IN JAPAN, NEWS OF THE FEBRUARY 1944 raid on Truk was reported with unusual candor. Some news reports falsely asserted that the Americans had attempted an amphibious landing and been repulsed, but on February 18 the Imperial General Headquarters released an accurate and unsparing account:
A powerful American task force suddenly advanced to our Caroline Islands Wednesday morning and repeatedly attacked our important strategic base, Truk, with a great number of ship-based planes. The enemy is constantly repeating powerfully persistent raids with several hundred fighters and bombers, attacking us intermittently. The war situation has increased with unprecedented seriousness—nay, furiousness. The tempo of enemy operations indicates that the attacking force is already pressing upon our mainland.8
As always, the dire tone of this release was intended to arouse the Japanese people to greater efforts and sacrifices. But the regime could not countenance any admission that Japan might be in danger of losing the war. The editors of the widely circulated Mainichi Shinbun must have failed to appreciate the subtle distinction. A front-page opinion piece, published on February 23, warned, “The decisive battles of offense and defense in the Pacific will not be carried out on the homeland shores of America and Japan. They will be fought out . . . on island bases several thousands of miles distant. If the point is reached when the enemy advances to the shores of our homeland, already there is nothing more that can be done.”9
The article included some pointed criticism of the training of civilians to fight with bamboo spears, and added that the only real hope of repelling the American advance was to build more warplanes and aircraft carriers. When the newspaper landed on the desk of Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, he blew his stack. Orders went out from the Information Board to suppress the article, but since more than 100,000 copies had already been distributed, the damage (such as it was) could not be undone. The Army Ministry issued a reprimand to the paper, forced the editor in chief to resign, and summoned other leading editors to be admonished against such commentary. The army drafted the journalist who had written the article, a common method of disciplining wayward writers.
Tojo was unpopular with the Japanese people and despised by most of the leading figures in the navy. He was pompous, shrill, and demonstrative, and tended to silence reasoned discussion with outlandish flights of rhetoric and sloganeering. He was always leaping to his feet, even in closed meetings of senior cabinet and military officers. In October 1943, when a minister referred to a disappointing harvest, Tojo stood and bellowed, “Even if we eat nothing, we members of the cabinet intend to give our lives for the nation!”10 His antics sometimes seemed to ape those of Hitler and Mussolini, but Japanese culture was unsympathetic to the notion of concentrating power in the hands of one man. The emperor was the nation’s singular figurehead, and his ministers were expected to govern with an attitude of humility and reticence.
The emperor was the ultimate underwriter of Tojo’s long ascendancy in the ruling circle. For nearly three years Hirohito trusted and listened to Tojo, and even after the war the emperor defended the general’s conduct and leadership. Immediately after the Truk raid, Tojo moved to consolidate his grip on the military planning and command functions of both the army and the navy. Since the Meiji era, authority in each service had been divided between a ministry and a general staff. But now, with the emperor’s support, Tojo forced the resignation of General Sugiyama, the army chief of staff, and named himself to that post while retaining his positions as army minister and prime minister. Navy chief of staff Admiral Nagano resigned and was replaced by the navy minister, Admiral Shigetaro Shimada, who also kept his existing job. The shake-up brought the planning staffs of both services under the control of the ministries. Because Tojo had always found Shimada a pliable colleague, it also brought the entire regime more firmly under the control of Tojo. Opposition within the general staffs melted away when the emperor let it be known that he had backed the plan.
BETWEEN NOVEMBER AND FEBRUARY, most of the aircraft carriers were again pulled back to Japan for repairs and to take on replacement airplanes and aircrews. The Zuikaku went into dry dock at Kure; the Shokaku, at Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay. The carriers were fitted with new radar systems and antiaircraft weaponry. New aircraft were embarked from Iwakuni Naval Air Station in Hiroshima Bay. Because the newly trained aircrews had not yet been cleared for carrier landings, it was decided to lift the planes aboard by crane rather than fly them aboard after the fleet had put to sea.
Six months was needed to train the new air groups. But the Americans could not be expected to oblige that timetable, so all understood that the Third Fleet might be thrust into battle before it was ready. Ozawa’s air staff fixed an optimistic deadline of April 1 to have the new carrier air force fully trained, equipped, and ready to confront the enemy. The Third Fleet was to have 500 aircraft on nine carriers (five heavy, four light). Another 400 to 500 land-based fighters and bombers would be positioned on island airfields within easy range of the Marianas and Palau.
Japanese war planners had hoped to produce 40,000 new military aircraft in 1944, but the production rate was barely half that level in the fall of 1943. Aviation plants were straining under the pressure of material shortages, maladroit logistics, and a paucity of trained machinists and engineers. Shipping losses bit deeply into deliveries of Malaysian and Jakartan bauxite, the industry’s chief source of aluminum alloys. The Mitsubishi complex in Nagoya had expanded steadily, employing 43,000 workers by the end of 1943, but it had turned out only 1,029 new Zeros in 1943, fewer than half the number demanded by the military services. The Japanese aircraft industry had relied to a disproportionate extent on a small, overworked coterie of talented craftsmen and technicians, and was never optimized for mass production. Belated efforts to introduce standard production-line techniques brought some improvement, but neither Mitsubishi nor the other major aircraft suppliers (Nakajima, Aichi, Kawasaki, Tachikawa, Yokosuka) managed to ramp up output fast enough to fill the military’s ballooning wartime orders.
When a government inspector passed through the Nagoya works in late 1943, he was surprised to learn that newly manufactured Zeros were still being hauled away from the plant by teams of oxen. There was no airfield adjoining the Mitsubishi plant. The new units had to be transported overland to Kagamigahara, twenty-four miles away, where the navy would accept delivery. The aircraft were too delicate to transport on trucks, and the railheads were not convenient. Twenty oxen had died, and the remaining thirty were verging on complete exhaustion. Feed had been obtained on the black market, but the supply was not reliable. Essential wartime deliveries of replacement aircraft thus hung on the fate of a diminishing herd of underfed beasts. Mitsubishi engineers at length discovered that Percheron horses could haul the aircraft to Kagamigahara faster and required less to eat. These ludicrous exertions, when compared at a glance to the arrangements at Boeing, Douglas, or Grumman, tell most of the story of Japan’s defeat.
Recent encounters with the new-generation American fighters—the Hellcat, the Corsair, and the Lightning—had settled any remaining doubts that the Zero was overmatched and obsolete. Jiro Horikoshi’s airplane had been a feat of pioneering ingenuity, and it will always be a milestone in the history of aviation. From the start of its remarkable career, however, the Zero had always embodied a set of design compromises. Horikoshi’s team had wrung every last ounce of surplus weight out of the aircraft, and given it a very large wingspan and control surfaces in proportion to its size. These traits gave the Zero long range, a fast climbing speed, and supreme agility, but they also made it sluggish at altitude, slow in a dive, and disastrously vulnerable to enemy fire. Mitsubishi had invested its limited design and development resources into two new interceptors, the J2M Raiden and the A7M Reppu. Both airplanes offered performance improvements over the Zero, but the early prototypes were plagued with mechanical failures and design flaws. Given enough time and engineering manpower, all of those problems might have been overcome (just as, for example,
the assorted defects of the Curtiss SB2C and the B-29 Superfortress were corrected as those machines entered service). But time was short, and engineering manpower was sorely limited. Only small numbers of the Zero’s successors were placed into service, and they were never popular with the airmen or air staff.
Without a viable alternative, the Japanese navy instead committed itself to improving the Zero. Mitsubishi tinkered with successive alterations throughout the war, generally adding horsepower, firepower, and armor plating while reducing wingspan—the Model II, the Model 21, the Model 22, and the Model 52 “Hei,” of which more were built than any other version. Performance improvements were generally too slight to be noticed by the American pilots who engaged the planes. Lieutenant Commander Iyozo Fujita, one of the few veteran Zero pilots who survived the war, found that Model 52 lacked the speed and agility of its predecessors. It was “simply aggravating to fly,” he said. “The aircraft’s nose did not rise quickly enough, so it was hard to aim my machine guns well. Because of this, I felt that I lost a lot of opportunities to get hits on enemy aircraft.”11 The navy also experimented with configuring the Zero as a fighter-bomber, fixing a 550-pound bomb under its fuselage, but an airplane powered by a 1,000-horsepower engine was not well suited to such a role. In all its versions, the Zero was still packaged in the same light airframe, which could not absorb much punishment without blowing apart or bursting into flame. Design alterations consumed an exorbitant amount of the Mitsubishi engineers’ time and energy, diverting their attention from the next-generation planes. They also clogged up the company’s manufacturing operations. Output at the Nagoya works fell short of the navy’s targets every year from 1940 through 1945.
In the 1930s, Japanese firms had imported American and European precision machine tools, needed to polish, grind, and mill high-performance metals. Prewar embargos had cut off those critical imports. By 1942, the plants were equipped with aging equipment that could not be replaced or upgraded. As a nation destitute of natural resources and mining deposits, Japan lacked access to the high-performance lightweight metals found in the 2,000-horsepower engines that powered the big American fighters. The Japanese aviation industry consistently struggled to produce reliable new aircraft engines that achieved high power ratings within desired weight limits. Atsushi Oi, an officer at the Naval Personnel Bureau, pointed to the small scale of Japan’s “so-called shadow industries such as the automobile industry which can be easily converted to produce aircraft engines.”12
Critical deficiencies at home were exacerbated by retrograde conditions in the advanced combat theaters. The Japanese had nothing to rival the civil engineering capability of the U.S. Seabees. Island airstrips were built with light construction equipment and backbreaking manual labor. In the early phase of the war, the Japanese had captured many of the best Allied airfields in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. As they were wrested back by the enemy, the Japanese were forced to retreat to bases in which ground support facilities were inadequate and living conditions abysmal. Pilots and mechanics were quartered in tents, cooked over open fires, and bathed in fuel drums. Latrines were built over vile open-pit cesspools. Medical facilities were undermanned and undersupplied, and surgery was often performed without anesthesia. There was always a need for replacement airplanes and airmen, but that was only one facet of the logistics problem. Airfields in forward combat areas required a constant resupply of aviation fuel, spare parts, lubricants, ordnance, and ammunition. Fresh ground crews had to be flown in to replace those who succumbed to illness, injury, or death by bombing. Newly trained mechanics were less skilled than the veterans. Japanese air cargo transports were limited in number, and many were lost to operational accidents and enemy attacks. The throttling of Japanese maritime transportation was well underway and growing worse month by month.
Under such conditions, aircraft on the front lines fell into poor repair. Saburo Sakai, the fighter ace, told his superiors that every Zero fighter should receive a complete overhaul after 150 flight hours. In the South Pacific, however, most Zeros in service surpassed 200 hours and began running very rough.13 By 1944, most front-line fighters were shot down before they ever had a chance for a maintenance overhaul.
Writing years after the war, Jiro Horikoshi observed that his country could not draw from the deep wellsprings of engineering and technical expertise that existed in the United States. There was nothing in Japan to compare with America’s sprawling complex of universities, research laboratories, design firms, and heavy industries. Japan had a small circle of gifted engineers employed by the navy, the army, and about a dozen industrial firms. Owing to rivalries between the army and the navy and between rival companies and cartels (zaibatsu), much of their work was duplicative and wasteful. All too often their talents were squandered on impractical, profligate, stop-and-start projects that never got off the ground (in some cases, literally). They were resourceful and dedicated, but there were not enough of them. Horikoshi and his colleagues drove themselves to the verge of complete exhaustion and collapse, until the doctors and bosses ordered them to rest. “Such poor management of technical policy created the situation where we had no other choice but to rely on the Zeros from the beginning of the war until its end,” Horikoshi wrote, “and this, in turn accelerated Japan’s defeat.”14
THE NEWEST ADJUNCT TO OZAWA’S FORCE was the Taiho (”Great Phoenix”), a 29,300-ton fleet carrier with an armored flight deck designed to withstand the sort of dive-bombing attack that had destroyed four carriers at the Battle of Midway. This was the first Japanese carrier to have such armor. The heavy steel deck required costly trade-offs, with the result that the ship’s two hangars were small in proportion to her great size, and were serviced by just two elevators. She would carry only seventy-five aircraft, twenty fewer than the new American carriers. Taiho entered service in March 1944 and sailed that month to Singapore, where Ozawa took her as his flagship.
Two new carrier bombers were gradually replacing their obsolete predecessors. A new torpedo plane, the Nakajima B6N Tenzan (“Heavenly Mountain”), was faster and had a longer range than its predecessor, B5N (“Kate”). Its service introduction had been delayed by a balky in-house engine produced by Nakajima, and the navy had eventually insisted on a more reliable Mitsubishi power plant. The Tenzan, which the Allies designated the “Jill,” seated a three-man aircrew and could carry a torpedo or a 1,754-pound bomb load for a distance of 2,000 nautical miles. It had gone into production in 1943; by early 1944 Nakajima was turning out about a hundred new planes per month.
The long-serving Aichi D3A dive-bomber (“Val”) was giving way to the Yokosuka D4Y Suisei (“Comet”), a fast and maneuverable aircraft derived from a design by the German manufacturer Henkel, and powered by a 1,400-horsepower radial piston engine built by Aichi under license from Daimler-Benz. The Allies named her “Judy.” Like the Jill, the Judy’s service introduction had been delayed by various problems with early prototypes, notably a tendency for the wings to flutter while in a dive. The issue was eventually corrected with stronger wing spars and revamped dive brakes. With a maximum speed of 342 nautical miles per hour in level flight, the Suisei was the fastest carrier dive-bomber to be placed in general service by any combatant nation during the Second World War. It had been developed by engineers at the Yokosuka Naval Air Technical Arsenal, an Imperial Navy facility, but most of the units that went into service were built in Nagoya by Aichi. Its chief drawbacks were a lack of armor and self-sealing fuel tanks and its high speed in flight deck takeoffs and recoveries. Like all Japanese carrier planes, it was relatively easy to shoot down. The Suisei also lacked folding wings, a feature that had become de rigueur in the American carrier planes. Planes with fixed wings required more storage space, reducing the potential size of the air groups, and they required more time to cycle between the hangars and the flight decks. While the Essex carriers and their “airedales” had achieved quantum leaps in plane-handling efficiency, Ozawa’s crews were hard-pressed even to meet the
standards set by Nagumo’s Kido Butai (carrier striking force) in 1941 and 1942.
If well-handled, the Tenzan and Suisei offered considerably better performance than their predecessor airplanes. They flew faster, higher, longer, and farther. Their introduction into the fleet had been rocky, but the same was true of carrier planes produced by other nations. If wartime Japan had possessed the resources to build a new fleet of larger and more sophisticated aircraft carriers to compare with the Essex class, and had simultaneously trained a new generation of pilots with the skill to measure up to 1942’s “first team,” the Tenzan and Suisei might have posed a deadly threat to the American fleet. But most of Ozawa’s aging Third Fleet carriers (the Taiho excepted) were too small to comfortably handle the hot new machines. The heavy sisters Hiyo and Junyo, whose top speed was about 24 knots, could not launch or recover them at all unless the wind was blowing hard. Because it needed a full deck run to achieve its takeoff speed, the Suisei had to be spotted well aft. That limited the number of bombers that could be launched in a single cycle. Air staffs experimented with new catapults and even fuselage-mounted rockets to get the new dive-bombers safely aloft.
Carrier recoveries were always a white-knuckle performance. The Suisei approached fast and low, often failing to snag the arresting cables. When the new dive-bombers entered the landing circle, recalled an air officer on the Zuikaku, “there was always great tension on the bridge. We had special respect for the crews of these planes.”15
The Japanese navy had been slow to acknowledge that its flight-training pipeline was inadequate. Most of the replacement aircrews who went aboard Ozawa’s carriers that spring of 1944 had spent fewer than 150 hours in the cockpit and had acquired only rudimentary flying skills. Virtually none had practiced gunnery or qualified for carrier landings. The projected flight-training shortfall had been anticipated and discussed among Japanese aviators prior to the war, but no concerted effort to expand the pool of qualified flyers had come until 1941, when it was too late. Ruinous air losses in the Rabaul campaign had left the Japanese with no choice but to rush their cadet pilots through truncated programs and send them out to the fleet. Ozawa now faced the daunting task of preparing those undertrained young men to fight the decisive naval battle that loomed in the immediate future.