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With a troupe of 40 assistants, General Yamashita went across Russia to Berlin. He arrived there in January 1941, and stayed almost six months. He and his men were taken in hand by German officers who had seen action in the Far East, notably the Navy's Vice Admiral Grassman and the Luftwaffe's Colonel General Otto Keller, Commander in Chief of the First German Air Fleet, now in Russia.
Yamashita inspected the broken Maginot Line and German fortifications on the French coast. He watched German flyers in training. He is said to have persuaded Hermann Goring, for whom he had wangled a decorative bauble, the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, to let him fly in a raid over Britain.
But the big event was his talk with Hitler. "I felt," he said afterward, "that in the mind of Hitler there was much of spiritual matters, transcending material plans. When I met the Führer he said that since boyhood he had been attracted by Japan. He read carefully reports of Japan's victory over Russia when he was only 17 years old and was impressed by Japan's astonishing strength."
The Führer, he said, promised to remember Japan in his will, by instructing the Germans "to bind themselves eternally to the Japanese spirit." In fact, General Yamashita was so hopped up that he said: "In a short time, something great will happen. You just watch and wait."
Yamashita persuaded the Germans to let him have more than 250 technicians, engineers and instructors. He went home. He performed a major operation, a most significant operation, on Japan's Air Force.
Teaching Teacher. Japanese military aviation had been built on a dream. The Italian Giulio Douhet had dreamed of great fleets of heavy bombers roaring over the enemy and, presto, wiping him out. And so the Japanese built heavy bombers, fleets of them. But these fleets merely nibbled at the edges of Chinese vastnesses of terrain and courage.
In Germany Yamashita had been excited by the Luftwaffe's function as heavy artillery mounted on hawks' wings. He had acquired licenses to build Stukas and light attack bombers. He had also got the rights for the 800-horsepower B.M.W.-132 radial motor, and for certain precision instruments made by Patin and Telefunken.
The result is the Air Force which so far has had its way in the southwest Pacific. It is not the Air Force of the brutal, aimless, bootless raids of Chungking. It has been as smooth as a team of riveters tossing white-hot rivets into tiny buckets, or driving them cleanly home. In Malaya this Air Force confused and broke the British, made their calm confidence look like childish complacency.
That Air Force actually taught its teacher, Adolf Hitler, some tricks. In skillful use of the torpedo bomber, it excelled anything the Germans had devised. In speed of maintenance, fueling and supply far from home base, it suggested the solution of problems which had seemed formidable to the Germans. In widespread yet effective dispersion of effort, it gave the Germans something to ponder.