Attack on Pearl Harbor (34 page)

Fuchida’s report of an oil tanker sunk at berth F-4, the aviation fuel pier at Ford Island, as shown on his chart for the Emperor’s briefing, is indefensible. There was no ship there to be sunk, as Fuchida knew.

The Threat from
Lessons

The assessment that Fuchida presented to the Emperor claimed 49 hits by D3A Val dive-bombers.

Many months later, after the Battle of Midway, the Battle-Lessons Investigating Committee that studied the Pearl Harbor attack represented a significant threat to Fuchida’s BDA report. There, presumably many more senior officers would have access to the data—the aviators’ reports and strike photographs—rather than just Fuchida’s small group of flight leaders on
Akagi
, with Fuchida the authority for the final decisions. The Investigating Committee could have made a major re-assessment of the hits claimed for the second wave dive-bombers, which would threaten the veracity of the claims Fuchida originally made to the Emperor.

Fuchida was probably a member of the Investigating Committee and there to defend his original assessments. Some of the pertinent records and witnesses were probably lost when
Akagi, Kaga, Soryu
and
Hiryu
were sunk at the Battle of Midway. The Committee did some digging, but went only so far: only 11 of the 36 bogus GP bomb hits were discarded. But by then nothing was to be gained by denigrating Japan’s signal victory.

Failures, even minor ones within an overall successful operation, tend to generate investigations. Success generates congratulations. The Pearl Harbor attack was clearly a success. There was no reason to go digging for individual failures, a reason why the problems with Fuchida’s BDA report to the Emperor have gone undetected.

Fuchida’s Reputation

Fuchida’s character must be a consideration. If Fuchida had a reputation for absolute veracity, any accusation that he intentionally misrepresented data in his report to the Emperor ought to be vigorously contested. However, Fuchida has been caught in other fabrications.

The Pearl Harbor Second Strike Story

On his return flight to the carrier after the Pearl Harbor attack Fuchida claimed he “mentally earmarked for destruction the fuel-tank farms, the vast repair and maintenance facilities, and perhaps a ship or two bypassed that morning for priority targets.” After the war, he claimed he strongly recommended to Admiral Nagumo that additional attacks be launched against “the damaged battleships and the other vessels in the harbor, the dock yards, and the fuel tanks.”
³³
In another version, “He begged the admirals to launch another attack at once and this time concentrate on the oil tanks.”
³⁴

Fuchida claimed that a heated argument ensued, with Genda supporting Fuchida. This exchange is depicted in the movie
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Fuchida was a technical advisor to the film.

No one else corroborates Fuchida’s tale.

It is likely that Fuchida created the story to amplify his reputation as a strategist with foresight. The “Second Strike Myth” will be more comprehensively covered in
Chapter 10
.

Midway—only seconds away from victory

Fuchida claimed that during the Battle of Midway the Japanese had a strike on deck just beginning to be launched when the American SBD Dauntless dive bombers attacked and destroyed three of the four Japanese carriers. In one account, “Throughout the torpedo attack, preparations continued for launching the
Akagi’s
second wave. The first Zero took wing. At that moment, Fuchida saw the approach of American Helldivers.”
³⁵

In Fuchida’s book
Midway: the Battle that Doomed Japan
, he described the scene:

According to Fuchida, “the dive bombers had caught the First Carrier Division with flight decks full of armed and fueled aircraft, with others in the same condition in the hangar decks waiting to be lifted.”
³⁷

Fuchida was trying to establish that the Japanese carriers had been defeated only by a whisper, “The Gods of War snatched it away from us,” an interpretation very acceptable in Japanese culture.
³⁸
Given another five minutes, their strike would have been launched and their carrier decks clear of the flammable aircraft and ordnance that was to destroy them. In Fuchida’s vision, but for those few minutes the probable result would have been several American carriers sunk with the Japanese losses considerably lower.

The Midway volume of the Japanese official history of the war,
Senshi Sosho
, contradicts Fuchida’s assertion that the strike was on deck and ready to be launched. It states there were no attack aircraft on the flight decks. This agrees with the reports of the American dive bomber pilots. Photographs taken during the dive bomber’ attack show only a few A6M Zero fighters on deck. It was not a matter of minutes but likely an hour or more before the Japanese would have had their attack staged and ready to launch. Only recently, in Parshall and Tully’s
Shattered Sword
, has the truth migrated across the ocean.
³⁹

In
Midway
Fuchida also criticizes Genda’s search plan, claiming that he would have been more comfortable with a two-phase search plan. Two-phase search plans were not developed until after Midway, in reaction to the failure at Midway. Again, Fuchida tells a tale that tends to represent himself as more intelligent and with more foresight than his superiors, a pattern in his behavior.

Surrender on the
Missouri

After the war Fuchida claimed that he was aboard
Missouri
for the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay.
God’s Samurai
, Fuchida’s biography based on interviews with Fuchida, tells the following tale:

Fuchida’s account lacks credibility from the outset. Why would an aviation staff officer be tasked to arrange small boat transportation instead of one of the port officer’s staff? Why would an air staff officer from an outlying air base be involved with any aspect of the surrender ceremony at all?

Captain Murray’s account makes it clear that there was no possibility that “several liaison officers, army and navy,” including Fuchida, were allowed near
Missouri
. Accounts of the ceremony indicate that there was no “liaison” necessary, or even tolerated—the eleven Japanese representatives came on board looking, according to one commentator, “as if they all had swallowed a toad,” signed where they were directed to sign, stood where they were directed to stand to watch the Allies sign, handed their copy, and hustled off. 30 minutes, no tea, no tour of the battleship, and certainly not something a Japanese patriot would want to voluntarily witness.

Security for this event was tight. All outside guests would have boarded under the scrutiny of the Officer of the Deck, who was responsible for ensuring that only authorized people were allowed aboard. Anyone who has participated in a naval ceremony would recognize that control of such events is obsessive. Officers put their careers on the line ensuring that nothing untoward occurs.

No Officer of the Deck on a flagship anchored in enemy territory would have allowed some random group of Japanese “liaison officers” access to his quarterdeck, much less release them to wander about unsupervised. The Japanese representatives were picked up by a US destroyer expressly to keep Japanese small boats away from the battleship. In a part of the world populated by 9,200 Japanese
Shinyo
suicide boats, there is no way a “big, beautiful launch” carrying Japanese naval personnel would be allowed anywhere near
Missouri
.

If Captain Murray was aware of, and took personal interest in the disposition and control of a news photographer, how much more would he have insisted that uniformed members of the Japanese armed services have their own escort? Why would “liaison officers” not be required to stand with the Japanese official delegation? This was a fleet that had been fighting off kamikazes for months. Japanese were not trusted to be rational actors. As an example, a Russian photographer—one of the Allies—tried to move to a different viewpoint and was physically tackled by a Marine guard and escorted back to his assigned position.

The curator of the Battleship Missouri Memorial has observed that had Fuchida been aboard “his presence would have been noted, and his placement would have been noted in the official records… and would have been strictly monitored and recorded.”
⁴²

Fuchida evidently used the newsreel produced by the Japanese photographer to inform his descriptions of the event. He spoke as if he were on the “upper deck,” the same location as the newsreel photographer. But it is hardly likely that the United States Navy would have given a courtesy pass to the surrender ceremony to any Japanese aviator, much less the leader of the Pearl Harbor attack.

For whatever reasons, Fuchida’s moral compass and the cultural imperatives working on him did not require strict adherence to the truth in these four cases.
⁴³
This reinforces the observation that the many questionable statements Fuchida made regarding his part in the planning, briefing, and execution of the Pearl Harbor attack did not strictly adhere to the truth.

Fuchida’s initial report gave four battleships as sunk and four damaged.
⁴⁴
After examining the photographs and the reports from the airmen on the carriers, the BDA Report that went to the Emperor claimed three battleships sunk, two seriously damaged, two moderately damaged, and one with minor damage.
⁴⁵
The actual result was five sunk and three with minor damage. Considering the amount of smoke around Battleship Row, this assessment was remarkably good, especially considering that
Nevada
and
California
did not touch the harbor bottom until well after the attackers had departed, and should not have sunk from the damage inflicted but for
Nevada’s
poor material condition and
California’s
open inspection hatches. Fuchida’s full BDA Report actually underestimated the damage inflicted against the battleships, a rare occurrence for aviators returning from a strike.

While it appears that Fuchida was not above manipulating reports to help himself, his friends, and the naval aviation community, he also gave the most accurate overall battle damage assessment possible to his commander and his Emperor, even though it meant reducing the numbers of battleships sunk from the number given in his original report.

In Fuchida’s defense, his untruthful or questionable statements were made after the war. Fuchida had gone from being a celebrated senior aviator to a starving dirt farmer, a stunning reduction in fortunes. The postwar attention he received from American historians provided a needed boost to his self-esteem, which he apparently reinforced by all these statements where he claimed intelligence and prescience to exceed that of his comrades—“If only they had listened more to me….”

The tale of the Pearl Harbor third-wave attack dispute, Midway, and the
Missouri
surrender ceremony story all point to a pattern of behavior, a character flaw that adds credibility to the questions put forth in this analysis regarding his various questionable statements, such as that he was the one to ensure that level bombers were included in the strike mix, that he ordered the level bombers to concentrate on one ship, that his error with the flares was inconsequential, that his level bomber formation scored two hits, that 36 torpedoes hit warships when only 33 were reported. The falsification of the dive-bombers’ performance in Pearl Harbor is probably another. With a history of falsification one suspects more of the same, rather than come to a conclusion that the errors were the result of simple understandable mistakes or the “fog of war.”