Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun Read Free Page A

personally responsible for the Navy’s defeat. Sasaki’s eyes showed his lack of sleep, and, unshaven, he sat impassive in the operations room. The big boss, Combined Fleet commander in chief (C-in-C) Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, his own eyes glittering strangely, had disappeared after the final, horrific news. Yamamoto had taken to bed for several days, eating nothing. He’d now been diagnosed with roundworms.
    Insult had been added to injury when destroyer
Isonami
ran down another screening ship,
Uranami
, during a routine course change to avoid suspected submarines. At Midway the Imperial Navy had lost a prized heavy cruiser, the
Mikuma
, when she was crippled by collision with another warship and could no longer evade the enemy bombers.
    Admiral Yamamoto finally reappeared on the
Yamato
’s compass bridge sipping rice gruel. Ugaki professed joy, for Yamamoto was the soul of the fleet, acknowledged as its most brilliant leader.
Isonami
’s collision brought back sour thoughts of the
Mikuma
, but both men knew the really disastrous result was the destruction of
Kido Butai
’s main strength—all four fleet carriers committed to Midway. Now they would review the battle with Nagumo’s officers.
    Among those who boarded the
Yamato
were
Kido Butai
’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Kusaka Ryunosuke, air staff officer Commander Genda Minoru, operations chief Captain Oishi Tamotsu, and the flag secretary. Their transfer had been simplified, ironically, because Nagumo and his staff had evacuated to the
Nagara
when their own flagship, the aircraft carrier
Akagi
, had had to be abandoned. Kusaka suffered minor leg wounds. But Genda was the one officer Admiral Yamamoto worried about. The power of
Kido Butai
air strikes, with which Yamamoto had struck Pearl Harbor and virtually swept the Pacific, derived precisely from Commander Genda’s championing of concentrated carrier forces and his innovating tactics to employ the airpower. Now the crucial question was whether Midway called those tactics into question. The Imperial Navy did not know at the time that Allied codebreakers had divined the Japanese plan, enabling Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the American Pacific commander, to position his fleet in ambush.
    Nagumo’s officers arrived early in the morning, and the staff conference dragged into the afternoon. Admiral Ugaki started on a conciliatory note, saying, “As the Combined Fleet headquarters, we realize our own fault, for which we extend our regrets.” Specialists on both staffs then broke off to discuss their respective areas of concern. Combined Fleet and First Air Fleet seniors mulled over the vagaries of underway refueling, dangers of radio emissions under precombat conditions, and the shortcomings of
Kido Butai
’s dawn airborne search pattern. Mistakes had been made in arming the waves of strike aircraft, delays waiting to recover planes rather than launch fresh ones, and there were problems inherent in the overconcentration thathad been built into the plan. Ugaki remarked that it would be good to have some carriers for fleet air defense entirely equipped with fighters. The chief of staff could see Admiral Kusaka afflicted by guilt and tried to buck him up, pressing yen and other gifts into his hands and extending assurances. Yamamoto, who had told his own staff at the height of the catastrophe, “I am the only one who must apologize to His Majesty,” rejected proffered apologies from Nagumo’s officers. “This present setback has not made us at all pessimistic,” Ugaki told Kusaka. “We still intend to try the Midway operation again and also to carry out the southern operation.”
    Admiral Ugaki understood the war situation in the wake of Midway perfectly. “Above all,” he told Kusaka, “to rehabilitate the fleet air force is imperative.” That was the main reason for the
Yamato
confab, as well as why Yamamoto ordered Genda to go ahead to Japan in a seaplane as soon as his ship reached flying range of the