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Unlike the Japanese Army, which has built itself a pretty sordid record in China, Isoroku Yamamoto's Navy displaces better than its own weight in pride, and he has grown up with that pride. He graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy in time to lose the first and second fingers of his left hand aboard Admiral Togo's flagship Mikasa in the great battle off Tsushima in 1904. Down the years he has absorbed and fostered the morale of Japan's Navy, the crafty conservatism of Japanese naval statesmanship, pride in such things as the superiority of Japanese Navy bombings over Army bombings of Chungking, 600 miles from the sea.
His Men. Besides rice, the main staple of Japanese diet is fish. To catch enough fish for 72,000,000 Japanese to eat, both raw and cooked, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is inevitable that a huge number of Japanese should have got a sense of the sea. Like the isle-bound British, the isle-bound Japanese are primarily seafarers.
Admiral Yamamoto's men, used to negotiating the rip channel tides and foul weathers of their islands, are fine navigators. They work round the clock. They service their ships smartly. They submit to living conditions at which U.S. sailors would mutiny: Japanese ships have super structures which look like pagodas piled on Shinto shrines astraddle Buddhist temples, and in these great upper horrors the crew lives, to save space, in quarters so crowded that most officers enjoy less room than U.S. enlisted men.
His Theories. "Japan," says Yamamoto, "has always regarded the aircraft carrier as one of the most offensive of armaments." How Admiral Yamamoto developed and perfected this concept was demonstrated all too clearly in his opening moves in the Pacific. The exact number of Japan's carriers is not known: estimates vary between eight and 13. Japanese carriers are small, with space for from 24 to 60 planes, compared with U.S. carriers' 80 to 100. They are fast, running to 30 knots. And they are daringly designed, with no island above the flight deck and funnels aimed astern like huge exhaust pipes.
Admiral Yamamoto subscribes also to the Japanese predilection for the torpedo as an attacking weapon. He considers the gun an ancillary weapon to be used mainly to create opportunities for decisive torpedo attack. The Japanese service torpedo is larger and more powerful than most (only equals: those fired by Britain's Nelson and Rodney), and Japan boasts an unusual number of small torpedo-bearing craft.
The use of torpedoes launched by aircraft has been developed by both Britain and the U.S., but Pearl Harbor and the sinkings off Malaya (see p. 20) testify to the skill with which Admiral Yamamoto has taken up the idea. This idea, extraordinarily enough considering what it has accomplished, has not been used with any great success by the German Air Force, which prefers dive-bombers.
Admiral Yamamoto must have been trying a little Japanese wool-pulling when he surprised everyone at the London Naval Conference by defining the torpedo as a "defensive weapon." "Doesn't it depend, sir," asked a U.S. naval technician, "at which end of it you are?"