreck the base or to find and sink the American carriers. Nagumo had seen the American battle fleet as his most important target, and once that had been dispensed with he had broken off the raid. At the time, the young and aggressive commander of the Second Carrier Division, Rear Admiral Yamaguchi Tamon, blinkered Nagumo a signal that he had “completed preparations” for another attack, a not-so-subtle hint that there was more work to be done. But Nagumo was immune to such suggestions. Once he had recovered his airplanes, he turned the Kidō Butai around and headed for home. Had he launched a third strike, he might have destroyed the repair facilities on Oahu and especially the oil tank farm, which would have crippled the Americans far more than the loss of their battle fleet.16
Since then, the consequences of having missed the carriers had been vividly demonstrated by American raids on the Marshalls, Wake, Lae/Salamaua, and elsewhere. In addition, Yamamoto was haunted by the thought that so long as the American carriers roamed the Pacific, there was always a chance, however remote, that they might find a way to launch a raid against the Japanese homeland. His chief of staff confided to his diary that protecting Tokyo from air raids was “the most important thing to be borne in mind.” Halsey’s raid on Marcus Island, only 999 nautical miles from Tokyo, was a reminder that such a catastrophic event was not impossible. As early as January of 1941, Yamamoto had expressed the fear that “we cannot rule out the possibility that the enemy would dare to launch an attack upon our homeland to burn our capital city and other cities.” He feared that the Americans might strike while the Kidō Butai was still in the Indian Ocean, and as a precaution he ordered the establishment of a picket line of small vessels seven hundred miles off the Japanese coast, well beyond the maximum range of American carrier bombers. However, there was always a chance that one or more American carriers might sneak past those pickets and find a way to launch. Since the protection of the homeland—and especially protecting the life and safety of the emperor—was the Navy’s first mission, such a possibility was unacceptable.17
Consequently, even before the Kidō Butai returned from its initial strike at Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto had already begun to think about ways to complete what Nagumo had left unfinished. He ordered his chief of staff, Ugaki Matome, to sketch out a plan for an invasion of Hawaii as a way of provoking a climactic sea battle that would result in the destruction of the American carriers. Ugaki spent four days in mid-January battling a terrible toothache while he outlined an operational plan to “mobilize all available strength to invade Hawaii while attempting to destroy the enemy fleet in a decisive battle.” Such plans were completely unrealistic, however, because the Japanese simply did not have the resources to invade Hawaii and lacked the sealift capability to keep it supplied even if they could take it. Both the Naval General Staff and the Army made it clear that such an operation was out of the question. In spite of that, Yamamoto continued to hope that he could contrive a way to lure the American carrier force out to its destruction. He was aware that Nagano and the General Staff, and the Army, too, opposed his plan for a decisive confrontation in the central Pacific, but to Yamamoto that only made the challenge of getting his way more appealing. As strategically important as it was to get the American carriers, it was almost as important to outwit his domestic rivals within the Japanese military hierarchy.18
The one constant in all of these plans was the Kidō Butai. Carriers would be needed to spearhead the invasion of Fiji and Samoa, and also for the Aleutian initiative, and now Inoue was calling for at least some portion of the Kidō Butai for the assault on Port Moresby as well. Yamamoto found all these requests annoying and wrongheaded. Just as Chester Nimitz complained to Ernie King that carriers should be used offensively, not defensively, Yamamoto wanted to use his carriers to attack and destroy their American counterparts, not to protect transports in invasion fleets. His view was that once the American carriers were out of the picture, future Japanese invasion groups could roam the western Pacific at will. To achieve this end, it would be necessary to threaten an asset so important that the Americans would feel compelled to commit most or even all of their carriers to defend it. Given Ernie King’s concern for the security of Fiji and Samoa, a Japanese thrust at those islands might provoke the reaction Yamamoto sought. Yamamoto, however, did not think them important enough to ensure a decisive confrontation. He sought an objective close to the Americans’ principal base at Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto continued to hope that operations in the central Pacific could somehow lead to the occupation of Hawaii, which could then be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Americans. These considerations led him to examine the Hawaiian archipelago carefully. Since neither the Army nor the General Staff would support an invasion of Hawaii, he decided to target the small two-island atoll of Midway.19
Midway was an unlikely objective. A barren, sandy outpost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it was quite literally a thousand miles from anywhere: Pearl Harbor was 1,135 nautical miles in one direction, and Wake Island was 1,185 nautical miles in the other. Like every other atoll in the Pacific, Midway was essentially a circular coral reef that enclosed a small lagoon. On the southern edge of that lagoon, two small sandy islands barely broke the surface of the sea. The larger of them, appropriately named Sand Island, was less than two miles long; the other, Eastern Island, was even smaller. For hundreds of years, the chief inhabitant of those two tiny islands was the Laysan Albatross, whose odd mating dance provoked visitors to dub them “gooney birds.” So remote was Midway that there is no record of its having been “discovered” until 1859, though whalers and others had certainly stopped there intermittently before that. The United States established a coaling station there after the Civil War, and two years later, in 1869, the U.S. Navy began dredging a channel between the two islands in order to provide access to the sheltered lagoon, though the project ran out of money before it could be completed.20
After the war with Spain in 1898, which expanded American interest in the Pacific, President Theodore Roosevelt placed Midway under the control of the Navy Department, and that same year the United States established a telegraph cable station on Sand Island, connecting it to Hawaii. The outpost was further developed in the 1930s when Pan American Airlines used it as a seaplane base for its trans-Pacific Clippers and even built a small hotel there for its passengers. In 1940, as war with Japan loomed, the Navy finally completed the ship channel into the lagoon, which made Midway a sheltered anchorage, principally for seaplanes and the occasional submarine. And in the summer of 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, the Navy completed an airfield on Eastern Island that made it a kind of unsinkable—though also immobile—aircraft carrier.
Thus, small as it was, Midway’s isolation made it an important outpost in the American defense line. Taking off from its protected lagoon, broad winged PBY Catalina seaplanes could scour the ocean out to a thousand miles, and from that same lagoon, American submarines could initiate patrols to the very shores of Japan itself. From the new airfield on Eastern Island, bombers and fighters could guard the northern approach to Hawaii. In their communications to one another, King and Nimitz both acknowledged the importance of the “Midway-Hawaii line.” Yamamoto calculated that Midway was important enough to the Americans that a threat to it would compel them to sortie from Oahu with their carriers to contest an invasion. When that happened, the Kidō Butai would pounce on them and send them to the bottom.21
An aerial photograph of Midway Atoll in 1942. Eastern Island, with its airfield, is in the foreground. The ship channel into the central lagoon and the channel from the lagoon to the Eastern Island dock are clearly visible. (U.S. Naval Institute)
In February, Yamamoto ordered his staff to put together an operational plan for the invasion and occupation of Midway. The Kidō Butai would approach Midway from the north (as it had the previous December) and launch a strike on its airfield, in order to destroy whatever American air assets were on the island. Meanwhile, a powerful (but not too powerful) surface force would approach Midway from the west to attract the attention of the Americans. The American carriers would presumably sortie from Pearl Harbor in response to either the bombardment of Midway or the appearance of this modest surface force, or both. When they did, a prepositioned group of Japanese submarines would inflict as much damage on them as possible as they moved toward the decisive battle. Then the Kidō Butai would steam southward to engage. The six carriers of the Kidō Butai should have little trouble with the two or three surviving American carriers, but just in case, Yamamoto himself—with several heavy battleships, including the giant Yamato—would back up the Kidō Butai to finish off any survivors. Despite his early advocacy of carriers, and his criticism of depending too much on battleships, Yamamoto felt obligated to find a role in this decisive engagement for the new and expensive heavy battleships.
For all its boldness, the plan was not a complete departure from traditional Japanese strategy, for it was essentially a tactical version of the strategic plan that had been part of Japanese thinking for more than a decade: submarines and airplanes would whittle down the American striking force as it moved toward the decisive confrontation. Here was the same plan in miniature. A critical difference, however, was that this decisive engagement would take place 2,500 miles from Japanese home waters. Indeed, by targeting Midway, Yamamoto was granting to the Americans all the advantages that the Japanese had counted on in their own defense of the Pacific: shorter logistic lines, proximity to repair facilities, and land-based air cover.22
It is noteworthy that this plan divided Japanese naval assets into four different and independent groups. If this seemed more complicated than it needed to be, it was because Yamamoto was more concerned that the Americans would refuse to take the bait than that they might actually pose a serious threat to his armada. If he put all six carriers of the Kidō Butai and the battle fleet into one mighty armada, it would unquestionably dominate the Pacific, but it might also intimidate the Americans to the point that they would refuse to come out to contest it, and the opportunity to sink the American carriers would be lost. As a result, in translating Yamamoto’s vision into an operational plan, the staff planners of the Combined Fleet divided up the available forces into at least four distinct groups that would sail independently.
The first of these was the so-called Midway Invasion Group, which was actually a surface force under Vice Admiral Kondō Nabutake, consisting of two battleships, five cruisers, and seven destroyers, plus the new light carrier Zuiho, which was capable of carrying two dozen torpedo planes and fighters. As Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully point out in their detailed study of Japanese operations at Midway, “Kondō was the bait.” Combined Fleet planners hoped that when the Americans discovered this force approaching Midway, they would see it as powerful enough to be tempting and yet not so large as to be intimidating. That would encourage them to come out of Pearl Harbor to contest its advance.23
Kondō’s force would screen the actual invasion force (called the “Transport Group”) that would carry the five thousand naval infantry and the construction battalion that would occupy Midway and turn it into a Japanese base. Carried in twelve large transport ships escorted by a light cruiser and ten destroyers, it would also approach Midway from the west. In close support would be four heavy cruisers and two destroyers under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo.
While Kondō and Kurita approached from the west, the Kidō Butai would approach Midway from the northwest. If Kondō’s surface force did not draw out the Americans, the first strike by planes from the Kidō Butai against Midway surely would. Once again Nagumo Chūichi would command this key element of the fleet. His main purpose, as Yamamoto saw it, was the destruction of the American carrier force, but assigning him responsibility to soften up Midway for the invasion and to cover the landing also created the opportunity for confusion and uncertainty, especially with a literal-minded commander like Nagumo.
Yamamoto himself would lead what was called the “Main Body,” composed of three heavy battleships, including the enormous Yamato, accompanied by a screen of one light cruiser and eight destroyers. This force would trail Kondō’s invasion force by several hundred miles, not only to remain beyond the range of American search planes but also to enable Yamamoto to support whichever of the other two advances turned out to be the focus of the American sortie. It would be the first time in the war that the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet personally accompanied an operation. Subsequent critics cited this as a grave error, since Yamamoto would have to maintain radio silence while at sea, preventing him from exerting any active supervision over the operation. Had he remained ashore, as Chester Nimitz did, he could have listened in on the radio net and sent out orders as necessary to ensure that his command vision was fulfilled.
But passive command from a distance was unappealing to a man with Yamamoto’s worldview. Though the early victories of the Japanese Navy had made him a national hero and won him many official decorations, he had not yet smelled the smoke of battle or even put himself in harm’s way. He confessed to a friend that the accolades that poured into his headquarters after the first victories left him “intolerably embarrassed.” Moreover, Yamamoto may have had a political objective in mind as well. The historian Hugh Bicheno speculates that Yamamoto went to sea during the Midway campaign so that he could return to Tokyo with a decisive victory in hand and use his elevated prestige to depose Tōjō’s government and open negotiations for an end to the war. Whether or not that was part of his grand strategy, Yamamoto’s gambler’s instinct was evident in every part of the Midway plan. Just as he had contrived the Pearl Harbor strike as a dramatic alternative to the thrust southward the previous fall, so now did he prepare a dramatic alternative to the Naval General Staff’s notion of consolidating Japan’s defense perimeter in the South Pacific and the Aleutians. If there was also a political element in play, that only raised the stakes for this nautical gambler.24
With the plan fleshed out, Yamamoto sent a representative from his staff to Tokyo on April 2 to present it to the Naval General Staff. The man he sent was Commander Watanabe Yasuji, his logistics officer and frequent shogi partner. Watanabe was not only a great admirer of his boss, he had also played an active role in developing the plan and therefore had a proprietary interest in its adoption. Watanabe flew to Tokyo by seaplane and reported to the two-story brick building near the Imperial Palace that housed the Naval General Staff. As he laid out the particulars, it soon became evident that the plan would monopolize virtually all the assets of the Imperial Navy and require the postponement of all other plans, including the move to Port Moresby and the seizure of Fiji-Samoa.
Both Nagano and Rear Admiral Fukudome Shigeru, head of the plans division, remained mute. It was Commander Miyo Tatsukichi, the only naval aviator in the room, who challenged Watanabe. A short, wiry man with gold fillings, he had attended both Eta Jima and the Naval Staff College with Watanabe, and the two men knew each other well. Nevertheless, their exchange grew increasingly tense. Possession of Midway, Miyo argued, would be more of a burden than an asset. Even if the invasion went flawlessly, the atoll’s distance from Japan would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Japan’s logistical capabilities were already stretched to the breaking point, and everything needed to sustain Midway as a Japanese outpost—food, ammunition, and especially oil—would have to be shipped there across an ocean crawling with American submarines. Sufficient tankers needed to carry refined oil from Japan to Midway simply did not exist, and, if they did, how wise was it for Japan to be exporting refined oil—the dearth of which had triggered the war in the first place? Moreover, up to this point in the war, Japan had advanced from one position to another only under the umbrella of land-based air. That would not be the case with Midway. The atoll was, however, under the umbrella of American land-based air from Oahu, which would make it vulnerable to American raids and recapture. Finally, if Combined Fleet wanted a battle with the American carriers, one could be had by attacking Fiji or Samoa, the loss of which would break the American link to Australia. And a battle in the South Pacific would give Japan all the advantages that the Americans would have at Midway.25
Watanabe was not used to hearing such sharp and direct criticism of a plan generated by the commander in chief. He responded to Miyo by asserting that “after capture [Midway] would be supplied the same as was already being done with Wake.” And he pledged “to go to Fiji and Samoa after the Battle of Midway had been won.” Apparently flustered, he merely repeated the outlines of the plan that he had been entrusted to deliver. It was evident that the evidence weighed heavily against adoption of the Midway plan, but Yamamoto’s influence had grown so great that it could not be dismissed outright. Fukudome, who had once been Yamamoto’s chief of staff, tried to calm the heated discussion: “Come, come,” he said, “don’t get too excited. Since the Combined Fleet’s so set on the plan, why don’t we study it to see if we can’t accept it?”26
The group met again three days later. It was clear at once that studying the details of the plan had only confirmed Miyo’s doubts. He reiterated, even more strongly, its obvious defects. Unable to counter Miyo’s arguments, Watanabe left the room to telephone the flagship Yamato. He summarized Miyo’s criticisms and asked for a response. Was Yamamoto still committed to the Midway plan? He was. Watanabe returned to the room to tell the members of the General Staff that Yamamoto’s mind was made up, and that “if his plan was not adopted he might resign.”
It was Fukudome who asked the crucial question: “If the C in C’s so set on it, shall we leave it to him?” No one else in the room spoke, but several nodded. Nagano capitulated once again, as he had over the Pearl Harbor raid. Miyo could only bow his head; some thought he was forcing back tears. Yamamoto had forced the Pearl Harbor raid onto the General Staff by bluff and threat. Now he was imposing the Midway plan on his skeptical and reluctant superiors. The behavior of the Naval General Staff was, as the historian H. P. Willmott has noted, “nothing less than an abject and craven shirking of responsibility.”27
The Army’s response was, in effect, a shrug. Since the plan did not call for any significant participation by the Army, its leaders seemed to say: do whatever you want so long as you don’t call on us for support. But the Army did worry about Inoue’s move southward to Port Moresby, for that did involve Army assets, and as a result, five days after winning his victory over the Naval General Staff, Yamamoto agreed to lend one carrier division of the Kidō Butai to Inoue for what was codenamed Operation MO—the capture of Port Moresby. For that operation, Yamamoto selected the newest and least experienced of the carrier divisions—CarDiv 5, composed of the new carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku. Inoue had to promise that he would complete the conquest of Port Moresby swiftly, so that those carriers could rejoin the Kidō Butai in time for the Midway campaign, now codenamed Operation MI. The Fiji-Samoa operation would have to be postponed until July, though Yamamoto agreed to allow a smaller operation for the capture of Ocean and Nauru Islands (Operation RY), and another to seize the westernmost islands in the Aleutians (Operation AL). This latter effort, often referred to as a diversion for Midway, was in fact a separate initiative unrelated to the Midway Operation apart from its timing. In effect, instead of choosing between moves to the south, north, or west, the Japanese decided to undertake all three, and to do so virtually simultaneously.28
In addition to internal military politics, one reason for the apparent hurry was that both Yamamoto and the Naval General Staff recognized that Japan’s carrier superiority in the Pacific was only temporary. The Japanese had six big carriers to the Americans’ three (or perhaps four—they weren’t sure where the Wasp was), but they knew that the Americans had no fewer than eleven big carriers under construction, all of which would become operational in 1943; the Japanese had only one under construction, the Taihō, which would not be available until 1944 (though they also converted several other existing ships into carriers). In short, the Japanese needed to complete their conquests and establish their defensive perimeter before the new American carriers and the flood of American airplanes began arriving in the Pacific.
The day after the Naval General Staff capitulated to Yamamoto’s Midway Operation, the planes of the Kidō Butai conducted their raid on Colombo in far-off Ceylon and sank the Dorsetshire and Cornwall. Four days later they struck at Trincomalee and sank the Hermes. Soon they would be returning through the Straits of Malacca to the Pacific. They would need to refit and resupply, and then they would be ready for more operations. The officers and men were hoping for liberty in Hiroshima. They would be disappointed. The crews of the Shōkaku and Zuikaku would not even be allowed to reach a Japanese port. Instead, those two ships underwent a quick resupply in Formosa so they could be ready for Operation MO.
On April 16, Nagano presented the “Imperial Navy Operational Plan for Stage Two of the Great East Asia War” to Emperor Hirohito, who, in theory at least, had final approval of all operations. Plans were never presented to the emperor until all the competing elements in the military and the government had agreed; all Hirohito could do was bless a decision that had already been made. The chief of the Army General Staff was present when Admiral Nagano presented the outlines of the Midway plan. He silently acquiesced because it did not call for the allocation of any soldiers. The landings and occupation of Midway would be the responsibility of Naval Infantry—the Japanese version of Marines. The Army may have suspected that Yamamoto’s plan was only the first step toward an invasion of Hawaii, which certainly would require support from the Army, but it could speak up in opposition to that move when the time came.29
Yamamoto had won, though it was not yet clear what the consequences of his internal victory over the Naval General Staff and the Army might be. As Commander Miyo had pointed out, the thrust into the Central Pacific was a gamble even if the Kidō Butai triumphed over the American carriers, for the logistical burden of sustaining an outpost at Midway, 2,235 nautical miles from Tokyo, was daunting, especially if the Army continued to remain on the sidelines. On April 16, the day when Nagano presented the plan to the emperor, it was hard for Army leaders to imagine a set of circumstances that would cause them to change their mind about supporting this adventure in the central Pacific.
Two days later, American bombers appeared over Tokyo.
* Early in 1941, Yamamoto wrote a letter to another officer who favored war with America. In that letter, Yamamoto stated that in any such war the Japanese would be compelled to seek “a capitulation at the White House, in Washington itself.” After the war began, Japanese newspapers published this letter, which led the Western press to assume that this was, in fact, Yamamoto’s goal. Instead, Yamamoto had written the letter as a way of suggesting that a war with the U.S. was not winnable. The next line in this letter, omitted when it was published, was: “I wonder whether the politicians of the day really have the willingness to make [the] sacrifice … that this would entail.”