Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 - Softcover

Peattie, Estate Of Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159114664X ISBN 13: 9781591146643

Publisher: Naval Institute Press, 2013

Synopsis

This acclaimed sequel to the Peattie/Evans prizewinning work, Kaigun, illuminates the rise of Japanese naval aviation from its genesis in 1909 to its thunderbolt capability on the eve of the Pacific war. In the process of explaining the Navy's essential strengths and weaknesses, the book provides the most detailed account available in English of Japan's naval air campaign over China from 1937 to 1941. A final chapter analyzes the utter destruction of Japanese naval air power by 1944.

About this title

About the Author

Mark R. Peattie was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He wrote and cowrote seven books including Kaigun before his death in early 2014.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sunburst

The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941By Mark R. Peattie

US Naval Institute Press

Copyright © 2007 Mark R. Peattie
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781591146643

Chapter One

The Navy Tests
?Its?
Wings

Japanese Naval Aviation, 1909-1921

When the Imperial Japanese Navy was established in the 1870s, there existed a formidablegap between Japan and the Western maritime powers. These powers, ledby Britain, had made epochal advances in naval technology, the tactical coordinationof fleets, and the applications of sea power to achieve strategic objectives.Decades and in some cases centuries of naval evolution in the West confrontedJapan with a daunting challenge. The Japanese navy was able to narrow this gapdramatically, but only through extraordinary effort intensified by a consciousnessof Japanese inferiority and backwardness.

    In the development of aviation, specifically naval aviation, the comparative situationwas different. While manned flight in balloons had been undertaken in theWest in the eighteenth century and powered lighter-than-air craft had been successfullytested in the middle of the nineteenth, heavier-than-air flight was notdemonstrated as practical until the opening of the twentieth. When, in 1909, theJapanese navy first made a decision to develop a capability in this new medium, theWright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk and Samuel Langley's abortive experimentson the Potomac River had occurred only six years before, and none of the pioneerendeavors of powered flight had yet demonstrated that aviation could contribute tothe conduct of war on land or at sea. Yet soon thereafter, progress in aviation camewith remarkable rapidity, and its principles were widely disseminated. The pace ofthis dissemination thus allowed Japan to participate in the general liftoff of aviationwithin a far shorter time than it had taken the nation to join the ranks of the greatnaval powers. Of course, Japan's smaller resource base in science, technology, andmateriel meant that the navy's first decades of powered flight were greatly dependenton Western developments in aviation. In the long run, moreover, the rise ofJapanese naval air power, as stunning as it proved to be by 1941, must necessarilybe viewed against the material dominance of the West.

    By 1911, naval aviation already offered two paths for development: the seaplaneand the wheeled land-based aircraft. Because it was waterborne, the seaplaneseemed the logical type of aircraft for naval operations. At San Diego thatyear, the American engineer Glenn Curtiss, who was pioneering the development ofseaplanes, undertook the first waterborne flight, landing alongside a warship thatthen hoisted the aircraft aboard. Other seaplane records were set over the next tenyears, and a mother ship, the seaplane tender or carrier, was developed by the leadingnaval powers as a new warship category. Yet the use of seaplanes with the fleetpresented problems. They took too long to launch and recover, the mother shiphaving to stop and lower or retrieve her aircraft over the side.

    The second approach to naval aviation was the employment of shore-based aircraft,but their range at that time was so short that they could not operate with thefleet. As early as 1910, the United States Navy made a historic effort to solve thisproblem by launching ship-borne aircraft. At Hampton Roads, Virginia, that year,an aircraft was flown off the temporary platform deck of an American cruiser, anevent followed a few months later by the successful landing of an airplane on thetemporary deck of a cruiser in San Francisco Bay. Yet these were flights by singleaircraft from and to ships riding at anchor. No navy had yet attempted to launchor recover aircraft from a ship under way. Nor had any maritime power yet determinedthe role of such aircraft in the operations of its navy, though many naval professionalssaw the function of both sea- and ship-borne aircraft as most likely oneof reconnaissance, not combat. It would take World War I to change this limitedperception of naval aviation.

    In that conflict, the impact of aviation on the war at sea was far less dramaticand wide-ranging than its effect on land war, but the airplane had, in isolatedinstances, demonstrated its potentially versatile role in naval operations. In 1913,even before the world war, a Greek seaplane carried out a reconnaissance sortieover a Turkish fleet in the Dardanelles. A British seaplane made a practice drop ofa standard naval torpedo in 1914, and the next year British seaplanes heavily damageda Turkish military transport in an aerial torpedo attack. In 1916, Austro-Hungarianseaplanes sank a French submarine at sea by bombing. Jutland itself wasthe first naval battle that involved naval aviation, though in a small role, when anaircraft from a British seaplane tender attached to the Grand Fleet spotted theadvancing German battle cruiser squadron and reported the enemy's movementsaccurately, though the British flagship did not receive the information because of acommunications breakdown.

    Despite these "firsts," however, the limitations mentioned earlier?the time-consumingprocess of launching and retrieving seaplanes at sea and the difficulty oflaunching more than a single aircraft from the temporary platforms installed on regularwarships?kept naval aviation from playing a significant scouting or strikingrole at sea. To operate wheeled planes from ships under way called for a new kindof warship with wide and permanent decks for the launch and retrieval of numerousaircraft. In converting the battle cruiser Furious in 1917, so as to provide a permanentflight deck forward, the British navy produced the prototype of the modern aircraftcarrier. In August of that year the first landing on a ship under way took placeon its flight deck. The next year a landing flight deck was extended aft, though thewarship's funnel and superstructure still separated it from the takeoff deck forward.

    First Flights

    The Japanese Navy Finds Its Wings, 1909-1914

In all such developments the Japanese navy had as yet little direct experience. At theend of the first decade of the new century, the issue of aviation in Japan was largelytheoretical, tested in the press rather than in the air, since there were no aircraft ofany sort in the country. But there were those who had at least begun to think boldlyabout the new subject of "aeronautics." In the navy, a few officers, stationed abroad,including Comdr. Iida Hisatsune, resident at the Royal Navy's Gunnery School inPortsmouth, and Lt. Comdr. Matsumura Kikuo, resident officer in France, hadbecome interested in Western developments in powered flight and had begun tosend reports back to Tokyo. But it was Lt. Comdr. Yamamoto Eisuke?nephew ofthe powerful Meiji-era naval figure Adm. Yamamoto Gombei, but no relation toAdm. Yamamoto Isoroku of Pacific War fame?who can properly be called the conceptualfather of Japanese naval aviation. While serving on the Navy General Staff,Commander Yamamoto became intensely interested in aviation through stories inthe press about Western advances in the field. He subsequently drafted a number ofpronouncements in which he urged the navy to address seriously the question of"flying machines" (tako-shiki kuchu hikoki, literally, "kite-type flying machine"). Inhis "Statement Concerning the Study of Aeronautics" (Kokujutsu kenkyu ni kansuru ikensho) of March 1909, Yamamoto predicted the advent of "aerial warshipsof awesome potential" and went on to argue that while naval warfare up to then hadbeen two-dimensional, in the near future, with the addition of flying machines andsubmarines, it would be conducted within three dimensions. This view prefiguredthe arguments of air power advocates in the Japanese navy in the years to come. Itobviously implied a challenge to the orthodox belief in the dominance of surfacefleets, but it ascribed to aviation capabilities that it was decades from achieving?thisat a time when "flying machines," with their delicate assemblies of wood andwire and cloth, had the structure and the performance of a crane fly, and in a yearwhen there was not as yet even one of these odd contraptions in Japanese militaryservice.

    In any event, Yamamoto's various memoranda came to the attention of NavyMinister Saito Makoto, who was sufficiently impressed with their dramatic claimsto enter into negotiations with the army minister for a joint program to study themilitary application of flight to the conduct of war. The timing was fortuitous, forjust about that time the army was beginning to move in that same direction. In1909 the two services established a "Provisional Committee for the Study of theMilitary Application of Balloons" (Rinji Gun'yo Kikyu Kenkyukai). Despite thisoddly narrow focus for the study of military aviation, both the army and the navycontinued to pursue heavier-than-air flight. The army sent several officers to Europefor flight instruction in the latest flying machines. Upon their return in 1910, theybrought with them two aircraft for a public demonstration of the first heavier-than-airflights in Japan. The interest engendered in the army high command by theexperiment led to the establishment of the first military airfield at Tokorozawa thenext year.

    But the Japanese navy was determined to acquire its own wings. Given the frictionthat had existed between the two services since their creation, it was inevitablethat the nature of the Provisional Committee?chaired by an army general, dependententirely upon the army's budget, and heedless of the navy's interest in waterborneaircraft?would cause restlessness among its navy members. Most of thoseofficers urged the navy to withdraw from the committee and to form its own aviationresearch organization. Thus, in 1910 the navy set out on its own course byestablishing a "Committee for the Study of Naval Aeronautics" (Kaigun KokujutsuKenkyukai), headed by Capt. Yamaji Kazuyoshi and twenty-one other naval officers,most of whom went on to become the pioneers of Japanese naval aviation.This navy initiative caused a good deal of resentment in the army and marked thebeginning of a bitter rivalry in aviation between the two services that lasted to theend of the Pacific War.

    The obvious first step in aviation for the Japanese navy was the development ofa core of young naval officers who could fly and who then could teach others to fly.This, in turn, required that a few selected officers be sent abroad for flight training.While there, they could purchase and ship home the latest flying machines. BecauseFrance and the United States seemed to be making the greatest progress in aeronautics,it was to those two countries that the first Japanese officers, most of themmembers of the navy's Aeronautics Committee, were dispatched.

    In 1911 to 1912, lieutenants Kaneko Yozo, Umekita Kanehiko, and KohamaFumihiko were dispatched to an aviation school in Paris, and lieutenants KonoSankichi, Yamada Chuji, and Nakajima Chikuhei were sent to the Glenn Curtissaviation schools in Hammondsport, New York, and in San Diego. At Hammondsportthe Japanese trainees learned to fly the newly designed Curtiss seaplanes onnearby Keuka Lake and later took training on the Curtiss wheeled aircraft, popularlyknown at Hammondsport as "grass cutters." Actually, only Kono andYamada were under orders for flight instruction on Curtiss aircraft. Nakajima wascharged merely with studying the production and maintenance of such machines,but he took it upon himself to obtain flight training from Curtiss instructors.Judging from American accounts, the Japanese students exhibited more zeal anddaring than natural skill, and as a result demolished several machines, much to thefrustration of their American instructors.

    Meanwhile, Commander Yamamoto had been dispatched to Germany to learnall he could about European developments in military aviation. While there he correspondedfrequently with Lieutenant Kaneko on the importance of aviationresearch for the Japanese navy. Seeking ways to demonstrate to the navy brass thepossibilities for aviation, Yamamoto hit upon the idea of using the navy's newlypurchased foreign aircraft in the annual naval review held before the emperor. Tothat end, he fired off a recommendation to the navy minister for such a demonstration.Many in the top echelon were opposed, being skeptical of the whole ideaof aircraft in naval warfare and fearful that an accident or a mechanical failure ineither one of the aircraft would ruin the demonstration and embarrass the navy. ButNavy Minister Saito approved, and lieutenants Kono and Kaneko were ordered tohurry back from the United States with their aircraft?a Curtiss seaplane and aMaurice Farman seaplane, respectively?to take part in the review. In the fall of1912 these aviators made the first flights in Japanese naval air history at Oppama,just north of Yokosuka, which was to become Japan's first naval air base. TheFarman seaplane was assembled at Oppama, and on 6 October 1912 Kaneko madea test flight of the aircraft for fifteen minutes, reaching an altitude of 100 feet (30meters). On 2 November, Kono flew the Curtiss seaplane for about ten minutes,also reaching an altitude of 100 feet. Then, on 12 November, the two lieutenantsput on a demonstration of their aircraft at the imperial naval review at Yokohama.Kaneko flew the Farman from Oppama, alighting on and taking off from the waternear the ship carrying the emperor Taisho, and Kono piloted the Curtiss in a circuitover the naval ships in the review.

    In such fragile and clumsy contraptions the navy had now tested its wings, butwhether they would become anything more than an entertaining curiosity remainedan open question for much of the navy brass. Still, there was now a sufficient, ifsmall, core of aviation enthusiasts among the junior officers and a few interestedflag officers to push along the development of aviation in the navy. Keepingabreast of foreign aviation progress was obviously essential to that purpose, andin December 1912 Captain Yamaji and Lieutenant Kono were sent to France,Germany, and Britain on a fact-finding mission. While in Europe they studied variouskinds of airships, picked up rumors about airborne radio communications,watched a demonstration of aerial bombardment in France, and observed that in allthree navies the preponderance of aircraft consisted of seaplanes.

    Among their observations was their assessment that ships able to launch andretrieve wheeled aircraft would be an inevitable development in future naval warfare,though they conceded that it was unclear how such a warship type and its aircraftwould influence conventional surface warfare. In any event, they concluded,navy pilots should practice short takeoffs and landings on fields ashore until suitableship platforms could be developed. In the meantime, however, they recommendeda continued emphasis on seaplanes and the development of more coastalsites from which they could be launched.

    In late 1913 the navy's decision to push ahead with seaplanes led to the developmentof its first specialized vessel for handling waterborne aircraft. This was theWakamiya Maru, a converted freighter, which had simple derricks and canvashangars fore and aft and was capable of carrying two assembled and two disassembledseaplanes. In the annual naval maneuvers off Sasebo that year, it was asa seaplane carrier that she loaded several Farmans at Yokosuka to test the usefulnessof aircraft in fleet reconnaissance. The seaplanes aboard the Wakamiya Maru,organized into a "seaplane unit" (suijoki butai), served the "Blue Fleet" (the"attacking force") while three seaplanes were kept at Oppama to serve the "RedFleet" in defense.

    As it was in the U.S. and British navies, lack of a rapid means of communication?betweenaircraft, and between aircraft and ships?was an early impedimentto integrating aircraft with the Japanese fleet. Some tests using radio telegraph werecarried out, but this means proved unsatisfactory because of the primitive nature ofthe equipment. In these early years, hand flags were used for communication fromaircraft. One of the early naval aviation pioneers, Wada Hideho, later recalled thatwhen communicating with other aircraft, crewmen actually stood up in their seatsand gave arm signals with flags tied from elbow to wrist. For communication fromaircraft to ships, Japanese naval aviators dropped weighted rubber balls with messagesinserted into them and with colored streamers attached to make them easierto see when dropped.

   The First Test of Combat

   Japanese Naval Aircraft in the Tsingtao Campaign, September-October 1914

While histories of Japanese naval aviation mention no particular feats by theseflimsy aircraft during the maneuvers of 1913, the test of the navy's fledgling air unitin actual combat was not long in coming. In September of the next year, within twoweeks of Japan's declaration of war on Germany and the preparations for thereduction of German territories in Asia and the Pacific, the Wakamiya Maru andher aircraft were assigned to the navy's Second Fleet. That force departed Yokosukaon 23 August to take part in the blockade and reduction of the German naval baseat Tsingtao, China. Aboard were Lt. Comdr. Kaneko Yozo (the senior air officerafloat), lieutenants Kono Sankichi (the group's executive officer), Yamada Chuji,Wada Hideho, Magoshi Kishichi, and Fujise Masaru, and several other junior officers?nearlyall the navy's "experienced" aircrew.

    Embarked on the Wakamiya Maru were four Maurice Farman seaplanes, aircraftthat could attain a speed of 50 knots and had a ceiling of 500 meters (1,500feet) when fully loaded. While their mission was expected to be principally reconnaissance,the navy also expected them to bomb targets of opportunity. But themeans by which they were to do so were ridiculously slight by the standards of tacticalbombardment that would evolve only a few years later. The planes had crudebombsights and carried six to ten bombs that had been converted from ordinaryshells and were released through metal tubes on each side of the cockpit. The pilotswere able to communicate with each other only by flag signals.

    On 1 September the Wakamiya Maru arrived off Kiao-chou Bay where theSecond Fleet had already supported a Japanese army landing. Bad weather and anumber of mishaps kept the ship's aircraft from taking off for some days. Then, on5 September, in the first successful Japanese air operation, Lieutenant Wada, flyinga three-seat Farman seaplane and accompanied by Lieutenant Fujise, piloting atwo-seater Farman, rose clumsily into the air and headed toward the Bismarck battery,the main German fortifications at Tsingtao. When directly over the battery,Wada dropped several bombs that landed harmlessly in the mud?a disappointingbeginning to the history of air bombardment. But the main value of the navy's earlyaviation was demonstrated almost immediately. Soaring over Kiao-chou Bay, theJapanese pilots were able to see which German ships were still at anchor and whichhad successfully reached the open sea. Their confirmation that the cruiser Emden,the most powerful remaining unit of Germany's Asiatic Squadron, was no longer inharbor was intelligence of major importance to the Allied naval command.

    On 30 September the Wakamiya Maru had the misfortune to be holed by aGerman mine, and after being patched up she was eventually sent back to Japan.Her aircraft were transferred to a strip of Japanese-held beach from which they continuedto conduct reconnaissance and bombing missions during the remainingmonth of the one-sided campaign against Tsingtao. The best opportunity for aircraft-to-aircraftcombat came about on 13 October, when Lieutenant Wada, incooperation with three army aircraft, set out to attack the lone German navy airplanethat had been used by the defenders for reconnaissance. The encounter wasinconclusive; after much dancing about in the sky over the bay, the German aircraft,too nimble for its pursuers, escaped into a cloud. By the end of the siege, the navyhad conducted nearly fifty sorties against Tsingtao, had undertaken various searchmissions at sea, and had dropped nearly two hundred bombs, though damage toGerman defenses may have been slight. With the surrender of the fortress, thenavy's air unit was withdrawn.

    In the greater scheme of World War I, the navy's air operations over Tsingtaowere a footnote in a campaign that was itself a footnote in the history of the war.Certainly the meager operational results had given the navy brass no reason to supposethat these fragile bundles of struts and wires would supplant the surface battleline as the locus of naval power. Yet if nothing else, the Tsingtao operations confirmedfor the navy's tacticians the fact that aircraft, far better than any surfacevessel, could act as the eyes of the fleet. That in itself was a significant step forwardfor Japanese naval aviation. Viewing the air operations at Tsingtao as a whole,Charles Burdick, the acknowledged authority on the siege, has asserted that "thesophistication of Japanese aircraft employment?i.e., coordination with landforces, bombing equipment, and general mobility?was well ahead of any othercountry."

   Watching from the Sidelines

   Development of Japanese Naval Aviation, 1916-1920

Japan's swift operations to seize the German territories in Asia and the Pacific werecompleted by November 1914, following which the nation became largely a passivebelligerent. Except for the dispatch of light naval forces to the Mediterranean in1917, Japan was content to watch from the sidelines as the endless and futile offensivesdragged on in Europe. But such a posture cost the Japanese a firsthand understandingof the conduct of modern naval war. This was particularly true in the fieldof naval aviation, where, at the outset of World War I, Japan had gained experienceahead of the Western naval powers. By 1918, however, aviation had become a standardelement in Western naval power, taking on new and important roles in reconnaissanceand antisubmarine patrol work; naval aircraft had grown significantly incapabilities and performance, and naval aviation had been given its longest reachyet with the development of the first aircraft carriers.

Continues...

Excerpted from Sunburstby Mark R. Peattie Copyright © 2007 by Mark R. Peattie. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159114664X
• ISBN 13: 9781591146643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392