Genda Minoru

Genda Minoru

Genda Minoru ( Japanese 源 田 實 ; born August 16, 1904 in Hiroshima Prefecture , † August 15, 1989 in Tokyo ) was a Japanese air force general and politician.

Life

Genda was born on August 16, 1904 in Hiroshima Prefecture and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1924. After serving at sea, he completed his flight training in Kasumigaura from 1928 to November 1929 . He was then used on the carriers Ryūjō and Akagi as a pilot in the Japanese Navy Air Force , before becoming a flight instructor for fighter pilots in Yokosuka in November 1934 . Here he gained national fame as the leader of a flight acrobat squadron. After attending the Naval Staff Academy, Genda was transferred to the front line in China , where he gained combat experience.

From 1938 to 1940 it was used as a naval attaché in London .

In the run-up to the war, Genda developed new ideas about future porter battles . So he was an advocate of bundling all porters into one group to increase their combat effectiveness. The fighter pilots were also supposed to escort the bombers on their attack and not, as before, only be used to protect the porters. In addition, Genda believed that Japan should give up building battleships and focus on carriers, submarines and cruisers, as in the future carriers would decide battles and battleships would only be big targets.

On his return to Japan he served on the staff of the first carrier group . In January 1941, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku sent a draft plan for an attack on Pearl Harbor to Admiral Ōnishi Takijirō and instructed him to look through it and check for feasibility. Onishi, in turn, turned to Genda for the opinion of a pilot. At the end of February 1941, Genda handed a nine-point plan to Onishi, which also provided for a landing on Oahu . Although this was not later implemented, the attack plan that was implemented was largely based on Genda's draft.

From April 1941 he was a flight officer in the First Air Fleet. This bundled all Japanese carriers according to Genda's ideas. During the Pacific War , he served on aircraft carriers in various combat theaters. At the end of 1944 he was promoted to captain and served on the Navy General Staff . In 1945 he became the commander of Kokutai 343 , an elite unit entrusted with the air defense of the main Japanese islands. Genda held this post until the end of the war.

After the end of the war he tried his hand at business, but in 1955 he joined the newly established air self- defense forces as a general . From 1959 to 1962 he was Chief of Staff of the Air Self-Defense Forces. Then he left the army and was elected in the same year as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party with 732,896.2 votes (5th place) in the national constituency in the upper house of the Japanese parliament , to which he belonged until 1986.

Genda Minoru died in Tokyo on August 15, 1989.

literature

• Prange, Gordon W .: At Dawn we slept. The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor . New York 1981. ISBN 0-942110-52-8
• Tucker, Spencer C. (Ed.): Naval warfare: an international Encyclopedia . Volume 2. Santa Barbara 2002. ISBN 1-57607-219-3

Individual evidence

1. ^ Prange, Gordon W .: At Dawn we slept. The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor . New York 1981. Pages 23-24.
2. ^ Prange, Gordon W .: At Dawn we slept. The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor . New York 1981. Pages 26-27.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jeffrey J. Gudmens: Staff Ride Handbook for the Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941: A Study of Defending America . Combat Studies Institute Press, Fort Leavenworth 2005, pp. 151 ( digitized from Google Books ).
4. ↑ JANJAN, The Senkyo: Constituency Results Japan 1962 ( Memento of the original from January 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Sangiin: Former MPs ( Memento of the original from September 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Genda is the family name, Minoru the first name.