Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
Isoroku Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor while arguing that Japan could not win a war with the United States. Born in 1884, the son of a schoolmaster, he was named for his father's age at his birth. He fought at Tsushima in 1905 as a young officer and lost two fingers of his left hand. He then spent years in America — studying at Harvard, and twice serving as a naval attaché in Washington — and travelled widely, including to the Texas oilfields and the Detroit factories. That is the fact that explains everything he said afterwards: he had counted the industrial capacity himself. He argued against the alliance with Germany and against war with the United States, at some personal risk; he received death threats from ultranationalists, and the navy posted him to sea partly for his own safety. His stated judgement was that he could run wild for six months or a year but had no confidence in the second and third. Given the decision anyway, he designed an operation that reflected his own conviction that battleships were obsolete and carriers decisive. Six carriers struck Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and sank or damaged eighteen ships. The carriers were at sea and the fuel and repair facilities untouched. Midway in June 1942 was his attempt to force the decisive battle before American production told, and he lost four carriers to a code the Americans had broken. They broke his itinerary too, and shot his aircraft down over Bougainville in April 1943.
- Lived: 1884 CE – 1943 CE
- Nationality: Japanese
- Roles: admiral, military_leader
