In the first week of December 1941, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku,

commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Combined Fleet, was aboard his flagship, the battleship Nagato, at Kure, on Hiroshima Bay in Japan's Island Sea. He was awaiting news from the Mobile Force of aircraft carriers he had sent to execute an operation that he had personally insisted upon adding to Japan's war plans for southward expansion.

Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto