The Japanese Navy Tells Its Story

Occasional newspaper and magazine articles have revealed that the Japanese are talking, and that the United States Army and Navy by painstaking questioning of former enemy officials are clearing up some of the mysteries of the recent war in the Pacific. Service personnel with access to the ONI Review have been able to read excerpts from the data thus gathered and doubtless have desired to read more. Now at last the wraps are being taken off and the story is made available to all through the release by the Naval Analysis Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of two volumes of Interrogations of Japanese Officials.¹ With the publication of these volumes the American public is given its first extensive picture of the war through Japanese eyes, and it becomes increasingly apparent that World War II will be the best documented conflict in history.

The interrogations, conducted in Tokyo towards the end of 1945 by officers of the Naval Analysis Division, had as their original purpose the assessment of the part played by air power in the war against Japan. “In the absence of any other body concerned with the conduct of this naval war,” Rear Admiral R. A. Ofstie, senior Navy member of the Survey, notes in his foreword, “this purpose was broadened to include as wide a survey of wartime events as time and other restrictions would permit.” The importance of the interrogations is enhanced by the fact that the Japanese kept nothing like the elaborate records gathered and maintained by the United States Army and Navy, and that such records as they kept were nearly all burned in the fires resulting from American air raids or were destroyed or hidden by the Japanese at the time of the surrender. Many of the hidden documents have since been recovered, but translation of these will be the work of years. In the meantime, the Interrogations provide the best possible source material for complementing our knowledge of the war in the Pacific.

In order to gain as complete a picture as possible, the Naval Analysis Division questioned both high-ranking officers, who could provide a broad picture of the basic planning and the strategic problems involved, and more junior commanders and other eye witnesses, who could furnish details of specific operations and engagements. Persons to be interrogated were brought to Tokyo from all parts of Japan and, in one instance, from as far away as Singapore. In view of the difficulties encountered, the results are astonishingly comprehensive. The Japanese appear generally to have been co-operative. “No important attempt consciously to mislead the interrogator was ever noted,” states Admiral Ofstie, but he warns that allowance must be made “for the normal fallibility of human memory and in particular the memory of events months or years in the past which were witnessed under the intense strain of combat.”

In general it may be said that the interrogations, while they introduce a number of surprises and compel reinterpretation of certain events, tend to confirm rather than to contradict conclusions reached by the Allied High Command and intelligence services. On the level of grand strategy, for example, highest Japanese naval authorities state that the first phase of the strategic plan drawn up by Imperial General Headquarters included the push to the south to secure sources of raw materials in the East Indies region, and the drawing of a defense line from Singapore to Rabaul and northward through the Gilberts to Wake. With the perimeter islands developed and fortified, the Japanese believed that Allied attempts to penetrate to their homeland could be frustrated. They hoped that by straining every resource they might continue this defensive campaign until isolationist elements within the United States, pointing to the high cost of a fruitless war of attrition, would force Congress to accept a compromise peace which would leave Japan a major portion of her conquests. Allied nations would then have no choice but to follow suit.

The first major threat to Japan’s defense perimeter came with a succession of land- based air raids on Rabaul early in 1942. To safeguard this vital bastion, the Japanese, though their supply lines were already overextended, established bases in the adjacent Solomons and sent down strong invasion and striking forces to occupy Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea. This attempt was frustrated by Allied air-surface forces in the series of engagements, May 4 8, 1942, known as the Battle of the Coral Sea. Contrary to opinions expressed in some quarters at that time, the enemy did not plan an invasion of Australia. The Japanese arc definite on this point. “We didn’t want to go to Australia,” says Captain Yasuji Watanabe of the Supreme Headquarters Staff. Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, at that time Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, adds: “The idea was considered of taking New Hebrides and even of proceeding to Australia, but these plans were never attempted or incorporated into an order.” The Battle of the Coral Sea, while strategically an Allied victory, was tactically more nearly a draw, for the Japanese traded their 12,000- ton carrier Shoho for the 33,000-ton Lexington, received damages on the carrier Shokaku and inflicted them on the Yorktown, sank an American tanker and destroyer against the loss of a destroyer and some torpedo boats, and cost the Allies at least as many planes and personnel as they themselves expended.

The Japanese, their operations in the south thus disrupted, pulled most of their surface forces out of the Coral Sea area and struck at Midway and the Aleutians in a two-prong invasion thrust which would extend their defense perimeter at the center and north. The Americans, however, apprised of the impending operations by cryptanalysis of enemy coded radio messages, placed north of Midway two carrier task forces, which, on June 4, 1942, disabled all four carriers of the attacking fleet and turned back the threat. In the Interrogations a number of new facts concerning the Battle of Midway are revealed. The turn-away of the enemy striking force following the air raid on Midway and the subsequent land-based air counterattack has generally been interpreted as a retreat. It now appears that a Japanese search plane had reported the presence of the American carriers. The striking force, upon receipt of this intelligence, made, not a 180-degree turn to withdraw, as previously represented, but a 90-degree turn to northeast to give battle. At the same time ammunition crews aboard the enemy carriers began disarming torpedo bombers then poised for a second strike at Midway, substituting torpedoes for bombs. The delay caused by this operation proved disastrous for the Japanese. Other surprising new information concerns the enemy strength involved. In addition to the known presence of the enemy invasion and striking forces, a powerful battleship force, with Commander- in-Chief of the Combined Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto aboard the Yamato, world’s largest warship, stood off to the west of Midway ready to follow up the initial carrier attack on the island base with a thundering big-gun bombardment. Upon learning of the loss of his four carriers, Yamamoto called off the attack and turned away, at the same time, in despair at his defeat, temporarily recalling the invasion convoy then en route to the western Aleutians.

It is now confirmed that in this decisive battle all important damage to the Japanese fleet was achieved by dive bombers and by torpedoes from a specially-rigged PBY and from the submarine Nautilus. High-level bombing was revealed as nearly useless against moving surface targets. Captain Hisashi Ohara, then executive officer aboard the carrier Soryu, sums up the Japanese opinion. “The dive bomber was most effective,” says lie, “because it was much more accurate and hard to hit by gunfire because of the speed and the high angle of fire. Because they came very low, it was difficult to avoid the bombs. We did not fear the high horizontal bombers because we could watch the bombs fall and avoid them. They never hit targets except against the land.”

From evidence brought out in the Interrogations it becomes clear that the United States Navy in the first two years of the war tended to overestimate its successes and thereafter to underestimate them. Nowhere is the earlier tendency more marked than in the six-months’ Guadalcanal campaign, in which American losses in surface vessels are now known to have been considerably greater than Japanese losses. The Battle of Cape Esperance, October 11-12, 1942, for example, despite American advantages of radar and a favorable tactical position, cost the Japanese only one cruiser and one destroyer sunk during the action. And a month later in the Battle of Guadalcanal cruiser action, long regarded as a victory for the United Slates, the Japanese suffered the loss of one destroyer sunk and a battleship and a destroyer put out of action and subsequently sent down. In the American force only one vessel, a destroyer, came through undamaged. Four United States destroyers and a cruiser were sunk or had to be scuttled, and an additional cruiser and destroyer were rendered unnavigable.

Among I he striking facts revealed concerning the Guadalcanal campaign is the too great dependence of American forces upon the comparatively primitive radar of that period. This led not only to incorrect assessment of enemy ship losses but actually at times put the Americans at an acute disadvantage, as on the night of August 8 9, 1942, when seven Japanese cruisers passed undetected at visual range between a pair of United States radar picket ships to enter Savo Sound and sink four Allied cruisers, or in the battleship action off Guadalcanal on the night of November 14-15, 1942, when the Japanese sighted the American force nearly three-quarters of an hour before they were themselves picked up by radar.

But the Japanese had begun their effort to retake Guadalcanal with a fatal underestimate of American forces initially landed. Instead of the nearly 20,000 Marines actually put ashore in the area, the enemy made provisions to repulse at most a few hundred, and on the night of August 18-19, 1942, put ashore east of American positions on Guadalcanal only about a thousand crack troops. These were virtually wiped out in an 18-hour battle beginning on August 20. Thereafter the campaign became essentially a race of supply and reinforcements, in which the United States Navy was ultimately victorious. “I look upon the Guadalcanal and Tulagi operations as the turning point from offense to defense,” states Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of the Imperial Navy’s General Staff, “and the cause of our setback there was our inability to increase our forces at the same speed that you did.”

Readers of the Interrogations will be particularly impressed by the miraculously lucky but purely coincidental timing of events by which the Japanese Fleet time after time was stripped of air cover before pilots in training had reached the peak of efficiency. Scarcely had flyers been provided to replace the heavy losses suffered in the Coral Sea and Midway battles when their numbers were severely cut down in the Battles of the Eastern Solomons and the Santa Cruz Islands. A year later, as United States forces were preparing to land on Bougainville, newly-trained Japanese airmen flew their planes from carriers at Truk to the defense of Rabaul. Here they were so nearly wiped out by a series of attacks from American carrier forces that the enemy was obliged to withdraw his surface strength from the central Pacific, leaving that area open for the triumphal march of the United States Fifth Fleet from the Gilberts to the Marianas. It is possible that had the Americans been aware of the temporary helplessness of the Japanese Fleet and the shortage of planes at all enemy bases, they might have by-passed the easterly mandated islands and at the end of 1943 seized Saipan and Guam with less risk than they incurred when they occupied them some months later. This, however, is pure speculation and discounts the advantages of the lessons learned in the earlier invasions, particularly the capture of Tarawa. By June, 1944, when the first American landings were made on Saipan, the reclusive enemy fleet, though still woefully unprepared, came up from Tawi Tawi, passed through San Bernardino Strait in the Philippines, and directed its course towards the new beachhead. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, which followed, United States forces, including submarines, sank three enemy carriers, and American surface vessels and naval aircraft once more almost completely wiped out the new and hastily-trained corps of Japanese carrier plane pilots.

When the United States invaded the Philippines the following October, training of enemy air replacements had not been completed to the point where all carrier pilots were prepared to land on flight decks. Accordingly, the Imperial Third Fleet with four carriers proceeded from Japan to the vicinity of Luzon, whence its planes struck at Rear Admiral F. C. Sherman’s Task Group 38.3 and then continued on to landing fields near Manila. The enemy carriers and their escorts, bent on suicide, remained of! Cape Engano as decoys to attract Admiral Halsey’s United States Third Fleet away from Leyte Gulf. “I had not much confidence in being a lure,” slates Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, at that time Commander in Chief of the Japanese Third Fleet, “but there was no other way than to try.” The ruse worked, and while Halsey’s fleet ran north to strike at Ozawa’s almost defenseless carriers, the Imperial Second and Fifth Fleets closed in through the straits north and south of the American beachhead in order to attack the landing ships and offshore support. But the Japanese failed to co-ordinate their forces. The Imperial Fifth Fleet and part of the Second Fleet penetrated individually and prematurely into Surigao Strait only to be nearly wiped out by American sea and air attacks.

The main body of the Imperial Second Fleet, four battleships, eight cruisers, and 11 destroyers, delayed by air strikes in the Sibuyan Sea, passed six hours behind schedule through San Bernardino Strait and engaged in a running battle with a small United States Seventh Fleet escort carrier unit. The Japanese Second Fleet Commander in Chief, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, however, perceiving that his already battered force was taking further losses, that his ships were running short of fuel, and that poor timing had spoiled the chances for a co-ordinated attack on Leyte Gulf, broke off action and turned back rather than face expected American air reinforcements. “The conclusion from our gunfire and antiaircraft fire during the day,” says Kurita, “led me to believe in my uselessness, my ineffectual position, if I proceeded into Leyte Gulf, where I could come under even heavier aircraft attack. I therefore concluded to go north and join Admiral Ozawa for co-ordinated action.” Ozawa’s carriers, however, hotly pursued by three task groups under Halsey, were already speeding towards Japan. Kurita made contact with no surface forces. Instead, he presently came under attack from planes of Vice Admiral J. S. McCain’s Task Group .18.1, then returning from a fueling rendezvous to the northeast. With the hulls of all his larger ships trailing oil, Kurita towards night abandoned his run to the north and retired through San Bernardino Strait.

The main striking power of the United States Third Fleet, meanwhile, had made air contact with the Japanese Third Fleet early that morning and by repeated plane and surface attacks through the day had sunk all four carriers. In the various phases of the Battle for Leyte Gulf the Japanese had lost three battleships, four carriers, ten cruisers, and nine destroyers, representing a total tonnage 50 per cent greater than the combined losses of the British and the Germans in the Battle of Jutland. Never before in history had so great a weight of shipping been destroyed in so brief a time. This was a blow from which the Imperial Navy could not recover.

Even before the Philippines were recaptured and Japan’s fleet had been reduced to impotence, Japanese leaders realized that the war was lost. American submarines had long since cut vital petroleum and other supplies from the East Indies to a trickle, and American fleet-borne aircraft, especially during the famous cruise of Task Force 38 in January, 1945, had almost erased what remained of the Japanese merchant fleet. With the loss of Luzon the southern supply area was blocked off entirely. Moreover, in seizing the Marianas the United States Navy had cracked the inner line of Japan’s defense system and provided bases from which long- range army bombers could lay waste the industrial centers of the Empire. Indicative of the desperation in high imperial circles was the sortie on April 6, 1945, of the Yamato, the cruiser Yahagi, and eight destroyers against the might of the American Fifth Fleet then cruising off Okinawa. Of this hopeless gesture, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, then Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet and later Chief of the Naval General Staff, says, “We questioned whether there was a 50-50 chance. Even in getting that squadron together we had a very difficult time getting the necessary 2,500 tons of fuel oil together. But it was felt that, even if there was not a 50-50 chance, nothing was to be gained by letting those ships lie idle in home waters, and besides it would have been contrary to the tradition of the Japanese Navy not to have sent them.”

By early June, 1945, Iwo Jima and Okinawa had both fallen, American army bombers had burned out the heart of Japan’s major industrial cities, and the United States Third Fleet was roaming at will up and down the coast of the home islands, adding to the destruction and smashing what remained of the Imperial Navy. Members of the Japanese Supreme War Guidance Council were by now agreed that peace terms should be requested through the Soviet Union. For another month, however, they temporized, where- upon the Emperor summoned the Foreign Minister and indicated his desire for immediate action. Japan’s ambassador at Moscow then approached the Russian Vice Commissar on Foreign Affairs. But the Russians, doubtless preferring not to have their hands tied by officially accepting the role of peacemaker, refused to act for the Japanese, giving as their reason that Stalin and Molotov were about to depart for Potsdam. Unofficially, however, they communicated the request for terms to the Presidents of the United States and the Chinese National Government and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who gave the Japanese their reply in the Potsdam Declaration.

But the Supreme Council still delayed. Its greatest problem now was how to present the fact of defeat to a people long propagandized with stories of fictitious victories. It was conceivable that the army and navy, even then preparing for an expected Allied invasion, might rebel against any attempt to surrender. The difficulty was quickly resolved, however, through the scries of shocks provided by the two atomic bombs and the entry of Russia into the war. The national leaders at length had their face-saving formula, and the people were prepared to accept the inevitable. “I do not think it would be accurate to look upon use of the atomic bomb and the entry and participation of Soviet Russia into the war as direct cause of termination of the war,” states Toyoda, who in the spring of 1945 was elevated to the Supreme Council, “but I think that those two factors did enable us to bring the war to a termination without creating too great chaos in Japan.”

Throughout the Interrogations one is impressed by repeated expressions from the Japanese of something like bewildered admiration for the speed with which the United States was able to develop bases and furnish replacements of materiel and the volume of supplies which flowed from American ports along ever-lengthening lines of communication. Asked what, in their opinion, were the principal instruments of their defeat, senior officers were in general agreement with Nagano and Toyoda, the two highest-ranking persons interrogated. Said Nagano: “I was most bothered by Naval Air Forces. . . . judging from the fact that your Naval Air Force was also the cause of considerable concern to the Chief of the Army General Staff, I believe that he was generally of the same opinion as myself. ... In the early stages, submarines constituted the main difficulty, but afterwards it was your air force; and I believe that the air force, once it got operating, was more effective than the submarines in checking shipment of our oil.” And Toyoda: “The first half of the war I believe the submarine constituted the most effective weapon [against the Japanese Navy] . . . and the latter half of the war that your air force was the most effective weapon.”

The 118 interviews in Interrogations of Japanese Officials, generally presented in question-and-answer form and arranged in the order of the dates on which they were conducted, do not tell a continuous and chronological story. Necessarily they jump about and backtrack a great deal and include much extraneous material. The casual reader, though aided by excellent cross-indexing, will find them hard going, for in their present state they are the raw material of history, awaiting the work of researchers and writers. The volumes, however, will prove of keen interest to military and naval personnel and others who have had direct contact with phases of the war in the Pacific or who have read widely in the field. All students of World War II will gratefully receive this primary source material and will look forward to the companion volume, The Campaigns of the Pacific, soon to be released.