The Quest for Decisive Battle: How Japan’s Navy Lost the War

The history of the Pacific War (1941-1945) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) are well known. From the Battle of Shanghai, to the Nanking Massacre, on to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the decisive naval battle at Midway, to the meat grinder in Okinawa, the brutality and savagery of the conflicts continues to shock. The fanaticism of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in battle, next to their subhuman treatment of conquered civilian populations and prisoners of war, remains hard to fathom even today, seven decades later.

The savagery of the conflict, however, makes it easy to overlook the rational motivation behind Japan’s brutal conquests in the early 20th century and why the Empire of the Rising Sun decided to take on the Republic of China, European colonial empires, and most importantly the United States all at once. While historians often speak of a fatal political and strategic miscalculation by the Japanese when deciding to expand the war into Southeast Asia and the Pacific in 1941, one crucial factor is often less discussed: the Japanese Navy’s obsession with battle.

Japan, similar to Germany up until 1945, was first and foremost focused on winning quick victories over their enemies that were best achieved by seeking decisive battles on land and sea. The Nihon Teikoku Rikugun (Imperial Japanese Army) and Nihon Teikoku Kaigun (Imperial Japanese Navy), influenced by quick victories during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), succumbed both to the “allure of battle” as the historian Cathal J. Nolan put it in his book The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost. This fatal attraction to decisive military engagement in the hope of winning a war against a superior enemy played no small role in pushing Japan to war in 1941.

The Imperial Japanese Navy, especially, was fixated on winning a decisive naval battle between two large fleets. As the historians, David Evans and Mark Peattie argue, the Imperial Japanese Navy, “neither understood nor prepared for war. Rather, it believed in and prepared for battle (…) the single, annihilating surface victory, fought essentially on the navy’s terms and intended to force the enemy to his knees.” The result was that not only that it created “a fighting force that was both one-dimensional and brittle,” but also guaranteed Japanese defeat right from the start, despite some brilliant early victories in Southeast Asia.

In broad terms, Japanese war aims were the following in 1941. First, destroy and neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Second, expand into Southeast Asia and secure crucial natural resources, especially oil fields in Indonesia, in addition to seizing British Royal Navy assets in Singapore. Third, establish a 14,200-mile (22,800-kilometer) outer defense perimeter consisting of isolated islands garrisons in the Pacific and newly acquired territories in Southeast Asia to keep U.S. forces at bay. Fourth, isolate China and break the military stalemate on the mainland there while watching the Soviet Union carefully. Fifth, eventually defeat U.S. naval forces decisively in a fleet-to-fleet action dominated by large battleships.

The last point warrants special attention.

What is often misunderstood is that the commander of the Imperial Navy’s Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto did not believe that he would annihilate all U.S. naval power in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Rather, Yamamoto saw the raid on Pearl Harbor as a means to sharply reduce American combat power before U.S. naval forces would finally be destroyed closer to Japan, most likely in the Philippine Sea, by new Yamato-class superbattleships. In short, Pearl Harbor was part of a sea battle concept that called for “progressive reduction operations” against the U.S. Navy before the main fleets of battleships would meet.

“The point was to whittle down the U.S. Navy main battlefleet as it steamed toward Japan, too confident in its superiority, and to clear the way to conclusive daytime battleship fight called yokucho kantai kessen (“decisive fleet battle the morning after”),” Cathal J. Nolan writes. “That was the hour and day when the Kaigun [Navy] would steam to victory over the USN [U.S. Navy].”

Although Yamamoto clashed with other naval officers over his daring aircraft carrier raid on Pearl Harbor, decisive naval action fought by battleships remained the non-plus ultra for Japan’s senior naval leadership. The Japanese Imperial Army would play only a secondary role in this plan with its primary task holding onto the outer defense perimeter. Pearl Harbor was meant to give the army a year to transform the newly conquered territories into bulwarks against U.S. counterattacks. However, as it turned out, it would not succeed in doing so because of logistical difficulties, which it tried to compensate with fanaticism.

As often in war, the attack on Pearl Harbor had unintentional consequences for Japanese war plans that would only hasten the Imperial Japanese Navy’s destruction. The temporary lack of battleships in the Pacific area of operations forced the U.S. Navy to adopt a more incremental approach in fighting Japan as fleet-on-fleet action was momentarily out of the question. More importantly, Pearl Harbor transformed the U.S. Navy into a carrier task force navy in the Pacific for good. The U.S. Navy was already leaning towards aircraft carriers rather than battleships as its primary tactical unit. Pearl Harbor only accelerated this ongoing shift in procurement and tactical direction. As a result, there would be no big decisive sea battle decided by big ships and big guns – the ideal of orthodox Japanese naval planners.

Rather than decisive naval battles, the war was dominated by long-range aircraft carrier actions, raids on shipping lanes – a slow war of attrition at sea. Japanese surface warships were not designed for long-range operations and the Imperial Japanese Navy lacked an advanced replenishment and refueling system. Following the decisive Japanese defeat at Midway in June 1942, fought almost entirely with aircraft, the Battle of the Philippine Sea in in June 1944 finally destroyed the Japanese Navy’s ability to conduct large-scale carrier actions. Japan’s naval fighting power was finally crippled at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, where for the first time Japanese aviators conducted suicide attacks. By the end of the war, the U.S. Navy had constructed over 140 carriers, whereas Japan was only able to build 15 partially because it continued to allocate precious steel for superbattleships that would still be able to decisively influence the outcome of the war.

For the remainder of the war, however, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s battleships would play no significant role, except for the brief suicide sortie of the Yamato in April 1945 that led to the battleship’s destruction, along with a large part of her escort, by U.S. carrier aircraft. By the end of the war, the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost over 330 warships and hundreds of smaller vessels, although not a single large-scale fight with battleships had taken place. While, various other reasons contributed to the defeat of Japan during the Second World War, the inability of the Imperial Japanese Navy to abandon its preference for a decisive naval engagement with heavy battleships played an important role.