Admiral Yamamoto
WWII Database/public domain
ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF JAPAN’S powerful Combined Fleet, prowled the operations room of his flagship, Nagato. Poster-sized maps of the Pacific region, particularly of Hawaii, filled the four walls. Maritime charts were unfolded on a long table in the center of the room, with a large globe sitting on top. Next to the globe rested a speaker connected to the nearby radio room by a cable snaking along the floor and across the hall. It enabled Yamamoto to receive directly and immediately any new messages. A smaller table held files of operational orders and a growing stack of communications.
The battleship was at Hashirajima anchorage, about nineteen miles south of the naval base at Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture. Yamamoto was waiting for word from his carrier strike force as it closed in on Hawaii, having left its secret staging area off the Kuril Islands days before. The date was December 6, 1941, Hawaii time, or five days since Yamamoto had told the strike force commander, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, to sail for the Hawaiian Islands and to “Climb Mt. Niitaka.” Nagumo’s force, slicing through rough seas, included the Imperial Navy’s six largest aircraft carriers, two battleships, and a number of destroyers, cruisers, and fuel tankers—thirty-one ships in all.
In the days since the order, Yamamoto had appeared before Emperor Hirohito in full dress, toasted the mission’s success at the navy minister’s residence, and hastily said his good-byes to his family, his longtime geisha friend Masako Tsurushima, and especially his lover, Chiyoko Kawai. Back aboard Nagato, Yamamoto wrote Chiyoko a quick note apologizing for being so preoccupied with official affairs while in Tokyo and asking for her to forgive him that “I couldn’t stay with you even a single night, to my regret.” He continued using the bouquet of roses he had bought for her as a metaphor for the imminent surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, this time framing it as a question that reflected the mission’s existential uncertainty: “By the time when the petals of those flowers fall, what will happen?”
Yamamoto and his command staff were waiting to find out—waiting and worrying. They worried about the weather, which at that time of year in the northern Pacific was more likely to be stormy than calm. Rough seas could not only hurt the strike fleet’s progress in general but also impede the refueling operations that had been so carefully planned and were critical if the fleet was to reach its destination. They worried about the fleet being spotted by ships or patrol planes of the United States—or any other nation, for that matter—which would set off alarms and blow its cover. That was why Yamamoto’s planners had chosen such a northerly, less traveled route—to minimize the chances of being detected through a random encounter. Lastly, they worried about US fleet commanders at Pearl Harbor deviating from their practice of having most of the ships at anchor Saturday and Sunday to give their crews time to rest and relax. What if the steady drumbeat of war had altered the weekend customs? Yamamoto, on the flagship, and Nagumo, his fleet commander, closely monitored the incoming intelligence reports tracking ship movements around Hawaii.
Yamamoto had also grown increasingly obsessed with wartime protocol. Negotiations had continued between Japan and the United States into early December even though Japan’s leaders had chosen to go to war. Such talks were outside the admiral’s bailiwick; they were handled by the Foreign Ministry. Even so, Yamamoto had demanded an assurance that no matter how great the strain and the rapidity of events, proper diplomatic practice would be followed, meaning that the United States would be put on notice of Japan’s war declaration before the attack, not after. It was one thing to launch a surprise naval attack during a declared war; it was another, and a wholly unacceptable action, to instigate a sneak attack. Honor was at stake. Yamamoto was told not to be concerned, that the Imperial General Headquarters was drafting a message, in fourteen parts, that would break off talks with the United States and declare war. The note was being transmitted to Japan’s embassy in Washington, DC, and the plan was for Japan’s ambassador to deliver it to the US secretary of state, Cordell Hull, thirty minutes prior to the start of the bombing. The attack on Pearl Harbor would not be seen as cowardly or underhanded but rather as the surprising opening salvo in an officially declared war.
Unknown to Yamamoto and Japan’s leaders at the time was that Hull and other top US officials, including President Roosevelt, were aware of what was afoot, at least partially. The deciphering of Japanese codes that had begun in the early 1920s had provided inside knowledge of Japan’s war preparations. On December 6, code breakers were even intercepting the fourteen parts of the final ultimatum as they were cabled from Tokyo to Japan’s embassy. Moreover, they’d intercepted messages instructing embassy staff to burn materials and prepare to leave Washington. But none of the intelligence landing in American hands specifically identified Yamamoto’s assault on Pearl Harbor in the central Pacific. The code breakers picked up clues that spies in Hawaii were passing along information to Tokyo about US ship movements. There was also information that Japan’s army was on the move much farther away in the South Pacific. Though several US defense officials had voiced worry about Pearl Harbor, no specific operational intelligence had surfaced. By December 6, as a result of the intercepted cables, the White House was in effect on notice, albeit surreptitiously, that war was in the offing. But as Congress adjourned for the weekend and the White House began to brace for war, the US fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor was under no special alert. Its crews were looking forward to enjoying a charity football game, watching a “Battle of the Bands” at the Bloch Recreation Center, catching a movie, or taking part in any number of other fun activities.
Yamamoto, hovering in the operations room aboard the Nagato on December 6, eventually received word that the strike force’s last refueling was nearing completion. The oiler ships were breaking off to rendezvous at a predetermined location. The strike force, now fully fueled and separated from the slower-moving tankers, picked up speed to cover the remaining six hundred miles south to Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto took that moment to send his final war message to every crewman, flier, and sailor at sea. The pep talk included the imperial rescript the emperor had given him, with the words “the responsibility assigned to the Combined Fleet is so grave that the rise and fall of the Empire depends upon what it is going to accomplish.” Soon after, a signal flag was hoisted aboard the strike force’s flagship, Akagi—a flag intended as a reminder of the “Z” pennant the heroic Admiral Togo had flown more than three decades earlier in the Russo-Japanese War. Nagumo, the strike force commander, repeated the legendary Togo’s very words to his fighters: “The future of the Empire depends on this battle. All men must give their utmost.”
Yamamoto then received a final intelligence report from Tokyo. Everything seemed quiet at Pearl Harbor, with no sign of unusual activity. Importantly, most of the US Pacific Fleet was accounted for: some nine battleships, three light cruisers, three seaplane tenders, and seventeen destroyers at anchor, with another two destroyers and four light cruisers in dock. That was the good news. There was cause for concern, though; there was no sign of the fleet’s aircraft carriers. But if Yamamoto, the fierce champion of a carrier-based navy whose entire Pearl Harbor operation was carrier centric, had any second thoughts about US carriers not being in his line of fire, he did not show it. Instead, he displayed the utmost coolness as the day turned into night and he and his staff officers awaited word. Yamamoto, as he did most evenings, played shogi with his underlings. This night, though, he stopped early. He headed to his cabin, where he bathed and rested. Most of his staff did the same. Whether or not they managed to catch a few hours of sleep, Yamamoto and his officers reassembled in the operations room after midnight. Yamamoto was standing by. It was approaching dawn at Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941—the same day, as Chiyoko later told Yamamoto, that the petals fell from her roses.
ON DECEMBER 1, WHEN THE MASSIVE JAPANESE STRIKE FORCE HAD finally gotten word from Yamamoto to “Climb Mt. Niitaka,” the anxiety that had dogged the fleet was dispelled. For weeks everyone had wondered: Would they be given the go ahead? Or not? With their commander in chief’s telegram came resolve and certainty: the surprise attack would happen as planned on December 7. “We felt the apprehension that had made us worry so long disappear suddenly,” noted the strike force’s chief of staff, a vice admiral named Ryunosuke Kusaka. “I felt then that my mind was as clear as the autumn moon in the sky.” Kusaka, who served alongside strike force commander Chuichi Nagumo aboard the Akagi, later composed a detailed account of the mission. When Yamamoto’s final war message was broadcast aboard the strike force’s ships five days later during the countdown to the attack, Kusaka wrote, the thousands of men serving on the force erupted in cheers. Said Kusaka, “Sensing the grave responsibility assigned to them, and also anticipating the bold enterprise to be carried out early the next morning, all hands were fired up in their blood.”
On December 6, the night sky was cloudy, the moon only occasionally breaking through as the fleet churned through the open sea on its southerly route. Nearly four hundred planes were lined up wingtip to wingtip on the flight decks of the six carriers. When the ships pitched, the planes carrying a maximum load of bombs and torpedoes rocked, their rubber tires bulging and squeaking. One of the pilots used chalk to scribble a message on the side of a bomb: “First bomb in the war on America.” For the initial wave, the attack flight would include 183 planes: forty-nine high-altitude bombers, later nicknamed “Kates” by American fliers, filled with powerful bombs and equipped with a rear-firing 7.7 mm machine gun; another forty “Kates” outfitted for the mission solely as torpedo bombers; fifty-one dive-bombers, nicknamed “Vals,” carrying bombs and three 7.7 mm machine guns, two of which were forward firing and the third in the rear; and forty-three fighter planes, nicknamed “Zeros,” notoriously fast and agile and armed with two 7.7 mm machine guns and two 20 mm rapid-firing cannon.
About 5:30 a.m., the engines were started and the planes warmed up. Kusaka recalled that daybreak on December 7 was “still so dark that black and white could barely be distinguished.” The deafening sound of so many propellers and engines competed with the noise of the roiling ocean waters below. Maintenance crews zigzagged through rows of aircraft, conducting final inspections, while pilots in the flying crew waiting rooms grew more restless with each passing minute. Map boards dangled from their chests. Given last-second instructions by operations officers, the flight crews then ran and climbed into their planes. The six carriers turned into the thirty-knot wind to achieve maximum lift. With visibility improving in the dim light now breaking on the horizon, Kusaka looked out from the Akagi’s bridge to take in the captivating sight of the strike force’s vessels “making way in a gorgeous formation.”
Hoisted atop the Akagi’s mast for the other carriers to see was a flag signaling “Take off.” It was 6:20 a.m. The first to launch were the Zero fighter planes, then the Kate horizontal bombers and the Kate torpedo bombers, and last the Val dive-bombers. Within fifteen minutes, the entire first attack wave of 183 aircraft was airborne. Setting up in formation, the torpedo bombers climbed to a cruising altitude of about 9,200 feet; the high-level bombers were at 9,800 feet; the dive-bombers went higher, to 11,100 feet; and the Zeros climbed to 14,100 feet, where they were free to roam as lookouts. Led by the flight commander, Mitsuo Fuchida, who was also the lead pilot of the high-level Kate bombers, the planes began flying the remaining two hundred miles to Pearl Harbor on the southern coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Kusaka was overcome. “I, who watched them take off at the bridge, was filled with deep emotion and couldn’t help feeling my blood boil up,” he said. The crews on the six carriers immediately began hauling more aircraft onto the flight decks from hangars in preparation for the next wave. Shortly after 7:00 a.m., the carriers began launching a second attack, and by 7:25 a.m., another 167 Zeros, Kates, and Vals were airborne. In all, in less than ninety minutes, the Japanese Carrier Strike Force had put 350 weapons-loaded planes into the sky, heading toward Pearl Harbor.
For the final approach, Commander Fuchida, flying with the big bombers at about 9,800 feet, was protected by cloud cover. Through a break in the clouds just north of Oahu, he spotted the white surf and coastline below. It was now 7:50 a.m. Fuchida signaled the start of the general attack to all pilots. Within minutes a dive-bomber dropped the first bomb—weighing 550 pounds—onto Wheeler Field in the northern part of Oahu. Within seconds, twenty-four more Japanese dive-bombers began dropping their payload onto Wheeler, the US Army’s largest aircraft base in the Pacific.
THAT SUNDAY MORNING, MANY OF THE HUNDREDS OF SERVICEMEN assigned to Wheeler Field were enjoying a weekend leave. Second Lieutenant Besby Holmes was no different. He had spent Saturday night partying hard and at dawn was paying the price. “Nobody had ever warned me about sweet rum drinks. One is fine, two is great, three is murder and four is death,” he said later. He’d had plenty of reason to celebrate. The US bases on Oahu were on high alert due to reports coming out of Washington that war was imminent, so for the prior week or so his squadron had been flying daily patrols. When the alert had been called off on the weekend, the men had headed into town. “We’d been restricted for 24 hours a day, but the teacher let the monkeys out.” Moreover, the San Francisco–born fighter pilot had turned twenty-four on Friday, and a pilot buddy whose cousin worked at the Royal Hawaiian hotel on Waikiki Beach had gotten them a deal on a fancy suite. Now, in the predawn darkness after a Saturday-night bash, Holmes was tossing and turning, unable to sleep. His head was splitting. He had one clear thought: to get himself to early Sunday Mass and, with his obligation to God out of the way, hit the beach to let the sun bake the poison out of his body.
Like Johnnie Mitchell of Mississippi, Besby Frank Holmes had been a boy when he had become enamored with flying. In Mitchell’s case, he had gotten a taste of the sky when the barnstormers had come through his rural hometown of Enid, landed their two-seater biplanes in the cow pastures, and offered rides for $1.50. Besby Holmes, meanwhile, was a city boy, and his epiphany had come one bright summer morning when he had been fishing at the foot of Van Ness Avenue. A flight of shiny new fighter planes in formation had flown over so low that he could see the pilots—their helmets and goggles and their white scarves streaming in the wind. The planes had screamed by, and he had said to himself, “I just gotta fly one of those.” He had gone to high school and junior college in San Francisco, where he had distinguished himself as a chess player, boxer, and swimmer, and he had been twenty-three when he had gone down to the recruiting station in March 1941 to enlist as an air cadet in the Army Air Corps. For the next eight months he had trained in southern California, then at Luke Field outside Phoenix, Arizona, and in November he had been assigned as a newly minted second lieutenant to Wheeler Field on Oahu. He had so far flown different planes: the single-engine AT-6 training aircraft, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter, and in Hawaii, for the first time, the sleek Curtiss P-36 Hawk, the Warhawk’s predecessor.
Holmes was still essentially a rookie pilot as he pulled on his brown pin-striped suit with a green wool tie just after sunrise and staggered into a church across from the Royal Hawaiian, where he began praying to God that his headache would go away. The church was open all the way around for ventilation, and the first thing Holmes heard was a whirring, whooshing noise, followed by a commotion at the altar. The priest abruptly concluded the Mass while outside all hell was breaking loose. People were rushing around, military trucks were roaring down the street, and Holmes looked up and saw the sky dotted with planes dive-bombing the harbor and airfields beyond.
Holmes raced across the street to the hotel to find his friend freshly changed into his army uniform. The hotel manager was listening on a tiny portable radio to reports that the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor, but no one needed telling. Operating on instinct, Holmes and his pilot buddy commandeered the first car they saw outside, a red Studebaker Champion. They raced past the harbor, which was under attack, and up a hill to their base. Holmes was dumbstruck: Wheeler Field was in shambles. Dozens of P-40s parked in line were in flames. He drove toward his hangar, only to find it burning, and as he got close, the top melted and crushed in. The airfield was incapacitated and useless. Holmes kept going, driving as fast as he could to the nearby auxiliary Haleiwa Field with its single paved runway. He saw other pilots climbing into undamaged planes, and then a ground crew hurried over and said that an older P-36 Hawk was fit to fly. They handed him a parachute, a helmet, and a .45-caliber pistol. Holmes had flown a P-36 only once before, but he hustled toward the plane along with the line chief. He heard the rapid machine-gun fire first and next saw dust rising all around the plane. Over his shoulder he saw a dive-bombing Val strafing the airfield and the P-36. He aimed his .45 and fired, but the handgun was no match for the Japanese dive-bomber, just as the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, caught by surprise, was no match for the Japanese Carrier Strike Force.
The line chief boosted Holmes into the cockpit and then helped him start the engine and load ammunition into the .30-caliber machine gun. Holmes took off. Several other pilots had already gone up in P-40s, and Holmes was, comparatively speaking, late to the show; in the twenty or so minutes it had taken him to get from the church and into the air, the Japanese had mostly completed their devastation of Oahu. Two of the pilots who’d gone up earlier, Second Lieutenant George S. Welch and Second Lieutenant Kenneth M. Taylor, managed to engage the enemy and shoot down a total of six enemy fighters between them. Holmes searched all around but never encountered enemy fire. He did encounter friendly fire, however. He thought it absurd that everybody on the ground was firing at him while he never saw a Japanese plane in the sky. What he got instead of actual combat was an overview of the damage done. He flew to his base, Wheeler Field, where twenty-five unmolested Japanese dive-bombers had destroyed Wheeler’s 140 unmanned fighter planes, and then to Schofield Barracks. Both were a chaotic mess. He passed over the Ford Island Naval Station in the middle of Pearl Harbor. The damage was massive: huge ships sunk and burning; fuel blazing; aircrafts burning. He swung quickly by Marine Corps Air Station Ewa, which he found was as bad off as Wheeler, and then flew to Hickam Airfield, likewise beaten up. He realized it was a good thing he hadn’t run into a formation of enemy Zeros: “They would have creamed me.”
Holmes’s flight lasted about a half hour. He returned to Haleiwa Field, the little airstrip that had been largely overlooked by the Japanese. Pilots from other fields had been making their way to Haleiwa, wanting to go up in the handful of operable P-40s and P-36s. Holmes found the scene surreal, a mix of panic and chaos. Everyone was jumpy and, worse, paranoid. Rumors were rampant that a new air attack was minutes away, then not. There were rumors that a Japanese land invasion was under way, then not. That night Holmes and his pilot buddy were assigned to the beach as lookouts for a land invasion that was widely expected. They were instructed to fire three shots from their .45-caliber automatic pistols the moment they spotted the enemy. That would signal army pursuit planes to take off for battle. Holmes spent the night hiking up and down the length of the 1.5-mile-long beach, along the way passing his partner pacing from the other direction. Holmes was spooked several times, mistaking the moonlight jumping off a rolling wave as the bow of a landing Japanese infantry troop barge. Luckily he never fired his gun. And no further attacks came. Holmes could not remember a more welcome sunrise.
IT WAS AS IF EVERY SAILOR AND PILOT STATIONED UP AND DOWN the California coast and in the Pacific was nursing a hangover as word spread Sunday about the early-morning attack. Second Lieutenant Rex T. Barber, a thick-necked jock fresh out of cadet training school, was sleeping his off in a bunk aboard President Garfield when a fellow pilot shook him awake. News of the devastation was blaring on the ship’s radio. The Garfield was a civilian cruise ship recently redeployed by the military to transport Barber, his squadron, and more than a dozen P-39 Airacobra fighters stored in the ship’s hold from San Francisco to the Philippines in the South Pacific.
Barber was from Culver, a small town in central Oregon with fewer than a hundred residents. Rex, who had grown up on his family’s 2,100-acre farm, was outgoing, athletic, and never lacking in confidence. He had starred in baseball and basketball at school and spent summers working on nearby cattle ranches, all the while being an avid hunter. He had a favorite uncle, a World War I pilot, whose frequent stories of war and of “hair-raising tales of flying and women,” had been enthralling. Barber had known he wanted to fly someday.
Barber was twenty-three when he enlisted in the army in the fall of 1940. He became an expert marksman with the pistol, rifle, and machine gun—one of the surest shots training officers had ever seen. Training to be a pilot starting in early 1941, he quickly earned a reputation as fearless and, to some, reckless. Barber rejected the latter description, insisting that he was simply eager and always ready for action. He had only just completed cadet training school on October 10, 1941, when he was one of four graduates picked to become fighter pilots. He was rushed to San Francisco to join a squadron about to set sail for the Pacific. When he boarded the Garfield on December 5, he’d had only four training hours on a fighter plane, a P-40. He was a neophyte, basically a fighter pilot on paper who would learn on the job.
The past month had been a whirlwind. The fact that the Garfield had been a cruise ship meant it was outfitted for comfort, stocked with quality civilian food and waiters. Pilots sneaked cases of booze aboard, and for the first forty-eight hours at sea they turned the Garfield into a party boat—music blaring on record players, card games, dice games, and gambling, accompanied by plenty of drinking. Then came the wake-up call at dawn on December 7. Stunned, Barber and other hungover pilots gathered to listen to the radio broadcast. His brain marinated in whiskey, he struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible. Hours passed as the men waited in limbo, their party spirit crushed. Barber grew restless and worried that the Garfield, a big cruise ship wallowing at sea, would be a sitting duck for one of the notoriously accurate Japanese bombers. Finally his commanders got word to return to San Francisco, where they’d all learn their assignments for the war. It was now all hands on deck, a message not limited to the Garfield but for all of America.
SECOND LIEUTENANT THOMAS G. LANPHIER, JR., WAS FAST ASLEEP in a hotel room in San Francisco when his father called to tell him to get up and turn on the radio—right now. Tom Jr. obeyed the orders. He launched his wiry frame out of bed, his curly dark hair all tousled, and switched on the radio. His first reaction to the Japanese attack was shock; his next thought was what it would mean for his unit.
Like Rex Barber, Lanphier was a neophyte fighter pilot. He had just graduated from cadet training school and earned his wings the prior month and was newly assigned to Hamilton Field north of the city. And like Besby Holmes, he had recently celebrated a birthday, turning twenty-six on November 27. Unlike either of them, though, Lanphier was a military brat, his father a celebrated career army officer.
Lanphier, in fact, had been born in Panama City while his father was stationed there. He had then lived briefly in several locales until his teen years, when the family had moved to Detroit, Michigan. His father had been transferred to nearby Selfridge Field to take command of its prestigious 1st Pursuit Group, the country’s oldest air combat group. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker had flown in one of the group’s squadrons during World War I and become the top-scoring ace in aerial combat in France. Lanphier’s parents had separated when Tom was fifteen, but Detroit had provided a certain stability in terms of living in one place for an extended stretch. He had finished high school in Detroit, excelling at academics and in baseball and earning acceptance to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Unfortunately, his father’s unwise investments had created financial havoc, and Tom Jr.’s college years were chopped up. He’d attend classes for a semester, then drop out to earn money, then return to school. He worked all kinds of jobs—one year as a grocery clerk in a small California town, another year as a ranch hand alongside his younger brother, Charlie. It was during one summer while visiting a classmate at Payette Lake in Idaho that he met his future wife, Phyllis Fraser. Probably his best job was as an apprentice reporter for the San Francisco News. Working nights and weekends, he juggled the reporting even after he returned to school, covering such breaking news as a longshoreman’s strike and also getting a chance to review new books and theatrical plays. It took him eight years to earn his Stanford degree, and he was twenty-six when he did.
The first time he flew was as a teenager in Detroit. Without his father’s knowledge, he pestered a couple of fliers into taking him on joyrides in the back seat of one of the training aircrafts, a Curtiss JN-4 known as a “Jenny.” The rides turned into instruction, and one Saturday morning Lanphier, just thirteen, convinced the pilots to let him fly solo. He was frightened at first, but then exhilaration set in and he flew over Mt. Clemens and Lake St. Clair, looking down on his family’s house. He assumed that at that early hour on a weekend—6:45 a.m.—his father would be asleep. He was wrong. Not only was his base commander father awake, he was already at the airfield to conduct a spot inspection. Lanphier, in effect, landed in his father’s lap, and his father was not pleased. He began to flail at the boy right there on the tarmac, using a length of solid rubber shock absorber. The pain was worse than that of the coat hanger his father usually used. It seemed that his father was more frightened than angry, Lanphier later said, “but that didn’t lessen the pain.”
Despite the beating, his father was the one who would insist that he enlist in the Army Air Corps flying school to train as a pilot. The senior Lanphier traveled to the Stanford campus in the fall of 1940 with the sole purpose of persuading his son to see things his way. His argument was that war was imminent—not with the Germans in Europe, where Hitler was running amok and the United States was already openly allied with Great Britain through a program of “loaning” it US destroyers, but with the Japanese. In war, his father argued, pilots had it way better than soldiers on the ground. Lanphier had a standing job offer at the newspaper but followed his father’s orders; he enlisted soon after his graduation in early 1941. Ten months later, Second Lieutenant Lanphier was at Hamilton Field outside San Francisco awaiting deployment to the Philippines.
During flight training he’d caught on faster than most, impressing his instructors as smart, skilled, and unafraid. Though he was friendly and fairly popular, some pilots nonetheless found him off-putting, a know-it-all quick to act as an expert on all things, even if he was well educated. He’d name-drop and seemed self-absorbed, with a salesman’s personality selling not a product but himself. Lanphier certainly had a lot to live up to: a demanding father who had been a West Pointer, a classmate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a close friend of many of the flying heroes of the time, from Colonel Billy Mitchell to Charles Lindbergh. He had flown combat missions during World War I and was soon to fill the prestigious post of air intelligence officer for Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall in Washington, DC.
Now, in early December 1941, the senior Lanphier had come to San Francisco once more, this time to see his newly minted pilot son off and also to wish him well in his marriage. Like Johnnie Mitchell and Annie Lee Miller, Tom Lanphier and Phyllis Fraser had set their sights on a mid-December wedding. Then all hell had broken loose in Hawaii, and Lanphier Sr. was on the telephone, ordering Tom to get up and turn on the radio. The marriage, and most everything else in his life, would have to take a back seat to war. Racing out of his hotel on the morning of December 7, the only thing young Lanphier could think about was returning to Hamilton Field. He needed to find his squadron leader, Captain Henry “Vic” Viccellio, to find out, what next?
FOR HIS PART, ON SUNDAY, CAPTAIN VICCELLIO WAS HAVING AN early lunch with his wife in a motel restaurant in San Francisco. It was basically a good-bye meal, as Viccellio was shipping out to the Philippines and while he was gone, his wife and year-old son would be staying with her family in Longview, Texas. When he had first learned that his destination would be the Philippines, he had been glad. He and his men would be far away from the Germans and wartime combat, which was fine by him. The pilots under his command were presently scattered, although they would all reunite in the South Pacific. Some, such as Rex Barber, were already en route on the President Garfield; others, such as Tom Lanphier, were awaiting the next ship out. Viccellio had heard some of the complaints about Lanphier and his tendency to self-aggrandizement, but the squadron commander liked him. Lanphier might lack experience, but he possessed the traits Viccellio looked for in pilots: boldness and a nimble mind. Then there was his operations officer, Lieutenant John W. Mitchell. Mitchell was still across the country in Charlotte, North Carolina, preparing to lead a small flight of repaired fighter planes back to Hamilton Field.
Then everything changed. Viccellio and his wife had just started eating when the cook ran into the dining room screaming something about the Japanese, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Needing to hear for himself, Viccellio bolted from the table and followed the cook into the kitchen, where a radio was broadcasting news of the attack. Viccellio switched into automatic pilot, telling his wife he had to leave immediately and return to Hamilton Field as fast as possible. When he got to the gate, the guards refused to let him onto the field even though he was in uniform. It was as if the guards were expecting enemy spies to be pouring in from all directions. Viccellio was apoplectic that the paranoia was so blinding. He was Vic, the Virginia-born captain in full uniform, standing right before the guards’ eyes—how could they possibly mistake him for a Japanese spy? It took arguing for nearly thirty minutes before he was allowed on the grounds. His mind was filled mainly with thoughts about his pilots, their whereabouts, and how nothing would ever be the same. More than ever, he needed his operations officer, who, at age twenty-seven, was one of his best pilots even if he hadn’t yet seen combat.
The problem was that the lovestruck Lieutenant Mitchell was in North Carolina. He’d spent the last two days waiting impatiently to fly cross-country to Hamilton Field. Mitch was thinking about little else than his upcoming leave and his wedding to his fiancée, Annie Lee Miller, and the previous week had been nothing less than an exercise in frustration. Following his reunion on December 3 with his sister Edith and her family in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, he’d returned to the airfield in Westover, Massachusetts, expecting that the P-40 he’d gone north to retrieve would be good to go. The plane was ready, but bad weather had kept him from flying south to North Carolina. “It is a ground fog and is all over the Atlantic seaboard,” he wrote Annie Lee. He was bored with nothing to do but sit around, read, and wait. “I’ve already read everything I can find, except the Woman’s Home Companion.” Two days later, on Friday afternoon, December 5, he caught a break in the weather and hurried down to Charlotte, but after he landed he was told that the lousy forecast for the next day, Saturday, December 6, would likely keep him grounded indefinitely.
Mitch was grinding his teeth, operating in a love bubble and seemingly unaware of anything else going on, obsessed with the weather and with getting himself to Texas in time for his pre-Christmas wedding. In a long letter he wrote to Annie Lee during that vexing week of idleness, he returned to an old theme: the moon, the symbol of their love, Johnnie Bill and the moon. During one subzero night, he’d caught sight of a full moon through the cloud cover and told Annie Lee, “This big ole moon shining outside my window isn’t adding a thing to my mental stability. I keep looking at it, thinking of you and loving you always and forever.”
To kill time that Sunday, he decided to catch a matinee movie to get his mind off his agitation and lose himself in other people’s made-up melodramas. It wasn’t until he was leaving the theater that he noticed real-life drama unfolding before him: the people of Charlotte were moving about in a nervous rush. A newsboy, his arms around a stack of the Charlotte News, came toward him, shouting something about an attack. Mitch heard the words “Japs” and “Pearl Harbor.” He bought a newspaper and saw the huge headlines announcing the Japanese attack. He began reading, immediately recognizing many of the bombed-out locations as places he’d been to and trained at during the four years he had served in the Coast Artillery Corps before deciding to become a pilot. He’d loved his time in Hawaii, and now, according to the news accounts, Oahu sounded like Hell on Earth, with an eventual tally of more than 3,400 Americans dead or wounded and twenty-one vessels of the US Pacific Fleet, including seven battleships, sunk or damaged. Mitch tried all afternoon to reach his squadron commander, and when he finally got through that Sunday night Captain Viccellio told him that he had to get back, that everything was organized chaos and their next moves were uncertain. Except for one thing: they were going to war. Mitch knew that most pilots in the squadron were still works in progress, but the time for maneuvers and war games had run out. This was the real deal.
War was now at the forefront, and Mitch, as soon as weather permitted, was eager to reach Hamilton Field. But although Tom Lanphier and other engaged servicemen might call off their weddings, Johnnie Mitchell did not. Nothing, not even war, was going to interfere with his first getting hitched to Annie Lee Miller.
ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO, MEANWHILE, WAS A STUDY IN SOLEMNITY, seated in a folding chair at the big table in the Nagato’s operations room, his eyes shut as he calmly awaited news from the strike force four thousand miles away. It was after 3:00 a.m. Tokyo time on December 8 when the first messages began streaming in from his men attacking the US fleet at Pearl Harbor: “I hit enemy battleship”; “I bombed Hickam Field”; “Enemy warships torpedoed—outstanding results”; and, then, most reassuringly, “Surprise attack successful.” In the next several hours, Yamamoto learned that only 29 planes in the strike force of 353 planes had been lost, far fewer than expected. More news came in, reporting the successful bombing and invasion of other targets from Malaysia to Hong Kong, Thailand, Wake Island, and the US bases in the Philippines.
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was on the radio by early afternoon announcing the surprise attack to a nation that, although it had been preparing for war, was stunned. He said, “The rise and fall of our Empire and the prosperity or ruin of East Asia literally depend upon the outcome of this war.” Propagandists kicked into gear to calm a public shaken by the suddenness of the war against the United States. Central to their strategy was exploiting Yamamoto’s renown. They had in hand the private letter Yamamoto had penned earlier in the year to the pro-war nationalist Ryoichi Sasakawa. The antiwar missive was Yamamoto’s impassioned warning that it would never be enough for Japan to take over Guam or even Hawaii. He said that the United States could be defeated only by total annihilation, with Japanese forces marching into Washington. “We would have to march into Washington and sign the treaty in the White House,” was what Yamamoto said—a scenario he expressly called impossible. That was why, in his view, the only hope had been creating the shock and awe of a Pearl Harbor attack to persuade the US leaders to settle for an early peace. But Sasakawa and others now saw a new use for the letter—as a vehicle to mold public opinion and to uplift the nation’s combat fervor. They directed the Japanese news agency Domei to release a story that Admiral Yamamoto, in a personal letter to a friend the agency had obtained, had boasted that he was going to crush the United States. Converting the “we” Yamamoto had used in his letter to an “I” and making up new wording altogether, the news story had Yamamoto saying “I shall not be content merely to capture Guam and the Philippines and to occupy Hawaii and San Francisco.” Rather, supremely confident, he was promising to go all the way: “I am looking forward to dictating peace to the United States at the White House in Washington.” His previous antiwar statement had morphed into a bombastic rallying cry for the Japanese people. It was fake news.
Yamamoto knew nothing about the manipulation. He was busy sending his thanks to the strike force and its commander, Admiral Nagumo. But even as he handed out plaudits, he was indisputably the hero above all others, showered with praise and, in the coming days, receiving sacks of fan mail and postcards. With the help of a clerk he did his best to answer them, promising in his own brush hand to continue the good fight on behalf of the country. He took a break to write his lover, Chiyoko, telling her about the letters “pouring into my place.” But, he added, “I am longing only for letters from you night and day.” He also wrote to an old friend, Admiral Sankichi Takahashi, a past commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, discussing the factors leading to “our early victory in the war.” He selflessly credited naval technicians for their breakthroughs that autumn that had made possible aerial torpedoing in shallow waters and for achieving vital improvements in the technique of horizontal bombing. Yamamoto continued, “We were blessed by the War God,” and the Imperial Navy’s “good luck, together with the negligence on the part of the arrogant enemy, enabled us to launch a successful surprise attack.”
One bit of news stung deeply, however. Despite his insistence that the United States be given notice prior to the raid, the admiral learned that the delivery in Washington of Japan’s official war statement had been delayed until after the bombing had begun. He was furious. He’d kept asking during the countdown about the warning and had been assured that it was being taken care of. But it wasn’t—something about a slowdown in the document’s transmission from Tokyo to the Japanese Embassy. No matter what the reason, as much as Yamamoto had wanted the raid to be a properly executed surprise attack, it would now always be cast as sneaky and underhanded.
But amid the crush of celebratory telegrams and congratulations the point seemed minor to most. The sailors aboard Yamamoto’s flagship, Nagato, were giddy with the mission’s apparently overwhelming success. One wrote home saying that his “dream was to go to San Francisco and there head up the accounting unit in the garrison unit after the occupation.” It was as if total victory was at hand. “All of us in the navy,” the sailor continued, have always “dreamed of going to America.”