[kearnyirish2]

Sadly, he was the best hope for negotiating a peace rather than dragging out the war for a few more years. He had warned in advance that if a deal wasn’t struck within six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan would lose the war. He knew our industrial might would grind them down, and Japan had no chance of winning a war outright.

Six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese fleet suffered a crushing defeat at Midway, and was ground down as he predicted.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Contrary to that, TOJO may have taken him out if we hadn’t if he’d have pushed for peace. It’s not an unheard of concept.

[A_Former_Democrat]

I doubt the American military and public was in any mood for a negotiated settlement after Pearl Harbor

Another Yamamoto miscalculation

[samtheman]

Sadly, he was the best hope for negotiating a peace rather than dragging out the war for a few more years. He had warned in advance that if a deal wasn’t struck within six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan would lose the war. He knew our industrial might would grind them down, and Japan had no chance of winning a war outright.

---

You are right that his thinking was along those lines but I think it was highly unlikely he would have been able to prevail and actually engineer a peace. The vast majority of the top brass wanted to fight to the death.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

Exactly. I have studied this campaign and even wrote my monograph for a Master’s Degree on the Solomons/New Guinea campaign.

A dispassionate analysis of Japanese senior leaders would have revealed that Admiral Yamamoto would have worked hard to negotiate an end to a war he opposed.

However expecting dispassion in war is a fool’s errand. Clausewitz described the composition of war as three interacting parts: “...primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason....”

Yamamoto was targeted for three reasons.

1. He was reachable, signal intercepts let us know he would be in range of US fighters (Chance/probability coming into play)

2. It was a rare opportunity to kill one of the ablest enemy commanders. (rational policy to harm the enemy war effort)

3. Revenge. Yamamoto embarrassed the Army and Navy, killing him (passion- hatred for the man who harmed and embarrassed you)

Even if Yamamoto had avoided or survived the attack (some people did survive the crash). It is likely that the extremists in the Army would have tried to kill him in ‘44-’45. The type of officers who wanted to fight on even after the two atomic strikes.

[Pelham]

Yamamoto ironically enough was one of the few Japanese who understood and appreciated America. He had studied at Harvard and had been naval attache to America. He wasn’t enthusiastic about war with the United States but he was a loyal son of Imperial Japan.

I ran across a fellow whose last name is Lanphier. Asked him if he might be related to the pilot who was part of the Yamamoto raid and that turned out to be his uncle. The wreckage of Yamamoto’s Betty bomber was discovered a few years ago and is now on display at the Chino, CA airport where you can see quite a few still operational WWII aircraft.