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One of Yamamoto's key planners was Commander Minoru Genda, still only 36, still a hot pilot at heart, first in his class at the Etajima naval academy, combat ace over China, leader of a daredevil stunt team called Genda's Flying Circus. Genda contributed several key ideas: that every available Japanese carrier should be assigned to the attack, that it should combine dive-bombing, high-level bombing and torpedoes, that the attackers should strike at dawn.
Not the least important of his ideas was to recruit a cadet classmate named Mitsuo Fuchida, who could train all of Yamamoto's pilots and lead them into battle. Fuchida, grandson of a famous samurai, was born in 1902, a Year of the Tiger ("Tora! Tora!"), so he was 39 when summoned to his mission. An ardent admirer of Hitler, he had grown a toothbrush mustache.
The techniques of dive-bombing and torpedo bombing were still relatively new, and aerial torpedoes were almost impossible to use in water as shallow as Pearl Harbor. Filching an idea from a recent British torpedo raid against the Italian naval base of Taranto, Genda had technicians create auxiliary wooden tail fins that would keep torpedoes closer to the surface; others converted armor-piercing shells into bombs. But drilling was Fuchida's main task, and all summer his planes staged trial runs over Kagoshima Bay in Kyushu, chosen for its physical resemblance to Pearl. Only in September did Genda tell him, "In case of war, Yamamoto plans to attack Pearl Harbor."
Ironically, Yamamoto didn't want to carry out his own plan. But if Japan was going to be forced to fight, he believed it should strike first and strike hard, in the hope that a demoralized U.S. would then accept a negotiated peace. If he was deluded in that hope, he was not deluded about U.S. power. "If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year," he presciently told Prince Konoye in the ! fall of 1940, "but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year."
By 1940 Japan had installed a pro-Japanese regime in Nanking, but U.S. aid enabled Chiang to fight on. Konoye began wondering about mediators to end the exasperating war that Tokyo insisted on calling the Chinese Incident. Where angels fear to tread, in rushed the missionary fathers of the Maryknoll Society, who guilelessly assured each side that the other seemed ready to talk. And so talks began in Washington in the spring of 1941.
Talks is hardly the word. Tokyo's goal was to negotiate a victory in China, Washington's goal to negotiate a Japanese withdrawal. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, nearly 70, a longtime power on Capitol Hill, was a log-cabin- born Tennessee mountaineer who knew little of the Japanese and disliked what he knew. He once referred to Tokyo's envoys as "pissants." Japan's ambassador, Kichisaburo Nomura, 64, a one-eyed retired admiral and former Foreign Minister, was considered a moderate and so was mistrusted in Tokyo. It did not help that Hull had a speech difficulty, while Nomura was partially deaf.