Remembering Genda

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Given the capability, would Japan have used the atomic bomb in World War II? Minoru Genda, who helped plan the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, answered that question in 1969, causing such a furor in Japan that the remark ended his illustrious public career.

General Minoru Genda, late Captain Imperial Jap­anese Navy, passed away on 15 August 1989, the 44th anniversary of the Japanese surrender and the day before his 85th birthday. He had led three lives, in tandem. In the first, 1921-45, he had been one of Japan’s foremost naval aviators and aircraft car­rier tacticians, planning the carrier’s role in both the Pearl Harbor and Midway operations. He spent his sec­ond career, 1954-62, as a general officer in the Japa­nese Air Self-Defense Force, finally as its Chief of Staff. His third career, 1962-86, was political—a two-term member of the House of Councillors, Japan’s equivalent to the U.S. Senate.

To say that he was a remarkable man would be a gross understatement. Several members of the Naval Institute staff and I gained a rare insight into Genda, the man and thinker, in 1969 when he was a guest in the Naval Institute’s Distinguished Visitor Program.

As I was to be moderator of the program and com­panion for Genda during most of his visit, I anticipated an adventure. And I got just that and more!

A small and affable man, Genda exhibited a keen intellect from the moment we greeted him at Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia. He admitted to me later that he did not understand a word I had spoken during our initial day together, but he quickly became accus­tomed to my speech; his English came back to him; and we got on famously.

The much-advertised “Evening with Genda” gener­ated considerable interest in the Washington-Annapolis area, but none potentially more vociferous and menac­ing than that of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. After all, as a result of Genda’s shallow-running aerial torpedoes, many of their shipmates in battleship row had been killed or maimed that infamous morning of 7 December 1941. His closely packed, six-carrier task formation had enabled the several waves of bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes to achieve surprise, sink the battle line, destroy Hawaii’s air forces, and kill more than 2,000 service personnel and civilians.

Navy security, therefore, took no chances that March evening in 1969. Plainclothed agents escorted at least one distraught individual from the audience at the Naval Academy’s Brigade Assembly Hall before the program began. A table and chairs were placed in front of the drawn stage curtains for Genda, myself, and Captain Fumiro Shimizu, the Japanese naval attache who acted as an interpreter but whom Genda seldom needed.

What the audience did not realize was that, directly

The Military Careers of Minoru Genda

Born in Kake, Hiroshima Pre­fecture, on 16 August 1904, Minoru Genda entered the Impe­rial Naval Academy at Eta Jima in August 1921, graduating three years later. He received his en­sign’s commission in December 1925 after having served nine- month tours of duty in the first- class coast defense ship Izumo and the light cruiser Oi. Follow­ing one year in the battleship Ise, he reported to Yokosuka for successive assignments at the Naval Gunnery School and the Naval Torpedo and Mine School. In July 1927 he rejoined the Izumo as assistant navigator.

Genda’s career as a naval avi­ator began in December 1928 when, as a second lieutenant, he reported for primary flight train­ing at Naval Air Station (NAS) Kasumigaura, transferring one year later to NAS Yokosuka for advanced training in fighters. He joined the fighter squadron on board the carrier Akagi in Febru­ary 1930. Returning to NAS Yokosuka as a flight instructor late in 1931, First Lieutenant Genda organized and led “Gen- da’s Circus” of navy aerial ac­robats which performed through­out Japan. In April 1933 he began 18 months of duty on the light carrier Ryujo, after which he went back to Yokosuka as squadron commander and flight instructor.

Now a lieutenant commander, Genda entered the Imperial Naval Staff College in late 1935 and quickly earned the nickname “madman Genda” for his out­spoken views on the supremacy of aircraft over the battleship. Immediately upon his graduation in July 1937, the war in China broke out, whereupon he served there briefly on the staff of the Second Air Force and at the headquarters of the Third Fleet. He reported as wing commander at Yokosuka in January 1938, transferring in April to the Tor­pedo School as instructor, his genius in torpedoes now well- established. Genda reported as assistant naval attache for air at the Japanese embassy in London the following December. At the end of this tour, November 1940, he was impressed by the

British carrier-based torpedo plane attack which crippled the Italian battleship fleet at Taranto.

Reporting as air operations officer to Commander, First Carrier Squadron, later that month and in the rank of com­mander, Genda began develop­ing carrier tactics for the fleet while on board the flagship Kaga. Early in 1941 Rear Admi­ral Takijiro Onishi, chief of staff of the shore-based Eleventh Air Fleet, asked his advice about a proposal by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief Combined Fleet, for a surprise carrier raid on Pearl Harbor to initiate war with the United States. Genda studied the idea for ten days before endorsing it. In April he became air opera­tions officer of the new fast car­rier striking force, First Air Fleet, and the next month initi­ated the study and testing of aer­ial torpedoes to make short, shallow runs in the 30- to 45- foot-deep Hawaiian anchorage. He was Admiral Nagumo’s key adviser on the flagship Akagi during the attack.

behind the curtain, a detail of Marines took up posi­tions, rifles at the ready with bayonets fixed, to protect the controversial guest, should the need arise. They remained behind us throughout the hour-and-a-half dis­cussion, but—thank goodness—nothing occurred that required their intervention.

Following the distinguished-visitor format established by Robert M. Langdon, my late colleague in the Naval Academy “bull” department (English, History, and Government), I acted as interlocutor, feeding questions to Genda and letting him field them completely im­promptu. We concentrated on his early days leading “Genda’s Circus” of stunt-flying navy pilots, the con­servatism of Japan’s battleship admirals, and his role as air operations officer in Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s First Air Fleet carriers during 1941-42.

His greatest historical revelation (which he subse­quently wrote up as “Tactical Planning in the Imperial Japanese Navy,” Naval War College Review, October 1969) was how he received the inspiration to develop the Imperial Japanese Navy’s basic carrier doctrine.

Returning from attache duty in London during the Bat­tle of Britain in 1940, he chanced to watch an Ameri­can news film in a Tokyo movie house in which four U.S. carriers were seen steaming in column. This sug­gested to him that they had been operating together in one tactical formation. Mulling over the possibilities, he was struck with the probable answer as he stepped off a trolley car one day: a circular cruising disposition for efficient air operations, defensive combat air pa­trols, and concentrated antiaircraft fire.

After experimenting with Japan’s four front-line car­riers early in 1941, Genda decided upon two separate tactical formations. Tight concentric circles of carriers and their escorts would be employed against land bases—like Pearl Harbor and Midway Island—while in a fleet action each two-carrier division would disperse up to 200 miles apart in order to split the targets for the enemy’s planes. The latter tactic was what Genda and Nagumo were unable to implement at the crucial point in the Battle of Midway, leading to the loss of all four of their carriers.

Genda’s carrier tactics worked equally well in the conquest of Southeast Asia, including air ^shikes on Ceylon and Port Dar- ^w'n, Australia. He drew up the ^air plan for the Midway opera­tion but was confined to sick °^ay with pneumonia at the out- s®t. On strike day, 4 June 1942, ue nevertheless managed to climb to the flag bridge, where, beset with fever and clothed in Pajamas, he was embraced by Admiral Nagumo, who followed bis advice. Later in the day, however, he was evacuated from the stricken Akagi.

The next month Genda be­came air group commander on tne carrier Zuikaku, from which ^ae participated in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August. ⁿ October he moved to Rabaul ^as air operations officer of Elev­^enth Air Fleet for two crucial ^onths of the Guadalcanal- Solomons Campaign. He trans­ferred in December to Tokyo for duty _With the air operations sec- ^tlon, Naval General Staff and •mperial Headquarters, coordi­ⁿating air defenses in Southeast

Asia and making trips to the East Indies, Philippines, and Indochina between May 1943 and the end of 1944.

In January 1945 Genda took command of the 343rd Fighter Group of the last veteran navy pilots and flying new Shiden-kai (“George”) fighters charged with defending Tokyo. When U.S. carrier planes from Task Force 58 struck Tokyo and Kure in March, his planes inflicted unusually heavy casualties on the Grumman F6F-5 Hellcats in dogfights. But the war was lost, and by its end in August, Genda had achieved the rank of cap­tain. He was transferred to the reserve in November 1945.

Called upon to testify before the U.S. Strategic Bombing Sur­vey that autumn, Genda revealed many of the details of Japan’s wartime operations. To charges of inconsistencies in his ac­counts, he explained in 1969 that he and his peers had been called to testify with practically no food to sustain them—only a small tin of rice for each wit­ness. Virtually starving, he had difficulty concentrating on the questions. During the hearings, he was questioned, and be­friended, by U.S. Navy Com­mander Thomas H. Moorer, who as Chief of Naval Opera­tions 24 years later, arranged for Genda to visit the United States.

After the formal Treaty of San Francisco, in July 1954 Genda was commissioned a major gen­eral in the Japanese Air Self­Defense Force as Deputy Chief of Staff for Material. At the end of the following year he as­sumed command of the First Fighter Wing and qualified in the F-86F Sabrcjet used by his command. Promoted to lieuten­ant general, in July 1957 Genda became commander of Japan’s Air Defense Command, and ex­actly two years later was made Chief of Staff of the Air Self­Defense Force in the rank of general. Although he retired from active duty in April 1962, by the time of his visit to the United States he had checked out in all major Western fighters except the F-4 Phantom II.

Clark G. Reynolds

Genda then entertained questions from the floor, jfere the fireworks began. Retired Rear Admiral Wil- ■am F. Fitzgerald, Jr., executive director of the U.S. hfeval Academy Alumni Association and himself a vet- ®ran of the Pearl Harbor attack, stood up and asked Genda, had Japan had the atomic bomb, did he believe ^apan would have used it against the United States?

A hush fell over the hall as Genda considered the Question. Then, smiling slightly, he quietly replied, “I _*nk so.” Fitzgerald thanked him and sat down to a ^shght murmur of chuckles from the audience.

The former enemies treated each other with the mu­tual respect and camaraderie of fellows-in-arms, as they jhd indeed when I introduced Genda to Rear Admiral hfenry l. Miller, identifying Miller as the man who ^ad trained Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders to take off in '25s from a carrier deck to bomb Tokyo in 1942. But *h^c radical left-wing Japanese press corps took a differ- ^Cra view, being opposed to any nuclear weapons, espe- Gitlly for American air forces then based on Okinawa. ^^ese reporters were waiting with a barrage of ques­tions when Genda made an official call on the Japanese ambassador in Washington.

Ever the outspoken critic of those whom he consid­ered to be naive pacifists, Genda had become a staunch advocate of the American nuclear shield over Japan.

His intimate cooperation with the United States during his years as the head of the Japanese air force had even earned him a U.S. Legion of Merit, awarded by Presi­dent John F. Kennedy in 1962. He continued to cham­pion this cause as chief of the ruling Liberal Demo­cratic Party’s permanent Committee of National Defense and stood his ground against the Japanese far left in Washington, as in Japan.

Going on to Newport, Rhode Island, Genda reiter­ated his nuclear stance before a gaggle of television cameras and reporters that greeted him at the airport and in talks before the faculty and students of the Naval War College. He and I were billeted in adjacent rooms. I was awakened around midnight by the duty chief petty officer. He said someone had telephoned from Tokyo for Genda and demanded that he