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Yamamoto Isoroku (born April 4, 1884, Nagaoka, Japan—died April 18, 1943, Solomon Islands) was a Japanese naval officer who conceived of the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Yamamoto commanded the First Fleet in 1938, and he became commander in chief of the Combined Fleet in 1939. In these later capacities, Yamamoto used his growing seniority to turn the navy away from battleships, which he viewed as obsolete, in favour of tactics based on aircraft carriers—carrier tactics that he later incorporated into the plan to attack Pearl Harbor.
Yamamoto was Japan’s most prominent naval officer during World War II. Despite his relative inexperience at sea in the years before Pearl Harbor, his contribution to naval strategy lies in his early recognition of the effectiveness of carrier-based aircraft in long-range naval attacks. Although he was a better tactician than strategist, he was an unusually gifted and able officer as well as a complex man of sometimes contradictory character.
