Isoroku Yamamoto

Isoroku Yamamoto , 1884-1943, Japanese admiral in World War II. He headed the combined fleet in 1941 and was the mastermind behind Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. After he was killed in action in 1943, he became a national hero. Throughout his career he worked to build an integrated air-surface arm for the navy.

Bibliography: See H. Hagawa, The Reluctant Admiral (1982).

Yamamoto, Isoroku (1884–1943), Japanese admiral and champion of naval aviation; as Combined Fleet commander in chief (1941), carried out the air attack on Pearl Harbor.No Imperial Japanese Navy officer of his age knew more about the United States than Yamamoto. He had served as a language officer and special student at Harvard (1919–21) and as naval attaché in Washington (1926–28). When navy vice minister (1936–39), Yamamoto opposed Japan's alignment with Germany and Italy, warning that the United States was not the weak‐willed nation pictured by Tokyo's hard‐liners. He also warned fellow officers that the industrial might of America posed a great threat. But when he was ordered to fight the United States, he took bold action.

The orthodox strategy of the Japanese naval General Staff was to wait for the U.S. Fleet to steam into the western Pacific and destroy it there in a battleship contest. To Yamamoto, a pioneer of naval aviation and a long‐standing lover of games of chance, this was a weak‐hearted approach. He insisted on a preemptive carrier strike on Pearl Harbor to destroy the U.S. Fleet at the outset. The navy staff opposed him, and only his immense moral stature allowed him to prevail.

The attack on 7 December 1941 proved a brilliant tactical success, and strategically it achieved its objective of protecting Japan's Southeast Asian offensives. But the wave of American public anger that it aroused made impossible a limited settlement of the war. Yamamoto continued to command the fleet in 1942 and 1943, but less successfully. The disastrous Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway was his responsibility, and his air offensives in the Solomons wore down Japanese naval airpower relentlessly. On 18 April 1943, Yamamoto was on his way to visit forward units in the Solomon Islands when his plane was shot down by U.S. P‐38s, alerted to his route by reading the Japanese naval codes.
[See also MAGIC; World War II, U.S. Naval Operations in: The Pacific.]

Bibliography

Hiroyuki Agawa , The Reluctant Admiral. Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, 1979.
Shinjimbutsu Oraisha , Yamamoto Isoroku no subete, 1985.

David C. Evans