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Sunburst

US Naval Institute Press

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...