What if American pilots had failed to kill Yamamoto?

Just out of curiousity's sake -- how likely would he have been brought up on war crimes? My admittably feeble and dinner-deprived memory tells me that quite a few of the military top brass were brought up on charges, no?

I have no idea about him personally. A number of the Japanese who went to trial got off relatively light (compared to the Germans). They probably would have gotten him on the whole "Planning an offensive war" charge.
 

CalBear

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I have no idea about him personally. A number of the Japanese who went to trial got off relatively light (compared to the Germans). They probably would have gotten him on the whole "Planning an offensive war" charge.


Yamamoto was fairly clean, at least as clean as any senior officer could be in Japan. The biggest charge that could have been thrown at him was "waging aggressive war". The IJN had fairly few prisoners (although there were a number of ship's captains who executed captured pilots right on deck & cheated the hangman by getting killed in action later in the war). At Wake the occupation commander and his exec Danced Danny Deever for killing civilian prisoners, but the commander was a Rear Admiral who was clearly operating on his own authority.

Even if Yamamoto HAD survived the P-38's, his star had begun to fade after Coral Sea, Midway, and the continuing disaster in the Solomons (where he was making a personal tour to try to somehow staunch the flow of blood that was killing the JNAF). He had never been that popular, even within the Navy (one reason he was given Combined Fleet was to get him at sea and away from the assassins), and the Army had no use for him at all, but while he was winning that didn't matter. once he stopped winning, ironically almost exactly on schedule (He had claim a good six months to a year, Midway was 6/4/42 and Guadalcanal was invaded 8/7/42, falling 2/7/43) he was vulnerable. It is very likely that he would have wound up like Nagumo; placed in command of some critical base (Iwo Jima?) and killed when it fell to the Americans.
 

Japhy

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Well if we failed to kill him 60+ years of political assassinations would probably go differently, as his was the first big goverment-planned killing.
 

CalBear

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Well if we failed to kill him 60+ years of political assassinations would probably go differently, as his was the first big goverment-planned killing.


This has always bothered me, the concept that he was somehow a political figure, and that his demise at the hands of American fighters is some sort of assassination. This is, simply put, ludicrous.

Yamamoto was an ADMIRAL, an active serving officer with a field command, He wore the uniform, not as a show, but because he was a career military man. In war, the whole idea is to kill the guy in the other uniform. It is especially useful to kill enemy officers, the higher ranked the better (it is no accident that saluting is forbidden by the U.S. military in hostile fire zones) since they have a greater impact on the battlefield. The term for this is "force multiplier". Had Yamamoto been on the deck of his flagship, the Yamato, when a bomb hit her, his death would raise no comment, even if the only way the U.S. found the ship was with decrypted code data.

It seems that there is a belief that the U.S. did something "wrong" by shooting his bomber (wait, a bomber, isn't that a warplane:confused:) down on a designed mission, or set some bizarre precedent by killing a sailor during a war. For in the end, that was who Yamamoto was, a sailor, a high ranking one, who was famous, but still a sailor, nothing more, nothing less. He was not a member of the Japanese ruling junta, never had been a member, and was not even a candidate to become a member.

The really funny thing is, had it been General Tojo, who WAS the leader of the Junta, that the U.S. shot out of the sky, no one would have cared, then or now.

Whole thing makes no sense.
 

Japhy

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I said that wrong and now I feel as foolish as the chap who started this thread... I'll be quiet now.
 

bard32

Banned
And if you'd only remember to line your baseball cap with tinfoil those sources won't bother you anymore.

Sheesh, how can someone be so wrong so often? It's like you're from an alternate timeline or something...


Bill

Hardy har har. I have a book about the Flying Tigers written in 1961 by a respected author. Ever hear of John Toland?
 

bard32

Banned
Yep, I was just hoping we could maybe have some sort of sensible discussion about something in this thread. However as bard appears to be getting his facts from the back of Top Trumps cards I think we may have sunk too far already.

Actually, it was a box of Milton Bradley airplane cards. Let's get back on the
subject. Shall we? What if American pilots had failed to kill Yamamoto? The
pilots who participated in it said that it was an assassination.
 

bard32

Banned
I have no idea about him personally. A number of the Japanese who went to trial got off relatively light (compared to the Germans). They probably would have gotten him on the whole "Planning an offensive war" charge.

Except for General Tojo. I heard that he and Yamamoto hated each other and
fought often. I'd love to be a fly on the wall then. :D Seriously, Yamamoto was
dead by then. I also heard that it was the Dutch judge that let most of the Japanese defendants off.
 
Except for General Tojo. I heard that he and Yamamoto hated each other and
fought often. I'd love to be a fly on the wall then. :D Seriously, Yamamoto was
dead by then. I also heard that it was the Dutch judge that let most of the Japanese defendants off.

There's actually a fighting chance that Yamamoto will get through the war trials rather scot free. Take Masanobu Tsuji "God of Strategy's case. He opposed communism, and he was kept alive. All Yamamoto has to be is a little more anti-communist. The War Trials were largely a lot of ex-facto laws anyway, it wasn't fair at all.
 
I have no idea about him personally. A number of the Japanese who went to trial got off relatively light (compared to the Germans). They probably would have gotten him on the whole "Planning an offensive war" charge.

As an aside, I take it the idea that "Planning an offensive war" is a war crime worthy of the death penalty has been quietly shelved in recent times?

Woah, bit of politics creeping in there.
 
As an aside, I take it the idea that "Planning an offensive war" is a war crime worthy of the death penalty has been quietly shelved in recent times?

Woah, bit of politics creeping in there.

It was an ex-post facto law, which the winners made up after they won. A revenge device.
 

CalBear

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Hardy har har. I have a book about the Flying Tigers written in 1961 by a respected author. Ever hear of John Toland?

So Toland gave the figure of 240:1?

Somehow I doubt that, but if it is true, it calls ALL his works into serious question.
 

bard32

Banned
Yamamoto was fairly clean, at least as clean as any senior officer could be in Japan. The biggest charge that could have been thrown at him was "waging aggressive war". The IJN had fairly few prisoners (although there were a number of ship's captains who executed captured pilots right on deck & cheated the hangman by getting killed in action later in the war). At Wake the occupation commander and his exec Danced Danny Deever for killing civilian prisoners, but the commander was a Rear Admiral who was clearly operating on his own authority.

Even if Yamamoto HAD survived the P-38's, his star had begun to fade after Coral Sea, Midway, and the continuing disaster in the Solomons (where he was making a personal tour to try to somehow staunch the flow of blood that was killing the JNAF). He had never been that popular, even within the Navy (one reason he was given Combined Fleet was to get him at sea and away from the assassins), and the Army had no use for him at all, but while he was winning that didn't matter. once he stopped winning, ironically almost exactly on schedule (He had claim a good six months to a year, Midway was 6/4/42 and Guadalcanal was invaded 8/7/42, falling 2/7/43) he was vulnerable. It is very likely that he would have wound up like Nagumo; placed in command of some critical base (Iwo Jima?) and killed when it fell to the Americans.

Yamamoto was also a good poker player. When he was the Naval Attache` to the United States, he knew that if we were mobilized, we couldn't be stopped. That's why he told Hirohito the following: "Give me six months, and I'll run wild. After that, I have no guarantee of victory." I'm paraphrasing here. If CalBear can find the exact quote, fine. Post it here because I don't
know it. BTW, "I'm afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant," was said after Pearl Harbor.
 
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