Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto

I am so glad you brought up Midway because reading these intelligence logs completely blew my mind.

Japanese Admiral Yamamoto has this grand plan to set a trap at Midway and crush the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Right.

But the U.S. codebreakers, led by Commander Joseph Rochefort, figure it out.

Um, because there, there's a moment with the, uh, Japanese, uh, general.

Admiral Yamamoto, if I am correct.

Yeah.

[laughs] Sure.

On December first, nineteen forty-one, a formal Imperial Conference sanctioned the decision for war.

The operation targeting Pearl Harbor had been in planning since the spring, developed under Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who had spent time in the United States as a young naval attaché and understood American industrial capacity well enough to be privately pessimistic about a prolonged conflict.

His strategy was not to conquer the United States but to deliver such a severe opening blow to the Pacific Fleet that the Americans would negotiate rather than fight a long war in the far Pacific.

It was a calculation built on a particular reading of American psychology that turned out to be completely wrong, but it was not an irrational plan on its own terms.

The high command was embarrassed in a way that institutional pride made very difficult to absorb quietly.

The response to that embarrassment drove Japan’s next major strategic decision, and it was not a good one.

Admiral Yamamoto pushed for an operation to destroy the remaining American carrier fleet once and for all, drawing it into a decisive battle near Midway Atoll in the Central Pacific.

The plan was complex, involving multiple task forces operating across a wide area, and it depended on the Americans not knowing it was coming.

When you take the time, you dig a little deeper, you look at, uh, history, you know what? Iran, uh, hey, I just talk about digging a little history.

There was a guy, uh, that, that launched this attack on Pearl Harbor, uh, Admiral Yamamoto.

Back to the Navy, right? He is quoted as saying, after Pearl Harbor was struck, "I am afraid that we have awakened a great giant." Hmm, something like that, right? "I am afraid we have awakened a great giant." Yeah, and he was right.

Japan awakened the American people, and boy, did we go to work.

I'm not going to settle here.

What is not disputed is that Admiral Yamamoto's bomber went down in the jungle of Bougainville and that Yamamoto died in the wreckage.

Japanese search parties found his body still strapped into his seat.

The architect of Pearl Harbor was killed by an airplane he had no idea was coming, flown 430 miles over open ocean on dead reckoning, timed to within a minute of its appointed intercept by pilots who had been briefed in a tent the night before and then asked to fly one of the most precisely timed intercept missions of the entire war.

So they stole it from Tora Tora Tora.

Legend has it Admiral Yamamoto said this.

He did not say this.

There's no evidence he said this.

Also, Admiral Yamamoto was not on an aircraft carrier during the attack on Pearl

Harbor.

He was

Um, he had all of the ships tied together.

He could, he could've picked up the phone and talked to, uh, Admiral Kimmel or General Short and let them know that, yeah, uh, General, uh, or Admiral Yamamoto was coming across the Pacific.

He did not do that.

This was deliberate.

And Admiral Gormley, having heard about the intensity of the day's fighting, had a large fuel run canceled.

But by that time, Yamamoto's Carrier Division 1 was already east of Guadalcanal, hunting for the Hornet.

They didn't find the lone carrier, but came upon the last vessels of that attempted fuel supply run to turn back.

The result of this turnabout was no fuel getting to Henderson Field, as well as a destroyer, the Meredith, being sunk, the tug, Vireo, abandoned, and the crews from both ships being in the water for three days.

Only 88 men were left.

187 others had fallen to Japanese bullets, but mostly to sharks.

As for the limited success of the Americans' air arm the day before, Admiral Yamamoto sent heavy cruisers again to bombard the American perimeter.

That night, October 15th through the 16th, another 926 8-inch shells were fired on the Americans.