Rohit Puri

The Japanese admiral who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor spent two years at Harvard. His name was Isoroku Yamamoto. He arrived in Boston as a Japanese naval officer in 1919. He walked around Cambridge in a wool coat he bought at a Boston department store. He ate cheap sandwiches. He played poker with American officers and usually won. Later he served two separate tours as the Japanese Naval Attaché in Washington, D.C. He drove across America. He saw the Texas oil fields. He saw the Detroit auto plants. He saw the Pittsburgh steel mills from a train window and wrote in his diary that one single Pittsburgh steel mill produced more steel in a year than Japan's entire national output. Yamamoto came home with a terrifying conclusion, and he said it to anyone in Tokyo who would listen. "We cannot win a long war against America. Their industrial base will crush us. I know this because I have seen it with my own eyes." He opposed the Tripartite Pact. He opposed war with the United States. He received death threats from Japanese nationalists who called him a traitor for defending America. When the militarists in Tokyo overruled him and ordered him to plan the Pearl Harbor attack, he gave Prime Minister Konoe a warning, in writing, that is now famous: "In the first six months I will run wild and win victory after victory. But if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success." Six months. That is all he promised. Midway was six months after Pearl Harbor. And at Midway, in June 1942, the United States Navy — carriers built in Yamamoto's own lifetime, from Pittsburgh steel he had personally seen poured — crushed the Japanese carrier force Yamamoto himself had sent in. Yamamoto was killed by American P-38 fighters a year later, in a precisely planned ambush over the South Pacific. The pilots who shot him down were young Americans flying machines his own country could not match. He died never admitting defeat in public. But he had told them. Everyone in Tokyo had been told. By a Japanese admiral who loved Harvard and warned them, in their own language, not to pick a fight with Pittsburgh. That is what an honest warrior sounds like, even when his own country will not listen. Japan did not lose because America was stronger. Japan lost because it refused to listen to the one Japanese admiral who had actually been to Pittsburgh.