Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (108 page)

Watching movies, playing cards and chess with his military aides, or lecturing to them on his entomological collections were Hirohito's regular evening activities throughout the war. For example, on May 20, 1942, J
wrote that in the evening:

These were the days of champagne victories, and in the daytime Hirohito often went horseback riding, worked in his laboratory, or attended palace lectures whenever his official duties permitted. On February 24, J
noted that the emperor viewed a newsreel; the next day he “enjoyed [cross-country] skiing in the inner garden” of the palace.
³⁰

On February 26 and 28, the naval vice chief of staff briefed Hirohito on the war situation and the role of the “special submarine attack force.” The vice chief also showed him “pictures related to the special attack force as well as writings [by the suicide volunteers] prior to their departure. After examining these photographs and writings, the emperor seemed very pleased.”
³¹
The notion of “body smashing” (
taiatari
), or riding a device intended solely to crash into and destroy an enemy, was already well developed by this time, though it was still two years away from being applied to warplanes.

On March 9, 1942, while the army and navy were advancing in the islands of the Central and South Pacific, Privy Seal Kido noted in his diary that the emperor:

Two days later Hirohito's naval aide J
departed Yokosuka on a six-week inspection tour of the Central and South Pacific theaters.
Jo's itinerary was a testament to the thinking of Japan's military leaders, who in their March “Assessment of the World Situation” (and again in July and November) estimated that the earliest the Americans would be able to launch their main counteroffensive would be the second half of 1943;
³³
ergo, it was safe for Japan to continue its offensive below the equator. The enemy would not think it worth paying the price to reestablish the status quo over such vast distances.

J
traveled first to Saipan in the Marianas Islands, then to Truk in the Carolines, and from there to Rabaul on New Britain Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, where the navy was establishing a major base that could be used to support advances further to the southwest. From there, he went to Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands, then to Wake, Guam, Palau (now Belau), Peleliu, and the new Japanese seaplane base at Davao, on Mindanao in the southern part of the Philippine Archipelago. He continued his tour by visiting the Dutch East Indies. His return trip took him to Subic Bay and Manila in the Philippines, and finally home by plane to Yokohama (stopping en route at Saipan) on April 23. During his long journey Jo sketched pictures of tropical flowers and collected seashells and American films for the emperor's viewing, including Walt Disney cartoon films found on Guam.
³⁴
J
's diary conveys no sense of how radically overextended Japan's lines of transportation and communication had become. Indeed, he seemed completely unaware of the enormous and insoluble logistical problem that maintenance of such a far-flung system of bases implied for a nation whose war power was so inferior to that of its enemies.

III

While Imperial Headquarters was still reeling from Midway, Nazi Germany came to the rescue in the form of the Wehrmacht's summer offensive against Russian armies in the Soviet Union and General Rommel's successes against the British in North Africa. As if in
compensation for the shock of Midway, Hirohito and the officers of the high command seem once again to have invested Germany with much greater military and industrial power than it actually possessed.
³⁵
On June 26, 1942, Hirohito asked Kido: “Not only has the German army captured Tobruk in North Africa, it is continuing its advance into Egypt and has occupied Salûm and Sidi Barrani. Should we send the Führer a special imperial message congratulating him on his victories?”
³⁶
Kido dissuaded him because the Führer had never congratulated the emperor. Nevertheless, Hirohito and the high command had concluded it might be possible to contribute to an eventual German offensive coming from the Middle East by launching an attack on Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in the Indian Ocean.

On July 11 Hirohito sanctioned Nagano's request to abandon the operation to capture strategic points in Fiji and Samoa, which Imperial Headquarters had decided—and he had approved—on May 18. During his briefing of the emperor, Nagano suggested a campaign to destroy enemy ships and communications in the Indian Ocean. Such an operation would “cut communications between the United States and Australia, prevent Australia from being used as a U.S. base to launch attacks against Japan…and make our defenses impregnable.”
³⁷

Meanwhile, five thousand sea miles from Tokyo, at Combined Fleet headquarters in Rabaul, plans were going forward to send construction troops and laborers to build an airstrip and naval facilities on Guadalcanal. As that work was nearing completion, on August 6 (two months after Midway) Sugiyama came to the palace to brief the emperor on the progress of the New Guinea campaign. The emperor used the occasion to make a disconcerting query: “I am not so sure the navy air [force] can count on effective enough army support in the landing operations in New Guinea. Don't we need to send in the army air too?”
³⁸
It was just the sort of question that Hirohito, who knew the navy's total losses in skilled pilots,
would ask. Sugiyama replied that the army was not considering doing so. He might have added (though he apparently did not) that Imperial Headquarters Army Department was actually withdrawing army air force groups from the south (mainly Rabaul) in order to begin the offensive against Chungking, which the emperor had urged in May. Sending army fighter pilots to the distant New Guinea and Solomons area was certainly not something the army cared to do.

The very next day, August 7, American forces under Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, the commander in charge of the Southwest Pacific Area, began their first, limited offensive thrusts against exposed Japanese positions in the south. Nineteen thousand U.S. Marines, divided into two groups, landed on the hot, wet, disease-ridden islands of Tulagi and neighboring Guadalcanal—ten degrees below the equator in the southern part of the Solomon chain. Two days later a nighttime naval battle took place off Savo Island, near Guadalcanal. Japanese shells and torpedoes sank four American heavy cruisers. The ensuing land and naval battles of Guadalcanal would continue for six full months, irrevocably crippling the Japanese navy air force and marking the first true turning point in the Pacific war.

From the outset the Imperial Navy's landing operation on Guadalcanal had been poorly planned, and the emperor had worried about it. Would the services be able to overcome their jealousies and cooperate in consolidating their newly won positions in the Solomons and in eastern New Guinea, where preparations were underway for launching a ground attack on Port Moresby?
³⁹
When American naval, air, and ground forces attacked Guadalcanal, the high command in Tokyo was stunned. The chiefs of staff and the operations officers had assumed, correctly, that the major Anglo-American counteroffensive would not start until 1943. They were utterly unable to conceive that, in the interim, their enemy could execute with incredible speed the same sort of leap across the Pacific
that they themselves had pulled off seven months earlier at Pearl Harbor.
⁴⁰

Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama agreed to the navy's request for an immediate deployment of troops to Guadalcanal to prevent an American buildup, but not perceiving the seriousness of the situation, he threw in only one small unit from Guam.
⁴¹
Most of this Ichiki Detachment (approximately fifteen hundred troops), was destroyed three days after landing on the island. In early September the army threw in a second small unit—the Kawaguchi Brigade (approximately three thousand soldiers)—from Palau, which attacked American positions on the night of September 13 and was also largely decimated. Later, early in October, the Seventeenth Army in the South Pacific decided to land its Second Division—some twenty thousand elite infantry troops—on Guadalcanal. Joining the starving survivors of earlier units, they soon launched two more suicidal attacks on American positions in the jungle; once again the outcome was failure. Thereafter the army landed more reinforcements, including parts of the Thirty-eighth Division.