Pilots, Yamamoto mission
Courtesy of the National Museum of the Pacific War
MAJOR JOHN MITCHELL AND HIS BAND OF FIGHTER PILOTS COMPLETED the first and longest leg of their outbound flight in the fifty-five minutes he had specified. It meant that Mitch had accurately accounted for weather, wind speed, fuel, and cruising speed to cover the leg’s 183 miles in the allotted time. He led the sixteen-plane formation on the first course change, into a more northerly direction but still far west of any of the Japanese-held islands. Meanwhile, the plane carrying their target, Isoroku Yamamoto, had settled into its flight, heading south from the base at Rabaul toward the island of Bougainville.
The first leg was uneventful to a fault, as were the second and third legs, covering another 188 miles into the rising sun: mile upon mile of flying in stuffy hot cockpits with the dull sameness of a wavy, heaving sea fifty feet beneath their aircrafts. “Nothing, except waves,” Mitch noted, “and one wave looks like another.” For D. C. Goerke, flying so low for so long proved taxing; he was hot, nervous, and anxious. The reality that the odds were against them was ever present, but Goerke stayed motivated nonetheless: the slightest chance of success made the mission worthwhile. Besby Holmes, usually calm in flight, fought the jitters. He worried that they might encounter a flight of Zeros on the way and have to stop to fight. The eagle-eyed Doug Canning took to looking for sharks, whales, men-o’-war—anything to occupy his mind and not get disoriented. He counted forty-eight sharks. One pilot became so lulled by the unvaried sea and hypnotic drone of the plane’s turbocharged engines that he drifted down to the water’s surface. Mitch wouldn’t call the pilot due to the radio silence he’d imposed, and he watched nervously as the fighter plane’s props began throwing up spray. Fortunately, the startled pilot instantly made a flight correction. And it wasn’t as if Mitch was immune—he began to doze a couple of times but was able to shake himself and clear his head. “I got a light tap on the shoulder,” was how he thought about it, saying a voice had told him, “John, hold the course.”
Staying the course was the challenge. Every one of his men, and anyone else who’d ever piloted a plane for that matter, knew that to get from point A to point B you usually passed something—a city, a town, a river, or a road—that gave you an idea of where you were, especially on long trips like this one. But on this trip the pilots saw nothing but the never-ending Pacific Ocean. “Not a rock in sight,” Mitch said. To assist him, he had an airspeed indicator, his Elgin watch, and his navy compass—that was it. He kept looking at his watch, like a nervous tic, over and over again—a thousand times, it seemed—as he made sure to stick to the course headings exactly the way he’d charted them, finishing one leg and turning into the next, making certain the men in the fifteen other planes stayed with him in formation. The question he kept asking himself was: Would they be on time? “That was crucial,” he knew. “Of utmost importance. The timing of it.”
SHORTLY AFTER 9:00 A.M., HAVING FLOWN ABOUT FOUR HUNDRED miles, Mitch eased to the right in a northeasterly direction and, five minutes later, turned harder to the right for the final leg of the flight. During the trip the formation had spread out quite a bit, as Mitch had directed, but now he needed his pilots to tighten up. He turned the control yoke back and forth slightly to rock the wings on his Lightning, the signal for everybody to close in, and they did as they were told. Flight discipline and radio silence were the bedrock of the mission. Not a peep had been uttered over the radio at any point during the two-hour trip.
Mitch looked straight ahead. They should now be heading toward Bougainville, according to his calculations, about five minutes from landfall. He squinted, trying to pick up the coastline, but couldn’t see it. The sun was in his eyes, and it was hazy on the “deck,” meaning at sea level. He’d thought he’d at least be able to spot Bougainville’s central mountain range, with its tallest peak at 8,900 feet. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t picking it up, if not the mountains in the distance, then at least Empress Augusta Bay, the big X on his map, the point he’d chosen for the interception because it spanned about forty miles and was easily identifiable. He thought he should be able to see that first checkpoint, the only one that truly counted, because it would confirm the completion of the five-legged journey over the seemingly endless ocean. But he still saw nothing through the haze. He was getting nervous, feeling itchy. He worried that they weren’t going to make it, that something was wrong. There was no option, though, but to stick to the flight plan and see it through, which meant climbing up and away from the ocean’s surface with the other fifteen planes in tow, and it was when he did that, as the formation ascended above the haze, that he saw Bougainville: the bay, the coastline, and the mountain range beyond. They were about three miles offshore and closing in.
Mitch knew what that meant: he was right on time.
Whatever relief he felt lasted only seconds, however, overtaken by a new worry. The sun shone brightly across the sky, a clear, blue sky but a sky that was empty. Mitch scanned ahead for the distant specks he was hoping to find, the tiny dots in the sky that would be Yamamoto’s bomber and his Zero escort. But he saw nothing. Every pilot was doing the same, squinting across a sprawling sky, desperately seeking their mark.
Then, for the first time in two hours, Mitch’s radio crackled, as did the radios in every other fighter plane, as Doug Canning broke their collective vow of silence.
“Bogeys, 10 o’clock high,” Canning said. The plainspoken Nebraskan, with eyes like binoculars, had spotted sharks, whales, and men-o’-war and now had apparently found their target.
Canning’s four words were electrifying. “Hot damn, and we didn’t even practice this one,” thought Major Lou Kittel, a flier in the cover flight. Kittel was stunned at the notion that a plan built on so many what-ifs and assumptions regarding speed, altitude, and flight routes was right on the money. Besby Holmes, one of the four pilots in the killer group, recalled the surprise raid on Pearl Harbor, when he had been attending morning Mass as the bombs began falling all around and he’d pulled out a pistol to fire back. The thought formed: “This time Yamamoto didn’t have surprise on his side.” But Mitch did not share their excitement—quite the opposite. When he looked and locked in on what Doug Canning had spotted, his first thought was that something was terribly amiss—because instead of one Betty bomber he saw two, each a glittering silver, bright and brand-new looking. This was not the guy, Mitch decided. Yamamoto was supposed to be in one bomber, that was all.
His heart sank to his boots.
THE BETTY BOMBER CARRYING ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO WAS ABOUT ninety minutes into its flight, cruising along a southerly course and ahead of the bomber carrying his chief of staff, Matome Ugaki. Leading the way, Yamamoto’s pilot had set the pace, making slight adjustments to the plane’s speed to keep on schedule. Overhead the escort Zeros, split into two groups of three, flew on either side and slightly behind.
The Yamamoto trip had been uneventful, so much so that Ugaki, in his plane, had dozed off soon after departing Rabaul. The pilots were relaxed, chatting with their crews. No one was studying the sky ahead with any particular rigor since the preflight briefing had not included any mention or warning of possible enemy activity in the area. Everyone simply had to keep an eye on the lead plane carrying Yamamoto and maintain his position.
The northwestern tip of Bougainville Island was visible, and the plane carrying Yamamoto, the one with “323” painted on its rudder, had begun a slow and unremarkable descent from its cruising altitude of 6,500 feet to about 4,500 feet. It was nearly 9:30 a.m., and the island’s coastline and thickly jungled lowlands were clearly in sight—mile upon mile of mangrove swamps, palm trees, and inlets. Yamamoto, right on schedule, began to make ready for landing in fifteen more minutes, as his aircraft continued its steady descent. Neither he, Ugaki, nor any of the pilots of the eight Japanese planes was aware that a few thousand feet below and off to their right, sixteen P-38 Lightnings were emerging from the haze over the ocean’s surface.
HAVING COUNTED TWO BETTY BOMBERS WHEN THERE WAS SUPPOSED to be only one, Mitch’s mind raced. What to do? Take these guys or not? Or let them go and hope that Yamamoto would come on later? He had to decide in an instant, and he chose to go after the two bombers, the Japanese Bettys being the equivalent of the proverbial bird in hand. “Take what we can get,” he thought. Maybe Yamamoto was seated in one of the bombers, maybe not. But, Mitch figured, they hadn’t flown up from Guadalcanal for nothing. This was what was offered to them, so they’d take it. In the next instant, he saw something else: three Zeros flying in tandem behind the Bettys to one side and another three flying on the Bettys’ far side. Six Zero fighters in all, matching perfectly the intelligence about Yamamoto’s trip. Mitch was reassured. He knew they had their target. His momentary angst was replaced by a cold, calculating calm. Yamamoto was in sight. All they had to do was kill him.
Mitch continued his ascent and turned slightly to the right in order to fly parallel to Yamamoto and in the same direction along Bougainville’s coastline. His squadron, in tight formation now, followed closely behind. There was no time to think about anything other than the task at hand. But one thing Mitch couldn’t help noticing was that they were closing in on Yamamoto so quickly that if they had been at 4,500 feet, where the admiral was, they would have collided—the very thing one of Vice Admiral Mitscher’s aides had recommended as a way of underscoring the magnitude of the mission. Ram into Yamamoto’s plane if necessary, the aide had said. It was unbelievable, Mitch thought, how close they were. And being in the lead, he had to resist the instinct to rush ahead—not to ram Yamamoto but to use the P-38’s “cone of fire” to seek and destroy the two Betty bombers. It was what Doug Canning, flying right behind Mitch, wanted to do. “Why the hell don’t we go in and get ’em?” he wondered, since they were nearest to the enemy planes. But that would have ruined the mission discipline Mitch had demanded so that his fliers wouldn’t suddenly peel off in different directions and make a mess of the plan to have a killer unit target Yamamoto while a larger cover unit protected them against the anticipated force of fifty or more Zero fighters.
Instead, with radio silence now moot, Mitch pushed the microphone button in his cockpit and issued the order “Skin ’em,” meaning “Shuck the external belly tanks.” The pilots turned the fuel selector valves to change the fuel lines to the planes’ internal tanks. Then they hit the switches to release the two auxiliary tanks that together had contained 465 gallons of extra fuel. The P-38s became faster and more maneuverable, and as they continued their ascent, Mitch signaled the squadron to split into two formations. He turned upward, showing off one of the features that had made the twin-engine Lightnings legendary: its ability to soar or, as one pilot put it, “climb like homesick angels.” The eleven others in the cover unit kept up with him. They headed high up past the Japanese planes carrying Yamamoto and kept climbing to fend off the expected attackers. It was time for the four-man killer formation to veer toward the two Japanese Betty bombers.
“Tom, he’s your meat,” Mitch told Lanphier, the leader of the killer unit.
Right away, though, the attack hit a snag. Besby Holmes could not shed his belly tanks. He flipped the switch to jettison them, but nothing happened. He hurriedly checked the circuit breakers and tried again. Still nothing. “Dammit!” he screamed. “Drop!” But the tanks remained stuck in their shackles. Then, instead of forging ahead, Holmes broke off from the killer unit and turned back over the water, rocking his plane and hoping that would shake the tanks loose. Mitch, watching from above, was incredulous. Holmes should have gone on in anyhow. The move was all wrong, Mitch thought, a failure in mission discipline. “Here was the rabbit right down at the dog’s nose, and he pulled off.” Moreover, the belly tanks were nearly empty and hardly the same drag on the P-38’s maneuverability that they were when full, and on a mission of such consequence, Mitch was unequivocal: Holmes should have stayed with him. To make matters worse, wingman Ray Hine dutifully followed Holmes out to sea, as he should have, to protect Holmes.
Mitch was agitated. He was also struck by a kind of planner’s remorse. He had continued his climb, leading the eleven other Lightnings in his cover flight to nearly 15,000 feet, where they expected to confront Zeros attacking from every direction. Everyone was bracing for high-altitude combat and dogfights. But when they got there, the sky was empty. There was not an enemy fighter in sight, except for the six Zeros way down below. Had they known that—had he and Mitscher and the top brass involved in planning known that against all logic Japan’s greatest admiral would not be greeted by a massive aerial force—Mitch would have done what Canning had been wishing to do when first sighting the Japanese bomber: get Yamamoto. He could have taken his own flight in for the kill, Mitch thought, as he had been in the front and in the perfect position to do just that. He would have certainly welcomed a do-over, but there was nothing he could do now.
He could hear Holmes struggling with the tanks. “Wait a minute, Tom,” Holmes called out to Lanphier on the radio. “I’ll tear my tanks off, just give me a second.” But there were no seconds to spare. It was up to Tom Lanphier and Rex Barber, the killer unit cut in half—two P-38 Lightnings against a Japanese flight of two bombers and six Zero fighters.
YAMAMOTO, HIS AIDES, AND THE CREW EXPECTED IN A MATTER of minutes to be on the ground in Buin, where the base commander and his men lined both sides of the runway waiting to greet the commander in chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Though the pilots in the six escort Zeros had not been expecting trouble, it was simply part of flying—never mind their duty—to instinctively scan the horizon for other planes. They had looked mainly up, however, the result of hard lessons learned from encountering the new P-38. The Japanese pilots knew that their US counterparts, to fully exploit the advantages of the P-38’s speed and high-altitude capability, liked to attack by dropping down swiftly from above. They’d never thought to look down below.
But Yamamoto and his flight crew were suddenly startled by the pilot in the first Zero, who had surged to the front and was dipping his wings, frantically trying to get their attention. With Yamamoto watching, the pilot kept pointing downward, directing Yamamoto’s crew to look down and to the right. They did, and they saw—and, in that instant, the other escort Zeros on Yamamoto’s right also saw what the lead Zero pilot had discovered, and all three Zeros turned sharply to take on the two P-38 Lightnings that were fast approaching. Simultaneously, Yamamoto’s pilot did two things: he pushed the throttle to accelerate rapidly and then dived toward the jungle’s treetops, where it would be far more difficult for an attacker to hit them. Most machine guns in fighter planes pointed up slightly, making the best firing position a tad beneath a target, and an attack plane trying to slip under Yamamoto flying across the treetops might easily end up in the jungle. His pilot’s maneuver was a smart evasive action, if only he could get them there in time.
Ugaki’s bomber did the same as the lead bomber, following Yamamoto’s sharp descent, a move that startled the vice admiral and sent crew members scrambling to their combat stations. Both cabins erupted in chaos and noise, with men yelling and the wind rushing in at the gun ports, which were open. But Ugaki’s pilot “overspeeded,” meaning that he had accelerated so quickly, the Betty bomber’s fuselage began to vibrate. To slow and stabilize the aircraft, the pilot pulled hard on the throttle, causing the plane to fall further behind Yamamoto’s. Ugaki was struggling to make sense of it all when he saw bullets passing over his aircraft, including tracers, “the special bullets which make a light,” as one crew member said. The bullets missed and kept going as Ugaki yelled over the noise, “What happened to Admiral Yamamoto’s plane?”
FROM HIS PERCH MITCH TRIED TO FOLLOW THE QUICKENING ACTION. With Holmes out over the water, trying to shake his belly tanks, and Hine accompanying him, Lanphier and Barber were on their own. The two had headed for the Betty bombers about five miles ahead. Lanphier took the shortest route possible, flying directly toward the bombers from a ninety-degree angle. To their surprise, the Japanese flight was continuing to hold its formation over the Bougainville coastline and in the direction of the base at Buin. It meant that they still hadn’t been sighted. Barber couldn’t help but think, “They were a little bit asleep.” He and Lanphier were hoping to bank in on the bombers’ tails and into the prime spot from which to open fire. But when they were about a mile away, they saw three Zeros, flying behind and to the right of the two Betty bombers, begin a very steep dive, throwing off their belly tanks.
Even as they pushed their P-38s as fast as possible, Lanphier and Barber could tell they were not going to reach the Betty bombers before the Zeros reached them. They’d be turning in behind the bombers as the Zeros turned onto their tails. The two flights—Lanphier and Barber from one direction and the Zeros from the other—were coming together at speeds of nearly three hundred miles per hour, and when the distance between them had closed to only about 1,000 feet, or the length of three football fields and then some, Lanphier made the split-second decision to turn left and head up straight toward the enemy fighter planes. It was a bold move providing cover of sorts for Barber, although Mitch worried that his pilots were about to get caught up in a dogfight while letting the bombers slip away. “Get the bombers,” he said over the radio. “Damn it all, the bombers!”
Running interference, Lanphier fired at the Zeros, and they returned fire. Barber kept going, catching up to the Betty bombers within seconds. He rolled his Lightning to the right to move in behind but banked so sharply that his wing momentarily blocked his view. He could not see either bomber, and when he rolled back and leveled off, he saw only one. He didn’t know where the other one had gone. In fact, flying at top speed, Barber had banked right over the top of the second Betty bomber and leveled off behind the lead one. The circumstances he found himself in were hardly ideal. He was traveling faster than he should for “good gunnery,” meaning that his speed would affect his shooting accuracy. Then there was his position—behind the bomber. It made him vulnerable. He was looking up right at the tail gun. He’d have preferred a high-angle attack, shooting on the curve of pursuit. Finally, there was the plane’s altitude—or lack thereof. He was getting so low at that point that he had to worry about clipping a tree. But such concerns were inconsequential in light of the fact that he was staring at the first Betty bomber, the one numbered 323, directly ahead of him at treetop level. Barber was lined up and could not delay a second longer.
He pressed the trigger on the four machine guns located in the nose of the P-38 and pushed the button to fire the 20 mm cannon, unleashing a burst of firepower from just fifty yards away that was everything the Lightning had to offer. He hit the bomber’s right engine, which immediately started smoking. He fired another burst that tore through the fuselage and into the left engine, and then he fired across the bomber’s left wing and back again, causing pieces of the bomber’s tail to split off. Each of Barber’s bursts sent bullets ripping through the thin aluminum skin of a plane that by design was lacking in heavy armor in order to increase its flying range, and as the P-38 Lightning’s four machine guns blasted away and the bomber shuddered with each round, Isoroku Yamamoto turned left in his seat to look back. In that millisecond two of the hundreds of .50-caliber bullets raking the plane found him. One bullet entered his left shoulder, causing a wound from which he could have recovered, but the second one penetrated his jaw on the lower left side, tore through his brain in a slightly upward trajectory, and exited at the right temple. It was the second wound that was incompatible with life.
Barber was so close now that he could see the bomber’s rear cannon and realized no one was manning it, which explained why he wasn’t receiving any fire, and as he centered his fire on the fuselage one more time, the bomber suddenly seemed to stop in midair, as if stalled. The plane rolled slightly to the left, “a quarter snap.” Barber nearly collided with it, barely missing the upturned wing as he flew past and over the bomber in a flash. He figured the plane’s sudden stall was what happened when a pilot was killed and involuntarily yanked back on the controls. But he couldn’t know for sure, and the only thing he knew as he looked over his shoulder was that the Betty bomber was spewing black smoke, a thick, heavy smoke from a fuel-stoked engine fire. He saw the bomber level off while continuing to drop, less than a hundred yards now from the tops of the trees, and that was all he saw, because he spotted a Zero approaching from behind, and in the next instant he heard the hollow noise that gunfire makes hitting a plane, a series of pings. They were unloading on him, shooting at him heavily. He hunched under the cockpit’s armor plate and began his own evasive action, hugging the treetops so that the enemy would have a harder time hitting him and managing as he turned sharply back toward the coastline to shout out on the radio, “I got one of the bombers!”
Rex Barber no longer could see the Betty bomber, which headed overland in the direction of Buin but would never come close to reaching its destination. The plane, engulfed in flames, brushed the jungle canopy before plunging into it, the left wing ripped off by treetops. Upon impact it exploded into flames and broke up, the biggest chunks being the tail assembly, engines, and parts of the wings. The eleven men on board were hurled in every direction, all but one burned beyond recognition. The eleventh passenger was propelled clear of the wreck, still strapped tightly into his seat. The sight was an odd one: an officer seated upright in the brush, dressed in a green khaki uniform, medal ribbons on his chest, his hands in white gloves. The left hand clutched a sword. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was a picture of repose, except that he wasn’t resting. He was dead.
MITCH CONTINUED CIRCLING AT 15,000 FEET, DOING HIS BEST TO watch for enemy Zeros while straining to see far below. He saw a fire, then another, in the Bougainville jungle but not much else. He did not see Lanphier’s dogfight with the escort Zeros or Lanphier’s next moves to elude the Zeros and go after the Betty bombers. He did not see Besby Holmes shake loose his belly tanks over the ocean and, with his wingman Ray Hine, turn toward Bougainville in time to see the first bomber crash in the jungle. It looked to Holmes as though it had gone straight in, given the size of the fire—a crash just after he’d heard Rex Barber shouting on his mic about getting one of the Bettys. The action continued nonstop beneath Mitch, with Holmes noticing that the second Betty bomber was trying to flee over water, so he and Hine performed a maneuver called a barrel roll in order to give chase. Meanwhile, Barber was dodging Zeros, zigzagging to avoid their gunfire and then getting an assist from Holmes and Hine, who scattered the Zeros as they went speeding past overhead toward the sea. That’s when Barber, still flying as low as he could, saw the other Betty bomber, too, hugging the water, right along the edge of the island, so low that its props were kicking up a wake behind it. Holmes and Hine went into a steep dive toward that bomber, and Barber raced to join them, enemy Zeros buzzing all around. The three fighter pilots opened fire, and when Barber closed in, he fired a burst into the fuselage. The plane exploded before crashing into the ocean. Pieces flew and hit Barber’s Lightning, one chunk striking the left wing, another cutting a gash in the canopy above Barber.
Practically nothing was going on with Mitch and the eleven other pilots, save for their mounting anxiety about fuel consumption. The longer they circled, the less fuel they’d have to return to Guadalcanal. Doug Canning, for one, almost got a taste of combat at one point when he stumbled upon a Zero. Undetected, he turned in behind the fighter plane, but then his canopy fogged up. He couldn’t see. He tried wiping the canopy by hand, but that made matters worse, smudging everything. He was forced to let the Zero get away, and when he looked around he was all by himself, with no idea where Mitch and the others in the cover flight had gone. The only thing to do was to get more altitude. He climbed to about 18,000 feet, looked some more, but still could not find anyone. He had apparently drifted ten miles out to sea and was on his own. He circled alone.
The action was all down at sea level, and although Mitch did not have his eyes on his four pilots, he’d heard snippets of heated radio calls and seen puffs of gunfire here and there along the coast, as well as one, maybe two fires in the jungle. To him the fires were key evidence that planes had been shot down. He needed to make a ruling, seated as a one-man jury of sorts, and he needed to make one quickly, given the fuel concerns, the fact that the interception was nearing its ten-minute mark, and, most alarming, the fact that dust clouds had begun stirring around the Japanese base in Buin, indicating planes scrambling to take off. Lacking proof beyond a reasonable doubt, he nonetheless reached two conclusions: the radio noise he had overheard meant his killer pilots were still okay, and the fires in the jungle meant they’d accomplished the job he’d given them—taking out the enemy bombers. He shouted, “Let’s get the hell out and go home.”
The flight of P-38s was turning in a southeasterly direction for Guadalcanal when Mitch heard Lanphier calling for help. He hesitated, shouted to the others to continue, and studied the area far below. He spotted a P-38 off the eastern tip of Bougainville. It was just above the water, with an engine smoking and trailing smoke. He saw a Zero sitting on the P-38’s tail, little puffs of smoke coming from the Zero’s guns. Right away he and his wingman, Jack Jacobson, rolled down from 15,000 feet, diving as fast as they could to help. They reached 400 miles per hour and were on the verge of buffeting when the Zero suddenly peeled away from its target, its pilot apparently noticing Mitch and Jacobson fast approaching. They both fired bursts at the aircraft as it fled. It sped toward the Buin airfield, and they let it go.
Mitch and Jacobson were unable to find the P-38. They wondered if another Zero had swooped in to finish off their crippled colleague, but neither of them had seen a plane go down. They took another minute to look around but knew they had to get going if they were to have enough fuel to make the three-hundred-mile trip back. Initially Mitch had thought Lanphier was the flier in the disabled P-38, because he had been the one calling for help just as Mitch had issued the order for everyone to clear out. But Lanphier turned out to have been elsewhere, frantically eluding a Zero, when he had called. And having outraced the Zero, he was already heading back to Guadalcanal, ahead of Mitch.
In fact, the pilot who had gone down was Jacobson’s friend and tent mate, Ray Hine. Besby Holmes and Rex Barber had lost sight of Hine after all three had gone after the second Betty bomber. “There’s one of the finest boys I’ve ever known,” Jacobson would write in his diary that night. “Hope he made land.” But First Lieutenant Raymond K. Hine, just twenty-three and from Indiana, never did return. Neither he nor any trace of his plane was ever found.
HEADING BACK, MITCH AND ALL THE OTHER PILOTS, ESPECIALLY the three from the killer unit, were thinking that no one could have survived their attacks on the two Betty bombers—the first one exploding into a ball of fire upon impact in the jungle, the second crashing into the ocean. They were wrong about the second Betty, though. Three of the twelve men aboard were alive: Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Matome Ugaki, the plane’s pilot, and one of the officers. Their plane had crashed into the water at full speed, rolling over onto its left side, bursting into a blaze, but the impact had apparently catapulted Ugaki and the pilot through the canopy covering the cockpit, while the third officer had somehow managed to escape the wreckage. Ugaki was hurt badly and struggled to reach the beach two hundred yards away, grabbing hold of a large toolbox from the wreck to use as a float. Soldiers from a nearby barracks came running and, after realizing Ugaki was friend and not foe, retrieved him, the pilot, and the officer. Ugaki’s condition was the worst: bruises and abrasions over his entire body; left eye swollen shut; clots of blood on his face; a broken left rib; and a right forearm compound fracture. He was carried to the barracks, where a medical orderly began treating his injuries. But the vice admiral insisted that he had urgent business to attend to. He ordered that the base commander at Buin be contacted and told that communications about the crashes “should be made by confidential telegram and be restricted as much as possible; this is from the Chief of Staff.” Ugaki then turned his attention to the chance that others had survived. He made sure that rescuers returned to the beach to look for any from his aircraft, and, after asking about Yamamoto’s aircraft, was told that a search plane was already flying to the crash site.
Mitch and his men, though wrong about Ugaki’s bomber, were spot on with their hunch about the first bomber: there were no survivors. Even Ugaki, told about the search plane while he was being treated for his injuries, was not hopeful. He’d witnessed the aircraft staggering southward, just brushing the jungle top with reduced speed, emitting black smoke and flame. Ugaki had gasped, muttering to himself, “My God,” then grabbing the shoulder of a crew member. “Look at the commander in chief’s plane!” he’d said, pointing out the window. Within seconds, Yamamoto’s plane was gone. Ugaki had strained his eyes but could not see it, only a pall of black smoke rising from the jungle to the sky.
Within a few hours, the aerial searchers located the crash site and reported seeing no sign of life either at the wreck or in the immediate vicinity. By midafternoon Sunday, a military cable was sent notifying the chief of the naval general staff and the navy minister in Tokyo of Yamamoto’s crash and disappearance. The secret cable prompted an emergency gathering of the country’s top naval officials. In Rabaul, Yamamoto’s senior aide, Captain Yasuji Watanabe, who had pressed the admiral the prior evening to permit him to join him, hurried to fly from the base to join the search. The devastated Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, a longtime friend, spoke for many when he lamented, “There could be only one Yamamoto, and nobody could take his place.”
THE REMAINING FIFTEEN P-38 LIGHTNINGS, SCATTERED DURING the attack, flew back not as a single unit but in various combinations. Mitch and his wingman, Jack Jacobson, were together, cruising at about 10,000 feet. Doug Canning, unable to find his wingman, D. C. Goerke, saw Besby Holmes running out of gas, struggling along, and he accompanied Holmes to be sure that Holmes was okay. Having been separated, Tom Lanphier and Rex Barber flew alone.
On the way back to Guadalcanal, Lanphier couldn’t contain himself. “I got the son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted triumphantly on the radio. “He won’t dictate terms in the White House now.” Not every flier heard him, but those that did were incredulous. Never mind that the assertion Lanphier was making—that he was the one who had shot down Yamamoto’s plane—was premature, to say the least, and hardly standard protocol. “Lanphier had not cross-checked results with other shooters,” noted Major Lou Kittel of the cover flight. Even if Lanphier had somehow managed to attack a bomber, instead of showing the poise of a seasoned fighter pilot, he was acting like a gold digger racing to a land office to stake out a claim before anyone else could. Worse was the security breach, putting at risk the code breaking that the US commanders were obsessed with guarding. Mitch had stressed that very concern, another pilot, First Lieutenant Roger J. Ames, recalled as he listened to Lanphier’s stunning remarks. “Just get out of the island,” Mitch had instructed. “Don’t say anything we weren’t supposed to, to let the Japanese know, in any way, shape or form that we might have broken their code.” To Ames, Lanphier on an open radio clearly referring to Yamamoto by invoking the White House line for which the enemy admiral was notorious was the epitome of recklessness. If Japanese monitors picked up Lanphier, thought Ames, “that would be enough . . . they could maybe put it together.”
Lanphier would not let up. Landing at Fighter Two at about 11:00 a.m.—after a number of pilots from the cover flight had already returned—he continued proclaiming his achievement to anyone within earshot, making no mention of Rex Barber or any other pilot for that matter but saying he’d looped around after taking on the escort Zeros, blasted the famous enemy admiral’s plane, and then watched as it plunged into the jungle. An officer who was one of the first to meet him on the ground heard Lanphier, still in his cockpit, claim victory over Admiral Yamamoto in no uncertain terms. The officer, Lieutenant Joseph Young, was surprised by the comments. He didn’t know Lanphier well but did know his reputation as very collected, mature—and a superior pilot. The histrionics left him astounded, and he considered Lanphier’s dramatics to be irrational. Lanphier next climbed into a jeep for a ride down the runway toward the operations tent, a ride that was tantamount to a victory lap as he stood in the back calling out “I got him! I got him! I got that son-of-a-bitch!” Some found the display off-putting, with one crew chief later composing a poem to lampoon Lanphier: “I got him, I got him, is what Capt. Lanphier said/I alone shot Yamamoto dead/Let no other man make this claim/He’d steal my honor and soil my name.”
Lanphier’s posturing was a distraction to the celebratory reception the returning pilots were receiving at Fighter Two, with at least one P-38 performing a roll and buzzing the field to the delight of cheering onlookers. Pilots leaped from their planes and excitedly gathered to greet the next one to land, and when their mission leader touched ground at about 11:30 a.m., a bunch of them began jumping up and down and cheering Mitch, “like it was a football game that we had won,” Mitch recalled. He unstrapped his parachute and climbed down from the cockpit to a hero’s welcome from all the crew chiefs.
Mitch’s gas tanks were nearly empty, as were nearly everyone else’s, especially the pilots in the killer unit who had burned through their fuel in combat with the Japanese. In fact, Holmes was delayed on his return, having to stop along the way; his main wing tank was empty from battle damage, and he had only four gallons left in another tank when he landed on the Russell Islands on a runway under construction. Holmes’s plane wasn’t the only one damaged; Lanphier’s had a few bullet holes in one of the horizontal stabilizers, the small, fixed wings at the rear that keep a plane in control and flying straight. But it was Barber’s that took a while to assess—104 holes from 52 bullets fired into the rear section of his P-38 by Zeros chasing him and a chunk of metal from the second Betty bomber still stuck in the skin of the plane. Barber had returned just prior to Mitch, and they both caught up to what everyone else was hearing: Lanphier’s claim for the Yamamoto shootdown.
Barber was not pleased. He and Lanphier were soon going at it. “How in the hell do you know you got Yamamoto?” Barber snarled. Barber was certain he’d shot down the lead bomber, but he knew he could not claim with equal certainty that Yamamoto had been aboard that plane. He doubted that Lanphier had even hit a Betty, but even if Lanphier had, how could he know positively, as another pilot put it, “that he had shot the big man down”? Lanphier persisted with his version of events, calling Barber a liar, and tensions got even worse when Besby Holmes returned. Learning that he and the missing Ray Hine had been left out altogether in the various recappings of the interception, he erupted in anger. Holmes pressed his case that he’d shot down the second Betty bomber and also some Zeros.
No formal debriefing ensued, just competing claims conveyed during informal discussions with the two intelligence officers who’d helped the day before in plotting the mission, Navy Lieutenant Joseph E. McGuigan and Army Captain William Morrison. The developing tempest threatened to overshadow the outpouring of accolades. Pete Mitscher, the vice admiral who’d seen the men off that morning, pulled up in a jeep at the Fighter Two operations tent with a case of I. W. Harper bourbon whiskey. “You raised hell with ’em, boys,” the elated Mitscher said, going around shaking the fliers’ hands. “They’ve been jabbering so much on the radio that we think you got him. I want you to know how good a job you did. By God, that’s what I call flying.” Marine Major John Condon was equally impressed, calling the mission “a marvel of performance on Mitchell’s part.”
An all-out donnybrook among the three pilots was averted when an apparent solution took hold—the notion that there must have been three Betty bombers. The theory would later prove inaccurate, but at the time it seemed to make sense, given each pilot’s claims, and it meant that Barber, Lanphier, and Holmes could each take credit for one. With that, peace was restored and the killer unit pilots calmed down. Lanphier, who’d worked briefly as a reporter and knew how to turn a phrase, even sought to reassure Barber and Holmes, telling them he would work on the “Fighter Report” with McGuigan and Morrison to make sure they got it right. Meanwhile, Mitch, ever the leader, had done his best to cool things down, stressing the bigger picture, not anyone’s individual glory. The mission was a team effort. “I couldn’t have cared less who shot him down,” he said. “We got him, that’s what we went up there for, and we got him. Joe Blow shot him down, fine with me. We got him.”
The men partied into the night, “singing like a bunch of high school kids after a ball game,” wrote Yank correspondent Mack Morriss from inside his tent at nearby Henderson Field, unaware of why the army fighter pilots at Fighter Two were making a ruckus. “Three or four men howl like dogs,” Mack Morriss continued. “They’ve sung everything I can think of and I think—I hope—they’ve about exhausted their repertoire.” But they carried on all night long, fueled by another accolade—the equivalent of a hearty backslap—from Bull Halsey, whom Mitscher had notified. “Congratulations to you and Major Mitchell and his hunters,” wrote Halsey in a cable from New Caledonia. “Sounds as though one of the ducks in their bag was a peacock.”
For the first time in two days, Mitch could let down. He wasn’t going to let anything get into the way of savoring the moment—the mission’s huge and unexpected outcome, beyond his wildest dreams, save for the loss of Ray Hine. Going in, he had figured they’d suffer significant losses in combat against the anticipated legions of Zeros that, fortuitously, had never arrived. In short order and relying largely on dead reckoning, he’d overseen one of the longest ever aerial interceptions to carry out the targeted kill of an enemy leader.
John Mitchell had told Annie Lee just a few weeks earlier that he was not ready to come home. He was responding to her lobbying for his return, and he had told her he didn’t think he’d done enough yet for the cause. He was feeling different now, on this night of April 18, 1943. He’d just made history: Yamamoto had been the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, and he was the architect of Yamamoto’s demise. “We’uns is coming home!!” he announced in his next letter to his wife, continuing in a lower, less exclamatory tone, as if he were whispering in her ear. “Speaking of action,” he said, “I have a wonderful story to tell you concerning a little action I led the boys on this last time.”