The recent movie by Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima, makes a passing reference to the death of General Yamamoto during the war. Here’s a short but well-known story about him that I originally posted up on the 13 Feb 2001.
Perhaps the most well known- and sometimes misunderstood- general of the Japanese military forces was General Yamamoto Isoroku. General Yamamoto was the commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet in August 1941, and was the chief architect behind the attack on Pearl Harbor, which momentarily crippled the US fleet docked at the harbor on the 7th December 1941. This attack has also been the subject of several several motion pictures, including Tora Tora Tora, and the upcoming Hollywood epic, Pearl Harbor.
What is less well known however is that Yamamoto actually opposed war against the United States; a stark contrast with the other war-mongering military leaders in Japan, who were spoiling for a fight with the Allied powers. He had been a visitor to the United States a decade before the war started, and knew that Japan would surely lose a protracted struggle with such a powerful opponent, with the large American industries which could be switched to produce war time munitions, equipment and other hardware. However, he was a minority voice; and when the Japanese war cabinet elected to go to war with the United States, he threw his entire person behind the task, being the loyal officer he was.
Even then, he was never confident of long term success, and even wrote that he would run freely with his forces in the Pacific for 6 months, after which he would be sorely pressed when the American industry came online to back their military might. He was in fact, nearly correct to the day. After the successful attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Japanese military forces went on to great success in Malaya, Singapore and the Philippines, and had the British and American forces on the run, defeat after defeat. But nearly exactly six months later, in June 1942, his naval forces was defeated at the Battle of Midway, and the tide of the war forever turned against the Japanese. As Yamamoto had said, he did indeed run amok for 6 months.
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