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His Next Steps. To secure a quick knockout in the South Pacific the Imperial Fleet has a hard and dirty way ahead. It must at all costs maintain the two principal operations in Malaya and the Philippines. This means a hazardous and endless duty of convoying, supplying, transporting troops, a duty subject to raiding by U.S., British and Dutch submarines, planes and surface craft. The Japanese Fleet must also continue to harass the U.S. lines of communication. It must, above all, be wary of Allied offensive action, which might take many forms.
The first U.S. offensive action would doubtless be a splicing of the raveled lifeline. The U.S. Navy would doubtless try to relieve Wake & Midway, retake Guam. The first attack was probably already on the way. It may have been, and probably was, slowed by the losses at Pearl Harbor. Even if the U.S. Navy had to draw on some of its Atlantic strength, it would have to try to fight its way to the Philippines. The southern supply route, by way of New Zealand and Australia, might do for a time but not for long.
That job done, U.S. armed forces might raid Formosa, clamp down the blockade of Japan that strategists have long envisioned, and, if Russian air bases were put at U.S. disposal, might bomb Japan's main naval and industrial establishments. From Alaska the U.S. Navy might punch air raids into Japan's northern advance base at Paramoshiri Island, south of the Kamchatka peninsula. From Guam and Wake, regained, U.S. Army and Navy Air Forces could bomb the Japanese mandated islands and begin to forge a chain that would be stout and confining.
His Animus. In every way, by feeling, by training, by detailed experience, Isoroku Yamamoto has all his life been bent to one task: defeat the U.S. and Britain in the Pacific.
Isoroku Yamamoto is not the grinning, bowing, breath-sipping little man with horn-rimmed glasses, eager mustache and super-buck teeth which U.S. cartoonists have selected as Mr. Japan. He is not a monster who enjoys killing babies and takes rape after dinner instead of coffee. He is, instead, a hard-bitten professional man with a sixth sense—hatred.
He hates, and all his colleagues hate, the U.S. and British attitude toward Japan, and especially toward Japan's Navy. He has heard for years the U.S. Navy's boast that the Japs would be a pushover.* He knows how the cruiser Mogami, some of whose welded seams parted when she fired a full salvo on her trials, was exaggerated into a kind of saltwater One Hoss Shay. He knows how the little torpedo boat Tomoduru, which, because it was overloaded with guns and torpedo tubes and had insufficient displacement, tipped over on steam trials, was exaggerated into a great turtle-turning dreadnought, built from stolen plans.
He has long hated, and did much to fight, the imputation of inferiority which Britain and the U.S. made in insisting on maintaining the 5-5-3 ratio in 1934. Referring to a dinner in London, he says: "I was never told there that being much shorter than the others I ought to eat only three-fifths of the food on my plate. I ate as much as I needed."