Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Early Intelligence Organization
dependent on trade with the United States to risk a war that would jeopardize
her gains in Manchuria. The reports that did come from Japan in the early years
of the decade tended to reinforce the widely held opinion that Japan lacked a
real military capability. The July 1935 annual aviation report for Japan filed by
the U.S. military attach6 in Tokyo described Japan’s Army Air Force as being
filled with large numbers of obsolete aircraft: “The unwise policy of some years
ago of storing up an immense amount of spare planes in depots and the apparent
failure to note the rapid changes which occur in aeronautical developments has
been impressed upon the Japanese, but it is doubtful if they will deliberately
scrap planes which have some use, even if ~bsolete.”~’
Maj. James F. Phillips, a graduate of the Air Corps Engineering School,
made the annual U.S. military inspection of Japanese Army aviation in May
1936. Phillips filed both an official report through the Military Attach6 in
Tokyo and an informal letter to the Air MatCriel Division at Wright Field.
“Superficial treatment,” he wrote, “was very courteous-including much
bowing, hissing, and gallons of tea being drunk-but verbal information was
often exaggerated or misleading.” Phillips was an early, though not sole,
practitioner of an error that came to be common prior to World War 11:
underestimating or belittling Japanese ability. In that year’s report, Phillips
noted that the morale of Japanese air personnel was extremely high, but that
practically all Japanese Army air mattriel was copied from American or English
standard types, and was therefore about four to six years out of date. Phillips
saw, he noted, “no really modern airplane^."^^ He was seeing only what the
Japanese wanted him to see.
In November 1936, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany
and Italy, and in July 1937 Japanese military forces marched into northern
China. Upon the passage of a military secrets act, the task of U.S. military and
naval attach& in Japan became almost fruitless. Discussions of service aircraft
or of the aviation industry were drastically curtailed. Even the attach& of
powers ostensibly associated with Japan complained that their connections were
inadequate to ensure a reasonable exchange of inf~rmation.~~ In view of the
extreme difficulty in obtaining information in Japan itself, Lt. Cmdr. Ralph A.
Ofstie, who became Assistant U.S. Naval Attach6 for Air in Tokyo in 1935,
thought Japan’s attack in China provided “a golden opportunity to see how and
with what material Japan carries on a war.” After a visit to Shanghai, Ofstie
came away unimpressed with the aerial prowess of either the Chinese or
Japanese. Capt. HaroldM. Bemis, theU.S. Navy attach6, reported the substance
of Ofstie’s observations: “The Japanese have been bold and courageous, but
they have exhibited a mediocrity in operations and in material which mark them
as distinctly inferior to other major powers in this vitally important element of
war.”55 In a briefing conducted later in Washington, Ofstie doubted that Japan
would use her fleet at any considerable distance from her own waters, even
though Japanese aviation in China was principally naval, since the bulk of
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