RETHINKING THE NAVY’S WAR PREPARATIONS
The Radical Views of lnoue Shigeyoshi
In 1941, however, a force structure that still gave primacy to the battleship and a strategy that relied on luring the enemy into fighting a decisive battle line engagement on sharply disadvantageous terms represented thinking that was at once fanciful and outmoded. One flag officer who had seen this clearly was Vice Adm. Inoue Shigeyoshi, chief of the ministry’s Naval Aviation Department and one of the trio of increasingly isolated moderates in the high command discussed earlier in this chapter. In January 1941, about the same time that Admiral Yamamoto was penning his thoughts on a radically different strategy for war with the United States, Inoue had attended the staff-ministry consultations to revise the Circle Five plan. Listening to staff representatives insist on the construction of still more Yamato-class battleships, Inoue exploded with exasperation at what he considered the staff’s outmoded and unimaginative assumptions in making such a proposal. Attacking the plan as a preparation for past, not future, conflicts, Inoue pointed out that rather than providing a rationale for naval construction based on a careful analysis of the kind of war that Japan would have to wage and the kind of weapons necessary to win it, the plan simply constituted a blind, unthinking response to American building programs. Inoue’s outburst stunned his colleagues; so flummoxed were they by his denunciation of their schemes that the meeting broke up without further discussion of the plan or of Inoue’s scathing critique of it. Several weeks later Inoue, demonstrating that he was not merely a destructive critic, submitted a lengthy memorandum to the Navy Ministry outlining his own alternative scheme for a naval armament program that would give Japan a greater chance for victory in a war with the United States.91
The dry title of Inoue’s memorandum, Shin gumbi keikaku ron (On modern weapons procurement planning) belied the radical nature of its recommendations, for it comprised not merely a proposed schedule of warship construction, but rather a comprehensive attack on the basic assumptions behind the high command’s current construction programs and an urgent call for drastic revision of the navy’s priorities.92
Inoue began by pointing out several stark facts. To begin with, it was impossible for Japan to bring about the total defeat of the United States, because it was obviously beyond Japan’s means to capture America’s capital, occupy its vast territory, or destroy all its operational forces. Nor could the United States, because of its two enormous coastlines—one unreachable by Japanese forces—and its essential self-sufficiency in most strategic resources, be brought to its knees by blockade. While there was no way for Japan to bring about the complete collapse of American resistance, conversely, it was technically feasible for the United States to bring about the total ruination of Japan: to defeat all its forces, to blockade its home islands—starving the country of all strategic resources—and to seize its capital and occupy all its territory. What Inoue was arguing, one postwar commentator has written, was that a future Japan-U.S. conflict was effectively a chess game in which the United States could checkmate Japan, but Japan could not do the same to the United States.93
Inoue went on to say that a Japan-U.S. naval war would likely be a protracted conflict, not the lightning war that Japan’s naval strategists had long studied. Implied in his argument was the idea that in such a extended struggle, the United States must inevitably bring to bear its tremendous industrial might, which Japan could not hope to match. But Inoue was less interested in underscoring the dire consequences of such a turn of events, which he believed were understood by the naval high command. Rather, he was determined to illuminate the reasons why Japan could not count on a quick decision. First, he pointed out, command of the sea was no longer an absolute matter. Although Japan could “secure” the western Pacific at the outset of the war by capturing all American territories in it, including the Philippines, with the maturation of aircraft and submarine technology, command of the sea was no longer one-dimensional, but three-dimensional. Thus command of the sea probably could no longer be achieved by surface battle alone. Indeed, in Inoue’s view, the “decisive” surface battle would probably never take place. The development of aircraft and submarine striking power within the last few years had made it probable that a significant number of capital ships on both sides would be destroyed before they could engage each other.
This being the case, Japan should gain control of the air over the western Pacific as a prerequisite to controlling the sea. Here Inoue argued that even the context of command of the air had changed in recent years. Whereas aircraft carriers had until recently been considered the prime element of naval air power, with the rapid development of land-based bombers and flying boats, these latter types of aircraft had become the most potent air weapons. Thus, in Inoue’s view, control of the air could be obtained without any surface units (specifically including carriers) and by aircraft alone. Indeed, it was time to think of control of the air by an air force independent of naval ships!
Given the advent of the long-range submarine, even control of the air would be insufficient to provide total control of the sea. Inoue noted that in the Russo-Japanese and China Wars, the Japanese navy had no experience in fighting an enemy with a powerful submarine force. But in a naval war with the United States, Japan could expect that numerous American submarines, in cooperation with aircraft, would deploy across Japan’s vital sea lanes, blockading the home islands and tenaciously destroying its maritime commerce in the western Pacific and along the Asian littoral.94 In Inoue’s opinion, Japan’s ability to carry on the war, indeed its very survival, would depend upon its ability to protect its ocean transport from American submarine and air attacks, and the campaign to do so would be one of the most critical of the entire conflict. To have any hope in winning such a struggle, the navy would have to construct many convoy escorts and organize powerful mobile task forces, employing surface, air, and submarine elements.
Returning to his earlier theme, Inoue wrote that a decisive fleet engagement involving battleships would be unlikely unless the U.S. fleet commander was ignorant or foolhardy. The United States would far more likely attempt the strategy of the gradual strangulation of Japan, beginning with the successive seizures of Japanese advanced island bases in Micronesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the north Pacific. The struggle to prevent this, as well as to take or retake American bases, would be one of the focal points of the war, one that along with the defense of Japan’s sea lanes would determine the fate of the nation. Hence, in Inoue’s view, landing operations were far more important than the so-called decisive battle, and Japan should begin now to strengthen its amphibious warfare capabilities by emphasizing construction of suitable ships and the organization of appropriate units to perfect its amphibious assault capabilities for capturing enemy island bases.
With the twenty-twenty hindsight of the armchair strategist in the 1990s, one can cavil at Inoue’s diagnosis of and prescriptions for the Japanese navy’s doctrinal ills. He was obviously wrong, for example, about land-based aircraft superseding aircraft carriers. Yet, obviously, also with the advantage of hindsight, it is clear that Inoue was far more right about the nature of the coming naval war in the Pacific than he was wrong. Certainly, his critique was a much more accurate assessment of its realities than any of the thinking in the Japanese naval high command up to that point. Ultimately, what marks Inoue as a clairvoyant of sorts is that he saw the war not in tactical, but in strategic terms. No single battle, no single weapon, would determine the outcome, but rather an array of balanced forces operating and cooperating in all three dimensions of naval war—air, surface, and subsurface. Even then, he saw, the struggle would be long and desperate and, for Japan, at great odds.
Evans, David C.; Peattie, David. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 (pp. 482-483). Naval Institute Press. Kindle Edition.
