On the quarterdeck of Nagato, hands behind his back, Yamamoto paced back and forth, stopping every so often to stare at the dim shape of the departing carrier. Confident as he was of Operation Z, he still dreaded war with America. “What a strange position I find myself in now,” he had recently written an Academy classmate, “having to make a decision diametrically opposed to my personal opinion, with no choice but to push full speed in pursuance of that decision. Is that, too, fate? And what a bad start we’ve made.…”
