Pacific Crucible: war at sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 - by Ian Toll
No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Carrier warfare is a little like a gunfight: the guy who clears the holster fastest walks away. That’s why the US got creamed at Pearl Harbor, and why the Japanese got hammered at Midway. The side that has its planes in the air first wins, and it really is that simple. Carrier warfare is not a sophisticated science, and the battle is won or lost without either flagship ever seeing the other. These are the lessons which come across most strikingly from Ian Toll’s excellent history of the Pacific conflict in the crucial seven months between December 1941 and June 1942, but the book is much more than amateur strategy for the armchair admiral.
A considerable portion of the early part is devoted to events in Japan in the 1920s and 30s leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for me, this finally settled the age-old question of what, if any, responsibility Emperor Hirohito bore for the excesses of his military. Although Toll does not explicitly address this question, it is apparent from his work that history has been much kinder to the Tenno than perhaps it ought to have been. We in the west are used to thinking of Japan as an ancient, tradition-bound country whose internal relations are settled and have remained stable for centuries, if not millennia. Add to that the western habit of thinking of hereditary monarchs as constitutional figureheads, out of the loop of power, and it’s easy to understand why people might consider Hirohito as merely an irrelevance studying biology in his palace while the real decisions were taken by Tojo and Yamamoto. That, however, would be to seriously misunderstand the Japanese situation between the wars.
Japan may have been culturally and linguistically a homogenous entity, but politically it was a very different story. Barely seventy years had elapsed since Commodore Perry had broken the country out of its two century isolation, and the Japanese were still not entirely sure which way to go. It was felt that the country had been treated badly by its western allies after the First World War, and matters came particularly to a head over the so-called 5:5:3 agreement, the naval treaty which limited Japan to three battleships for every five built by The UK and America. The treaty was entirely logical from an economic and strategic viewpoint, in that it took the financial pressure of a naval race off Japan at a time when its economy was struggling, while still guaranteeing her hegemony in the eastern Pacific, but the ultranationalist right didn’t see things that way. To them, a liberal, westernized government had betrayed the honour of Japan and a chain reaction was set in motion.
In a strongly established democratic tradition like the US or Britain, that might have been contained, but there was no such tradition in Japan, and representative democracy was still considered a foreign concept with no roots in the soil. In short, there was a vacuum; Japan could have gone one way, or it could have gone the other, and the one person who had the moral authority to choose that direction was Hirohito. In a situation like that, doing nothing is not an option; the militarists were claiming to act in the name of the Emperor, and the Emperor wasn’t disabusing them.
Bear in mind also that in the 1920s and early 30s at least, the militarists were not the government, but the middle and even junior ranks of the navy and particularly the army; the invasion of Manchuria was not done on orders from the Japanese government but from the local Japanese commanders invoking an ancient tradition called gekokujo, a samurai concept whereby subordinate officers, from a fatalistic sense of honour, precipitate war with neighbouring states without the leave or their authorities. The more victories the militarists brought to Japan, the more powerful they became until they effectively ran the country, and so long as they were bringing victory, Hirohito made no objection to them invoking his name. At the very least, he is guilty by omission.
After Pearl Harbor, the US was at a grave disadvantage. Her battleship capacity had been seriously compromised, and naval doctrine of the time leaned heavily on the battleship as the showstopper in any war. The period was a transitional time in tactical theory, however, with the more radical naval strategists forecasting the rise of the aircraft carrier as a game changer. This was heavily disputed by the traditionalists, as the carrier was an untested quantity. Certainly, airplane design was still somewhat haphazard, and it was not at all clear if carrier-borne aircraft were even capable of delivering the kind of punch that the big guns of the battleships were. After Pearl Harbor, however, the US just had to suck it and see, since carriers were about all that were left.
In early ‘42, the US was a year or so from bringing her industrial capacity fully to bear. In the meantime, there were four carrier groups in the Pacific. The US commander, Admiral Nimitz, knew he had to use these vessels in a defensive role until American industry could kick in, but he also knew that defensive strategy must be aggressive, otherwise there is a real danger of demoralization and perimeter collapse. It was a delicate balancing act, but he had just the man for the job, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.
Halsey certainly had the aggression needed, but he also had rather a good idea. His notion was to use the carrier groups as a kind of naval cavalry, streaking out of Pearl Harbor at high speed, disappearing into the Pacific wilderness, popping up at the last spot on the map the Japanese would expect, levelling the place and then legging it back to Pearl before the enemy knew what had hit them. The strategy was so successful that they were forced to withdraw two of their carrier groups back into home waters to defend against a strike on Japan itself, and Halsey’s group, in recognition of the speed they moved, was known as “The Haul Ass Club”
Ranged against Nimitz and Halsey, however, was one of the greatest naval strategists of the age, Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto has the rare distinction of being one of the few commanders in history to be admired by the enemy even as they fought, and today most people think of him as the civilized and far-sighted leader portrayed by Sô
Yamamura in the 1970 movie Tora! Tora! Tora! He was certainly that, but Toll also portrays a colourful, eccentric and mischievous man who would occasionally imitate the Charlie Chaplin walk and was known to perform handstands in the street after an evening with his geisha lover. These little pen portraits, Yamamoto, Nimitz, Halsey and others are one of the great strengths of the book, humanizing historical figures. But Toll also goes into great and fascinating detail describing the conditions on a carrier, the politics of Hypo, the American code-breaking station on Hawaii, the manoeuvres of combat aircraft in battle and a thousand other details which build up into a thrilling story that reads like a novel.
The Hypo story is of particular relevance, since it was their intercepts of Japanese radio traffic which allowed the Americans to lay in wait at Midway Island and get their planes in the air first in June of ‘42. That was the turning point in the Pacific war, with three Japanese carriers going to the bottom within minutes and the hitherto invincible empire suddenly becoming, well, vincible.
A recommended read for the naval anoraks, but the rest will probably enjoy it too.
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Carrier warfare is a little like a gunfight: the guy who clears the holster fastest walks away. That’s why the US got creamed at Pearl Harbor, and why the Japanese got hammered at Midway. The side that has its planes in the air first wins, and it really is that simple. Carrier warfare is not a sophisticated science, and the battle is won or lost without either flagship ever seeing the other. These are the lessons which come across most strikingly from Ian Toll’s excellent history of the Pacific conflict in the crucial seven months between December 1941 and June 1942, but the book is much more than amateur strategy for the armchair admiral.
A considerable portion of the early part is devoted to events in Japan in the 1920s and 30s leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for me, this finally settled the age-old question of what, if any, responsibility Emperor Hirohito bore for the excesses of his military. Although Toll does not explicitly address this question, it is apparent from his work that history has been much kinder to the Tenno than perhaps it ought to have been. We in the west are used to thinking of Japan as an ancient, tradition-bound country whose internal relations are settled and have remained stable for centuries, if not millennia. Add to that the western habit of thinking of hereditary monarchs as constitutional figureheads, out of the loop of power, and it’s easy to understand why people might consider Hirohito as merely an irrelevance studying biology in his palace while the real decisions were taken by Tojo and Yamamoto. That, however, would be to seriously misunderstand the Japanese situation between the wars.
Japan may have been culturally and linguistically a homogenous entity, but politically it was a very different story. Barely seventy years had elapsed since Commodore Perry had broken the country out of its two century isolation, and the Japanese were still not entirely sure which way to go. It was felt that the country had been treated badly by its western allies after the First World War, and matters came particularly to a head over the so-called 5:5:3 agreement, the naval treaty which limited Japan to three battleships for every five built by The UK and America. The treaty was entirely logical from an economic and strategic viewpoint, in that it took the financial pressure of a naval race off Japan at a time when its economy was struggling, while still guaranteeing her hegemony in the eastern Pacific, but the ultranationalist right didn’t see things that way. To them, a liberal, westernized government had betrayed the honour of Japan and a chain reaction was set in motion.
In a strongly established democratic tradition like the US or Britain, that might have been contained, but there was no such tradition in Japan, and representative democracy was still considered a foreign concept with no roots in the soil. In short, there was a vacuum; Japan could have gone one way, or it could have gone the other, and the one person who had the moral authority to choose that direction was Hirohito. In a situation like that, doing nothing is not an option; the militarists were claiming to act in the name of the Emperor, and the Emperor wasn’t disabusing them.
Bear in mind also that in the 1920s and early 30s at least, the militarists were not the government, but the middle and even junior ranks of the navy and particularly the army; the invasion of Manchuria was not done on orders from the Japanese government but from the local Japanese commanders invoking an ancient tradition called gekokujo, a samurai concept whereby subordinate officers, from a fatalistic sense of honour, precipitate war with neighbouring states without the leave or their authorities. The more victories the militarists brought to Japan, the more powerful they became until they effectively ran the country, and so long as they were bringing victory, Hirohito made no objection to them invoking his name. At the very least, he is guilty by omission.
After Pearl Harbor, the US was at a grave disadvantage. Her battleship capacity had been seriously compromised, and naval doctrine of the time leaned heavily on the battleship as the showstopper in any war. The period was a transitional time in tactical theory, however, with the more radical naval strategists forecasting the rise of the aircraft carrier as a game changer. This was heavily disputed by the traditionalists, as the carrier was an untested quantity. Certainly, airplane design was still somewhat haphazard, and it was not at all clear if carrier-borne aircraft were even capable of delivering the kind of punch that the big guns of the battleships were. After Pearl Harbor, however, the US just had to suck it and see, since carriers were about all that were left.
In early ‘42, the US was a year or so from bringing her industrial capacity fully to bear. In the meantime, there were four carrier groups in the Pacific. The US commander, Admiral Nimitz, knew he had to use these vessels in a defensive role until American industry could kick in, but he also knew that defensive strategy must be aggressive, otherwise there is a real danger of demoralization and perimeter collapse. It was a delicate balancing act, but he had just the man for the job, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey.
Halsey certainly had the aggression needed, but he also had rather a good idea. His notion was to use the carrier groups as a kind of naval cavalry, streaking out of Pearl Harbor at high speed, disappearing into the Pacific wilderness, popping up at the last spot on the map the Japanese would expect, levelling the place and then legging it back to Pearl before the enemy knew what had hit them. The strategy was so successful that they were forced to withdraw two of their carrier groups back into home waters to defend against a strike on Japan itself, and Halsey’s group, in recognition of the speed they moved, was known as “The Haul Ass Club”
Ranged against Nimitz and Halsey, however, was one of the greatest naval strategists of the age, Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto has the rare distinction of being one of the few commanders in history to be admired by the enemy even as they fought, and today most people think of him as the civilized and far-sighted leader portrayed by Sô
Yamamura in the 1970 movie Tora! Tora! Tora! He was certainly that, but Toll also portrays a colourful, eccentric and mischievous man who would occasionally imitate the Charlie Chaplin walk and was known to perform handstands in the street after an evening with his geisha lover. These little pen portraits, Yamamoto, Nimitz, Halsey and others are one of the great strengths of the book, humanizing historical figures. But Toll also goes into great and fascinating detail describing the conditions on a carrier, the politics of Hypo, the American code-breaking station on Hawaii, the manoeuvres of combat aircraft in battle and a thousand other details which build up into a thrilling story that reads like a novel.
The Hypo story is of particular relevance, since it was their intercepts of Japanese radio traffic which allowed the Americans to lay in wait at Midway Island and get their planes in the air first in June of ‘42. That was the turning point in the Pacific war, with three Japanese carriers going to the bottom within minutes and the hitherto invincible empire suddenly becoming, well, vincible.
A recommended read for the naval anoraks, but the rest will probably enjoy it too.