Yamamoto at Rabaul, April 1943
WWII Database/public domain
WHEN THE CODED MESSAGE CONTAINING ISOROKU YAMAMOTO’S travel plans was transmitted late in the afternoon of April 13, 1943, the signal was picked up right away by a US radio station in Wahiawa, just north of Pearl Harbor. The interception began as routine fare—just one message among hundreds gathered in the radio net by technicians working around the clock. But after being forwarded to the Dungeon, the basement office where a band of code breakers labored in secrecy, the message stood out from the heap. It concerned Yamamoto. Deciphering the message’s contents became top priority, and the transmission was fed into the Dungeon’s IBM computing machines on punch cards—a first step in converting into text the five-digit number groups making up the latest version of the enemy’s JN-25 code. That revealed the second significant feature: the number of recipients. The classified message was not a communiqué between Yamamoto and a single colleague or underling but had gone to naval commanders at the several Japanese bases located in the northern Solomon Islands.
Taking the lead at that point was linguist Marine Lieutenant Colonel Alva B. “Red” Lasswell, the intense, lanky night duty officer who was not only a translator but a skilled cryptanalyst. Nearly a year had passed since he and fellow Japanese-language expert Joe Finnegan had played crucial roles in unraveling Yamamoto’s grand plan to crush the US Pacific Fleet at Midway, a code-breaking coup that had set the stage for the stunning US victory there in May 1942. Since then Lasswell, Finnegan, and a core group had continued to anchor the Station Hypo decryption unit at Pearl Harbor, officially called Fleet Radio Unit Pacific (FRUPAC). But there had been some changes in personnel. Most notably, Navy Captain Joe Rochefort, the gung-ho, strong-willed officer in charge of Station Hypo during its Midway heyday, was gone, reassigned to command a floating dry dock in San Francisco. It was the humiliating price for having been on the losing end of political infighting with the officials in Washington, DC, who ran the rival naval intelligence decrypt unit Op-20-G. The boss’s fall from grace had dismayed Lasswell and the loyal crew, most of whom Rochefort had handpicked to serve at Station Hypo. Lasswell called Rochefort “a very valuable man” and later lamented the captain’s transfer to a floating dry dock as “a waste of talent.” Other turnover among Hypo’s officers and enlisted men was headline grabbing only in history’s future tense: a young navy lieutenant who would eventually become a justice on the US Supreme Court had joined the unit. John Paul Stevens, about to turn twenty-three years old, was not one of the cryptanalysts but served as a traffic analyst. The analysts, also known as scanners, were the ones at Hypo who, by monitoring the source and destination of enemy transmissions on Tuesday, April 13, had caught notice of the multiple endpoints in the message involving Yamamoto.
Following the wildly successful and impactful Midway decryption the previous spring, the Japanese had altered their JN-25 code in a more consistent and timely fashion. In late summer 1942, they had switched from JN-25(c) to JN-25(d), and by year’s end they had made another alteration. The changes had slowed the code breakers at Station Hypo and elsewhere, creating blackout periods in cracking Japanese transmissions. But between traffic analysis and a network of coastal watchers on islands in the South Pacific, the United States continued its clear advantage in gathering intelligence and providing Nimitz, Halsey, and other commanders a leg up in plotting strategy and combat operations against the Japanese. The retrieval of the Yamamoto message from the pile now carried the potential for yet another huge “get.”
Holding a raw, encrypted version of the message, Red Lasswell pulled his chair up to a gray metal desk and, adjusting his signature green eyeshade to fend off the fluorescent ceiling lighting, readied himself to pick up where the IBM tabulating machine had left off. He was obsessively organized. “Lasswell approached cryptanalysis like a chess player maneuvering relentlessly to untangle his problems,” said the unit’s information officer, Lieutenant Commander Wilfred J. “Jasper” Holmes. With input from fellow cryptanalysts, he extracted the meaning of coded geographic symbols essential to understanding the message. “RR” meant Rabaul, the major Japanese base where Yamamoto was stationed. “RXP” was Buin, a Japanese base on the southern tip of the island of Bougainville. “RXE” meant Shortland Island, just south of Buin, a six-minute ride by plane. “RXZ” meant Ballale, a tiny island next to Shortland, with a small airfield.
Toiling through the night and into daybreak on Wednesday, April 14, Lasswell decoded numerical values into plain Japanese text and worked up an English translation. And just as film image goes from latent to visible as a negative soaks in chemical developer, the full meaning of the message was eventually revealed: on the morning of April 18, 1943, the commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy was going to fly from his Rabaul stronghold for a quick inspection of various southern bases.
“Lasswell had worked it out in every minute detail before he showed it to me,” Holmes said, and the contents that Lasswell shared began:
SOUTHEAST AREA FLEET/TOP SECRET.
The Commander in Chief Combined Fleet will inspect Ballale, Shortland, and Buin in accordance with the following:
0600 depart Rabaul on board medium attack plane (escorted by 6 fighters).
0800 arrive Ballale. Immediately depart for Shortland on board subchaser (1st Base Force to ready one boat), arriving at 0840.
0945 depart Shortland aboard said subchaser, arriving Ballale at 1030. (For transportation purposes, have ready an assault boat at Shortland and a motor launch at Ballale.)
1100 depart Ballale on board medium attack plane, arriving Buin at 1110. Lunch at 1st Base Force Headquarters (Senior Staff Officer of Air Flotilla 26 to be present).
1400 depart Buin aboard medium attack plane.
Arrive Rabaul at 1540.
The dispatch was relatively brief but shockingly loaded with detail, practically an hour-by-hour itinerary of Yamamoto’s travels.
“We’ve hit the jackpot!” Lasswell announced.
EVERYONE ON DUTY INSTANTLY UNDERSTOOD THE PROMISE OF the decryption: the chance to ambush Japan’s top admiral. But after the initial adrenaline surge, the idea actually gave Lasswell pause. Most, if not all, of the key intercepts he had handled had involved ship or troop movements. The Midway intercept, for example, had yielded an entire battle plan. That, generally speaking, was the fruit of the code-breaking labors, uncovering information about Japanese navies and armies, not individuals. But intelligence revealing the movement of a single person was exactly what they had in hand—intelligence that, if acted upon, would be tantamount to Yamamoto’s death warrant. Lasswell couldn’t put his finger exactly on the reason for his discomfort. He didn’t think there was necessarily anything wrong with going after Yamamoto, but doing so, targeting an enemy leader, felt strangely personal. It felt more complicated than the clean and clear-cut euphoria following the Midway intercept, and it was why he always favored the Midway accomplishment. “I got greater satisfaction out of that than any other thing,” he said later, whereas with the Yamamoto intercept, “I didn’t feel, somehow or other, the joy in that one.” The best way he could explain why was that he “felt more of a snooper in the latter.”
Whether to use lethal force—morally or legally—to target an enemy leader was certainly not Lasswell’s responsibility, but already during the course of World War II, its application had gained traction. The British were at the forefront, having created highly trained units within their armed forces to carry out special operations, and Winston Churchill had given the green light in late 1941 for a commando unit to kill Nazi general Erwin Rommel, “the Desert Fox.” The mission had failed, but the notion of a “leadership decapitation” or “targeted kill,” as it was variously called, was increasingly seen as part of the wartime playbook. Moreover, the Hague Convention of 1907—the body of international law applicable during World War II—did not forbid a directed killing of an enemy leader.
Even so, Lasswell and his colleagues at Station Hypo were more than relieved to run the Yamamoto message up the chain of command. Holmes, the information officer, used a secured line to call the fleet intelligence official at Pearl Harbor, Commander Edwin T. Layton. Holding Lasswell’s translation, he read the explosive contents over the phone. Then, so that Layton would have an actual hard copy to deliver to Admiral Nimitz, he and Lasswell raced out of the Dungeon. They passed the security guards at the door, climbed the stairs, stepped into the bright light of dawn, and hurried across the grounds to CINCPAC headquarters.
“Lasswell and I were glad to have it out of our hands,” Holmes said.
Lasswell, for one, certainly had full confidence in Nimitz. The admiral had backed Station Hypo’s decryption saying that Yamamoto was planning to attack Midway when code breakers in Washington had adamantly insisted that the targets were different. Said Lasswell, “He laid it on the line when that controversy came up regarding Midway, and he risked everything on his judgment of me.” But just as important, Lasswell had gotten to know Nimitz personally in the twelve months since. The two men were housed not far from one another and on many mornings walked to work together. “I saw a great deal of him,” Lasswell said. “He was a great man.” It was that simple for the star code breaker. Nimitz would know what to do with the Yamamoto intercept. But Lasswell also knew that the admiral did not have much time. The message of April 13 said that Yamamoto would be on the move on April 18, which meant in five days.
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF APRIL, WHILE ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO WAS deciding to fly south on his inspection tour, Major John Mitchell of the 339th Fighter Squadron was back at Fighter Two on Guadalcanal. Mitch had been on leave the first part of the month, enjoying a respite in Auckland, New Zealand, which had become the leading “leave town” for pilots rotating off Guadalcanal. He’d gone swimming in a cold mountain stream, its bed solid rock, its water as clear as crystal. He had found peace and beauty in the country’s volcanic landscape and had thought of Annie Lee. “I will have to find a nice quiet spot like this when I get home,” he wrote, “where we can spend a week or ten days by ourselves.” It was quite a contrast to the pouring rain on Guadalcanal in early April, where day after day began with a downpour, up to three inches some days, the men sloshing to the mess tent through mud.
Mitch returned to “Cactus” rested and had lots to catch up on. He’d missed plenty of action—the entirety of Yamamoto’s concerted but unsuccessful bid to disable Henderson Field. The men told him stories, none more dramatic than the combat trifecta featuring either Tom Lanphier or Rex Barber or both, showcasing their mastery of the P-38 Lightning. There had been the one on March 29, when Lanphier, Barber, and several other pilots had relentlessly strafed a Japanese ship, during which attack Rex had experienced “target fixation” and nearly crashed into the ship. He’d come back alive but without three feet of one wing that had been sheared off by the ship’s mast as he had swerved out of harm’s way. There had been another on April 7, when Lanphier, Barber, and every other available pilot had taken on Yamamoto’s aerial raid, a day that had seen Lanphier increase his kill tally by downing three Zeros and Barber increase his by two. The third would have made an aerial combat highlight reel, if such a thing had been possible. It had occurred on April 2, the day after Rear Admiral Pete Mitscher’s arrival at Henderson Field, and what a way to impress the new boss. Lanphier and two other pilots—not Rex Barber this time but Doug Canning and Delton Goerke—had been returning from a flight near Japanese-occupied Vella Lavella, northwest of Munda Point, when they had spotted an enemy freighter along the shore, partly camouflaged by trees. With plenty of fuel left in their belly tanks, they had decided to try out Vic Viccellio’s idea of deploying the tanks as skip bombs, like skipping flat stones across the water’s surface. Lanphier and Canning had zeroed in on the freighter, releasing their tanks as close to the vessel’s hull as possible. The tanks had burst on impact. Right behind them was Goerke, who had opened fire, the tracer bullets from the plane’s .50-caliber machine guns igniting the gasoline. Flames had roared, a spectacular sight, as the ship had begun burning instantly. Back at the base, the usually stone-faced Mitscher had been ecstatic about the pilots’ ingenuity. He had dashed off a note to Bull Halsey, who had been equally impressed. VERY NEAT USE OF HEAT, Halsey wrote back. YOUR TREATMENT IS HARD TO BEAT. The three pilots enjoyed the attention, none more than Lanphier. The belly-tank trick became another instance when his war record was embellished. In Washington, DC, Lanphier’s father spoke to a Time magazine reporter, and a few weeks later the resulting account was all about young Tom, with no mention of either Canning or Goerke. Lanphier had catapulted to the “top crust of fighting airmen,” Time correspondent Jim Shepley wrote in a memorandum to his editor summarizing his interview with the senior Lanphier.
Mitch, who was glad to hear all about their aerial exploits, made it no secret that he was antsy to “get back in the scrap.” He was reinvigorated, not just physically as a result of his break but emotionally as well, the result of his last letter from Annie Lee. They’d fallen into a rut all winter long when Annie Lee had seemed to be hounding him about his returning to Texas, to which in early March he’d finally told her that enough was enough. Then, while he had been on leave, he had received her most recent letter, and when he had opened it and begun reading, a calm had washed over him: she had written to tell him to do what he had to do, that she now understood. It was a stunner. She said that nothing had changed—she still wanted him home as much as ever—but that if he “had not had enough fighting” he should stay and fight; she would be “waiting and carrying on” until he did come home. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear,” Mitch replied. “You know that I’m coming home when I can, and when I feel that I have done enough.” But if he were to return before then, he said, or “before war weariness or pilot fatigue started then I would not be content at home and would very soon be wishing I were back here or somewhere where our men are spilling their blood for America.” He didn’t think it would be much longer, perhaps after the next rotation, though “Uncle Sam may have different ideas.” But no matter when it was, her words had bolstered him, and he was so appreciative. “To have you backing me makes it 100%.”
COMMANDER LAYTON, MANILA FOLDER IN HAND, HURRIED DOWN the hallway in the headquarters building at Pearl Harbor toward the first-floor office of Admiral Nimitz. It was 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 14, 1943, and Layton, the fleet intelligence officer, was arriving for a morning briefing with the admiral. The briefing was part of their daily routine, but there was nothing routine about this one. Inside Layton’s folder were the sheets of paper Red Lasswell and Jasper Holmes had handed to him just minutes before—sheets with information about Isoroku Yamamoto on them, the detailed plan for the admiral’s island-hopping scheduled to begin in four days.
Though code breaker Lasswell had never met Yamamoto during his tour of duty in Japan prior to the war, Layton had. As an assistant naval attaché in Tokyo in the late 1930s, Layton had socialized with Yamamoto, then a navy vice minister. He had played bridge against him. He had gone on a duck hunt at the Japanese emperor’s hunting preserve with naval officers from several other countries, all of whom Yamamoto had hosted with memorable charm and courtesy. Yamamoto had even given every officer a duck to take home at the end of the hunt. But their personal connection did not matter. That was then, and this was war, and the file held urgent intelligence about the Japanese naval commander responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack—the enemy leader most loathed in all of the United States, save for Adolf Hitler. They were still picking up the pieces at Pearl Harbor sixteen months after his sneak attack, sifting through the wreckage and rebuilding the base. In fact, below Nimitz’s office at naval headquarters the mangled, rusting upper hull of the USS Arizona still jutted out of the deep harbor waters. The wreckage served as a memorial to the 1,100 sailors and marines who had died in the flames and explosions after a 1,765-pound bomb had hit and destroyed the 29,000-ton battleship.
Layton handed Nimitz the folder and took his customary seat in a split bamboo chair to the admiral’s left. Nimitz opened the file. “Our old friend Yamamoto,” he said. He began to read, and Layton waited. It was so quiet that Layton could hear a marine sentry’s footstep on the linoleum floor in the hallway outside. Hanging on one wall of the plain, cream-colored office was a prized keepsake from Yamamoto’s raid—a samurai sword that had been recovered off Pearl Harbor from the body of the commanding officer of a Japanese midget submarine. If Nimitz’s heart began racing as he read the enemy dispatch, he didn’t show it, his body characteristically erect, his demeanor poker faced. He would have noted, though, that the date of the beginning of Yamamoto’s travels—Sunday, April 18—fell on Palm Sunday. In addition, it was the first anniversary of the Doolittle Raid, and although the bombing of Tokyo had been at once a morale booster for the United States and a shocker to the Japanese, who’d thought their homeland was invulnerable, reports afterward of the torture of eight captured US pilots and the Chinese villagers who’d tried to assist them had further deepened the animosity Americans already felt toward their Japanese foes. To act on the deciphered message would add to the wartime significance of the eighteenth day of April.
“What do you say?” Nimitz asked.
Layton detected a slight smile on the admiral’s face.
Nimitz continued, “Do we try to get him?”
The discussion that followed touched briefly on the propriety of such action in terms of wartime customs and practices: plotting to kill a specific enemy leader was highly unusual in US military history. Nimitz then notified naval headquarters in Washington, where code breakers were also going over the message and further discussion about rules of war and possible legal precedents were being held. Whether President Roosevelt, who was not in Washington at the time, and Secretary of the Navy Knox were directly involved in discussions remains unclear. No paper trail exists confirming that Roosevelt was ever made aware of the fast-breaking events, while some officers stationed on Guadalcanal later recalled seeing classified paperwork with Knox’s name attached to it. What was clear was that Nimitz, as the commander of the US South Pacific Fleet, had operational authority to make the call. He and Layton spent that Wednesday talking through a range of what-ifs—as in, if they did go after Yamamoto, what would be the upside? Layton was quick to reply. “It would stun the nation,” he said of Yamamoto’s home country. Layton and the admiral well knew that Yamamoto was probably second only to Emperor Hirohito in popularity in Japan, idolized by naval officers, sailors, and civilians alike. The elimination of Yamamoto would be a morale crusher. Equally important, his death would remove from battle Japan’s top naval strategist, a leader, as Layton said, “unique among their people. He’s the one Jap who thinks in bold strategic terms.” But what if his replacement proved to be an even more effective commander? Nimitz wondered. Wasn’t the devil you knew better than the one you didn’t? They came up with the names of the top-tier naval leaders in line to replace Yamamoto, reviewing each one’s strengths and weaknesses, assessing how they measured up. Layton said, “Yamamoto is head and shoulders above them all.” Layton, though not addressing legal precedents per se, then brought up the nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general whose classic work Vom Kriege [On War] was familiar to any aspiring military officer. Layton paraphrased Clausewitz’s view that “direct annihilation” of enemy forces was paramount, reminding Nimitz that in his book the revered strategist had once written “something to the effect that in war the object is to direct the attack at the heart of the enemy.” Layton said that a strike against Yamamoto would be a “practical and direct application of that principle, for Yamamoto represented the heart of the Japanese Navy.”
Then there was code breaking, the secret and powerful advantage the United States had enjoyed for so long. If US fighter planes were to suddenly appear at one of Yamamoto’s scheduled destinations at the same moment as his plane, how would that look? Would it be seen as more than mere coincidence, leading the Japanese to conclude that their code had been breached? That would be a horrible setback, potentially catastrophic to the Pacific campaign. The cracking of the Japanese code, though not perfect, had yielded so much helpful intelligence during the Guadalcanal campaign, and it had given them Midway. Had they not had advance warning of Yamamoto’s massive assault at Midway Island, the Japanese could well have succeeded in crippling the US Pacific Fleet once and for all. Instead, the US victory had been a pivotal turn in the balance of power in the South Pacific Theater. Keeping the source of the intelligence secret was essential. Layton suggested a cover story that coastal watchers had come through once again and spotted Yamamoto’s movements. “We could say it came from Australian coastal watchers around Rabaul,” he said. “Everybody in the Pacific thinks they’re miracle men.”
Layton and Nimitz then considered the mission logistics, starting with planes—the enemy’s and their own. Yamamoto would be flying as a passenger in the high-performance Mitsubishi bomber the Allies had nicknamed “Betty.” That was actually fine by Nimitz. The Japanese might value the Betty for its long-range capability, but the plane’s lack of armor and lightweight materials, plus all the fuel it carried to achieve distance, could be viewed as a gift, rendering it vulnerable to aircraft fire. The key question was whether Yamamoto’s trip to the various northern Solomon Islands would bring him within range of any of the US aircraft at Guadalcanal, the lone base within striking distance. Nimitz studied the map of the South Pacific on the wall of his office, locating Rabaul, Bougainville, and other Japanese outposts in the Solomons and then Guadalcanal. It would have to be an aircraft that could handle well in excess of eight hundred miles of flying, round-trip. It was probably too far for the Navy’s F4F Wildcat fighter or the Marines’ F4U Corsair fighter, but maybe not for the new fighter plane that had been in service for less than six months: the Army Air Forces’ P-38 Lightning.
But Nimitz would leave the basic operational details and challenges to commanders on the ground. He had made up his mind. In the end, authorizing the special operation against a prominent, high-valued target was likely not difficult. Nimitz had no doubt that eliminating Yamamoto would carry enormous advantages, demoralizing Japan’s military and its people. That Yamamoto was so deeply despised in the United States would help inoculate against any moral second-guessing after the fact. Besides, wasn’t going after Yamamoto while he was in a plane akin to bombing his flagship while he was aboard—a combat action rather than some kind of a violation of wartime ethics?
His next move was to notify the admiral he’d installed in late fall to take on Yamamoto and the Japanese in the South Pacific. “Let’s leave the details to Halsey,” Nimitz said. Layton began work on the order that Nimitz would send to Halsey’s headquarters at Noumea on the island of New Caledonia, where it was already Thursday morning, April 15. In it, Halsey, the outspoken hater of all things Yamamoto, would be informed about the prized intercept and told to begin planning an aerial attack, with this proviso: that “all personnel concerned, particularly the pilots, are to be briefed that the information comes from Australian Coastwatchers near Rabaul.” Nimitz did not want to have any pilot or pilots shot down and interrogated spilling the beans about the deciphered intercept. Nimitz looked over the typewritten dispatch Layton had prepared, initialed it for release to Bull Halsey, and then added a personal note: “Best of luck and good hunting.”
It was payback time, vengeance for the December 7, 1941, surprise raid on Pearl Harbor.
THE SAME EVENING, APRIL 13, THAT THE DISPATCH WAS TRANSMITTED announcing his inspection tour in five days, Admiral Yamamoto crashed a party at the Rabaul base. He’d caught wind that a handful of underlings, classmates years earlier at the Naval Cadet School on the island of Etajima in Hiroshima Harbor, were planning a small reunion. Yamamoto showed up and, to the officers’ delight, brought along two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black, the high-quality blended Scotch whisky that was a favorite not only among officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy but also of Great Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. The men traded stories from days gone by, enjoying the kind of socializing—drinking and smoking—that had been strictly banned when they were fledgling naval warriors at the austere academy. The occasion brought back to Yamamoto memories from the turn of the century when, just sixteen years old, he had left his home in remote Nagaoka to enter the academy. His final year, spent like that of every midshipman sailing the world’s seas on the academy’s square-rigged ship, was one of his fondest memories. By night’s end, the officers were making up greetings on paper with their signatures to send to several more classmates stationed elsewhere, with Yamamoto proudly writing their words in his skillful calligraphy.
The evening spent in the soft glow of nostalgia served as a relaxing break from wartime matters. The next morning, April 14, Yamamoto was back at it, monitoring planes departing Rabaul for a strike on Milne Bay and nearby US ships, the final aerial attack of Operation I-Go, after which he ordered planes to return to bases and carriers to head back to Japan. He held a series of meetings that day and the next with staff and commanders from the various air corps, congratulating them on their hard work, warning against contentment despite all of the positive combat reports coming in, and cheerleading about sea and air battles soon to come. “Every man who attended these special meetings could not help but be impressed by the admiral’s sincerity,” said one Zero squadron leader. But despite the outward appearances, Yamamoto had to know in his heart of hearts that conditions were hardly as promising as the exaggerated victory reports trickling in from the war front suggested. For one thing, Japan had suffered serious losses in pilots and planes—an attrition that was becoming increasingly problematic. And its series of attacks against US bases, even if causing substantial harm, had not ultimately mattered. Henderson Field had not been ruined but remained fully operational. That meant the change of fortunes of the United States that had begun with the Japanese loss at Midway and had then been followed by the failed Japanese effort to retake Guadalcanal would continue, with Allied forces pushing northward from one island to the next or, as Allied military leaders liked to put it, climbing the rungs of a ladder toward Japan.
Yamamoto’s key aides, too, continued to fret over his upcoming tour. His loyal, longtime staff officer and frequent shogi opponent, Captain Yasuji Watanabe, was distressed upon learning that the itinerary had been sent by radio rather than the secure alternative of delivering orders to each base commander by hand. Watanabe tried to enlist Yamamoto’s chief of staff and confidant, Matome Ugaki, on his side, but the vice admiral agreed with Yamamoto about the value of the trip. Even if Ugaki had been opposed, he was in no position to say so; he was hospitalized with fever, diarrhea, and overall muscle pain from a bad case of a mosquito-borne illness, dengue fever. Army Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, on the other hand, tried to persuade Yamamoto to reconsider by relating his own near miss at Buin. In February, when Imamura had flown to the base on southern Bougainville to visit his soldiers, his plane had unexpectedly run into a flight of enemy planes. His quick-acting pilot had turned straight into storm clouds and been able to escape undetected. But Yamamoto was untroubled by the close call and simply praised the pilot’s evasive action. Then there was the commander at one of the three bases Yamamoto was planning to visit on Sunday. Rear Admiral Takaji Joshima, the commander of the Eleventh Air Fleet on Shortland Island, seemed to speak for all commanders when he was handed the radio message. “What a damn fool thing to do, to send such a long and detailed message about the activities of the C. in C. so near the front!” he had told his staff officers. “This kind of thing must stop.”
BULL HALSEY WAS NOT AT NOUMEA, NEW CALEDONIA, WHEN ADMIRAL Nimitz’s initial dispatch arrived on the morning of Thursday, April 15, but his executive officer was, and he immediately gave a heads-up to the freshly installed commander of combined air forces on Guadalcanal, Rear Admiral Pete Mitscher. The chain-smoking, thirty-seven-year veteran of the Navy was given the message at the tent near Henderson Field he used for a command office. Hardly posh, the tent was at least large enough to hold his desk in one corner, three other desks for his top officers, and folding chairs for visitors. Mitscher studied the message, occasionally using a handkerchief to wipe the moist humidity from his gold-framed glasses. The previous April 18, he had been the captain of the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier from which Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his Tokyo raiders had taken off, and Mitscher, like so many others, had raged afterward upon hearing of the torture of captured US pilots. “I hate those yellow bastards worse than if I were a Marine,” he had been heard to say more than once. The chance, one year later to the day, to go after Admiral Yamamoto was irresistible, and Mitscher assembled his senior staff.
Halsey, once back in the loop, contacted Mitscher the next day, Friday, April 16, and with characteristic wit wrote, “It appears the Peacock will be on time. Fan his tail.” By then Mitscher had begun brainstorming with his navy and marine staff. They considered basic requirements for the high-stakes mission, including making sure that pilots kept radio silence and stayed away from Japanese-held islands to avoid detection. They began studying maps and making more precise distance calculations. Even though a straight flight from Guadalcanal northwest to Bougainville was about 325 miles, the mission’s total round-trip would be closer to 1,000 miles. That was because the fliers would have to take a circuitous route to avoid being spotted by any of the Japanese outposts along the direct line between the two points. The numbers confirmed Nimitz’s hunch that P-38 Lightnings were the only fighter planes suitable for the long-range assignment, as Mitscher notified Nimitz in one of the secured communications now making the rounds between Pearl Harbor, New Caledonia, and Guadalcanal. The navy and marine officers working with Mitscher were not thrilled; they had been angling for their own fliers to lead the charge in F4F Wildcats and F4U Corsairs. Instead, the Army Air Forces’ P-38s would carry the day. But even for the gas-guzzling P-38s, the distance was a stretch; they would need belly tanks to increase their fuel capacity. Mitscher’s office notified a base on New Guinea to deliver all the drop tanks on hand, preferably large three-hundred-gallon tanks, as quickly as possible.
To man the mission, Mitscher already had in mind a couple of P-38 pilots he figured had the right stuff: Tom Lanphier and Rex Barber, the pair who had made such a strong first impression as he was taking command at Guadalcanal. Their bold flying had certainly debunked the early grumblings of the navy and marine pilots who, when the P-38 had first arrived, had complained the Army’s fliers were soft and sometimes hard to find, hiding high in the clouds. When he was told that Lanphier, Barber, and other pilots in their flight were scheduled to go on leave in a matter of days, Mitscher ordered the leave canceled. To get a fuller take on the personnel flying P-38s, Mitscher then turned to the most obvious person, Army Air Forces Lieutenant Colonel Vic Viccellio, who before his recent promotion had commanded nearly every pilot now manning “the fork-tailed devils.” In his new position as fighter operations officer, Viccellio often hopped around between Henderson Field and Halsey’s headquarters on New Caledonia, but this particular week ended in Mitscher’s tent, where he was briefed on the mission, with Mitscher sharing the message from Halsey that ended, “Fan his tail.” It had been a race against time from the moment code breaker Red Lasswell first deciphered the Yamamoto message, and now it was even more so. Yamamoto was scheduled to depart Rabaul in less than forty-eight hours. The mission planning had gotten started but was an ad hoc work in progress, still without a hard-and-fast flight route and decisions on the number of planes to use and who would fly them. There was still a lot that needed sorting out, with Mitscher and his advisers agreeing that over such a long distance, the only chance of success would be to develop a precise flight plan that the fighter pilots would then need to execute to near perfection.
Mitscher wanted to know: Who should lead the strike?
Viccellio did not hesitate: Major John W. Mitchell, commander of the 339th Fighter Squadron, he said. Mitch had been back from leave only a few days, and he was easily the most logical choice. Vic had known Mitch since before the war, going back to Hamilton Field outside San Francisco and those early training days. He’d always wanted Mitch, a natural born leader admired by the rest of the men, nearby. Moreover, Mitch was an ace pilot, the first in the fighter group, and over the winter, during multiple bombing raids and dogfights, he had proven that the P-38 Lightnings were the best thing the Allies had going in the Pacific skies.
Viccellio got no argument from anyone. Hands down, Mitch was the one.