Day of Infamy

(5 of 15)

Japan's Prince Fumimaro Konoye, a serpentine conservative who had twice been Premier since 1937, realized the way was now clear "to include the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese islands of the Orient" in a Japanese commercial empire that Tokyo called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. On Sept. 27, 1940, Konoye joined the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in a formal alliance known as the Tripartite Pact. He demanded that Britain shut down the Burma Road, supply route for aid to Chiang, and that Vichy accept Japanese bases in Indochina for a southern attack on Chiang.

The U.S., the only Western power strong enough to retaliate, banned all iron and steel shipments to Japan. "It seems inevitable," said Asahi Shimbun, then Japan's largest daily, "that a collision should occur between Japan, determined to establish a sphere of interest in East Asia . . . and the United States, which is determined to meddle in affairs on the other side of a vast ocean." Added Yomiuri, another giant newspaper: "Asia is the territory of the Asiatics."

Impersonally though the tides of history may seem to flow, they now waited on one man, a remarkably squat and broad-shouldered man, no more than 5 ft. 3 in. tall. He had been born Isoroku Takano, the first name meaning 56, because that was the age at which his proud father had been presented with his sixth and last son. Later adopted, according to an old custom, into a richer family, he acquired a new name: Yamamoto.

Trained as a naval cadet, Yamamoto proudly bore the scars he got at 21, when he lost the second and third fingers on his left hand during Admiral Togo's great victory over the Russian navy at the Strait of Tsushima in 1905. Yamamoto had come to know the U.S. as a graduate student at Harvard and as naval attache in Washington. And as executive officer of Japan's naval flight school, he had learned the new religion of air power. He loved poker, bridge and shogi, the Japanese version of chess. Said one of his top aides: "He had a gambler's heart."

Now 57, with a gray crew cut, Admiral Yamamoto commanded Japan's Combined Fleet, but he disliked the imperial navy's cautious strategy. In case of war, its plan was to fall back and try to lure the U.S. Pacific Fleet into the Inland Sea between the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Kyushu. But as early as spring 1940, Yamamoto remarked to one of his officers: "I wonder if ( an aerial attack can't be made on Pearl Harbor."

Others had suggested such a strategy but it had always been rejected as too dangerous. Pearl Harbor was too far away, too inaccessible, too well defended. Besides, the overall strategy of striking south toward Malaya and the Dutch East Indies now required all the navy's resources. Yamamoto nonetheless began in early 1941 to assemble some trusted lieutenants to make plans for Operation Hawaii, which he also named Operation Z, after Admiral Togo's historic banner at the battle of Tsushima.