experience, during which he toured Texas oil fields and studied Charles Lindbergh’s first solo transatlantic flight, Yamamoto became convinced that the world was shifting from coal to oil and iron to light metal. He was supremely confident, however, when it came to military strategy and often argued against the grain of conventional naval thought. Self-conscious, he would often go to the public baths only after midnight to minimize exposure of the bomb scars on his lower body. He had lost two fingers of his left hand in a bomb blast during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. He was a taciturn man but imposing intellectually despite his small size-just 5 feet 3 inches, weighing 130 pounds. Yamamoto’s international experience helped convince him that the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy would be disastrous for his country by inviting war with the United States, and his strident opposition to it marked him as an assassination target by right-wing extremists. He also spent nine months touring the United States and Europe and was a delegate to the London Naval Disarmament Conference of 1930. After graduating from the Naval War College in 1916, he was sent to the United States for two tours of duty-once to study at Harvard University and a second time as naval attache in Washington, D.C. As a boy growing up in the northern rural area of Niigata, the sixth son of a school principal who was later adopted by the Yamamoto family, he attended the church of an American missionary. His reservations came from a direct knowledge of the United States. pursue unswervingly a course that is precisely the opposite of my personal views.”
“I find my present position extremely odd-obliged to. Yet he was personally opposed to war with the United States, convinced that Japan could never win, and two months before the attack wrote of his depression: Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, is regarded as the brilliant mastermind of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
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