Quote:
Originally Posted by Torvald Von Mansee
I don't know off the top of my head if he was responsible for any actual war crimes, but is it safe to say even if he wasn't guilty he would have been executed via "victor's justice" for just being too damn good a leader?
Discuss.
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Yamamoto was sort of a bipolar strategist. Sometimes he was brilliant, other times he was reckless. His operational plans often broke such basic military principles as concentration of force and maintenance of the objective. In retrospect, the Midway operation seems to have been dreamed up by a desire to just grimly keep pushing the initiative Japan held and give his carriers something to do. He was so obsessed with luring the US carriers out to fight that he never devoted much thought to what to do if they're already there. He could probably could have cut off the Marines at Guadalcanal if he had been willing to commit the full might of Combined Fleet, but he failed to do so, and Guadalcanal eventually became the decisive campaign of the Pacific War.
His later survival in the war could have saved the IJN from some fairly embarrassing subsequent underestimates of USN strike capability, as in the case of the Truk raids, and he might have had enough political clout to prevent the
Yamato's final suicide sortie. However, if the
Yamato would have survived she likely would have ended up expended in an atomic bomb test like the
Nagato and
Prinz Eugen were. He may have even been able to stifle the whole kamikaze corps concept as stupid and pointless.
As the architect of the strike on Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto did manage to avoid the cardinal sin and capital crime of making Douglas MacArthur look bad in the field, so it's possible he might have survived any subsequent trials.
But indications are that he expected to join his men who had already died in combat, and, like his chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki, he seemed to have been waiting for the right time and place for his own death.