Yamamoto called best Jap military, naval strategist
By Robert Bellaire, United Press staff writer
The following closeup of the late Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was written by the manager of the former United Press Bureau in Tokyo who was interned by the Japs at the start of the war. He returned to the United States in the exchange of diplomats and newspapermen.
New York –
Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was probably the greatest military and naval strategist Japan ever had, and his death is a blow to Japan comparable to what the loss of Gen. Douglas MacArthur would be to the United States.
Outside of Premier Tōjō, Yamamoto was the best known and most popular of Japan’s war leaders. He was a poker player, a heavy drinker and a hard-hitting fighting man, a man who would go personally into air combat anytime.
There is no question but what he got close to Pearl Harbor during the sneak attack of Dec. 7. How close no one knows for sure, but the report he sent back is known. It was couched in poker lingo and it read:
America had a full house but we had a royal flush.
His death – and I suspect it may have been harikari – may well explain what happened to that long-expected all-out Jap offensive in the Pacific. He was the brains of any Jap offensive.
Yamamoto frequently said that he would take his own life by harikari rather than lose any Jap territory. He repeated that in a statement when Gen. MacArthur came out of the Philippines – a hero in defeat.
Regardless of how he died, Yamamoto’s death would force a new man to take over the projected offensive and that would cause delay. The offensive hasn’t started and meanwhile the United States has had a chance to get underway in the Aleutians.
Thus, Yamamoto’s death may have a very strange bearing on what happens next in the Pacific.
In June 1942, when the Japs moved toward Midway and the Aleutians. Yamamoto took the defeat of Midway very hard. He talked very little about the whole operations. When he did, he referred to the Aleutians as the main scene. There was the gain. But Midway he termed a diversion. There was the defeat.
At the end he said the Aleutians had to be covered “because they are the pathway to Washington.”
About two years ago, I had a long talk with Yamamoto about the comparative morale of the U.S. and Jap Navies. Our Navy, he told me, was a “social navy of bridge players and golf players – a peacetime navy.” The Japanese, he said were so high in morale they would take their own lives rather than live in disgrace after defeat.
After Pearl Harbor, the Jap newspapers carried dispatches about how Yamamoto, out with a fleet unit, would toss his empty liquor and beer bottles into the water after sinking an American ship. It was his peculiar way of paying tribute to the dead sailors.
His successor, Mineichi Koga, is a very different man, more in the old Samurai tradition, the frugal warrior class. But he is also an able strategist.