Summary: In the previous seven chapters of this series we remembered Japan’s 1916 April Revolution and the new regime’s crackdown against religious and political dissenters in the revolution’s aftermath; the brief but intense Siberian border conflict with Russia in 1932 and the 1933 Japanese-sponsored Singapore terror bombing; the appointment of Yuji Kagamoto’s protégé, Mitsuharu Yamagida, to the chancellorship of the Japanese People’s Republic in 1934; and the Ribbentrop-Matsuoka summit that led to a formal political/military alliance between the Third Reich and Japan in 1936. In this installment we’ll review the expansion of the Japanese People’s Navy carrier fleet during the late 1930s.

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Consistent with its long-standing policy of building the strongest possible military air arsenal for its defense, the Japanese People’s Republic was committed from its earliest days to amassing the largest, best-equipped aircraft carrier fleet its shipyards and factories could produce for the People’s Navy. Particularly keen interest was taken by that navy’s admirals in the area of tactical fighter combat; World War I had opened the eyes of military men everywhere to the possibilities of what fighter planes could do in future wars, and Tokyo was eager to take advantage of these possibilities. So it’s not surprising that one out of every four naval vessels commissioned between 1937 and 1940 was an aircraft carrier. In the eyes of Japanese People’s Republic founder Yuji Kagamoto and his successor as chancellor, Mitsuharu Yamagida, the aircraft carrier was an ideal striking weapon for prosecuting Japan’s planned wars of conquest in Asia and Pacific and subduing the Western powers’ own carrier fleets; to use a samurai analogy, they viewed the carrier as a sword with which to strike down those nations opposed to the ambitions of the People’s Republic to become the dominant power in the Pacific region. The fact that Japan’s two most likely adversaries in any future Pacific war, the United States and Great Britain, each substantial carrier fleets in their own right didn’t faze Tokyo in the least; the People’s Navy high command was convinced they could easily smash those forces at the start of hostilities. Two other likely foes, France and the Russian Federation, had few aircraft carriers in their navies at all and none in the Pacific theater-- a fact which troubled Allied strategic planners immensely.

The point man for Tokyo’s campaign to ready its carrier forces for the coming conflict with the Western powers and Russia was an ex-naval attaché named Isoroku Yamamoto, who had been promoted to admiral right before Yuji Kagamoto’s death and was now overall commander-in-chief of the carrier arm of the Japanese People’s Navy. Like Hideki Tojo he had once been an Imperial loyalist but gone over to the Liberation Society camp in response to the atrocities committed by the Imperial regime; he’d done yeoman’s work in convincing his fellow naval men to support the April Revolution, and the Kagamoto regime had rewarded his service by bestowing on him a steady stream of honors and promotions over the seventeen years following the revolution. Upon succeeding Kagamoto as chancellor, Mitsuharu Yamagida had named Yamamoto second in command of the navy’s Marine Aviation Corps, and within eighteen months Yamamoto would become the corps’ overall C-in-C.

Yamamoto had studied at Harvard and spent time as naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington during the 1920s; these experiences had given him a valuable education into the character and naval power of Japan’s most likely future wartime adversary, the United States. He was certain that unless the U.S. Pacific fleet’s carrier forces could be knocked out of action at the start of hostilities Japan was in all probability doomed to lose a military confrontation with the giant on the other side of the Pacific. So while his shipyards were assembling the next generation of carriers for the People’s Navy, his engineers and designers were busy working on a new kind of torpedo specifically made to operate in Hawaiian waters...

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The first example of the new breed of carrier being constructed for the Japanese People’s Navy was the Kashimagu, commissioned in late March of 1937 and launched from the port of Nagasaki on its shakedown cruiser five months later. Named for an ex-Imperial Navy sailor killed in defense of the April Revolution during the final assault on Tokyo, Kashimagu was bigger than any other carrier built for Japan up to that time-- and bigger, for that matter, than many Western carriers. A U.S. Navy admiral is supposed to quipped after seeing a photograph of the new carrier for the first time at an intelligence briefing that if the Japanese ever changed their minds about going to war with the U.S. the Kashimagu could be rented out as a convention hall.

Kashimagu spent most of her first year of operations cruising up and down the China coast, enforcing a Japanese blockade against the Chiang Kai-Shek government. There was little fear on Japan’s part of the feeble Chinese navy challenging the Japanese presence in China’s territorial waters; the carrier’s patrols were meant to deter Japan’s more powerful foreign adversaries from attempting to deliver arms or other supplies to Chiang by sea-- and to give Kashimagu’s crew enough time to work out the kinks in her main systems. The JPN admiralty was highly impressed with the results of the shakedown cruise, and only a few weeks after the Kashimagu came home from her maiden voyage two of her sister ships went into service with the People’s Navy.

By the time the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 there were nine Kashimagu-class carriers in service with the People’s Navy and three more were well into the final stages of construction. Supplementing these big carriers was a fleet of smaller vessels designed as escort (or, in U.S. Navy intelligence slang, “toy car”) carriers whose main roles in future wars were intended to be providing air cover for JPA amphibious landings and guarding Japanese merchant shipping convoys against enemy attack; while not as impressive-looking in newsreels as their Kashimagu-class cousins, the planes the escort carriers sailed with were every bit as lethal as those flown off the decks of the big carriers. Apart from their respective sizes, the biggest difference between the escort carriers and the big carriers was that the escorts carried predominantly fighters and reconnaissance planes, whereas the main carriers were equipped with a mix of fighters, attack aircraft, recon planes, and even a handful of search and rescue planes. By 1940 Japan had the world’s second-largest inventory of aircraft carriers of all types-- and the Yamagida regime was eager to make full use of that inventory...

To Be Continued