Isoroku Yamamoto: The poet who planned Pearl Harbor.

Romance continues to surround his name, not least in Japan, where he is a cult figure, and not exclusively on the political right. His distaste for a war with the Western allies has always rung a bell with postwar liberals aware that, if the enemy had been as pitiless as the Japanese High Command, the defeat could have been more disastrous, the occupation more humiliating, and the subsequent resurgence of both the culture and the economy much less impressive.

The Yamamoto romance benefits from his artistic tastes. Like America's General Patton, Yamamoto wrote accomplished poetry. Again like Patton, and like other romantic commanders such as Rommel and Guderian, Yamamoto probably experienced battle as an aesthetic event: the most likely reason for his participation in a war of which he disapproved. Superior military minds share with poets the uncomfortable position of waiting for lightning to strike, and having to act on it when it does. Yamamoto knew that World War II was the wrong war, but it was the only war he had.

WW II wasn't “the only war he had”...Japan had been fighting in Manchuria, and then China since 1931. The Japanese Fleet and air arm supported those operations.

Yamamoto liked overly complex battle plans [Midway is the perfect example]. As a result they were difficult to carry out, dissipated resources on subsidiary operations, and often failed.

Although an innovator, Yamamoto was much more conservative than the author allows. He didn't oppose having Chuichi Nagumo command the Pearl Harbor Strike Force, since he was one of the most senior Vice Admirals in the Japanese Navy. But Nagumo was a destroyer man, whose field of expertise was torpedoes. He had no experience with aviation. When one looks at Midway, one is struck by the fact that Yamamoto’s carriers were bait for the “decisive battle”, in which Yamamoto was commanding a fleet of battleships, from the bridge of YAMATO. In fact Yamamoto’s flagship was always a battleship. An interesting conundrum, but not the mythic figure the author attempts to make him.

“He chose to ignore the Geneva Convention, which Japan was a signatory, thus pig poop be on him and his ‘poetry’.”

You show me a documented episode of Yammamoto personally violating the Geneva Conventions, or ordering the same from his subordinates, and I’ll believe that he was involved in such things. Contrary to popular belief, there were many Japanese officers who did everything they could to adhere to the “rules of war”, only to have their unruly subordinates make a mockery of such. That such happened frequently is due to the peculiarities of Japanese culture and thier ideas on warfare, and the twisted purposes for which this had been harnessed for a campaign of national aggrandizement by the militartists.

Yammamoto was not the genius he’s made out to be, in my opinion. What he is a wonderfully romantic figure who’s “vision” basically consists of having spoken common sense on the eve of his country’s greatest undertaking (i.e. saying that Japan could not win a war against the United States has, in hindsight, has now been elevated to something on the order of prophecy, apparently. The Japanese knew before they started that they couldn’t win, but pride would not allow them to just roll over to Western demands).

As for the Pearl Harbor attack, the “brilliance” of it lies more in the security and some of the technical innovations surrounding the operation than the actual tactics. The “sneak attack” was not new to warfare, nor innovative (the sneak attack by carrier borne aircraft wasn’t even new: it had been done the year before at Taranto by the British, and had been theorized about for a decade prior).

The inclusion of diversionary attacks in connection with a main attack (as inb just about every Japanese naval operation after Pearl Harbor) was not new nor novel.

Where Yammamoto is revolutionary (and a bit of strange bird) is that he manages to change, momentarily, the hidebound doctrine of naval warfare that had been accepted by every major navy on the planet for the past 50 years. All-in-all, it lasted six months, and then failed, because Yammamoto himself failed. Not because of his strategically disasterous actions at Midway (where he violeted just about every rule of basic military strategy and hamstrung Nagumo), but because he had failed to lay the foundations that would have allowed his ideas to flourish in the future; he had not succeeded in training a new generation of air-minded officers, he had not found a truly innovative and creative mind to run the naval air training establishment (Japan ran out of trained pilots long before planes in part because they refused to accellerate or modify their pilot training, which took up to two years!), he could not convince his superiors to break faith with the battleship, he singularly missed the opportunity to get the Japanese navy to make better use of it’s (initially) superior submarines.

Give the mnan credit for his accomplishments, for certain, but also note that many of those accomplishments equate to little more than a man doing his job competently, and that much of Japan’s successes have as much (if not more) to do with Western unpreparedness and stupidity than they do with the invincibility of Japanese arms (this is NOT to detract from the often brave and amazing feats performed by Japanese forces, but one is left to ask the question “if only...” with regards to many of them).

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