And therein lay the problem. There was a great deal of debate at the higher levels of the Japanese military in early 1942 about what the next moves should be: the Naval General Staff favored taking Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa, which were lightly defended and would have isolated Australia from the US (and quite possibly drawn the USN into Yamamoto’s “decisive battle”); but Yamamoto was obsessed with the Central Pacific, and used the same strongarm tactics he used for Pearl Harbor — including threatening to resign and take the entire Combined Fleet command with him — to get his way.
Oh, he absolutely used his popularity in the IJN to get his way. But I don’t see the alternatives actually making much difference if they had been chosen instead. The IJN’s codes were broken enough that we could get useful information from them. Eventually the IJN is going to commit their carriers to a battle with the US Pacific fleet. Every day that passes the US carriers are getting important experience, and they eventually are going to get numerous enough that all the luck in the world won’t save the IJN.
Actually, I kind of take that back. I’ve heard that Yamamoto wasn’t a fan of the Yamato class battleships, and wisely preferred the same resources be devoted to aircraft carriers instead. So, probably not as myopic as general naval thought at the time.
Perfectly mirrored by the wargaming by the IJN before Midway, when US carriers “which weren’t supposed to be there” sank 2 Japanese carriers, but Yamamoto’s hand-picked umpire overruled said sinkings.
Yeah, basically although it’s a little more complicated.
Japan was really interested in seizing the “Southern resource region”, with oil as the most critical aspect, and needed to take Singapore to keep the British out and the Philippines to keep the US pushed back.
They wanted to take Burma to cut the supply lines of Allied support to China, and they raided British bases in Ceylon, pushed the British fleet back to the east coast of Africa.
For Pearl Harbor, their motivation is complex and somewhat contradictory. The IJN top leadership was opposed to the attack as they felt it unnecessarily risky and they wanted the carriers for the conquest of SE Asia. They managed to find alternative methods, including using their two engine land based bombers.
Yamamoto pushed it through by essentially blackmailing his bosses; threatening to resign with his entire staff, as others noted. Insubordination was running rampant in those days.
When discussing the lead up to World War II, and the various strategies and preparations, it’s absolutely essential to remember that America had 10 times the war making capacity of Japan.
America had the ability to take the war to Japan, including a complete naval blockade and even invading it.
Japan could not do that at all. Although there were some elements within the Navy who wanted to invade Hawaii, they didn’t have the logistics for it.
So the question for military planners in Tokyo was how could they win a war against America?
Because of the increased tension between the countries, when it seemed that war was starting to look inevitable, then they had some really difficult choices to make.
The first choice was to back down, but people who suggested that often wound up being assassinated. Not a good career choice.
The alternative was to convince yourself that America would give up.
There were three main ways in which various people envisioned that America would quit.
The driving doctrine of the IJN was the kantei kessen, Decisive Battle Doctrine:
“The Decisive Battle Doctrine (艦隊決戦, Kantai Kessen; “fleet showdown”) was a naval strategyadopted by the Imperial Japanese Navy prior to the Second World War. The theory was derived from the writings of American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. In the Decisive Battle Doctrine the Japanese navy would win a war by fighting and winning a single, decisive naval action.”
This was the theory behind Japan developing the super battleships.
So the belief was that the American battle line would come out and Japanese destroyers and cruisers would pick away at the American fleet at night with their long lance torpedoes as well at attacking them with land based bombers carrying torpedoes. Finally, Japanese battleship would finish the American battle line off.
The second way was to grab all those territories, fortify them and wait for the weak-will, soft, decadent Americans to get tired of having their boys bleed on foreign sand.
Yamato introduced a new approach. For whatever reason, he believed that if Japan sank several American battleships, we would give up.
- Sink a couple of American battleships
- US quits (because???)
- Profit
Yamamoto is the recipient of so much adulation, and everyone says that he alone, out of the entire Japanese nation understood Americans.
But he completely and utterly misunderstood American resolve. Both sides were guilty of this, and the lack of appreciation directly led to war.
To add to the above excellent description, a quirk of IJN planning between the wars was not only to lay out what they would do, but also to lay out what the USN would do (which generally amounted to blundering oafishly into their own demise). This tended to blind the IJN to alternatives, which was manifest during the preparation for Midway.
You keep repeating this nonsense as if repetition would make it true. I’ve seen no evidence that it is true. Instead, I’ve provided quotes from him that show his actual belief was:
- If Japan goes to war with the US, it’s going to suck.
- If they’re going to war with the US, they might as well follow his plan. It at least gives Japan 6 months to a year of time to work with.
- Even if you do follow his plan, Japan is almost certainly fucked after a year.
If you made statements like yours about the Japanese cabinet, that’d be true. I don’t really see any evidence it’s true about Yamamoto. How exactly did he misunderstand US resolve? It wasn’t his idea to attack the US, and his opposition to Japan signing a treaty with Germany and Italy got him death threats and an IJA guard dispatched to keep tabs on him.
Ah, the nonsense word has now come out. This term is employed by people who believe they have far superior knowledge and insight . It’s not used in a minor quibble but rather when one feels that the other opinion is utterly foolish and without merit.
It also means that a respectful disagreement isn’t possible. Years ago, I enjoyed getting into fights with people who were wrong on the Internet, but now I’ve found it’s pointless.
As such, I won’t engage with you. I may point out to others some of your many errors, but I won’t respond or get into a pointless argument.
If the information I had posted my original conclusions, that comment may have bothered me, but as I said earlier, this is from a YouTube video of an interview with Mark Stille. Who is he?
About the author
Mark E. Stille (Commander, United States Navy, retired), received his BA in History from the University of Maryland and also holds an MA from the Naval War College. He worked in the intelligence community for 38 years including tours on the faculty of the Naval War College, on the Joint Staff, on US Navy ships, and as a Senior Intelligence Officer at a national intelligence agency. He is the author of almost 50 Osprey titles with a focus on Pacific War naval history.
And, not only is he the author of a new book on Pearl Harbor, he’s also written a bibliography on Yamamoto.
This presents a challenge. One one hand, we have one of the world’s experts on the subject matter. OTOH, we have a few quotes which “prove” something or other.
From the interview
All right, let’s talk to talk about Yamamoto because he is such an important figure in the whole Pearl Harbor saga because like I just said, without him, it’s fair to say that there would never have been a Pearl Harbor attack.
He’s hard to understand uh at least for a western reader because there aren’t a lot of good sources for him about him in English and what there is really not very good at all.
Keep in mind, this is from Yamamoto’s bibliographer, and no, it doesn’t mean that he himselve doesn’t understand Yamamoto.
What happens is that everyone knows something about Pearl Harbor, and are impervious to logic or real history. (This comes from the discussion on the same YouTube with this naval historian Drachinifel, someone that anyone interested in the Pacific War will know quite well.)
Some quotes from Stille discussing
As we’ll talk about his planning for the Pearl Harbor attack, it was based on his personal speculation. and this was not examined during the process. So, Japan literally goes to war the way it did by expanding the war against the US based on his personal uh speculation which was not founded in fact.
So let’s talk about uh some behind the-scenes thinking of Yamamoto. After the event, he admitted to an admiral buddy of his that he decided to attack Pearl Harbor as early as December 1940. And that’s remarkable because obviously at that point uh there was no were no rising tensions between the US and Japan. and Japan hadn’t made its mind up to go to war with the US.
This is bad timing because I’m running out the door for a vacation where I won’t have my laptop and will have to post from my phone.
I’ll probably follow up several days later.
The following is what I had written before responding with the above.
Pearl Harbor was a much better plan than Midway, mostly brilliant. Of course, PH had flaws, but Midway was just a flawed idea from the get go.
All the Western powers completely underestimated Japan and the Malaya campaign shows how the British really screwed up.
The US failure was rooted in racism, general unpreparedness, doctrinal mistakes, assumptions that the enemy would act as they would, intelligence failures, and gross underestimation of Japanese abilities.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, US carrier doctrine also retained the battleship as the core component of the fleet. Carriers acted individually or in pairs and had more of a scouting role.
Japan had the revolutionary idea of creating a single command with up to six carriers, supported by battleships and cruisers (and destroyers) to pack a massive offensive punch.
Their carrier operations were the best in the world. Their pilots were fantastic and they had
They could spot and launch planes far faster than anyone else. The also invented the idea of having the torpedo bombers of one carrier go out with the dive bombers of a sister carrier, allowing a balanced attack to be launched far faster than the US. The US couldn’t match them until late 1943.
The US did not believe that Japan also had developed the ability to refuel at sea, an operation necessary to put Hawaii within range.
And of course, they just didn’t believe the Japanese could do these things.
Because the US military failed to understand that a Japanese attack was not only possible, they did not see the potential scope.
As such, they just didn’t prepare enough for a possible attack. One of the persistent myths was that the Japanese attack was completely unexpected and the US was still a peacetime force. It was transitioning to a wartime footing, but the peacetime mentality came through too much.
In the week prior to the attack, Army and USAAF actually had people at battle stations manning AA guns and pilots ready at the fighters. Then the decision was made to relax the level and stand down.
Likewise, the fleet was doing intense training training, but was took Sunday off.
Admiral Kimmel was focused too much on preparing for offensive action and failed to consider sufficient defensive measures.
(And I’ll have to post more later.)
Sending this off unedited, hoping it’s not too badly written.
Yeah, I’d have to stand by the position that believing Yamamoto had the logic of an underpants gnome with regard to Japan’s chances of winning a war with the US is an idea that is utterly foolish and without merit. Everything I’ve read indicates that he thought it was one that Japan would undoubtedly lose, no matter what he did. Nothing in you post seems to contradict that.
Which is why the IJN absolutely could not afford to unzip their fly until the optimal moment, which would be in accordance with the prewar plans and wargames: hit the USN with subs, then air, then torpedo barrages, then the big guns, and sink most of their capital ships. Only chance to get them to the table.
To reveal their doctrines, tactics, equipment, and capabilities prematurely would risk their opponent grasping all of these things and making the appropriate adjustments in their own doctrines and orders of battle, which is precisely what they USN did after PH. To trade away all of that information just to permanently destroy 2 old battleships simply wasn’t an adequate trade at all.
Of course, this assumes the USN would stick with their prewar Plan Orange, and that the existing leadership would simply blunder into such a battle (I don’t know if Kimmel would be replaced by Nimitz in this alternate timeline).
In my Pacific scenario for the game Strategic Command, I gave the Japanese the option to cancel the first 2 Yamatos in favor of 4 more Shokaku’s. But that would depend on the hidebound IJN brass to be much more prescient that they were.
USS Panay. Maybe an inkling there, at least
And even if that incident wasn’t enough, Roosevelt had assumed that war was inevitable by October of 1940:
Yeah, that was their plan and as the old saying goes, plans only survive until the first contact with the enemy. The US gets a vote in how it goes.
As I posted earlier, there just wasn’t a way for force the US into negotiations if they didn’t want to participate.
The US had an insane number of carriers and battleships already ordered and in the pipeline. There was no compelling reason to quit.
None of us that large of crystal balls, but without an attack on Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t be a compelling reason for the change. What would actually happen can’t be known.
Nimitz was so much better the leader, and Kimmel lacked vision, so who knows what would have happened.
If we allow leaders to act out of character, I counter the switch to four Shikokus by waking up the American, Australian, British, Dutch and Chinese leaders to Japanese military prowess. 
OK, asking the Chinese to change would be too much. 
The US and Britain could have made successful attacks impossible at just a fraction of cost of the later war.
Things weren’t too tense in 1937.
I took his comments to mean that things hadn’t reached the breaking point yet.
There was obviously tension in 1940, which started rising after first, the fall of France in June, but really after the invasion of French Indochina and Japan joining the Tripartite, both in September.
I’d have to refer to Eri Hotta’s book Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy for the exact timeline on the internal Japanese movements, but when Yamamoto had started planning Pearl Harbor war wasn’t set in stone.