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" Withdrawn and introspective, passionately devoted to the study of history and philosophy, more interested in the principles of war than in the actual fighting, he was more a naval intellectual than a rough salt-water professional.’’ This, in a general way, is the way we remember Mahan, but it was written about an Asian contemporary whose writings—the cover of his Naval Strategy” appears on the facing page—rank with those of Mahan, Makarov, and Corbett.
The second half of the 19th century has been described as a golden age in naval thought among the maritime powers of the world. The explosive advances in technology—particularly the rapid developments in propulsion, weaponry, armor, and communications— impelled the study of naval science beyond the simpler axioms of sailing navies and toward newer and more complex naval problems. Among these were the organization of fleets in peace and war, coast defense and blockade, convoying of troops, long-distance operations, the establishment and maintenance of bases, and the intricacies of amphibious assault. By the first decade of the 20th century, leading thinkers throughout the great navies of the world had compiled an impressive body of doctrine dealing with these problems. The names of those naval writers in Europe and America stand out clearly: Sir Julian Corbett and the Colomb brothers, John and Philip, in Britain, Gabriel Darrieus and Rene Daveluy in France, Stepan Makarov in Russia, and Alfred Thayer Mahan in the United States.1
One searches the standard works in English on mod- 'For footnotes, please turn to page 69.
ern naval history in vain, however, for mention of the Japanese counterparts of these men. Indeed, a noted scholarly article on Japanese naval strategy, published in 1944, asserted that, "The Japanese translated and studied Mahan, but did not publish any significant works of their own on sea power.”2 Yet between 1900 and 1912, unheralded in the West, a circle of Japanese tacticians and strategists, centered on an illustrious trio of instructors at the Naval Staff College in Tokyo, created a doctrinal legacy which was itself a major contribution to naval thought. Together, these three officers— Sato Tetsutarb, Suzuki Kantaro, and Akiyama Saneyuki— developed an arsenal of naval principles.3 Molded to the needs of Japan’s geographic position and forged in the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War, their ideas would influence the tactical and strategic assumptions of the Imperial Japanese Navy for nearly three decades prior to the Pacific War (1941-45).
Of these three officers, it was Akiyama Saneyuki who left the most dramatic and comprehensive impact on Japanese naval thinking. He was born on the island of Shikoku in March 1868, the year of Japan’s emergence as a modern state—the fourth son of a samurai official of the Matsuyama clan. Destined to be one of two illustrious brothers of the Meiji period (his older ' brother Yoshifuru went on to a distinguished career in the cavalry), Akiyama graduated in 1890 from the Japanese Naval Academy at Etajima. His early years of sea duty provided him with a wide range of sailing experience, including a voyage from Britain in 1893 on board the sleek new cruiser Yoshino and, later, various assignments as navigation officer in several of the Navy’s most modern warships. He barely missed Japan’s first modern naval test of arms, the Battle of the Tayang (Yalu) in September 1895, because his ship was on detached duty at the time.4
That missed opportunity for personal combat experience hardly mattered to Akiyama’s career, however. From the outset, he, like Mahan in the U. S. Navy, was to make his mark as a strategist and planner rather than >
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as a commander. Indeed, he was quite outside the usual mold for a naval officer. Withdrawn and introspective, passionately devoted to the study of history and philosophy, more interested in the principles of war than in the actual fighting of it, Akiyama was more a naval intellectual than a rough salt-water professional.
There is little doubt, however, that Japan’s victory over China stimulated Akiyama’s interest in the larger problems of strategy and tactics. In 1896, he began to read voraciously in military matters. At the time, he was assigned to the Torpedo Training School at Yokosuka and then to the Intelligence Division of the Naval
General Staff, where the quality of his analysis first drew the attention of his superiors. Naturally, he became familiar with the outstanding foreign naval treatises of the time, such as Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783 and Makarov’s Consideration of Questions of Naval Tactics, both of which were in Japanese translation by the turn of the century. Because the great bulk of 19th century writing on warfare was devoted to the principles of land combat, it is not surprising that Akiyama’s critical young mind ranged over the great works of military literature from Karl von Clausewitz and Antoine Jomini to Herman von Blume’s On Strategy which Akiyama believed contained concepts eminently adaptable to naval war. Nor did he neglect the strategic writings of ancient times from his own part of the world, reading translations of the ancient Chinese classics of Sun Tzu and Wu Tzu. Always he read with a sense of participation, drafting a brief commentary after he had finished each work.
By 1897, Lieutenant Akiyama had begun to make his mark as a keen and perceptive analyst of naval matters. In that year, he became one of a steady stream of officers, many of whom were trained at Annapolis, that the Imperial Japanese Navy had been sending to the United States. However, the emerging naval rivalry between the two nations had begun to diminish American willingness to provide such advanced training for Japanese officers. From the beginning of his two-year tour of duty in America (1897-1899), Akiyama was forced to be resourceful in seeking access to the essentials of American doctrine and technology. Frustrated in his attempts to enroll in the U. S. Naval Academy or the Naval War College, Akiyama went to Alfred T. Mahan himself for counsel as to how to pursue his professional education. Mahan appears to have received him cordially and, after tactfully suggesting that Akiyama would find it more profitable to study by himself anyway, provided the young Japanese officer with a reading list on naval history. On Mahan’s advice, and using the well-stocked library at the Japanese Legation in Washington, he began to read widely in the naval history of the Western world, an effort which sensitized him to what the writers of the "historical school” sa'# as the grand principles of naval strategy.
But it was not the quiet of the library, but service on board a warship at sea that brought Akiyama his greatest understanding of the tactical, strategic, and technological developments of the U. S. Navy. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, the Japanese Navy, through the intercession of the legation in Washington, sought and received permission for Akiyama to serve as a foreign observer. He was then assigned to the staff of Admiral William T. Sampson’s North Atlantic Squadron during the blockade and
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k ar’ he analyzed the combat he witnessed within a roader context. He discussed geography, opposing Reties and strategies, and stressed the implications for rure naval development. Akiyama admired Sampson’s rateful planning and bold initiatives which he credited Wlth destroying the Spanish fleet off Santiago. Later, as 3,1 instructor at the Japanese Naval Staff College, he ^ade Sampson’s Cuban tactics the special subject of study for its St:UC}ents But he was sharply critical of trterican landing operations in Cuba as wasteful, amateurish, and cumbersome. Akiyama’s writings in this regard were among the first commentaries in the Japanese Navy on the problem of amphibious assault.
Gn 15 August 1898, Akiyama sent off his master j^Port on Sampson’s Santiago victory to the Naval er>eral Staff. The communication gained fame in Japa- ^ese naval intelligence circles as Secret Intelligence ‘'cport 108. Its purpose was to provide the General an with a review of the latest American innovations Iri the science of naval blockade and an overview of the '^plications of naval encounter between modern bat- eships and armored cruisers. In ten lengthy sections, uiyama proceeded from a detailed description of the typographical situation of the Santiago campaign, r°ugh a discussion of the organization of the Ameri- Cari blockading fleet (useful when the Japanese block
destruction of the Spanish fleet at Santiago and the amphibious landings on the Cuban coast.
Akiyama’s observations while serving with Sampson during these encounters marked an important development in the professionalization of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Until that time, the battle off the Tayang had provided the only demonstration of modern naval war vvhich Japanese officers had witnessed.5 Moreover, it Was not until Akiyama’s extensive coverage of the Cuban campaign that intelligence reporting developed uito a rcal literature in the Japanese Navy. His reports t0 naval superiors in Tokyo were unparalleled for their thoroughness, polish, and first-rate analysis. Couched in v>vid prose, his communications took on a metaphorical style which came to be associated with his name. At same time, he provided exacting detail, gleaning and sending along all matter of information which c°uld be of possible future use to Tokyo: tabular data, ttaval communiques, battle sketches, press clippings, and technical articles. Included was one on Bradley lske’s marvelous new telescopic sight, which Akiyama ^commended that the Japanese Navy adopt immediately. Eventually, when back on American shores, Inyama followed these reports by sending a steady Stream of naval books purchased with his own funds.
Nor was Akiyama lacking in the ability to convey to r's readers the significance of what he had observed, asping the broad aspects of the Spanish-American aded the Russians at Port Arthur six years later), and ended with the speculation on future naval construction and weaponry which might result from the outcome of the battle of Santiago. It was one of the most complete studies of American naval doctrine, organization, and technology which the Japanese Navy ever obtained. In the years to come, it remained a classic source of information on the U. S. Navy for Japanese naval planners.
After returning to Japan in 1900, Lieutenant Commander Akiyama was appointed instructor at the Naval Staff College at the specific request of Admiral Sakamoto Toshiatsu, president of the college. He had met Akiyama in 1899 when both were in America and had been impressed with the young lieutenant’s comprehensive and analytical approach to naval matters. Akiyama’s appearance at the Staff College as an instructor of naval doctrine was particularly fortunate, for he began speaking and writing at a time when the various principles, terms, and schools of naval strategy were beginning to emerge from fhe influence of theories on land warfare. More than anything else, Akiyama was able to organize and classify these diverse elements of tactics and strategy into a systematic study of naval warfare which had practical applicability in the advanced training of Japanese officers.
Akiyama began by dividing the study of warfare into three discrete subjects. The first two of these, strategy (senryaku) and tactics (senjutsu), were fairly orthodox. Akiyama’s particular contribution was the third, "the conduct of war” (.senmu, his own term) which combined both strategy and tactics and included the drafting of communications, logistics, and training. Such a concept was to become commonplace in all navies in later years, but was dominant in Japanese higher naval education at the time. In forming it, Akiyama appears to have been influenced by the rigorous and meticulous planning which had been carried out in the better American operations he had observed.
Akiyama’s approach to naval warfare minimized arbitrary, speculative decisions in planning and relied on thorough practice in estimating approaching operational problems rationally and scientifically. Specifically, it relied on skillful preparation of a "situation estimate” {jokyo handan) which gauged the various elements of an approaching operation—strengths of opposing forces, weather, possible courses of action, and so on—a technique which had been used at the U. S. Naval War College for some years. The analytical tool used by the War College to draw up such an estimate was, of course war-gaming—a laboratory method for testing plans and doctrines by means of exercises worked out on tables with ship models and markers to simulate real combat conditions.6
Akiyama's painstaking concern for detail is reflected in this eyewitness sketch of the Battle of Santiago which, combined with his "Secret Intelligence Report 108,” provided the Japanese General Staff with a review and critique of the latest U. S. Naty innovations in the science of naval blockade and an overview of the implications of naval encounter between modern battleships and armored cruisers.
While at the Staff College, Akiyama instituted a similar method of tabletop gaming known as heiki enshii (a Japanese term implying a relation to shogi, Japanese classical chess) which became, until the Pacific War, the standard practice for working naval problems in the Japanese classroom. In the years to follow, these sessions, some of which were actually conducted in the presence of Japanese emperors, provided the Navy with the same sort of organized, practical application and analysis of naval theory which was being developed by American naval strategists. In this way, Akiyama’s ideas on fleet formations, principles of engagement, use of supporting forces, and night attacks came to be embed
ded in the Japanese Navy’s "Fighting Instructions” (kaisen yomurei) which—classified as top secret—eventually formed the basic framework for Japanese tactical doctrine until the 1940s.7
Akiyama also brought a sense of authority to his lectures. There had been few naval officers who had read as widely in foreign naval doctrine, and none who had witnessed naval combat outside the Sino-Japanese War- Thus, lectures by the faculty at the college up to that time proved to be uninspired and unconvincing. The critical and inquiring student officers at the college too often debated the instructors on points that seemed unclear, so that question-answer sessions turned into cross examinations. Akiyama’s expertise changed all that and, as one officer later recalled, "Akiyama was equipped with a file card intelligence which enabled him to extract the essential piece of information at exactly the right time.” With his command and instant recall of a vast range of naval information, he soon helped to make the college an outstanding institution for advanced naval education.
But while Akiyama had developed a practical application of naval doctrine which incorporated Western techniques and merhodology, his more theoretical ideas came largely from an indigenous source of insight and inspiration. While he was hospitalized for an intestinal illness in 1900, Akiyama had been visited by a friend and colleague, Lieutenant Commander Ogasawara Naganari—destined to become Japan’s most prolific naval historian—who brought to his bedside a number °f medieval Japanese treatises on sea war.
In the classic struggles of medieval Japan, freebooters, operating in the Inland Sea, often in cooperation with land forces, had developed a body of "corsair” (kaizoku) tactics of maritime warfare. Early Japanese naval tacticians eventually combined these with studies °f Chinese, Korean, and even Portugese tactical concepts and produced a Japanese doctrinal pattern. Among the most important of the various tactical schools” which subsequently emerged was the Yashima school of maritime warfare, and it was The Ancient Corsair Tactics of the Yashima School (Yashima ryu kaizoku kobo), written in the 14th century, which first caught Akiyama’s attention. From this and other classic texts which Ogasawara brought to him, Akiyama derived a number of principles: concentration of forces ■while still maintaining sufficient flexibility of formation; that the object of battle should be to overwhelm ar>d scatter, rather than annihilate, the enemy; and the assumption that in order to accomplish this, it was less important to try to sink the enemy’s ships than it was to destroy his will. Undoubtedly, Akiyama gained an understanding of a number of traditional Japanese tac- t'cal maneuvers—such as the "wheeling attack” (karumagakari) which, though dating from the times °f the medieval corsairs, was not unlike the modern tactic of "crossing the T”—as well as concepts such as that of indirect attack, by which the enemy is assaulted at a time and from a direction which he least expects.
From his readings in Japanese maritime history, Akiyama drew a number of conclusions. Some were specific, such as the importance of the line-ahead formation as the basic one for battle due to its flexibility. Others were general, such as the recognition that while a mastery of Western techniques was essential to effective preparation for modern naval combat, only a study °f classical instructions could provide the essential psychological guidance for the individual Japanese commander.
By 1904, at any rate, Lieutenant Commander Akiyama had put together a comprehensive tactical doctrine, endorsed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which integrated both Western and classical Japanese concepts, which placed emphasis on planning, organization, training, and morale, and which envisioned a strategy of attrition whereby an enemy fleet approaching Japan would be weakened in successive assaults by defending naval units.
By 1904, also, Akiyama was a man moving up. He had been given sea duty with the First Fleet in 1903 and then, following his promotion to full commander, was appointed a member of the senior staff of the First Fleet on board the Mikasa, flagship of the redoubtable Togo Heihachiro. By the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War early in 1904, Akiyama was regarded as the unrivaled tactical genius of the Navy and was given free rein by Togo and fleet chief of staff Kato Tomosaburo.
Akiyama was also by this time one of the Navy’s eccentrics. Every military organization has its tradition of cherishing a few brilliant oddities, and the Imperial Japanese Navy was no exception. Almost 40 years later, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku’s brilliant staff officer, Captain Kuroshima Kameto was to draft the original plans for the Pearl Harbor attack alone in his cabin in a haze of garlic and cigarette smoke. Akiyama himself spent a good deal of the Russo-Japanese War alone in his quarters on board the Mikasa, reading and poring over maps and plans until the early hours of morning. He would emerge only occasionally, appearing at the officers’ mess in his bedroom slippers. After wolfing down his rice and pickles, he would shuffle back to his cabin and his plans. Some days, in the late afternoon, he would suddenly appear on deck and then plunge overboard for a swim without so much as removing his trousers.8
But while seemingly absorbed in a hermit’s existence, Akiyama’s attention from the outset of the war was riveted on the effort to destroy or neutralize Russian ships in Asian waters. In cooperation with Lieutenant Commander Hirose Takeo, who was to die a hero’s death in the undertaking, Akiyama helped to plan the blockade of Port Arthur in the first days of hostilities.9 In the months that followed, Akiyama was constantly engaged in the planning which kept Togo’s fleet prepared for most contingencies. Only once were the Japanese caught by surprise: when the Russian warships in Port Arthur suddenly sortied in August 1904 in order to link up with the squadron at Vladivostok. Even then fortune favored Togo, for a lucky Japanese shell killed the Russian commander, thereby throwing the Russian ships into confusion. But the engagement left Togo convinced that in a showdown battle the Japanese Navy must have a detailed plan of operation or risk a shift in the fortunes of war. As a result, when Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski’s fleet sailed halfway round the globe and steamed north through the China Sea toward Japan ten months later, Admiral Togo charged Akiyama with drafting the battle orders for the anticipated engagement when the enemy appeared in the Tsushima Straits.
Feverishly, Akiyama worked to complete the set of instructions for the First Fleet. His plan of attack was to become the classic model for the Japanese Navy in the years to come. Drawing apparently on both modern naval tactics and the maritime concepts of medieval Japan, Akiyama put together a seven-stage plan of attrition which employed daylight assault by the main fleet elements and night attacks by destroyers and torpedo boats. Battle orders for the first two stages were based on the assumption that the Russian fleet would be discovered and attacked by torpedo boats and destroyers south of the Tsushima Straits. The third stage called for a general fleet action and the middle stages for night attacks by torpedo craft. The final set of battle orders envisioned the remnants of the Russian fleet being driven toward Vladivostok where the harbor mouth had already been sown with Japanese contact mines.
Rozhdestvenski was able to enter the Tsushima Straits without being dicovered, costing Togo his opportunity to reduce the enemy force by early torpedo attacks. It now became critical to prevent the Russians from slipping through the straits undetected. As the two fleets drew together, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo anxiously awaited information from
Togo concerning the weather. Two situations in particular concerned the General Staff. Dense fogs often blanketed the straits and might, therefore, allow the Russians to slip through unseen. The condition of the sea itself was also in concern since more of the broadside guns on the somewhat lower decks of the enemy would be masked by a rough sea than would those of Togo’s fleet. On the morning of the battle, Togo heralded news of the enemy and the critical conditions of the sea and weather. It was fitting to the drama of the hour that Togo's signal, largely drafted by Akiyama himself, included the arresting phrase: "The sky is bright and the waves are high!”
Dawn in the straits had indeed broken over heaving seas and the patchiest mist, and it had revealed Rozh- destvenski steaming past Tsushima island. By early afternoon Tog5, heading east with his main force, bore down to intercept the enemy, his famous Z flag flutter- tng from the masthead of the Mikasa. By mid-after- uoon the two fleets had met, and Tog5, using a daring wheeling attack” had crossed his opponent’s "T” and commenced a furious pounding of the Russian line. By nightfall, the third stage of Akiyama’s battle plan, the main fleet encounter, had been completed, and the battered Russian fleet limped northward to Vladivostok. As darkness fell, Togo closed in for stage four, which comprised repeated night attacks by his destroyers and torpedo boats. They lasted for three hours and sank a number of Russian ships. By the next morning, surrounded by a great circle of Japanese warships, the remnants of the Russian fleet surrendered. Thus, rang down the curtain on one of the most resounding naval defeats of modern times. Japan’s victory had been so complete that Akiyama’s plan was not carried out beyond stage four. In his cabin that evening, at one long sitting, Akiyama drafted Togo’s report of the battle, thus becoming the scribe, as well as the architect, of the victory.
What gave Akiyama’s plan major importance in 20th century Japanese naval thinking was not that it by itself gave Japan her victory at Tsushima, but that Tsushima appeared to prove the validity of its essential tactical features. These were the attrition of an approaching enemy fleet by light forces, followed by an encounter with the main Japanese battle line. Thus, in the years of ensuing enmity between Japan and the United States, die plan became the basic strategy contemplated by the Japanese Navy in the defense of the home islands against the possible approach of a westward-moving enemy fleet.
Peace found Akiyama back at the Naval Staff College, more renowned and influential than ever. There he was joined by Sato Tetsutaro, "the Japanese Mahan,” who lectured on naval history and grand strategy, and by Suzuki Kantaro, the Navy’s leading expert on torpedo warfare (destined to be the prime minister of the Japanese "surrender cabinet” 40 years later). Together, these three officers, with experience in Japan’s two modern naval wars behind them and displaying considerable insight into the tactical and strategic implications of these conflicts, began to forge a Japanese naval doctrine. Essentially oriented to Japan’s position on the rim of the Asian continent, its concerns nevertheless reached out beyond Japan’s home waters into the broad reaches of the Pacific, necessitating new strategic considerations of an oceanic nature and directed toward a new hypothetical enemy: the U..S. Navy.
No longer, as in years past, were Western strategic concepts accepted uncritically by Japanese Navymen. They were subjected to rigorous scrutiny by Akiyama and his colleagues and weighed against Japan’s maritime situation. To these men, even some of the ideas of the great Mahan seemed open to question. Akiyama, for one, concluded that Mahan’s concept of the "command of the sea” as the ultimate objective of maritime strategy was a vague and idealized concept when applied to the Pacific. It could be realized only by the utter annihilation of the enemy’s fleet, something that neither the Japanese nor American navy was likely to accomplish. Such a judgment rested, of course, on Japanese assumptions underlying their basic strategy of attrition in the event of war with the United States. That strategy, in turn, had much to do with the traditional Chinese and Japanese military emphasis on subjugation of the enemy by numerical superiority, maneuver, or strategem, rather than on the attempt to exterminate him in immediate frontal collision.10
It remained for Akiyama to give substance to the general principles behind the basic maritime defense of Japan by suggesting the weapons, tactics, and organization necessary. In his treatise on "Basic Naval Tactics” (.Kaigun kihon senjutsu), drafted in November 1912 as the Japanese Navy was contemplating a program of expansion, Akiyama stressed the importance of balanced forces within a major fleet and the necessity to make basic decisions about the organization of a fleet before construction of major naval units. One of the first to advocate the Japanese "eight-eight fleet” concept, Akiyama called for a main force of two squadrons of eight battleships, each supported by two squadrons of first-class cruisers and two squadrons of second-class cruisers as the main battle fleet.
Akiyama also paid attention to the role and organization of light forces. Based on the spectacular achievements of Japanese torpedo squadrons in the night engagements at Port Arthur and Tsushima, Akiyama looked beyond the current supremacy of naval cannon to the increasing range and destructiveness of the tor-
pedo. Organized under independent commands, Akiyama concluded, torpedo squadrons of destroyers and other light vessels operating at night could equal the daytime offensive punch of the battle line. In the not- too-distant future, the submarine (still essentially untried as a war vessel) would give the torpedo its most awesome potential of all. But for the time being, it was necessary to maintain at least three torpedo squadrons of 16 surface vessels each. Akiyama’s ideas on naval organization, set out particularly in this 1912 essay, came to have great impact on the force level require
ments of the Japanese Navy, and his specific formations for the "combat” and "auxiliary” fleets became a model for Japanese naval organization throughout the 1920s.
Promoted to rear admiral in 1913 and designated as Chief of the Naval Affairs Division of the Navy Ministry the next year, Akiyama turned his energies and imagination to educating the Japanese public in the importance of maintaining a front-rank navy. Concerned that antimilitary arguments of an emerging Japanese liberalism in the Diet were producing dangerous budgetary limitations on the Navy, he penned a
number of articles in which he noted the great shift in the balance of naval power in the Pacific in favor of the United States, and pointed out the need for the modernization, as well as the numerical expansion, of Japan’s front-line naval vessels.
In making these arguments, Akiyama was particularly concerned with the revolutionary developments in naval technology—the submarine, naval aircraft, radio communications—which were spectacularly furthered during World War I. His speculations on these matters ln his last years became increasingly imaginative, envisioning radically different vessel types, such as "submersible battleships” and "flying cruisers.” Yet his speculations about Japanese naval strength also began to show increasing concern with the role of "will” in warfare to an extent that became almost mystical. This trend was reflected in his assertion that Japanese "spirit” would inevitably provide the balance of victory in a war with the United States, no matter how long the conflict or how great the odds. It seems an odd and irrational perspective to be held by an officer who had done so much to infuse the Navy with rational planning, but it was part of the emerging belief of a whole generation °f Japanese strategists and tacticians who were trained In a feudal ethos and who faced the problem of an overwhelming American industrial superiority in the interwar period.
In any event, Akiyama never faced the full range of complex naval problems after World War I. Passing away suddenly in February 1918, he left to his colleagues the difficult task of adjusting Japanese tactical ar>d strategic doctrine to fit the new restrictions of the postwar "treaty era” of building limitations and tonnage ratios. Yet his legacy persisted in the Japanese Navy well into the 1930s. Combined Fleet Commander
Suetsugu Nobumasa’s "strategy of interceptive operations,” which envisioned the reduction of the American fleet by submarine attacks in the central Pacific, was basically an extension of Akiyama’s original attrition concept. The Navy’s "Fighting Instructions” based on Akiyama’s ideas were only gradually outmoded by the emerging dominance of naval air power. And finally, as Japan moved to abrogate her participation in the treaty limitations and the nation approached the perils of an unchecked maritime competition with the United States, Japanese naval writers looked back with deepened respect for Akiyama’s abilities and innovations in the planning and organization of naval warfare. Thus, when naval critic Mizuno Hironori was pondering the qualities of naval leadership in the mid-Thirties, he expressed, "the fervent wish for the appearance of a second Akiyama Saneyuki.” It was a clear recognition of Akiyama’s place as the founder of modern Japanese naval doctrine.
Mark Peattie earned his B.A. in history from Pomona College in 1951 and his M.A. in history from Stanford University in 1952. In 1955, he joined the U. S. Information Agency, serving in Cambodia for two years before being assigned to Japan in 1958. He spent the next nine years of his career there. He took Japanese language training in Tokyo for two years and served two years as director Cultural Center in Sendai and five years as director of the Kyoto American Cultural Center. Upon his return to the United States in 1967, he spent a year as Japan-Korea Desk officer with USIA headquarters in Washington before resigning in 1968 to undertake work towards a doctoral degree in Japanese history at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1972 and that year joined the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University where he is associate professor of Japanese history. Professor Peattie is the author of Ishiwara Kanji andJapan’s Confrontation with the West, published in 1975 by the Princeton University Press. Dr. Peattie is currently continuing research on the evolution of Japanese naval doctrine.
(Note: Dr. Peattie’s article is based on both Japanese and English-language sources. Those in English are listed below for the convenience of readers.)
Pot an illuminating discussion of the golden age of naval thought and the men who created it, see Clark Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc-> 1974), Chapter 13.
Alexander Kiralfy, "Japanese Naval Strategy” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, edited Edward Meade, (Prince- tQn, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), p. 461.
The Japanese names in this article are given in customary Japanese order, fhat is, family name first. Some accounts use Masayuki as Akiyama’s personal name, but Saneyuki is preferred by most historians.
On 17 September 1895, the Japanese under Admiral Ito Sukenori soundly defeated the badly trained Chinese fleet under Admiral Ting Jih-Ch’ang. The Vlctory made Japan the chief naval power in East Asia.
In years past, a few Japanese officers had visited recent battle sites of foreign naval wars, such as those of the Sino-French War of 1884 and the Greco- Turkish War of 1897, but they had only interviewed participants after these encounters. In any event, their accounts did not go much beyond straight descriptions of the course of combat.
6For details see Francis McHugh, "Gaming at the Naval War College,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1964, pp. 48-55.
7 In late 1940, the cumulative effect of developments in naval air warfare caused the Imperial Japanese Navy to institute major changes in its "Fighting Instructions.”
8Noel F. Busch, The Emperor’s Sword: Japan vs. Russia in the Battle of Tsushima (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), p. 184.
9Hirose was killed while running his blockship into the mouth of the harbor at Port Arthur and posthumously became a much publicized hero to the Japanese people.
10On the other hand, Mahan and the maritime ambitions he expressed for his nation seemed to Akiyama to pose an increasing menace to Japanese naval supremacy in the Western Pacific. He wrote that Mahan was "an old fellow who will have to be watched very closely.” In 1916, pointing with alarm to the American naval expansion program, Akiyama asserted that it represented the realization of Mahan’s big-fleet policies.