XXXI: Planning the Perimeter, December 1942
The staff officers in Tokyo had been seven thousand kilometres from the battlefields of New Caledonia, and while the campaign was fought on the island they could only follow the progress through radio reports. Yamamoto and Yi had been confident of their imminent victory, and the advance to Tontouta had looked impressive on a map, so Imperial Headquarters had little reason to doubt them. No-one there had seen the conditions in New Caledonia: a lack of food that got worse the further inland the soldiers pushed, increasingly powerful air attacks, and the knowledge that the Americans were receiving reinforcements while the Japanese struggled to bring a convoy every three weeks without losing ships. Thus, when the battle turned from imminent victory to total defeat in just two weeks, Tokyo was shocked.
The Chief of the IJA General Staff, Field Marshal Hajime Sugiyama, was among those taken by surprise. In May, he had committed 30,000 Army soldiers to the FS plan on Yamamoto’s request, when his initial support for the operation was based around the assumption that the Navy would only demand one quarter of that force. Although the men had been taken from other islands, particularly Java, every Army man fighting in the Pacific was one not being used in the more important struggle: the conquest of China (where Sugiyama had briefly served in 1939). FS, especially after Coral Sea, had been a Navy plan that had used predominantly Army resources. Marshal Sugiyama was furious now that his men appeared to have been used up. Fiji had been nice for prestige, but had since proven largely useless as a base and almost impossible to supply. Efate had been wrecked, and Samoa and New Caledonia had both been disasters, although at least Samoa was entirely the Navy’s problem.
On the anniversary of the Pearl Harbour raid, an angry Sugiyama met with Admiral Yamamoto, who while technically subordinate to Admiral Osami Nagano, Chief of the IJN, by now greatly overshadowed his superior. Yamamoto was told that the Army would oppose any more offensive plans outside of China, and that no more Army troops were to be transferred to the Pacific islands. In other words, the Pacific was now the Navy’s fight, and would have to go it alone.
Yamamoto had already come to the conclusion that further offensives would not be to Japan’s benefit: any potential targets save perhaps Funafuti would be too far to supply and have limited strategic value, while FS had served its main purpose in allowing him to finally destroy the US Navy. Funafuti was considered for invasion first as a part of FS, and then under a new plan drawn up in August codenamed ‘FF’, which was to be carried out once New Caledonia fell. Now that the carriers had been sent back to the Home Islands for repairs, the earliest time that FF could be attempted would be in the middle of 1943, and that would require more transport ships and oilers that Yamamoto doubted he would be able to use: new constructions were barely keeping up with losses in more important theatres.
FF was unlikely to go ahead, so Yamamoto turned to his other plan for the coming year: the buildup of the outer defensive perimeter. With complete control of Java, New Guinea, the Solomons, Gilberts and Marshall Islands, the Japanese had formed an arc of territories, at least part of which the Americans would have to attack before they could even approach the Home Islands. The refusal of Japan’s peace offering meant that a new American Navy would inevitably attack somewhere along that perimeter, at which point Yamamoto would send the bulk of the Combined Fleet to destroy them in a second decisive battle. Any American infantry would be killed on the beaches of the chosen islands, and Japan would prove once and for all that it was too strong to be conquered, and the Americans would be forced to make peace.
The recent conquests, the New Hebrides and Fiji, were not considered an essential part of this defensive plan. Halsey’s raid had destroyed Efate as a useful base, and now that the New Caledonia operation had been defeated there seemed little value in rebuilding it: it had already become a target for endless waves of Fletcher’s bombers and no other Allied bases were in range of bombers stationed on Efate. Fiji meanwhile was just as good a location for interdicting communications between Australia and the United States, and had proved ineffective in that role: ships headed to Brisbane or Sydney were now taking the slightly longer route via Samoa instead. Fiji was too exposed to form a part of any perimeter, and supplying it had been a chaotic affair since August. Yamamoto hoped the islands would buy him time to ready more important positions, but otherwise wrote them off.
Yamamoto had long feared that a long war with the United States would be one that Japan would surely lose, but ten weeks in the South Pacific had convinced him that the nation was unprepared for a long war, even if America’s vast industrial power was ignored. Most importantly, he worried that a shortage of skilled pilots would soon result in a disastrous drop in the quality of the Japanese air forces: there were only about half of the Pearl Harbour veterans still alive a year after the raid, and at present two years of training was considered necessary to train a carrier pilot to the elite standard that had been expected. Two years would mean that a new pilot starting today would not be ready until the beginning of 1945: Yamamoto felt that would be too late.
Despite some opposition from elements of the Navy, Yamamoto decided to split the training program in two: one part would continue under the old methods, with graduates to be assigned to the carrier forces. These carriers, under repair for the moment but set to be ready for use in a few months’ time, would form the most important part of the fleet in the second decisive battle, and Yamamoto wanted to have the most elite force possible. Until the day of the decisive battle, they were to be kept somewhere safe as a fleet in being, training for the decisive battle off the Japanese coast or in low-risk operations against the Chinese. The rest of the training program was cut down to twelve months, and then six as fuel became an issue. The islands under the Navy’s control were to be garrisoned with lower quality pilots, filling aircraft while keeping the elite units for the decisive battle. Yamamoto saw the islands as bait, intended to draw the Americans in, and saw the use of elite pilots on the islands as an inefficient use of valuable resources.
Had he told Sugiyama of that, his requests for more Army troops would have been met with a cold silence, if not anger (and Tojo’s reaction would have been even more hostile). Instead, he presented his grand plan to the entire Imperial General Headquarters and secured the Emperor’s approval. Sugiyama was once again angered by Yamamoto’s new request for 40,000 men, which would have to come from China, to man the defences across the Eastern Pacific. Only with the Emperor’s support of Yamamoto’s plan did Sugiyama begrudgingly transfer the forces, which would be transported to various locations including the Marshall and Gilbert islands throughout the first few months of 1943. As long as Yamamoto could deliver victories, the Army would tolerate him, but many within the IJA ranks had already come to resent an admiral that was either extremely skilled, or very lucky.
- BNC
). The Navy at least will think that preferable compared with going to Tojo for support instead.
