Ford has distilled an enormous body of battle observations and intelligence reporting and related these to the evolution of U.S. Navy combat tactics in the Pacific war.
By John Prados
Douglas Ford. The Elusive Enemy: U.S. Naval
Intelligence and the Imperial Japanese Fleet. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press,
2011. 320 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59114-280-5; $13.49 (e-book), ISBN
978-1-61251-065-1.
Learning the Enemy
Conflicts usually follow a different course
than participants imagine beforehand. That is certainly true in the modern era,
where U.S. prewar expectations of what would happen in Iraq and Afghanistan
proved quite different from what transpired once the guns began to speak. One
function of intelligence is to try and close that gap. The frustrations of
recent experience should actually come as no surprise. The norm is that
belligerents go to war, discover their expectations falling short, and then
need to learn the enemy: their tactics, their techniques, their strengths, and
their weaknesses. In The Elusive Enemy, Douglas Ford brings us a classic case
of this process drawn from World War II.
Ford’s concern is the Pacific war, more
specifically the contest between the United States Navy and the Imperial
Japanese fleet. Pearl Harbor demonstrated, in addition to much else, that U.S.
appreciations of the Japanese adversary were wildly off the mark. Despite
watching the Japanese for decades before 1941, and the vaunted achievements of
American--and Allied--codebreakers, the Japanese not only succeeded in their
daring attack but also ran the board in the Pacific for months afterward.
Nevertheless, the American forces came back to blunt the Imperial Navy
juggernaut and then, across the broad expanse of the Pacific, drive the
Japanese back into their inner empire. The analyst, a British historian and
author of a previous study of his own nation’s intelligence activities in
Southeast Asia during the war (Britain’s Secret War against Japan, 1937-1945
[2006]), sets out to explain the intelligence aspect of this evolution. It is
an important story, one that bears not only historical lessons but also ones of
contemporary value.
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| ISBN 978-1-59114-280-5ISBN 978-1-61251-065-1 |
The narrative opens with an account of
American efforts to observe the Japanese during the prewar era. This is not so
much a history as a thematic review. Ford touches on the U.S. naval attaches
and Japanese language officers; the development of technology, in particular
aircraft; U.S. war planning and calculations; and strategic culture. He
concludes reasonably that American intelligence underestimated the Imperial
Navy’s strength and prowess, in part by giving excessive weight to straight
numerical comparisons, but also because data was scarce and imperfect. He also
makes the good point that while the intelligence may have been flawed, the U.S.
Pacific Fleet lacked the resources to contain the Japanese in the early war
period.
Once war began the shock of Pearl Harbor and
other early defeats reversed the prewar appreciations. In this construction,
the Japanese became skillful, consummate warriors, and the Americans absorbed
the tenets of a new strategic culture. There was a paucity of intelligence
about the Japanese enemy. Indeed this lack is the author’s constant refrain. In
part that was due to the earlier misappreciation, but it was also the product
of a war plan that assumed the need for a protracted war, which led to a
long-term intelligence view. The enemy was elusive because of the intelligence
uncertainties, and the U.S. Navy had to learn by trial and error how to fight
the Japanese to advantage. The result was the eventual development of a new
vision of the adversary, a different strategic culture.
The author’s analysis is most detailed with
respect to aerial combat, the subject of two of his five substantive chapters,
and such technological issues as the opponents’ use of weapons like torpedoes
and mechanisms like radar. Ford provides extended commentaries on how
observations of Japanese behavior in various battles led to notions of how to
fight them more effectively, the evolution of specific tactics, and growing
confidence as the enormous industrial weight of the United States made itself
felt on the battlefield. He offers three essential conclusions: that combat
experience was the most important source of intelligence; that the navy’s
“organizational culture” was an equally important catalyst; and that “racial
perceptions did not play a significant role in shaping American opinions of the
Japanese” (p. 2).
This book contains a fresh perspective but it
would have benefited from, at least, a different subtitle. The Elusive Enemy is
not really about intelligence per se, but about strategic culture. In essence
what the book contributes is an analysis built on countless after-action and
“lessons learned” reports from naval and air combat actions in the Pacific. A
certain number of intelligence documents are cited but their number pales next
to the volume of combat narratives and lessons learned summaries. Because
American naval officers had a certain problem-solving attitude, such
observations led to improvisations, then solutions expressed in combat tactics.
From the use of radar to the evolution of the ring formation used by U.S.
warships, to the innovation of the aerial maneuver known as the “Thach weave,”
this kind of exposition permeates the narrative (p. 81). The enemy was elusive,
but it was gradually discovered and countered by close observation. The system
for learning from experience, as Ford rightly says, was a product of
organizational culture--and something the U.S. Navy did very well. Expressed in
a certain strategic culture, that practice became fundamental to the
achievement and consolidation of U.S. naval superiority in the Pacific.
Nevertheless, it does not follow that all of
this was about “intelligence.” If anything, intelligence is shortchanged in The
Elusive Enemy. Mentions of the Battle of Midway, of which there are eleven,
never include the work of U.S. codebreakers in revealing the Japanese plans.
Almost all of them concern aspects of aerial operations. In fact, the
intelligence from Station Hypo and the name of Commander Joseph Rochefort are
not mentioned in this book. There is but a single reference to its successor,
the Fleet Radio Unit Pacific, in company with its Australia-based counterpart
Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne. The question of credit shared by these field units
versus that for their Washington counterpart, Station Negat, is never engaged.
As for photographic reconnaissance, it is mentioned in connection with
identifying the characteristics of certain Japanese warships, but there is no
treatment of where photo recon came from, who did it, or the operations in the
field. The coast watchers, so important to the United States in the Solomons
campaign, are not covered at all.
By making “intelligence” part of a strategic
culture that assumed a protracted war--hence making desirable long-term
estimates of Japanese intentions and capabilities--the author is able to
exclude its main substance compared to that of the lessons learned. Ford argues
that “the available intelligence also provided what was often a vague picture
of the [Japanese Navy’s] long-term intentions,” and again, “signals
intelligence was not very useful for
securing information on Japanese plans” (pp. 105, 106). Apart from Midway’s
incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, this observation obscures the true
picture. American intelligence officers, most particularly those with the Joint
Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA), didcast strategic estimates,
repeatedly, for many major campaigns from mid-1943 onward. These estimates were
based primarily on capabilities to be sure, but they reliably projected the maximum
level of response the Japanese could make to given U.S. operations. Intentions
were missing and in that sense Ford is correct, but the notion of projecting
adversary intentions and capabilities in the sense of the modern “national
intelligence estimate” hardly existed in World War II, at least in the Pacific.
It was only in 1945, when Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King established a special
estimative unit within his own office--under Rochefort incidentally--that
anything like an intelligence “estimate” was crafted. This was not the result
of some vague picture of the enemy, it was precisely a consequence of an
underdeveloped American theory of intelligence combined with U.S. Navy
organizational culture. The originators of estimative intelligence in World War
II were with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and because OSS played
only in the China-Burma-India theater in the war against Japan, it had little
to say about the Imperial Navy.
Intelligence in the Pacific was supremely
tactical and operational and it made enormous contributions. This “current
intelligence” reporting dominated the intelligence war in the Pacific.
Virtually every naval action between mid-1942 and the end of the war involved
U.S. foreknowledge resulting from codebreaking--hundreds of thousands of
decrypts of Japanese message traffic attest to that--photographic intelligence,
coastwatchers, document exploitation, prisoner interrogation, or other pillars
of intelligence. Excepting the coastwatchers, these are all touched on in The
Elusive Enemy, but with the lightest of hands, nothing like the mountains of
text lavished on lessons learned. Yet the virtually daily tallies of how many
Imperial Navy warships lay anchored at Rabaul or Shortlands, and how many
aircraft were parked on their airfields, not to mention the spotting of enemy
task forces or airstrikes on the prowl in The Slot, were at least as
important--arguably more so--as knowing (from lessons learned) that Japanese
pilots had a tendency to expose the underbellies of their aircraft when
dogfighting. To write at book length about U.S. naval intelligence and the
Imperial Japanese Navy without covering these aspects in detail seems
distinctly odd.
That mystery--the conflation of battle
observation with intelligence--results from the author’s purposes. By framing
the discussion as one of strategic culture, postulating a priori that the
evidence which is admissible must concern long-term perspective, hence U.S.
Navy efforts to evolve countermeasures, The Elusive Enemy blurs the categories.
If battle observation is intelligence, what is to be made of the numerous
lessons learned comments on the insufficient explosive charges in U.S.
munitions, the adequacy of torpedoes, the learning curve on the use of radar,
radar-vectoring of combat air patrols, and so forth? By this standard they are
intelligence too. It is striking in this book that the evolution of U.S.
tactics and operational doctrine are a major focus, yet wartime current
intelligence is not, in a work that professes to be about intelligence on the
Japanese Navy.
Ford comes closest to intelligence in the
occasional passages where he discusses the array of naval organizations engaged
in the work. Coverage of such matters--like the prewar attaches, the Washington
organization for Pacific intelligence, and the changes made in 1943--is on the
mark but all too brief, and driven by the preoccupation with lessons learned. A
good example is the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)--a producer of “combat
narratives,” an intelligence digest, and technical reports, long-term products
of the kind featured in this analysis. Let us call this “survey intelligence.”
The ONI’s survey intelligence (like the enemy island studies produced at
JICPOA) had the function of establishing a level of basic knowledge among
intelligence staff officers, as well as appraising those line officers cleared
for the material of Japanese (and other war theater) developments. The Elusive
Enemy contains no treatment of that intelligence function but it repeatedly
incorporates the ONI material in its discussions of battle observations.
Moreover, there is no inquiry into ONI’s evolution through the war, or the
jockeying for position between it, the Office of Naval Communications, the
Joint Intelligence Committee, or the intelligence field units in the Pacific.
Sometimes the lessons learned can themselves
be curious. This reviewer was struck by repeated citations from battle
observation, even quite late in the war, referring to the high quality of
Japanese pilots and aircrew. This is at odds with what we understand from
postwar Japanese accounts and it conflicts with what was established by the
United States Strategic Bombing Survey and in ONI interrogations of Imperial
Navy officers after Tokyo’s surrender. We also see in the survey intelligence
that the decline in quality of the Japanese air arm was perceived at the time.
What squares the circle is the realization that battle observation is
selective: that is, American naval officers could only comment on what they
saw--the Japanese pilots who had closed to press home their attacks on U.S.
task forces despite the long odds, not the numerous aerial formations that lost
their way, or turned back in the face of weather that more experienced pilots
might have gutted out. In an analysis that is so dependent on a particular set
of source material, the author’s reflections on the character of the data would
have been very useful.
Having said all that, it should still be
emphasized that The Elusive Enemy is a useful book. Ford has distilled an
enormous body of battle observations and intelligence reporting and related
these to the evolution of U.S. Navy combat tactics in the Pacific war. His
inquiry endows that evolution with a coherence that is explicit, not inferred,
and therein performs a service for readers and other historians. Until now this
aspect of the war has been dimly known, if at all, and here Ford fills a gap.
Many of the weaknesses would have been eliminated had the author explicitly
framed his account to be about doctrine and tactics, or strategic culture, and
not about intelligence. The practical application of lessons learned in a
doctrinal transformation is the take-away message, one as valuable in today’s
wars as it was in the Pacific. Read Ford for this exploration of strategic
culture.
Printable Version:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=35050
Citation: John Prados. Review of Ford,
Douglas, The Elusive Enemy: U.S. Naval Intelligence and the Imperial Japanese
Fleet. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2012.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by the Original Publisher.
Image Attribute: Japanese Mitsubishi Zero / Source: Wikimedia Commons
Image Attribute: Japanese Mitsubishi Zero / Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ratings:
The Elusive Enemy: U.S. Naval Intelligence and the Imperial Japanese Fleet
Douglas Ford
978-1-61251-065-1
John Prados
Rating:
9 out of
10
H-Net Reviews
