WRITING A NONFICTION NARRATIVE BUILT AROUND WORLD WAR II army fighter pilot John W. Mitchell, the architect of the mission to intercept Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Mitchell family: Theresa “Terri” Mitchell Cleff and her husband, Paul, and John W. “Billy” Mitchell, Jr., and his wife, Stacy. They opened up their homes and their voluminous primary resource materials—hundreds of letters their father had written to their mother, starting before Pearl Harbor and continuing through the end of World War II; letters their mother had written to her aunt during the war; and a handful of letters written by their grandfather Noah Mitchell; a diary and flying notebook their father had kept after he had left California for the South Pacific in January 1942. Both Terri and Billy hosted me at their homes in Illinois and California, respectively, so that I could painstakingly review and copy these and other materials—such as newspaper articles, military papers, and photographs—documenting the history of their parents’ families in Mississippi and Texas. The Mitchell family materials have never been used before in prior coverage of the historic Yamamoto mission.
I thank Rebecca Williams and Tim Hodgdon at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who assisted with access to the Burke Davis Papers. Davis, a historian at UNC, maintained extensive, detailed records for his book, published more than fifty years ago, on the Yamamoto mission. He interviewed John Mitchell and others as part of his research, asking the same questions I would have asked were the pilots alive today. In Davis’s unedited interview transcripts I found details about events and people that never made it into his fine book and that became material for a new and updated narrative. In the Davis collection was a copy of a diary Mitchell had kept for a few months, which was not part of the personal material in the Mitchell family’s possession.
Similarly, I thank Patricia Nava of the Special Collections and Archives Division, History of Aviation Collection, University of Texas Library, which holds the C. V. Glines Papers. The Glines papers contained interview notes and correspondence with Mitchell and others that proved helpful in rounding out the mission and life at Fighter Two.
Over the years, the Nimitz Education and Research Center at the National Museum of the Pacific War, Fredericksburg, Texas, has recorded and collected numerous oral histories with veterans. Four interviews proved especially helpful: those with pilots Rex Barber, Doug Canning, and Jack Jacobson, and Japanese pilot Kenji Yanagiya. The Museum hosted a weekend symposium in 1988 called the Yamamoto Mission Retrospective, at which Mitchell, Barber, and others appeared, and I want to thank archivists Chris McDougal and Reagan Grau at the museum for sharing video taken at the time of the speakers participating in panel discussions, as well as photographs from the archives.
I thank Rich Remsberg, a researcher specializing in photo, film, artifact, and vintage music, who was a font of research tips and provided photographs of Yamamoto and audio of radio newscasters reporting the admiral’s death in May 1943. I also want to thank Susan Coop Howell, archivist/librarian’s assistant, the Webb School, Bell Buckle, Tennessee, for digging up photographs of John Mitchell’s father, Noah, and for information about his attendance at the school; Fred Allison, PhD, Chief, Oral History Section, USMC History Division, Marine Corps University, for providing a transcript of Alva B. “Red” Lasswell’s oral history; Attorney Clifford “Joe” Cole of Piggott, Arkansas, and the Lasswell family for sharing biographical materials about Alva Lasswell; Chequita Wood, assistant managing editor, Air Force Magazine, for providing materials about First Lieutenant Wallace Dinn, including an article Dinn wrote that appeared in the March 1943 issue of the magazine.
For their research assistance, I thank William Ashley Vaughan, who scoured old newspapers in Mississippi and Tennessee for stories about Noah Mitchell and the Mitchell family in Enid, Mississippi, in the early 1900s; George Cully, premier Air Force historian, who gathered information about various fighter squadrons from the Air Force archive at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama; and David Morriss, son of the journalist Mack Morriss, who was reporting from Guadalcanal for several months in 1943. On Guadalcanal Island, I thank Moses Kenny for his good company while driving me around the island during my stay there, showing me the World War II sights and especially Fighter Two and the Henderson Field area, where John Mitchell and his pilots were located.
In my research I consulted many books and articles; along the way I found the work of a handful of historians especially helpful. I want to acknowledge them: Burke Davis, John Wible, Carroll V. Glines, R. Cargill Hall, Daniel Haulman, Ian Toll, and Hiroyuki Agawa. Pacific Wrecks, a website founded and maintained by Justin Taylan, is an excellent resource.
I want to especially thank my friend and colleague Mitch Zuckoff. We’ve written a book together, talked endlessly about writing and journalism, and for years have cheered each other on. Mitch was the one who first told me the story of the Yamamoto shootdown. He’d written the best-selling Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II and, in the course of his work, had run across all kinds of stories from the Pacific War, some told, some not. Without his input and wisdom and even a pile of his research materials, I would never have gotten off the ground.
I thank Tom Fiedler, former Dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, where I teach journalism. Tom retired in 2019 after a decade as dean, and I’ll miss him. He’s been a champion of storytelling, not just mine but across the college. I thank, too, Bill McKeen and Susan Walker, cochairs of the Journalism Department, Jennifer Underhill, Sarah Kess, Maggie Mulvihill, John Hall, and Tobe Berkovitz for their support and friendship. Two BU graduate students in journalism provided key assistance along the way: Mariya Manzhos transcribed videotape of John Mitchell, Rex Barber, and others; Geoffrey Line read the manuscript with a keen eye. My thanks to Jacob Boucher, Steve Theer, Joey Campos, Jake Kassen, and Tristan Olly in the college’s technology office for their help in keeping my laptop and technology humming along.
I also want to thank a longtime friend, Bill Cole, who drove me around southern California in his camper so that I could visit with Billy Mitchell and his wife and spend time at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino. Bill made the research trip more fun than if I’d done it alone, and from the start he has been a fan of the story. He often sent me research tips and at one point even tried to arrange a flight for me in a working P-38 Lightning.
Bill was also one of my readers, a group I want to acknowledge and that included another longtime friend, David Holahan, my sons, Christian and Nick, my brother, John, and Donald Altschiller, research librarian, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University. Each brought a different perspective, and their careful reading made for a better book.
I’m lucky to have literary agent Richard Abate in my corner. He’s the best. He and Rachel Kim of 3 Arts Entertainment were always available whenever needed, from start to finish. My heartfelt appreciation to Jonathan Jao, my editor at HarperCollins, Sarah Haugen and the entire team there, as well as Roger Labrie for his careful reading and helpful comments.
Most of all, I want to thank my family. My sons, Nick and Christian, offered plenty of helpful insights along the way; my daughters, Holly and Dana, made sure I kept one foot in the day-to-day and wasn’t completely lost to time; and my wife, Karin, held it all together.
I have dedicated this book to my father, John F. Lehr, a staff sergeant in the US Marine Corps. He was seventeen when he enlisted in April 1945. Several months later, he was sent to Guam, where he was stationed for the next two years. Arriving after the war ended, he never saw combat and was part of an occupying force. When I was growing up, he never said much about his service, and, frankly, I’m not sure I would have listened if he had. I was more interested in playing ice hockey or swimming and simply running around than hearing a grown-up’s talk about something that had happened long ago and far away. I wish that hadn’t been the case, that I’d been curious and asked questions, just as I wish today that I could talk to him about the research for and writing of this book. There is, however, one thing I do recall: while on Guam, my father befriended a Japanese prisoner of war. I learned that because every once in a while a letter arrived from Japan at our home in Connecticut. It was from the former POW. He and my father had apparently become occasional pen pals. I don’t recall much about the correspondence. It’s not as though my father read the letters to us. But he did explain the reason for them: the former POW was grateful for the way my father had treated him. In addition to news about his career, family, and life in Japan, the letters were expressions of appreciation. I remember my father being a bit embarrassed, feeling that the thanks were over the top; he didn’t think he’d done anything special, offering a cigarette at one time or another or, overcoming the language barrier, engaging in conversation. Simple things like that. But for the prisoner the small gestures were apparently a big deal, and I think the reason must have had something to do with the fact that my father had treated him as a person, not some caged, vile savage. I don’t know for sure; as I said, my father never said much about Guam. But that one memory—of their letter writing—has stayed with me, not just because of the simple gestures that carried so much meaning but because of the fact that two enemy soldiers, their countries such fierce adversaries, had become friends.