Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific

The Yamamoto Option

Martin Stansfeld

• Verlag: Pen and Sword Maritime
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781399010122
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

Japanese Carriers and Victory in the Pacific focuses on the pre-war debate between building a new generation of super-battleships or adopting aircraft carriers as the ‘capital ships’ of the future. An Asian power in particular sees carriers as a way of challenging the USA and the colonial empires initially losing the contest yet coming out all right in the Cold War aftermath. Martin Stansfeld examines the much overlooked genesis of Japan’s so-called shadow fleet that was a secret attempt to bring about parity with the US in carriers -- albeit only with slower speed conversions of liners and auxiliaries but along with the super-battleships cluttered launch facilities when these could have been devoted to keel-up fast fleet carrier production. This first analytical look at what major launch facilities were available in Japan shows that the Imperial Japanese Navy could have doubled its fast carrier fleet thereby able to give sufficient air cover for an invasion of Hawaii rather than just the raid on Pearl Harbor, but only providing nobody noticed they were building all these carriers. This is shown to have been entirely possible given the IJN’s extraordinary success at covering up their super-battleship and shadow fleet production. This secret fast carrier fleet program is given the name ’phantom fleet’ by Stansfeld who proceeds to demonstrate how the strategy of the Pacific War would have been transformed. Weaving through the chapters is an exotic cast of characters led most notably by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the conceiver of Pearl Harbor and a figure of mythic status to Japanese today and famous around the world thanks to the movies. Stansfeld dwells on the ironies of war, notably how, without the ‘day that will live in infamy’, America might never have become the worldwide super-power it is today.

Chapter 1

Treaty Fleets

‘The American Immigration Act of 1924 excluded Japanese completely from entering the United States. If Japan had been given a quota like other nations, only 150 to 200 persons could have been admitted annually, a mere drop in the bucket; and Japan demanded no more, since that would have placed her on the same basis as “white” nations. But this absolute exclusion, placing Japan in the same category as other orientals, deeply offended her national pride, built up bitter hatred, and discredited the liberal policy of co-operating with the Western Powers.’

(Samuel Eliot Morison, The Rising Sun in the Pacific)

Japan’s path to great-power status was accomplished within the span of a lifetime. A 10-year old in the shogun’s capital in the late 1860s puttered around a city little changed from The Hundred Views of Edo, the celebrated series of woodblock prints by Hiroshige that had been executed in his father’s day, and showing a Japan little changed since 1600.

His grandfather would have regaled him with stories of a Japan where foreigners had been forbidden for over 200 years and society had been caught in a feudal time warp. That is until the great lords of the south west – those of Choshu, Satsuma and Tosa provinces – conspired to overthrow the shogunate government in the eastern capital and substitute direct rule by a fledgling Emperor hitherto secluded and powerless in the old Imperial capital of Kyoto in western Japan.

Strolling from the subject of one Hiroshige print into another, he might find himself in Kanda district on Boy’s Day, entranced by a sky fluttering with gaily coloured kites in the form of carp swimming in the breezes. On his way home, we can imagine him caught in a downpour on the Ohashi bridge, or back home intently enjoying the family album containing The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, the great eastern road portrayed by Hiroshige in as many prints. The road connected Edo (modern Tokyo) with Kyoto, and today has coursing above much of its ancient way the rail ducts of the Shinkansen, the famous bullet train.

As a teenager, he would have found himself in a turbulent, changing world, such as that portrayed in the movie The Last Samurai. Westerners were moving in. Railways and telegraph poles had begun to spread. Old Japan reacted unsurely. Equilibrium was in due course to take root and mature as old settled in with new.

Let us say that he was drawn to a career in the new Imperial Navy. His heart would have pounded with pride over the thrill of Japan’s victories over continental Goliaths, first over China (1894–1895) and then against mighty Russia (1904–1905), as a result becoming a great power of the world rather than succumbing to the usual fate of the non-European world in the nineteenth century, which was to become a colony of the ‘white’ imperialists.

At the heart of this unexpected status, and indeed the acclaimed symbol of it, was the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This marked the first time since Napoleonic days the British Empire had deigned to ally itself formally with another nation. Japan had indeed signed into the Pax Britannica as junior partner. Following on from this, Britain supplied Japan with its battleships and armoured cruisers. These annihilated the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, a few months short of the centenary of Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, which had been the birth date of the Pax Britannica. Britain became godfather to the Imperial Japanese Navy. In turn the IJN revered Nelson as the greatest all-time naval hero and its inspiration, until a living legend grew with their own Admiral Togo after the victory at Tsushima.

Thanks to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan joined Britain against the Kaiser in the Great War. The windfall was Germany’s Pacific empire, consisting of what the Japanese were to call the Nanyo (or South Seas territories) but the Americans and British called Micronesia. The League of Nations later granted Japan a mandate over these many archipelagos, after which this Central Pacific constellation became referred to colloquially as ‘The Mandates’.

Japan’s First World War achievements, however, did not at all suit America, who found the jugular to its Philippines dependency and to trade with China flanked by the Nanyo’s westward and northward extensions, and finally bracketed by the north–south chain of the Marianas and the Yap and Palau island groups to their south. It had not mattered when Germany had the islands, because the Kaiser was at the other end of the world. But now there was a big difference – Japan, with the third largest fleet in the world, was vying for mastery in the western Pacific. ‘Tea clipper Yankees’ were turning in their graves, as New England’s romance with the allure of China, the market of hundreds of millions, had this unwelcome shudder cross the room. Mega-Wasps (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) confabulating at their country clubs over bourbon and branch water waxed indignant at what they saw as Japan’s arrogant groping towards various appendages and orifices of China.

Alarmingly, Japan also ended its participation in the war by occupying the Soviet Far East deep into Siberia. It was the last of the intervening Allied Powers to evacuate after the Reds defeated the Whites in the Russian Civil War that followed the Communist revolution in 1917.

By 1921, there was much in what a Navy man close to retirement had experienced that would make him proud to be Japanese.

Such a man was Tomisaburo Kato. Born in 1861 in Hiroshima, Kato was the son of a samurai. He joined the new Naval Academy, graduating in 1880, and later also the Staff College in 1889. Aged 44, he became Chief of Staff to Admiral Togo. Aboard the flagship Mikasa, they led the fleet against the Russians at Tsushima. There followed after the war’s end various appointments, first as Navy Vice Minister and from 1915–1922, Navy Minister successively in three governments. As such, he led the Japanese delegation to the Washington Conference on naval disarmament, becoming Prime Minister on his return. By dying in office a week before the cataclysmic Tokyo Earthquake of 1923, the very distinguished old gentleman, by now a viscount of the realm, was spared the irritation of the two decades of vulgar reaction that led to war and then to the shame of conquest following the nuclear bombing of the city of his birth.

A portrait of Kato in full admiral’s uniform shows a figure bearing lightly a gravitas that clocked in as a heavyweight in the councils of the great. The face is austere and poise is reserved, but there is the hint of a twinkle in the eyes. As was the British-led tradition of the Naval Academy, he had been groomed to be an ‘officer and gentleman’ eligible to walk in as a guest at any London club. Asked if gentlemen should sneakily read other gentlemen’s mail, one can imagine him disdaining to answer. Unfortunately for his delegation in Washington, theirs was being read by his American hosts, as shall regretfully be revealed.

When the Armistice came in November 1918, the raucous music of war ceased amidst the reeking ruins and everybody sought a big-power chair in shaping the world that was to follow. There were to be no chairs at the Conference of Versailles for the losers – Germany, Austria and indeed, by virtue of its revolution, Russia.

By the yardstick of naval power, Japan had superseded Germany and Russia. Italy no longer found itself competing with an Austrian navy. France and Italy were in balance. The biggest change in fortune was one that amply belaurelled a triumphant America, to whose industry victory had so much been owed. In the course of the conflict and its aftermath, the US Navy began growing to a size matching Britain’s in fleet power.

On the other hand, not at all to US liking was how Japan, across the Pacific, had become the third greatest naval power. Washington reacted by doing two things. First, a naval disarmament conference was proposed in Washington to end the arms race in ever-bigger new battleships. Secondly, Britannia was politely nudged – could she please seek divorce from the Mikado?

It was time to gently prod the ‘big stick’, to use the pre-war expression favoured by President Teddy Roosevelt, who was an advocate of naval expansion as the means to waging gunboat diplomacy.

This put Britain in a pretty spot. Why abandon a successful alliance that had ably patched up the Pax Britannica just to please these bumptious ex-Colonies? On the other hand, there were those who argued that for the Royal Navy to be able to continue ruling the waves, the Japanese might not be enough help now that Uncle Sam was clearly destined for that role in due course. So why not join one’s fellow Anglo-Saxons? One could not now beat them; the days of fighting them were long over. As for the Japanese, hadn’t one politely guided so many little people to the exit before; wasn’t one still that ‘perfidious Albion’ so deplored in Napoleon’s famous phrase?

The government mandarins won the day. The Royal Navy lost its great ally. Japanese pride was the loser; the Emperor could no longer aspire to membership of White’s Club on Pall Mall. He was back to wherever it was ‘the yellow men’ clubbed.

Miserably, the jilt coincided with mounting racism. In Australia and on the western seaboard of the United States, there was agitation against Japanese immigration. On the heels of the reaction came demeaning acts of exclusion by contemptible politicians. Things written in the press were innocent of prophesy in terms of late twentieth-century political correctness.

A supremely sensitive nation riding the crest of a tremendous pride had suddenly been thrown into the rubbish bin by this Britannia, the lady who thought she ruled the waves.

Well, the samurai might have to see about that, given half a chance – as happened all too soon. It came with the world-shaking conquest of Malaya and fall of Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s three divisions twenty years later. He was executed for his alleged sins after the war, but the kittens of the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ lived to see the sun set on the British Empire.

The legacy of the Washington Conference was that the early-century embrace of Anglo-Saxonry all too soon turned to vicious bile during the 1930s as it fanned a quasi-brand of fascism.

The loss of face particularly poisoning the well of good will in the 1920s had been how Japan had been forced by the Treaty to genuflect to a humiliating ratio in battleships. Britain and America awarded themselves equal status, but insisted the non-European nation accept a 60 per cent battleship fleet size of either Anglo-Saxon power.

Kato accepted the imbalance for sound arguments of the head rather than overly heeding his heart. His central point was geographic. Japan was concerned with repelling an attack on its home islands and some contiguous possessions. America, meanwhile, was well known to have oceans on each side of its ‘Lower Forty-Eight’ (the US states minus Alaska and Hawaii); to fight Japan effectively, it would be forced to bring the Atlantic Fleet through the Panama Canal into the Pacific in order to reinforce the Pacific Fleet. That would run the risk of leaving its eastern seaboard bereft of naval protection. The combined fleets must next aspire to fight their way across the world’s largest ocean. Kato was thus particularly reassured when America and Britain agreed to develop no naval base closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor in America’s case and Singapore in Britain’s. Japan could now view itself as safe – at least in the age of steam and the big gun.

The British Empire was far more extended than Japan. For London, the Far East lay on the other side of the world. The august Kato felt that a ‘60 per cent battleship fleet’ was more than adequate in these circumstances, and a small price to pay for ending an arms race that could lead to social revolution in Japan if the burden of it continued. This was an elder statesman’s style of approach to the problem, and there were many who applauded it, who became known as the ‘treaty faction’. They were opposed by a vociferous majority called the ‘fleet faction’, led by a naval adviser at the negotiations – another Kato, although no relation. This was Kanji Kato. The row between the factions was to rumble on and on. The death of Tomisaburo Kato within a year of the Treaty being signed rather left the floor to Kanji Kato and his confreres. However, the debate became better balanced with the rise in influence of Yamamoto and other stars of the ‘treaty faction’ in the 1930s.

For the ‘fleet faction’, it all reached fury point over what was called the Black Chamber Incident a few years later, when a book by America’s former cryptology chief revealed that his unit, colloquially ‘the Black Chamber’, had deciphered the coded diplomatic cables between Kato’s delegation and Tokyo. Washington thereby had foreknowledge that Kato was ready to accept 60 per cent in battleships. They could expect to be robust in rejecting demands for a higher rate without risk of the Conference falling apart. No doubt there had been a quiet whisper into the ear of the British delegation chief, thereby making his nation a partner in the humiliation of Japan. The Black Chamber had won a victory comparable to that of Midway twenty years later.

When the likes of the bug-eyed Kanji Kato realized this sneaky betrayal of his nation by its perfidious Anglo-Saxon ‘friends’, there was thereafter scant respect for the restrictions of the Treaty. Imaginations sought ways to offset the limitations. An iron determination settled in to make sure that in war, America’s battle line would be whittled down by 40 per cent or more as it waddled past the island constellations of the Nanyo on the southern flank of its advance before encountering the IJN’s battleships close to Japanese home waters. If quantitative parity was to be denied the nation, then qualitative superiority and the advantages of a fortuitous geography could instead prove equalizers.

Central to this strategy would be the torpedo, whether delivered by air or by surface ship or submarine: Japan must have the best torpedoes in the world and the best weapon platforms for their delivery. These developments we shall relate in due course.

In the case of battleships, there is a beginning and end to the story, but no middle, as for the fifteen years that Japan abided by the naval disarmament treaties, it laid down no battleships. Nor could anyone else do more than complete those that had been agreed and then make do with them. In contrast, Japan did more than ‘make do’; it performed what interior designers call ‘makeovers’; it rebuilt and re-engined its battle fleet.

Aspiring to a qualitative edge very much guided IJN thinking even before the Washington Treaty. The Fuso was briefly the most powerful battleship in the world when completed in 1915, and was followed by three more bearing twelve 14-inch guns. The five Queen Elizabeth-class dreadnoughts produced by Britain bore eight 15-inch guns and were the first to be oil-fuelled for higher speed. Japan took due note and went to eight 16-inch guns with the Nagato and Mutsu. The Nagato became the first 16-incher in the world. Britain followed suit with HMS Nelson and Rodney, and America with the USS Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia.

Kato‘s heart and head had been in what was called the ‘Eight-Eight Project’, although privately he was latterly of the view that the programme was beyond the resources of Japan. This called for eight battleships (inclusive of the Nagato and Mutsu) and eight battlec...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: ‘The Mutsu Incident’
• Chapter 1: Treaty Fleets
• Chapter 2: Rearing Eagles
• Chapter 3: Shadow Fleet
• Chapter 4: Phantom Fleet
• Chapter 5: Smoke and Mirrors
• Chapter 6: Denouements
• Chapter 7: The Mother of All Carrier Battles
• Afterword: The Ironies of Mars
• Platessection