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prevent something that was already scheduled to happen?
    Yamamoto believed that if Americans could be induced to despair they would place pressure on their government to end the war, leaving Japan in possession of the southern resource areas. He asserted that “American public opinion has always been very changeable, so the only hope is to make them feel as soon as possible that it’s no use tackling a swarm of lethal stingers…. And the one other thing we can do is to take bold risks, resigned from the start to losing up to half our own forces.” 66
    Yamamoto did not understand the Roosevelt Administration. They saw things not as “the Japan problem” and “the German problem,” but the problem of defeating the Axis en toto . There would be no contemplation of a separate peace with Japan. Pearl Harbor eliminated Japan’s greatest potential negotiating tool, its offer to switch sides and join the Allies against Germany as the price of a separate peace. The Japanese assumption that a separate peace was possible was fatally flawed.
    The losses at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines did not induce despair. The Americans were not interested in a negotiated, separate peace. With their pre-war assumptions exploded, Yamamoto’s fallback was Zengen Sakusen , with a twist. He must force a final decisive battle onto the enemy by an attack on Midway, which Yamamoto thought would flush out the American battleline. Yamamoto extemporized his way into a course of action that became the greatest role reversal in history.
    After six months of war he gathered together a massive fleet to steam east. He placed himself on what he had proclaimed to be that world-class “folly,” the battleship Yamato , and led an invasion fleet against the island of Midway. He was opposed by Midway’s concentrated air power and the American carriers, in what the Japanese would call an Interceptive Operation. Yamamoto took the course of action Japan had wanted the Americans to take, and the Americans’ Interceptive Operations did to the Japanese what the Japanese had hoped to do to the Americans.
    Even if victorious in the carrier preliminaries, Yamamoto would not have gotten his Zengen Sakusen , as the Americans did not commit the battleships of Joint Task Force One to defend Midway.
    The Battle of Midway has to stand as the greatest irony in military history.

A B5N Kate carrier attack bomber armed with a torpedo taking off from a carrier. This photograph has sometimes been identified as depicting one of the bombers from the Pearl Harbor attack. This is more likely a single frame from a propaganda movie about the attack. The torpedo looks an exercise round: note the prominent dent in the warhead. Source: Naval Archives, Washington DC

CHAPTER FOUR
PLANNING THE ATTACK
    Limitations and Constraints
    The attack plan was limited by material, force level, and doctrinal constraints.
    Carrier Capacity
    Eventually, at Yamamoto’s insistence, all six of Japan’s fleet carriers were assigned to the operation. Added to the four large carriers employed in the wargames were the new carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku , to be completed only weeks before the departure date, barely sufficient time to work up their flight deck crews. These air groups would be “as green as spring grass.” But these aircraft could carry the volume of bombs needed against targets that did not demand high skill levels.
    All six fleet carriers provided the planners with 417 aircraft. Spare aircraft were on each carrier, but they were disassembled and crated and would take a day or more to assemble.
    As seen in the chart that follows, the numbers of each type of aircraft are nearly balanced, and reflected the normal complement of the carriers.

    Tailoring the Air Groups for the Attack
    Only three of the Japanese carriers had sufficient range to make the transit from Japan to Hawaii and back without refueling. 1 Genda had considered breaking up the normal carrier air groups to preferentially load