Latest / Generals of WWII: The Art of Command / Admiral Yamamoto: mastermind of the Japanese Navy (with Jon Parshall) | Ep 8

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Admiral Yamamoto: mastermind of the Japanese Navy (with Jon Parshall) | Ep 8 · Generals of WWII: The Art of Command

0:06
Welcome to generals of World War 2, the art of command.
0:10
I am your host, John Pescardo. We are back with the great John,
0:14
partial author of a new book, 1942, The Crux of War.
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We're happy to have him on the call.
0:20
Today we're going to talk about a guy very famous, Commander
0:23
Yamamoto. But before we do that, I did
0:26
want to talk about your book which will be coming out soon,
0:29
2020 looking like June timeframe.
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If you want to learn more about the book, please go to 1942
0:35
book.com. John, what is this book about?
0:39
It's talking about how the Allies turned around their train
0:42
wrecks in what I think is the, you know, the most crucial year
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of the war. You've now got, you know, both
0:49
the Japanese, the Americans now joined the war and in December.
0:52
And so this book covers from December 1941 to December 1942,
0:57
that 13 month time span. And I'm basically arguing that
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42 is the hinge point of the entire war.
1:03
You know, all the big dogs are in the game at this point.
1:07
And now we can finally get a sense for who is going to win
1:11
this war. And it's not at all obvious when
1:13
we come into it. I mean, the first, honestly,
1:16
five or six months, seven months even, are just terrible for the
1:20
Allies. It's just it's going badly
1:22
everywhere. And to the average man or woman
1:24
on the street, you know, looking around and, you know, trying to
1:26
figure out who's going to win this thing, it's not at all
1:28
obvious that the Allies are going to actually end up being
1:31
the victors. It's like the turning point of
1:33
the war. Absolutely it is.
1:35
And one of the things I'm trying to push back on, I, I will
1:38
admit, is that I think it's become fashionable in the last,
1:43
I don't know, 1520 years or so. There's been a rise of what I
1:46
would term Eastern Front determinism.
1:49
So with the failure of Operation Barbarossa, which is the
1:53
invasion of the Soviet Union in, you know, the summer or fall of
1:58
1941, pick your scholar that it's trendy to say, well, you
2:03
know, the Germans can no longer beat the Soviet Union.
2:06
You know, the Vermont can't do it against the Red Army.
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Therefore the war is decided. And I'm like, that's ludicrous
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to say that for a number of reasons.
2:16
First of all, again, to draw that analogy out to its logical
2:20
conclusion, you are essentially saying that this war is in the
2:22
bag before the US and the Japanese are even in the war.
2:26
I think that that's ridiculous. The other thing is that I think
2:30
that a lot of the Eastern Front literature tends to over focus
2:36
on the military aspects of that campaign and under focuses on
2:41
what's going on in the Soviet domestic economy, which is
2:44
absolutely on a knife edge all through 1942.
2:47
The wheels could totally have come off that economy.
2:50
And if that happens, I mean, the, the, the Russian economy
2:53
had fallen apart in World War One just 20 years prior under
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economic circumstances that were not nearly as dire as the ones
3:01
that the Soviets are now facing in 1942.
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You know, they've lost 40% of their population, 40% of their
3:08
GDP. The majority of their food
3:10
production is in Ukraine, you know, So how are you going to
3:14
keep the lid on that from a societal standpoint?
3:17
There's a lot of stuff going on there.
3:19
OK. And there's good quotes and maps
3:21
in the book as well. Absolutely, yeah.
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It's got a about 140 maps. I did all the maps.
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I'm a map kind of guy. It's a large book.
3:30
It's about 1200 pages, but yeah, it'll be coming out from Oxford
3:34
University on June 1st, 2026. All right, we'll be looking for
3:37
that again. The website, if you want to
3:39
learn more, is 1942 book.com, so please check that out.
3:43
And yeah, I'm glad you're joining me for this episode
3:46
because in my mind, when it comes to Admirals of World War
3:49
2, Yamamoto's name is up there with Nimitz and Halsey and all
3:53
the other greats. What made this man so unique?
3:58
Well, I think, you know, his calling card was and always will
4:01
be the attack on Pearl Harbor. I think that that particular
4:04
attack is just stamped on our collective memory as Americans
4:09
because it was just such a stunning occurrence, you know,
4:13
in that the Japanese in 1941 were an undervalued enemy.
4:19
And then in at Pearl Harbor, you know, all of a sudden they just
4:24
blow the doors off and pull off this stunning attack.
4:28
And there are a lot of people in the US that are like, whoa,
4:31
whoa, whoa, whoa. How, how did this happen?
4:34
You know, how is it possible that we were surprised by this
4:38
particular adversary? And that has led to any number
4:42
of conspiracy theories that still reverberate to this day.
4:45
So Yamamoto is the architect of that attack.
4:48
That right there puts him front and Center for us forever.
4:52
But you and I are talking for the call.
4:54
There's more to him. He's not just some commander,
4:56
like he's a diplomat, He's an educator.
4:58
He's a really smart guy. He's a really interesting guy.
5:01
He's a very complex guy. Yes, he's highly educated.
5:04
He's been to the US He was an A naval attache.
5:08
He was also a part of the the diplomatic group that comes over
5:13
to negotiate the Washington Naval Treaty.
5:16
And so this is a guy who has had a lot of exposure to America and
5:21
Americans, knows us and really understands our industrial
5:26
potential, too. So yeah, he's got that diplomat
5:30
aspect to him. During the interwar period, he
5:33
is named as the head of the Navy's Bureau of Aviation.
5:38
And so he's a real aviation pioneer.
5:41
He's not a pilot himself, but he puts a lot of money and a lot of
5:46
time in trying to beef up Japan's carrier force and also
5:50
their aviation element, which is going to be crucial.
5:53
And then he is also a product of a military system, obviously,
5:58
and we can see elements of that in his war planning as well.
6:01
Yeah, let's, let's talk about his background a little bit.
6:04
He's born in 1884 and Nagaoka, Japan.
6:08
Yeah, Nagaoka, the son of a former samurai.
6:12
How did Yamamoto's samurai background influence kind of his
6:16
discipline and worldview? That's a.
6:17
Great question. And it's tricky too, because
6:20
within Japan, the fact that the samurai had essentially been
6:24
shunted to the side by the reforms of the Meiji
6:27
Constitution, and that sort of thing meant that a lot of these
6:31
former samurai families were in many cases destitute.
6:34
You know, they haven't got another way of making a living
6:37
now that they're sort of out of business, if you will, that
6:39
they, their military system has been replaced by what we would
6:42
look at as sort of classic Western style militaries.
6:46
So a lot of these individuals, you know, would would have a bit
6:48
of a chip on their shoulder. And yet at the same time, that
6:52
whole Bushido code, you know, figures into the Japanese modern
6:58
military as well. It has a number of elements that
7:01
we would look at as Westerners. And we would say, well, that's
7:03
kind of anachronistic. You know, the sense of personal
7:06
honor, A lot of shame gets built into this sort of worldview as
7:10
well. But 2IN in terms of war
7:14
planning, he would also be very much a product of an Eastern
7:18
mindset in that they look at Western thinkers like Alfred
7:23
Thayer Mahan and they they say that that guy is really
7:26
important. But from a planning standpoint,
7:28
they would look at Chinese people like Sun Tzu.
7:31
And there are a lot of Eastern elements that get dragged in
7:35
too. So I guess.
7:37
But to sum up, he is a product of all of those influences and
7:42
the samurai background is is just one piece in the kit bag.
7:46
Right, right. Because it seems to me, you
7:48
know, he honors his father and he, he's very big on discipline,
7:50
but he also wants to learn new things like he wants to, he
7:53
wants to be progressive as well. Absolutely.
7:56
Well, he enters the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy graduates
8:00
in 19 O 4. What kind of officer do you
8:03
think he was in his early Academy years?
8:05
Well, I will say that the Imperial Navy at this point in
8:09
time was long, undisciplined and very harsh discipline.
8:13
And so Yamamoto would have been subjected to that as he's going
8:16
through that system as well, just just like everybody else
8:19
was. It's important to follow orders.
8:22
It's important to follow them extremely quickly without a lot
8:25
of thinking. And so I can't imagine that that
8:28
did not chafe because Yamamoto very clearly was a, was a man
8:34
who had his own opinions about things.
8:36
He was not a sheep. But yeah, you know, he's got to
8:40
come up through the ranks. He's got to do his his
8:42
midshipmen cruises and 1st deployments and all that stuff.
8:45
So. Yeah, and he serves on the Russo
8:48
Japanese War. Yeah, the Battle of Sushima
8:52
where he's wounded and loses 2 fingers.
8:54
But also, you know, the Japanese kind of shocked the world and
8:57
beat the Russian Navy, right? Yeah, no.
9:00
That's, that's a huge victory. I mean, that's really the first
9:02
time that a Western Power has been defeated by an Asian power.
9:09
And yeah, that was a real eye opener.
9:11
You know, the Russians sent this fleet all the way around, you
9:16
know, thousands and thousands of miles and in some cases around
9:19
the Cape of Good Hope. And yeah, they come up through
9:22
the Straits of Sushima and just get absolutely plastered, just
9:26
blasted. And, you know, it's, it's, it's
9:30
one of the most, it is a decisive defeat.
9:33
And actually there's a there's a seed of a seed of disaster that
9:38
is that is sown there. I think for the Japanese Navy as
9:41
a whole, this defeat is so decisive for the Russians that
9:45
it essentially ends the war in favor of the Japanese.
9:49
It's not quite that simple. But you know, a lot of people
9:51
look at this as, you know, that's the turning point in the
9:53
war. That's when it's clearly over.
9:55
What that plants in the mind of people like Yamamoto and the
9:58
Navy as a whole is that you can win a war just by winning one
10:02
battle. So this quest for what they call
10:05
a decisive sea battle is something that then infects that
10:10
Navy for the rest of its history.
10:12
And so they carry that lesson forward to their planning
10:15
against the Americans too, that all we have to do is win one big
10:19
climactic sea battle against the American battle line, and we're
10:22
going to decide the war in our favor.
10:25
And unfortunately, World War 2 era United States is an entirely
10:30
different animal than Czarist Russia in 19 O 5.
10:34
That's really. Good.
10:36
That's a really good point. We'll come back to that.
10:40
But yeah. Yamamoto studies later on at
10:42
Harvard, 1919 to 1921, and later serves as naval attache in
10:47
Washington. Yeah.
10:49
So how do you think his time in America shaped his understanding
10:52
of US industry and culture? I know he he learns to speak
10:54
English as well. He speaks English, he travels
10:57
extensively. And this is one of those sort of
10:59
the fracture lines that you see within the Japanese military as
11:03
a whole, that the Navy is often more, what I would say,
11:07
cosmopolitan than the imperial Army is.
11:10
And Yamamoto is sort of emblematic of that.
11:12
I mean, this is a guy who has traveled widely within the US,
11:17
not only on the East Coast, but he's been in the American
11:19
heartland too. And so he's been to what is now
11:24
the Rust Belt, but was back in the 1920s and 30's, the largest
11:29
manufacturing complex in the world.
11:32
This, you know, span of real estate that starts in upstate
11:37
New York, goes all the way across the Great Lakes, through
11:40
places like Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Detroit,
11:44
obviously, you know, And so Yamamoto went through all of
11:47
that, and he had an extremely healthy appreciation for the
11:53
industrial power of the United States.
11:55
It's not. It's not Czarist Russia.
11:58
It's not Czarist Russia exactly, that the the industrial
12:03
potential of the US vis A vis Japan just is awe inspiring and
12:08
absolute. You know, there, even by the
12:11
time you get to the eve of the Pacific War, internal Japanese
12:15
estimates were estimating that America had 20 times the
12:21
manufacturing power that Japan did.
12:23
Even though Japan was a major world power by this point in
12:26
time. It's it's, it's, it's almost
12:29
hard to imagine just how powerful America was by that
12:33
point in time. You know, we represented 1/3 of
12:36
the world's energy consumption and probably close to 40% of the
12:41
total GDP, which is a monster. And we'll come back to his
12:46
warnings that were ignored here in a minute.
12:48
Yeah, he kind of rises in the Navy, gains recognition for his
12:51
expertise in aviation. Yep, and modernization of the
12:54
fleet. Why do you think he championed
12:58
naval aviation over battleships again?
13:01
I mean, this is against traditional thinking at the
13:03
time. Yeah, well, you know, aviation
13:05
is, pardon the pardon the pun, is just taking off in the in the
13:08
20s. And you have, you know, people
13:10
like, you know, Lindberg making his cross Atlantic flight that
13:14
inspired entire generations of people, not just in America, but
13:19
worldwide. If you were a young man in the
13:23
20s and 30s who was adventurous and technically minded, you
13:28
wanted to be a pilot or be involved with aviation.
13:32
It's the it's the nearest thing to being, you know, part of the
13:34
American space program in the 60s.
13:36
That's where all the cool kids wanted to hang out.
13:39
Planes were it, man, they were cool.
13:41
Right, they were new. They were new, I guess, from a,
13:44
you know, a career development standpoint too, if you're a
13:47
product of a military system and suddenly there's this kind of
13:50
greenfields opportunity to potentially get in on the ground
13:55
floor of this new military service.
13:59
A lot of the ambitious, cool cats inside the military, not
14:03
only in Japan, but you know, the same thing is true in in
14:06
Britain, Germany, any place, you know, that's was a place where
14:10
careers could be made to the point you see people like Halsey
14:16
and Ernest King likewise are reinventing themselves during
14:20
this time period, even though they're too old.
14:23
You know, cats like Halsey are like, no, damn it, I'm going to
14:26
go back and I'm going to get my wings, you know, and I'm going
14:28
to be a pilot so that I can get in on this career path.
14:33
And Yamamoto's the same breed of cat.
14:35
That's a really great point. Yeah.
14:36
I mean, I think Halsey was the oldest to get his wings, like at
14:39
52. Like he knew that it was.
14:41
It was important to learn this new technology.
14:43
Yeah, and Ernest King, same thing.
14:45
So yeah, that's. Yamamoto himself is not an
14:48
aviator, but he very much sees that air power can do
14:53
interesting things within the broader expanses of the Pacific
14:57
Ocean. And so he aligns himself with
14:59
the other sort of pioneers within the Japanese military,
15:03
guys who, if you're a Pacific War historian, you would
15:06
recognize names like these. You know, Ozawa, who's going to
15:09
be the main carrier Admiral in places like Battle of the
15:13
Philippine Sea in a way. Shigiyoshi likewise a little
15:16
more obscure, he's the guy who's in command at Battle of Coral
15:19
Sea from a theater standpoint. So there's a, you know, there's
15:23
kind of a clique within the Japanese Navy that are very air
15:26
minded and think that the whole battleship orthodoxy is just,
15:31
yeah, that's old news and it's gonna be superseded by aircraft.
15:34
Just thinking about it, I think you hit upon it like within 20
15:37
years, you're gonna have naval battles where the fleets don't
15:39
even see each other. They're not even gonna be within
15:42
range of each other, but they're still gonna have naval battles
15:44
via airplanes. Which would have been, it was
15:47
inconceivable in 1920s, right, If you had spouted something
15:51
like that, that hey, you know, in, in 20 years, we aren't even
15:54
going to have to cite the other guys, you know, battle line in
15:58
order to bring them to battle. You know, the, the, the big gun
16:02
orthodoxy would be like, you're high.
16:04
That's never going to happen. Yeah, yeah, well, let's kind of
16:09
approach World War 2 now. Yamamoto has opposition to the
16:12
war, with the US warning that Japan could only win for six
16:16
months to a year. Why did he believe war with the
16:19
US was ultimately unwinnable? It goes back again to his
16:23
experiences in the US You know, this is a guy that has a first
16:26
hand appreciation of the industrial potential of America
16:31
and is like this is a very, very bad idea to go to war with these
16:36
guys. And if you look through the
16:39
source material, this whole business of I, I will run wild
16:44
for the first six months to a year.
16:47
There are several different renditions of that quote because
16:50
he says it to several different people.
16:53
You know, during this run up to war in, yeah, 1941, generally
17:00
speaking, but particularly from like July of 1941 onward, which
17:05
is when the Americans put this oil embargo in against the
17:08
Japanese. This is not a war that the
17:10
Japanese had really planned for. I mean, the immediate post war
17:14
myth when I was a kid growing up, it was always, oh, the
17:17
reason the Japanese were so successful with their early
17:20
campaigns is because they've been meticulously planning these
17:23
for decades in advance. That's all malarkey, complete
17:27
malarkey. The Japanese had no notion that
17:30
they were going to be getting into a war with the Western
17:32
powers. The earliest some of their
17:36
divisional staff started mulling about, you know, could we do
17:40
operations in Southeast Asia that the soonest that that
17:44
happened is actually around the fall of France in May of 1940.
17:47
It really doesn't get kicked into high gear, like I say,
17:51
until July of 1941. And then all of a sudden they're
17:54
like, Oh my God, we're going to run out of oil.
17:57
You know, the spigot's been turned off.
18:00
What are we going to do if we're going to actually fight?
18:03
So unfortunately, what ends up happening for Japan, this is
18:08
sort of a tragic period because it's a period of real
18:12
fecklessness and a lack of leadership on the part of the
18:15
top political decision makers within Japan.
18:18
In that there are a lot of private conversations happening
18:23
between people like Yamamoto and his boss, Admiral Nagano, who's
18:26
the chief of the naval staff, where people are asking
18:31
questions. You know, do you think you can
18:32
beat the Americans? And people like Yamamoto are
18:34
like, no. And so those private
18:36
conversations are happening. And in some of those cases that
18:39
you're getting a sort of a candid exchange of information.
18:42
But from a public standpoint, all of these leaders have got
18:45
public facing faces that they have to put out there for public
18:49
consumption that are belligerent and bellicose and war minded
18:54
because they know that if they don't tow the proper line in
18:58
terms of belligerency, that there are junior officers that
19:02
may assassinate them for their opinions.
19:03
I mean, this is very much a thing in Japan in the interwar
19:06
period. A number of prime ministers have
19:08
been killed because they were not sufficiently militaristic.
19:12
And so Yamamoto is being relatively straightforward, as
19:16
was his want. But, you know, the result is
19:19
that the political dynamics within Japan are militating
19:23
towards war, and that's what ends up happening.
19:27
So he's made commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, appointed
19:30
in 193039, give him control over Japan's naval operations.
19:35
So what are his priorities at the outset?
19:37
Is it to grab raw materials? Is it to knock out the American
19:41
fleet? What?
19:42
What are his priorities? One of the reasons he gets named
19:44
as commander of in chief of Combined Fleet was to get him
19:48
out of Tokyo, where he might have been assassinated.
19:51
Because he was the kind of cat who would say things like, no,
19:54
we should not fight the Americans.
19:55
That would be a really bad idea during the war planning
19:58
processes. We're kicking this off leading
20:00
up to war. The overall game plan for the
20:03
Japanese has to be grabbing resources.
20:06
Oil is the driver here. And it's the Imperial Navy that
20:09
once that oil embargo goes on, they're the ones that are really
20:12
sort of leading the charge and are convincing the Army that you
20:17
need to pry your attention away from the Soviets and you know
20:21
what's going on in Mongolia and places like that.
20:24
And you need to get focused on down South.
20:27
That's where the oil is. There ain't no oil in Mongolia.
20:30
We got to go to Java, particularly Sumatra.
20:34
That's where we got to go. And so the whole war plan really
20:39
is this charge to the South. They're going to they're going
20:42
to invade places like Malaya to isolate Java, both East and
20:48
West, and they're going to eventually grab Java.
20:50
It's Java that is the centerpiece of this operation.
20:52
Americans tend to say, well, Pearl Harbor was the centerpiece
20:55
of this whole thing. It's like no Pearl Harbor can be
21:00
viewed as tactically offensive, but operationally and
21:04
strategically defensive in that what it is designed to do is to
21:09
put the American battle fleet out of business for six months
21:14
so that we, the Japanese, can do this massive assaults right now
21:18
they. Create a sphere of influence
21:20
where the Americans can't stop us.
21:22
Yeah. Exactly.
21:24
Let's talk about Yamamo's personal life a little bit.
21:26
I know he was married with four kids and he also enjoyed
21:30
gambling, which segues nicely into my next topic.
21:33
What was his personal life like? Kind of a mess.
21:36
He was not, he was not meeting his wife's emotional needs.
21:40
She was not meeting his emotional needs.
21:42
I mean, he's got multiple mistresses and that's, you know,
21:46
that's just kind of he was a very complex guy and he's also a
21:49
guy who was away at sea a lot. And so he was not at home.
21:53
And this is not what we would look at as a perfect father
21:57
figure. I guess I would say, you know,
21:58
this is not the he's not a soccer dad, right?
22:02
He's just not. I think he's got a fairly,
22:04
fairly healthy self regard. Nobody who gets promoted to a
22:08
position of, you know, being in charge of your main battle fleet
22:11
doesn't think fairly well of himself.
22:14
On the other hand, he is he's pretty gregarious.
22:16
He's easy to get along with. He he has pretty good relations
22:21
with a lot of his subordinates. And, and as you say, he is, he
22:25
is a bit of gambler. He likes cards, he likes playing
22:28
shogi in chess. So, yeah, he he does have a
22:33
streak to him, which is he is a risk taker.
22:36
And he demonstrated that obviously as soon as he got
22:39
interested in aviation. You know, that's another thing
22:42
that that we also forget is just how dangerous aviation was at
22:45
that time. Yeah.
22:46
You know, if you're going to fly airplanes, you've got a
22:49
probably, you know, a 5050 chance that you're going to end
22:52
up dead in these early things. And that was just the nature of
22:55
the beast. And so Yamamoto brings with him
23:01
a risk taking element, and that obviously informs the planning
23:05
for Pearl Harbor. Yeah, let's talk about that.
23:08
Yeah, what risk did he see in attacking Pearl Harbor and why
23:12
did he proceed? Was it the Warhawks in Tokyo
23:15
tell him to do it, or did he? This is his baby and it's a
23:20
little bit murky as to when he actually started thinking about
23:24
this. But if the seeds at least had
23:26
been planted in the middle of 1940 that he had been mulling on
23:30
this notion that if we do end up going to war with the US, how
23:35
are we going to turn the tables on this thing?
23:37
Because if we just get into an A straight up attritional contest
23:41
with these guys, they're going to clean our clocks.
23:43
You know, we cannot hold out against the Americans in a long
23:47
term war. So that means that we need to do
23:51
something stunning and dramatic at the outset of that war.
23:56
And some of that has to be aimed at America's morale that we all
24:01
understand that war making is not necessarily a strictly
24:04
rational business, right? That that morale is, is super
24:09
important. So if I'm going to chip away at
24:12
America's morale and hopefully get them to a place where
24:16
they're just like, screw it, this isn't worth it.
24:18
We're going to throw in the towel.
24:19
We got other things to focus on. I need to, I need to hit him in
24:23
the face right off the bat with something that's so stunning and
24:28
outsize that it looks like, you know, we're just not going to be
24:30
able to come back from this. And the coin of the realm at
24:34
this point is battleships. That's how everybody measures
24:37
naval power these days. So the Americans have got 17
24:42
battleships in Commission. And these vessels embody, you
24:48
know, they are the today's equivalent would be fleet
24:51
carriers in our Navy, right? They cost a ton of money, they
24:55
take years and years and years to build, and the loss of even
24:59
one or two of them is would be seen as tantamount to a national
25:04
catastrophe. His goal in Pearl Harbor is to
25:08
knock out a third of our battleships.
25:10
I want to sink five of these things.
25:13
And that's going to just be such a stunning blow to the Americans
25:16
that hopefully that will induce them to just come to the
25:19
bargaining table and we can get this thing over with via
25:22
negotiation rather than war fighting.
25:25
Yeah. And I've been to Pearl Harbor.
25:26
It's a very moving place, yeah. We were lucky though that none
25:29
of the aircraft carriers were there though, right?
25:32
That's absolutely right. And we can we can talk a little
25:34
bit about about that too. But the horrific risks involved
25:39
in this attack though, from the Japanese standpoint are they're
25:43
alarming. You're going to basically try to
25:45
bring a carrier force across 3500 nautical miles of water,
25:49
and that means that you've got to develop underway
25:51
replenishment, which was not a thing back then.
25:54
The Japanese actually do some really innovative things in that
25:57
respect, too. And if this attack does not go
26:00
well, if the Japanese end up losing a substantial component
26:04
of their carrier force, that in turn imperils this whole
26:08
southern advance as well. So, you know, when he presents
26:13
his plan to Naval GHQ, which is his boss, they're like, again,
26:20
you're high. You know we're not going to go
26:23
for this. Right, yeah.
26:24
And you make a good point there. You know, you have to 3500 miles
26:28
without being detected with replenishing yourself because
26:31
you're going to be out in the middle of nowhere.
26:32
Yep. And once you get there winning a
26:36
battle that maybe the Americans are ready for you and you lose.
26:38
So there's there's a lot of dangers in this.
26:41
Hell of a lot of dangers. Exactly.
26:43
When Yamamoto ends up resorting to frankly is some skullduggery
26:47
on his part in that when naval GHQ balks at his at his plan, he
26:53
says fine, I'm going to resign and my entire staff is going to
26:56
resign too. Which is blackmail when you
26:59
think about it. I mean, you are on the eve of
27:01
the most consequential war in Japan's history.
27:06
And what do you mean you're going to resign unless you don't
27:08
get your way? What the actual you know that's.
27:11
A little ego there. Hell yeah, there there was.
27:15
But he gets away with it, and this is going to have really bad
27:18
ramifications, you know, for the rest of his Command tenure.
27:21
Because having played that blackmail card once, he knows he
27:24
can play it again. He's going to play it before
27:27
Midway as well. So anyway, he does get his way.
27:29
It's a stunning tactical victory, but it's a strategic
27:32
gambling. I want to talk about his
27:34
reaction to the aftermath Pearl Harbor, because we've all seen
27:37
the famous quote. It's in the movie Pearl Harbor
27:39
quote. I fear all we've done is to
27:43
awaken a sleeping giant. End Quote.
27:44
But that never happened. Right.
27:46
Never happened. That was a brilliant
27:48
screenwriter. I don't know who the
27:49
screenwriter was, but yeah, the Japanese Navy nerderati has gone
27:54
through all of the, you know, source material numerous times
27:57
is like, yeah, Yamamoto, so far as we can tell, never ever said
28:00
that, but he might have. It might as well have.
28:04
I mean, it perfectly encapsulates, you know, what
28:06
actually happens as a result of that attack.
28:09
He's probably patting himself on the back, too, Like, hey, it did
28:12
what we wanted it to. It got the battleships knocked
28:15
out. Yeah, you know he.
28:15
Knocked out five battleships, as you mentioned earlier, you know,
28:18
the carriers were not there, which was a bummer.
28:21
And you know, a lot of the the aviators in the carrier task
28:25
force, Cheeto Bhutai were very disappointed by that.
28:28
From a tactical standpoint, you know, we tend to look at this
28:31
operation, We say it was brilliant.
28:33
You know, if you dig into it, the Japanese actually left a lot
28:36
of stuff on the table, I guess I would say.
28:39
But it was a minimal loss on their part.
28:41
A few airplanes. Yeah, although a lot were
28:43
damaged. They lost 29 planes, but over
28:46
100 were were actually damaged, you know, out of a total force
28:50
around 400 aircraft. No, don't get me wrong, it
28:53
absolutely was a successful attack.
28:55
Tactically, there are ways that they could have played their
28:58
cards better to have done things like attacked some of the heavy
29:01
cruisers and light cruisers that were available.
29:04
Yeah, there was a third wave, right that he didn't release.
29:07
That whole thing is is a myth. Down through the years there's
29:10
been this whole notion of all they should have attacked the
29:13
fuel tanks and all that stuff that is all malarkey and is the
29:18
result of post war fabrications by a guy named Mitzvah Fuchita.
29:22
He made all that stuff up and it got implanted into Tora Tora
29:27
Tora, which has been viewed by millions of people.
29:30
And therefore it is now cemented in our collective memory that
29:33
all they should have gone after the fuel tanks there.
29:35
That was a huge mistake. Actuality, Nagumo and his crew
29:40
never had any intention of attacking those fuel tanks.
29:44
OK, it's never going to happen. Let's move on because into your
29:48
book now. Turning Points 1942 we have the
29:52
Battle of Midway. Yamamoto's fleet suffers
29:54
catastrophic losses. So what happened to the gambler
29:58
here, and how did it alter the course of the war?
30:02
So much to unpack there. Yes, the problem you see at
30:06
Midway, a big picture is that from a battle planning
30:09
standpoint. Do we have their codes now?
30:12
Yeah, that helps. Yeah, it never hurts, although
30:15
you got to be careful about that.
30:17
I think that there's there's again, one of these sort of
30:21
interpretational pendulums that you see swinging in history when
30:24
the first books came out on the code breaking in in the late
30:27
1980s. There's this notion that if you
30:31
are reading the other guy's mail and you know he's coming, you
30:36
should win the battle, right? Should be that simple.
30:38
Game over, you. You know they're coming.
30:39
There's a big difference in having operational level Intel
30:44
on enemy intentions and, you know, rough timetables and being
30:49
able to actually translate that into meaningful results on the
30:52
battlefield. The analog I always use is that
30:55
the British were getting great intelligence in the northern
30:59
desert against Rommel. It didn't do him any good
31:03
because their army just was not good enough to defeat the Africa
31:06
Corps. Up until, you know, October of
31:08
1942, they just couldn't get it done on the ground.
31:11
And so it's an open question after six months of this war,
31:15
which has been a dumpster fire, are arcade carrier aviators good
31:19
enough to get it done against the Japanese?
31:21
Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you can be the best
31:24
coach in the NFL, but if you don't have the players fighting
31:27
the game, then you're going to you're not going to win.
31:29
So yeah, that's a good point. It's not going to work, but
31:32
what's going on then from a battle planning standpoint?
31:34
Yamamoto is convinced that the American Navy is morally beaten
31:38
by this point and that they're going to have to be lured out of
31:41
Pearl Harbor and bring them out to battle somehow, which results
31:45
in a battle plan that has a lot of different formations that are
31:48
running around that are not mutually supporting.
31:52
And what that means is that even though if you look at the
31:56
aggregate number of Japanese warships that are running around
31:59
in the Pacific doing something on the date of Midway, they got
32:02
a hell of a lot of warships out there.
32:04
At the tip of the spear, right off of Midway itself, you've got
32:09
a Japanese carrier force that has four aircraft carriers and
32:13
248 carrier planes, and about 20 warships going up against an
32:19
American force of three aircraft carriers, 276 carrier planes,
32:26
another 100 on midways. We outnumber them in aircraft.
32:29
We've got 4 runways, one of which on Midway cannot be sunk
32:33
and we know they're coming. That's a pretty even matchup.
32:37
You know, we have some problems. Obviously our submarines don't
32:40
perform as well as Nimitz would have hoped.
32:42
The land based air groups on Midway likewise don't perform
32:46
terribly well. And so it really does come down
32:49
to at the end of the day, our three carriers versus their four
32:52
carriers. And that that particular battle,
32:55
there's so many command decisions with like the
32:57
Japanese. Stuff.
32:58
Going on with like, do we do die bombers or do we make the planes
33:01
into torpedo bombers and there's like they have like 15 minutes
33:04
to decide and then they change their minds.
33:06
Like there's so many little tactical decisions that alter
33:09
the battle. I don't think it's Yamamoto's
33:10
fault entirely. It just is one of those things.
33:14
It just didn't go their way that day.
33:15
It didn't go their way that day. And and the same is true for
33:18
Nakumo, the Admiral in charge. I argue in Shattered Sword that
33:22
he actually fights that battle on reasonably doctrinally
33:25
congruent lines. It's just the decisions you end
33:27
up making were not unfortunately optimal.
33:31
And so, yeah, the, you know, the Japanese end up just taking it
33:35
on the chin and they lose for their aircraft carriers there.
33:38
The one thing I would point out to the other huge advantage that
33:41
we have in that battle that are hardly ever talked about is the
33:45
advantage in scouting assets. That carriers are incredibly
33:50
fragile beasts. And it really comes down to who
33:53
can attack effectively first. And that means that he who has
33:59
the most scouting assets is the most likely to to find his
34:02
opponent first and therefore hopefully get his strike
34:06
packages up first. And we've got that in spades in
34:09
that battle because we've we're running, you know, a dozen or
34:12
more PBY Catalinas out of Midway and we know that they're coming.
34:16
And so, you know, if you just kind of do a breakdown of the
34:19
number of aircraft that the Japanese have out looking for US
34:23
versus the number of aircraft we have out looking for them, we
34:26
got them like 2 to 1. And that's why we are able to
34:29
get our attacks in first and end up devastating their carrier
34:32
fleet. Scouting is critical.
34:34
Scouting is critical. Napoleon, when he didn't have a
34:37
cavalry force after Russia, that's when he started to falter
34:40
because he didn't know how big the enemy was or where they were
34:43
and he just, he didn't have the horses like he had before
34:45
Russia. That is absolutely true.
34:47
Scouting is is one of these unsung kind of things.
34:51
You know, we tend to focus on the firepower elements, but man,
34:55
yes, scouting is huge. Let's let's talk about the
34:58
Solomon Islands campaign. After that way again, Yamamo is
35:02
kind of overseeing operations. How did his decisions affect
35:06
Japanese chances in the Solomon Islands?
35:08
They affected them very deleteriously, I would say.
35:14
Is he a genius or is he just losing his his mojo?
35:17
Like what's what's happening? No.
35:18
And this is not just, yeah, Modo's fault.
35:20
This is again, a product of Japanese naval doctrine between
35:24
the wars, which again is based on this notion of the war is
35:28
going to be decided in a decisive sea battle.
35:32
And I would argue that it takes the Japanese a lot longer than
35:37
the Americans, a lot more time to just get their heads around
35:41
the fact that this Guadal Canal, this is the decisive battle.
35:47
And you know what? It doesn't look or smell
35:50
anything like the pre war doctrinal.
35:53
You know, Tenet said Japanese doctrine said that this decisive
35:57
battle is going to be a blue water affair.
35:59
It's going to be fought out in the Marshall Islands someplace.
36:02
Climactic clash of the battle lines and all that stuff.
36:04
That's what their head says. And yet, if you look at the
36:08
context of 1942, the Solomon Islands campaign really is, I
36:14
would argue, the crucial campaign of that year more so
36:18
than Midway. Midway.
36:21
Midway is what I would say is the gift that keeps on giving.
36:25
What Midway does for us as the Americans is it it creates
36:29
parody of carrier forces within the Pacific.
36:32
We now have roughly as many flight decks as they do, which
36:35
then gets us out of this defensive Crouch that we've been
36:38
in for the first six months of this war and allows us to start
36:42
thinking about where do we want to counter attack and how Ernest
36:46
King, who's the commander in chief of the US Navy at this
36:48
time, just seizes that opportunity.
36:50
I mean, right now. And within two months, we're
36:54
going to have counter attacked at Guadalcanal, which was crazy
36:57
fast. You know, we didn't have the
36:59
logistical basis to do that. It was nuts.
37:01
And it was nuts from the Japanese standpoint, too.
37:03
They did not anticipate that we would be able to start counter
37:07
attacking that quickly. One of the things that you see
37:10
then throughout that campaign is that the Japanese are always
37:13
kind of a day late and a dollar short emotionally in just
37:17
investing the resources in that campaign that they needed to
37:20
win. They had opportunities to do
37:22
that, but there are a number of case examples that I can I can
37:26
kind of trot out here. So, for instance, during the
37:29
October time span, they came down with a group of two
37:32
battleships. This is October 13th and 14th,
37:35
and they put a battleship bombardment onto Henderson Field
37:38
that just whoa, you know, just knocked us in the kisser.
37:44
Should have been doing that every week.
37:45
They should have been bringing down a force.
37:46
Same thing happens during the First Naval Battle of
37:49
Guadalcanal in This is November 13th.
37:55
They bring down another battleship bombardment forces.
37:57
The only the second time that they've attempted this, they
38:00
were using their Congo class fast battleships.
38:03
These are old battle cruisers, very useful vessels.
38:05
They've been, you know, because they're fast and they could have
38:08
brought four of those puppies down.
38:10
In fact, two of them were left kind of circling up around on
38:14
Tong Jabba Aitol, which is about 400 miles north of Guadalcanal.
38:18
Why didn't they bring down all four?
38:20
The reason they didn't bring down all four, there's a number
38:23
of things that go into that. They didn't have the kind of
38:25
ammunition for bombardment. There may have been fuel
38:27
problems. But if you kind of look at on
38:30
the opposite side, you got Admiral Halsey, who at this
38:33
point in time is just he's all in, man.
38:36
Anything I got, I'm pushing into the center of the table.
38:39
The Japanese like, yeah, it's the decisive battle.
38:42
And we're we're all kind of in, you know, but they're they're
38:46
never willing to just push all the chips in, bring all the
38:50
battleships. I mean, hell up a up a truck,
38:52
you've got Yamato, which is the biggest battleship in the world.
38:56
You've got, you know, the Mutsu, which is a 16 inch gun ship.
38:59
But nevertheless, they had the assets, but they never committed
39:03
them to actually winning. Yeah, hit him the fastest with
39:07
the mostest with the mostest. Yeah.
39:09
Let's talk about demise, and I want to talk about Operation
39:13
Vengeance, which I really don't know much about.
39:16
U.S. forces intercepted his flight.
39:18
I guess Yamamoto was touring the, you know, his sphere of
39:22
influence there. He came down there, came down to
39:25
rebal, which is, you know, the main naval base.
39:28
It's at the tip of New Britain. That's the hub for their
39:30
campaign, both in the Solomons and down in New Guinea.
39:34
He's going to go on an inspection trip.
39:36
He's going to go over to Bougainville.
39:38
So how did American intelligence succeed in targeting Yamamoto,
39:42
and why is his death such a blow to Japan?
39:44
Code breaking. We we broke the codes that
39:47
indicated and. This is very fortuitous, but by
39:51
this point in time, which is 1943, middle of 1943, as opposed
39:55
to the early war where we didn't have a lot of code Breakers at
39:58
all. Now we got thousands of analysts
40:00
who are, you know, just constantly cracking this this
40:03
stream of Intel. And we get wind of the fact
40:06
that, yeah, he's he's going to be at rebal and he is going to
40:09
fly over to Bougainville to, to have this, have this inspection
40:13
tour. And so you get out.
40:16
The calipers and you're like, well, flying time from here to
40:19
here is roughly X and therefore if we want to intercept him at
40:22
this location, you should be there roughly around Y.
40:26
And at that point we we now are using P38 Lightnings, which is a
40:32
pretty long ranged fighter, especially if you can you put
40:36
belly tanks under it and this kind of thing.
40:38
And so that fighter has got just enough range that it can reach
40:43
all the way out from Guadalcanal and potentially intercept him.
40:49
Then there's sort of the command element.
40:51
Do you want to assassinate an enemy general in that fashion,
40:57
and by so doing potentially jeopardize the intelligence that
41:04
has led to that? Yeah, there's that great scene
41:07
in The Imitation Game where they're like, well, we have the
41:09
intelligence. Do we act on every little note
41:11
we get? Because then they'll know that
41:12
we broke the code. Bingo, that's exactly right.
41:16
But eventually the decision is made that he's the best Admiral
41:19
they got and we should get rid of it and so.
41:23
Well it's a Gable on his part too, right?
41:25
Because I think his staffers told him not to go and he only
41:27
had two escort fighters with him like it was.
41:30
Four, I think, but just a handful.
41:32
But he didn't need to go. Or maybe in his mind he needed
41:34
to go, but I don't know. It seems like a dangerous risk
41:37
in hindsight. Although, you know, just from, I
41:40
guess from a leadership standpoint, you know, if you're
41:42
doing your thing there, there are plenty of other examples
41:45
along these same lines. You know, Halsey flew into
41:48
Guadalcanal during that campaign, so did Nimitz.
41:52
Shanghai Shek was flying into Chinese battlefields in 1942
41:58
that were extraordinarily dangerous.
42:00
You know, the Japanese had air superiority and that dude was
42:03
flying all over the place. So if, you know, showing the
42:07
flag as as a as a big time leader is important for the
42:10
morale. You're men.
42:11
And again, morale is important. So yeah, I think Yamamoto felt
42:14
that he had to do this. And unfortunately, the result
42:17
was that he did get intercepted. And, you know, a couple of a
42:22
couple of these P38's got into range and yeah, they, they took
42:25
down his bomber and, and the other bomber that was coming
42:29
along with him with his chief of staff and whatnot.
42:31
And yeah, they shot those planes down, killed him.
42:34
Well, when we talk about legacy, he's seen as both a brilliant
42:37
strategist and a tragic figure. Who knew Japan could not win the
42:41
war? I mean, top five Admirals of War
42:43
2, wouldn't you say? What is his legacy?
42:45
That's complex. I did not see him as that great
42:48
of a of a planner. That's my problem with him is
42:53
that I think that if you look at Midway as a battle plan, it was
42:56
hopelessly flawed. There were a lot of problems
43:00
with the Pearl Harbor battle plan, too.
43:02
I would argue in particular the inclusion of many Subs in that
43:07
overall plan because Pearl Harbor is all based on the
43:10
element of surprise and trying to sail, you know, a group of
43:14
tiny submarines up the, you know, the narrow waterway into a
43:18
harbour that is full of thousands and thousands and
43:21
thousands of eyeballs. You know, the one submarine that
43:23
actually did make it in there. Funniest thing, many hundreds of
43:27
people saw that submarine. So for my money, Yamamoto's
43:33
legacy really needs to be viewed more through bureaucratic and
43:39
that his role as a visionary in promoting Japanese airpower was
43:42
absolutely, absolutely crucial to Japan's early war successes
43:47
in that war. Pearl Harbor two, Yeah.
43:50
You know, OK, So I have some quibbles with it from a tactical
43:53
planning standpoint, but obviously it was a successful
43:57
operation tactically. You should be given that.
44:00
But I would not put him up against cats like Spruance, you
44:05
know, was a much better Admiral than Yamamoto.
44:08
Maybe that's, you know, we give him a lot of credit because it
44:11
is. It's one of the greatest
44:11
surprise, Yeah, attacks of all time.
44:14
But you're right. He loses Midway, loses
44:15
Guadalcanal. Yeah, that had he actually been
44:19
more aggressive in the Solomon Islands, he could potentially
44:23
have won that campaign. It was a desperate, desperate
44:27
time in October on Guadalcanal. We were not winning many of the
44:31
naval battles down there, and the Marines were really feeling
44:35
pretty isolated and, you know, don't have sufficient men, don't
44:38
have sufficient supplies, you know, the chip.
44:40
The Japanese Navy had the assets to make things a lot worse for
44:44
us, and they never pushed the chips into the table.
44:47
Yeah, and I know he's still a revered figure in Japan.
44:49
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I appreciate that
44:52
overview of him, John. That was fantastic.
44:54
Yeah. Again, if you'd like to learn
44:57
more about John's book coming out in June, it's 1942 Book 1942
45:02
book.com, so please check that out.
45:04
And yeah, we're happy to have you on the show, John.
45:07
This is great. Appreciate it.