Yamamoto funeral
Courtesy of the National Museum of the Pacific War
FOLLOWING THE SHOOTDOWN OF YAMAMOTO’S PLANE ON SUNDAY, April 18, 1943, the admiral’s devoted aide, Captain Yasuji Watanabe, tried to fly to Bougainville to join the search but was delayed in Rabaul by a severe tropical storm. When Watanabe reached Buin the next day, he learned that an eleven-man crew of army soldiers, working road construction eighteen miles west of the base, had been redeployed to find the crash site. The crew cut its way through the thick, dark jungle and, near dusk, discovered the remains of the Betty bomber. The air smelled of a repulsive mixture of charred flesh, smoke, and gasoline. Ten bodies were scattered amid the wreckage, and when the searchers saw an eleventh person strapped in a seat thrown from the plane, they were initially fooled into thinking they’d found a survivor. The man’s head drooped forward, however; he was dead. Positive identification was made by virtue of the corpse’s two missing fingers; it was Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto and the ten other bodies were carried to Buin the next day, Tuesday, April 20, where, following autopsies, they were cremated. Watanabe put the admiral’s ashes into a small wooden box lined with papaya leaves. That same day, he transmitted official notice of the admiral’s death to Japanese Imperial Navy headquarters in Tokyo, which kept the devastating news shrouded in secrecy. To maintain the chain of command, a successor was immediately named to take over as commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. His name was Mineichi Koga. Few people, if any, considered him Yamamoto’s equal. Even Koga knew that. “There was only one Yamamoto,” he said following his promotion. “His loss is an unsupportable blow to us.”
Escorting Yamamoto’s ashes, Watanabe and the wounded chief of staff, Matome Ugaki, flew back to Rabaul. Ranking officers were allowed in on the secret of Yamamoto’s death and were able to pay their respects at a hastily assembled private wake. Within days, Watanabe and Ugaki left Rabaul for the fleet’s main anchorage at Truk. From there Ugaki departed on May 7 for Tokyo on the flagship Musashi, to bring the admiral’s remains home. Japan’s leaders, meanwhile, continued to suppress the news. Fearful of a nationwide panic, they needed time. But with the flagship due back in Japan on May 21, navy officials in Tokyo knew they could wait no longer. On May 19, they notified Yamamoto’s wife, Reiko, and the family.
Then, early the next morning, retired Vice Admiral Teikichi Hori drove to Chiyoko Kawai’s modest home in the Tokyo neighborhood of Kamiyacho. When Chiyoko opened the front door, she immediately recognized her lover’s old friend. She had not heard from Isoroku in nearly two months, since his departure for Rabaul, when he’d written one of his longest love letters, saying he was heading south to the war front and would not write again for a while. It had been a letter full of passion and had included a lock of Yamamoto’s hair. Chiyoko studied the unexpected visitor standing in the doorway. She knew Hori well and could tell by his formal bearing and pale demeanor that something was wrong.
Hori said, “I am very sorry to tell you this sad and unexpected news.”
Chiyoko Kawai felt her body stiffen.
“Yamamoto has been killed in action.”
Chiyoko felt faint, free-falling in grief to a place she called “bottomless sorrow.” Her only thought was “Everything is finished.”
Chiyoko’s sorrow became a nation’s. The news of Yamamoto’s death was finally released on Friday, May 21, a month after its occurrence and just as the flagship bearing his ashes dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay. When it was first reported on the radio, the newscaster’s voice broke while reading the statement the government had provided to the media: “Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, gallantly met death aboard a warplane which engaged in an encounter with the enemy while directing strategic operations during April this year.” The statement included news of Admiral Koga’s appointment. It was all covered in less than fifty words, and when the announcer was done reading them, he cried.
Mourners lined the rail tracks two days later as a special train carrying Yamamoto’s elder son, Yoshimasa, and various high-ranking officers traveled from the shipyard to Tokyo. Yasuji Watanabe held up the box containing Yamamoto’s ashes in the window along the way. The widow, Reiko, other family members, and a host of military officials met the train at Tokyo station. The government announced Yamamoto’s posthumous promotion to fleet admiral and his award of the Grand Order of the Chrysanthemum, First Class, the country’s highest honor. The two weeks leading up to the state funeral on June 5, held in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, saw a continuous outpouring of sadness. Thousands upon thousands of citizens turned out along the city streets the day of the funeral to pay their last respects, and in attendance at the service itself were hundreds of government and military leaders, including Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and emissaries of the emperor. The navy band played Chopin’s funeral march during the procession to the park, and Chiyoko Kawai watched discreetly from a spot not far from her home. Afterward, Yamamoto’s ashes were divided in half, with one container interred in a cemetery on the outskirts of Tokyo, next to the country’s most famous naval leader, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, the second transported north to Yamamoto’s hometown of Nagaoka. On June 7, the ashes were buried there in a simple plot near a Zen temple, marked by a hand-carved stone with the words “Killed in action in the South Pacific, April 1943.”
In the weeks leading up to the funeral and during the weeks afterward, Chiyoko Kawai was visited several times by officials, including men she’d once considered friends. The point of the visits was clear—to suppress the story of the long love affair and thus to keep untarnished the reputation of the country’s naval hero. Teikichi Hori came one day and left taking away with him “letters sent from my darling,” as she recorded in her diary. More than once Chiyoko was advised to commit suicide, and in her grief, there were moments she considered doing so. But she did not. She left Tokyo and moved to Numazu City on the coast, where she opened a restaurant, kept a low profile, and, for more than a decade, steadfastly maintained her silence—until a reporter came calling in the spring of 1954. The article that resulted appeared in the Weekly Asahi on April 18 of that year, eleven years after Yamamoto’s death. It was titled “Admiral Yamamoto’s Sweetheart,” and subtitled “The War God Was a Human Being, Too.” Most of the couple’s letters had been seized and destroyed, but Chiyoko had saved a batch of the most precious ones, along with her diaries. She opened up to the interviewer and talked emotionally about her love for Isoroku Yamamoto, recalling how they’d first met, how they’d stayed together, and how, after his death, she’d plummeted into a bottomless sorrow. But with the war now over and from the perspective of Japan’s defeat, she’d arrived at a different view. She told the reporter, “It might have been rather fortunate for Yamamoto to be killed in action.” Had he lived through to the end, she said, he might have “been hanged as a war criminal. So, I no longer feel sorrow.”
IN THE UNITED STATES, THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF YAMAMOTO’S death was greeted triumphantly. “Public enemy number one of the American Navy is dead!” the young Chet Huntley announced on CBS radio to start a lengthy newscast on the death of a Japanese military icon who, at Pearl Harbor, “in about sixty minutes inflicted more hurt on that force than ever occurred in all our history.” In newspapers across the country Yamamoto’s death was front-page news, with nearly every story repeating the jingoistic boast he had supposedly made after the Pearl Harbor attack—that he would march victoriously into the White House—when in fact his statement, made before the attack, had expressed deep worry about war with the United States. The distorted version was now a permanent tagline, demonizing him to the fullest. Typical was the Washington Post headline: “Yamamoto Killed; Boasted He’d Dictate Terms in White House.” Much of the reaction in the United States was powered by revenge. Commander Edwin T. Layton, the intelligence chief who before the war had known Yamamoto personally and who as intelligence chief to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz had hand delivered the code breakers’ work on Yamamoto’s fatal trip, certainly felt that way. “All of us who were there that day, and experienced the shock and violence of Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack—and who lost shipmates and friends there—can be forgiven, I hope, if we were pleased in our inner hearts when Pearl Harbor was avenged, in part at least, by Yamamoto being ambushed and killed,” he wrote later.
In Washington, a larger-than-usual gaggle of reporters gathered late in the morning of May 21 for a press conference in President Roosevelt’s office. The president, seated at a desk decorated with a fresh bouquet of red roses, seemed to enjoy the extra numbers. He was dressed in a light gray suit with a blue necktie and casually smoked a cigarette as he bantered with the newsmen in their typical cat-and-mouse game where he dodged most of their questions and offered up only the information he wanted to. He began by noting Maritime Day was the next day, May 22, and he reminded the assembled press that a year ago he’d used the occasion to praise the nation’s shipyard workers. The reporters grew restless. They wanted the president’s take on the big wartime news of the day: the word from Japan about Yamamoto’s death. But FDR said nothing, just looked across the desk through a haze of blue smoke. The press persisted: this was the admiral who’d said he would dictate peace terms in the White House; didn’t the president have a comment?
FDR’s eyebrows circled high in “calculated, Barrymorish astonishment,” as a Time magazine correspondent wrote later that day in a memorandum to his editor. Finally, FDR spoke: “Gosh!” That was it. The president was feigning surprise, as if the report out of Japan about Yamamoto was news to him—good news, to be sure, but completely unexpected. Every reporter in the room could tell the president was role-playing. “Reporters got it,” the Time correspondent noted, and everyone began laughing along with the president.
One reporter asked, “May we quote that, ‘Gosh’?”
The president chuckled “an affirmative.”
The reporters did not know the exact extent of the president’s knowledge, but they did know he knew much more about the Yamamoto shootdown than he was letting on with his phony wonderment. Indeed, his coyness was part of the administration’s larger playbook for not doing or saying anything that might put at risk the United States’ decryption of Japan’s codes as the basis of the shootdown. It was better to seem bewildered and pleased at the serendipitous turn of events, and there was no question that FDR, who’d been briefed weeks earlier on the work of Mitch’s men, was very pleased. Several days later, he composed a faux letter to Yamamoto’s widow—a note he shared only privately with staff—revealing a dark, even cruel gloating. It read:
Dear Widow Yamamoto:
Time is a great leveler and somehow I never expected to see the old boy at the White House anyway. Sorry I can’t attend the funeral because I approve of it.
Hoping he is where we know he ain’t.
Very sincerely yours,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
IT WASN’T AS IF THE US LEADERS OR THE GENERAL PUBLIC thought that Yamamoto’s death would instantly result in Japan’s defeat. Instead, the death was a capstone of a critical pivot in the Pacific war, a war that had begun with a frightening Japanese dominance in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor but that more recently had turned in favor of the United States with the victory at Midway the previous year and the long and bloody battle for control of Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942. Yamamoto’s death boosted Americans’ confidence, while in Japan morale plunged. It was a blow that one American journalist called “comparable to what the loss of Gen. Douglas MacArthur would be to the United States.” The government-controlled media in Japan would continue to try to inspire the shocked and disheartened public by invoking Yamamoto’s memory. “His stirring fighting spirit lives on in the Imperial Japanese Navy” was a typical rallying cry. But the reality was that the navy’s leading strategist was gone, and, as one military scholar noted, “the Japanese felt lost at sea without their beloved admiral.” The Pacific war would continue, brutally, for two more years, but from that point on it tilted always in the United States’ favor, with Japan’s navy never again prevailing in a significant clash. Yamamoto’s inspired leadership and originality had proved to be unique.
FOR MITCH AND HIS MEN IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, THE NEWS FROM Tokyo was welcome confirmation. “We had been 99 percent sure we’d killed the SOB,” Mitch said, “but it was possible he’d bailed out and we hadn’t seen him.” Listening to the report on the radio, Mitch noticed that “the Japs gave the date but little else.” The details didn’t matter at that point, however. “We knew for sure then we’d gotten him.”
Mitch and his men had awakened the Monday after the April 18 mission with serious hangovers from their late-night partying. Still, they’d managed to gather on the airfield for a group photograph. The fifteen mission pilots posed in front of several P-38 Lightnings, with Mitch crouched front and center, Rex Barber to his immediate right. Missing, of course, was Ray Hine. Vice Admiral Pete Mitscher, meanwhile, had ordered another flight to head north from Fighter Two toward Bougainville. The idea was to carry on, business as usual, to make it seem as though the Yamamoto encounter had been coincidence rather than the result of advance knowledge. Following Mitch’s flight with another one would encourage the idea that the first flight had not been a special operation, and Mitscher continued sending P-38s to the Bougainville area for the next several weeks.
But Mitch was not involved in the cover-up flights. Nor were any of the other pilots who had flown the Yamamoto mission. They were done—grounded that first day and the next and the one after that. It didn’t have anything to do with their wild partying; it was because they knew too much. “They wouldn’t let us fly any more on Guadalcanal,” Doug Canning said. “We knew the code had been broken and they didn’t want a leak if we were captured.” They were on their way out of the war. Mitch, still at Fighter Two when the Japanese announced Yamamoto’s death, was ready to depart any day. Others were already gone; Canning, Mitch’s wingman, Jack Jacobson, and Besby Holmes were in New Caledonia, while Tom Lanphier and Rex Barber were in Auckland, New Zealand, enjoying a rest leave.
In the days since the shootdown, the senior command, especially Admiral Nimitz and his intelligence chief, Layton, had pressed upon Mitscher and Bull Halsey on New Caledonia the need to keep lips sealed regarding the prior intelligence of Yamamoto’s trip. The last thing anyone wanted was a scare or worse, like the one following Midway when the Chicago Tribune had run a story disclosing that Nimitz and the US Navy had known about Yamamoto’s battle plans ahead of time. That story had certainly put the code breakers’ work at risk.
On Guadalcanal the problem was that the Yamamoto shootdown became an open secret the moment Tom Lanphier began claiming he’d shot down the enemy admiral. The challenge became to contain the news. Making matters more difficult, accolades kept coming for Mitch and the others, praise that did not reference Yamamoto but was hardly subtle. The top army general in the Pacific, Lieutenant General M. F. Harmon, for example, was over the moon about the performance of his army air forces fliers. In letters to Mitch and to the Army’s top brass in Washington, DC, during the weeks after the shootdown, Harmon was mindful of the “Navy’s insistence on secrecy” given that the “public knowledge of all the facts involved would adversely affect the intelligence sources.” Yet he wrote a letter hailing Mitch “for the superior manner” in which he’d led “an important air action [author’s italics] in the vicinity of Kahili, Bougainville Island, on April 18.” Said Harmon about the mission leader, “This operation was excellently conceived and splendidly executed.” And before the Japanese had even made public Yamamoto’s death, Vice Admiral Mitscher told the P-38 pilots that promotions were forthcoming and paperwork was under way for everyone to get honors. Eleven of the pilots were in line to receive a Navy Cross for heroism, while Mitch, Lanphier, Barber, Holmes, and Raymond Hine (posthumously) were up for the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest possible award for bravery in combat, a medal dating back to the Civil War and presented by the president on behalf of Congress.
Mitch could hardly contain himself. “I’m tickled to death over being recommended for the Medal of Honor,” he told Annie Lee in his May 3 letter, the one saying he was coming home. “Of course, I haven’t got it yet, but enough of the brass hats got their signatures and endorsements on it, and I’m pretty sure it will go through.
“The President hangs that one on—and you will be with me.”
SOON ENOUGH, HOWEVER, THE PROSPECT FOR HIGH HONORS went sour. Tom Lanphier and Rex Barber, careless in the company they kept while enjoying a breather in New Zealand, ruined things for everyone. They hit the golf course every day the week they were there, playing with one of General Harmon’s aides. To fill out the foursome, they agreed to let J. Norman Lodge join them. Lodge was a seasoned war correspondent for the Associated Press. He’d heard about the shootdown and had been gathering material for a story, which wasn’t too difficult; by early May, anyone who’d been on Guadalcanal knew at least the general outline of the mission. While Lanphier and Barber were focusing on their stroke and having a good time, the enterprising reporter was using the outings to nail down his information. “He would talk about the mission,” Barber said, “and ask us if this or that was about right. We would agree or, if he was incorrect on details, correct him.”
Lanphier and Barber should have known better. The next week the pilots arrived at the navy base at Noumea, New Caledonia, and not two days passed before they and their army officer golfing buddy were summoned to Admiral Bull Halsey’s ship. The three men were informed that reporter Norman Lodge had submitted a detailed account of the mission to censors for clearance. The blockbuster story had landed on Halsey’s desk, and, although it had been suppressed, Halsey’s legendary anger was not. The admiral screamed at them for talking to the reporter. He roared about security and their responsibility regarding classified information. He said they were unfit and should be court-martialed. Then he grabbed papers off a nearby table. “See these pages,” he shouted. “Your citations for the Congressional Medal.” He waved five pieces of paper—citations not just for Lanphier and Barber but for Mitch, Besby Holmes, and Raymond Hine. He trashed all of them, saying they would not be getting the medals. “You’re not worthy,” he said in disgust. But, and only because of the mission’s importance, he would forward paperwork for five Navy Crosses.
The tirade finally ended. Barber stood there stunned. He and the other two saluted, but Halsey just glared and pointed to the door. “That was the end of our meeting,” Barber said afterward. “We were not asked one question nor did any one of us speak.”
THE FIRST WEEK OF JUNE SAW MITCH FINALLY MAKING THE LONG trip home, landing first in San Francisco and flying from there to San Antonio for a grand reunion with Annie Lee—their first time under the same roof since his departure for the South Pacific in January 1942. The couple had less than a week together, however. The Army Air Forces had plans for Mitch, and by mid-June, he was on his way to Washington, DC, where he and Tom Lanphier received a hearty welcome in military circles. It seemed that plenty of people knew about their role in bringing down Japan’s greatest naval leader, and the Army’s top commanders wanted somehow to showcase them. They couldn’t do it in connection with the Yamamoto mission; nothing had changed about keeping its details secret. But Mitch and Tom could be presented as ace pilots who’d helped turn the tide in the Pacific piloting the new fighter plane, Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning. They attended a confidential debriefing on June 15 with officials in the Office of Air Staff Intelligence and then huddled with the Army’s press officers. On June 17, the Department of War issued a press release: “Two Outstanding Fighter Pilots of AAF Tell of South Pacific Air Battles.” They next appeared on the popular radio show Army Hour, rolling out their main talking points on the prowess of “our baby, the P-38,” which Lanphier called the “best all-purpose fighter plane ever built. It will go faster, higher, and as far as any fighter plane ever built, and deal out more punishment.”
Then they hit the road. The two traveled to bases around the country to meet with pilots in training and pump them up with stories of aerial combat against the Japanese. And they did press interviews at nearly every stop, trumpeting the P-38 Lightning. It became the Mitch and Tom road show, or, more accurately, the Tom and Mitch show. Tom seemed to do most of the talking and get most of the press attention—favoritism fueled in part by Lanphier’s father, the army colonel who worked the Washington press corps on his son’s behalf. Within days of the pilots’ mid-June press debut, for example, the Washington Post ran a story about Tom, “son of Col. Thomas G. Lanphier,” with no mention of Mitch. The headline: “Lanphier Stars as ‘Hot’ Pilot in Pacific War.” The Los Angeles Times’ front-page story at least mentioned Mitch but quoted only Tom. The photograph that ran with the story showed Mitch deferentially holding a match to light Tom’s cigarette.
The two zigzagged along the West Coast on their speaking tour, mostly together but sometimes splitting up. They spoke to cadets at March Field in Riverside, California; at the training school in Merced; at Muroc Army Airfield (later renamed Edwards Air Force Base); and at Minter Field in Bakersfield. At the Cal-Aero Academy at Chino Airport, Lanphier flew a demonstration in “the art of knocking Japs out of the sky.” While at Minter Field, Mitch put on an air show to climax his talk to about eight hundred cadets. Besby Holmes showed up to watch, and the two went out that night for drinks and a spaghetti dinner.
The star pilots spent the rest of the summer in California, managing to mix in plenty of nights out on the town. They even had their Hollywood moment: staying at the Hollywood Knickerbocker, mingling with film stars and directors in the splendor of the Spanish Colonial Revival–style hotel. Tom Lanphier was taken one night to Jack Benny’s house for a dinner party hosted by Jack’s wife, Mary Livingstone, herself an actress and comedian. Other nights, top executives of Lockheed Aircraft, maker of the P-38 Lightning, hosted them at their Hollywood mansions, where at parties Mitch and Lanphier socialized with the film stars Ellen Drew, Wallace Beery, and Jimmy Stewart, the actor turned air force captain. Stewart flew the B-24 Liberator, a heavy bomber, and over drinks and dinner, he couldn’t stop asking Mitch and Lanphier about the speedy P-38. By night’s end, the group had hatched a plan to get Stewart up in a Lightning. Mitch and Lanphier were due to report the next morning to the base in Santa Ana for a meeting with the commander of West Coast pilot training. They had Stewart tag along and, after the meeting, let the actor try flying a P-38. Mitch wrote to Annie Lee all about it: “Stewart was really tickled. He is a fine fellow and we really enjoyed having him around.”
In August, Mitch sneaked off to see Annie Lee in San Antonio. One day while there, he took a plane from a nearby base and, in fun, buzzed her parents’ house in El Campo. Another day, he and Annie Lee went out with his former wingman, Jack Jacobson, who happened to be passing through with his wife. But after a few days Mitch was back on the road, traveling beyond California to Oregon and Washington and then across country to a slew of bases in the Deep South, including army airfields in Greenfield and Grenada, Mississippi. Mitch spent a weekend in Enid with his father, Noah, and his stepmother, Eunice, at the family homestead. Father and son caught up; it had been several years since they’d seen each other. They played checkers, and Mitch told him about the war.
One night late in the fall, Mitch had a dream: he’d gone out to eat, and when he returned, there was a message for him to call President Roosevelt, the secretary of war, and some senators. “I couldn’t figure it out, but figured finally that I was receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.” Awake, he knew that the dream was a fantasy; he’d learned months earlier about Bull Halsey’s tantrum following Rex Barber and Tom Lanphier’s foolishness with the newspaper reporter. In fact, he’d already received an honor that was less prized than the medal originally intended for him. It had happened during a stopover in San Francisco. The ceremony, held in a general’s office, was simple, brief, and anticlimactic: he and Lanphier had been presented with Navy Crosses “on the authority of Admiral W. F. Halsey, commander of the South Pacific area.” The award cited their “extraordinary heroism and distinguished service” and mentioned Mitch’s leadership, his “record of eight Japanese planes shot down, approximately 100 operational missions and 200 hours in combat.” Even so, the moment was bittersweet. “Of course, I was glad to get it,” Mitch wrote Annie Lee. “But I had been hoping for the Medal of Honor, so it was disappointing.”
By the time of the dream, Mitch had been spending a fair amount of time wondering what his next job would be. He’d left Guadalcanal in June, and now it was November. Five months on the road, the song and dance of mainly talking about, rather than flying, the P-38, had grown tiresome. Then, in early December, he finally got word: he was assigned to take command of the 412th Fighter Group at Muroc Army Airfield, a newly created unit for training pilots and testing fighter planes. Mitch wasn’t so sure he wanted to do that. He was itching for more combat, realizing after months of inactivity that a life of all talk, no action wasn’t really for him.
THE US MILITARY’S TARGETED KILL OF YAMAMOTO ON APRIL 18, 1943, proved historic, but there have been many more “targeted-kill operations” since, particularly with the dawn of the twenty-first century. The most famous was on May 2, 2011. That was the day US Navy Seal Team 6 raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Whereas Yamamoto had been behind the devastating Pearl Harbor raid, Osama had been behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that had killed nearly three thousand people and injured another six thousand as two hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City, another plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field. In its wake, Congress granted the president broad powers “to use all necessary and appropriate force” to hunt down Al-Qaeda terrorists in legislation titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF). Practically overnight, targeting leaders of terrorist groups—“Decapitation of high-value individuals”—became vital to counterterrorism programs overseen by presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, especially through the use of cruise missile strikes and armed, pilotless drones.
The expanding practice drew criticism. Human rights monitors, international lawyers, and the American Civil Liberties Union questioned the lawfulness of targeted-kill operations and condemned their collateral damage—the killing of innocent civilians. In response, Obama’s attorney general, Eric H. Holder, Jr., made clear the administration’s view. “It is entirely lawful—under both United States law and applicable law of war principles—to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces,” he told an audience at Northwestern University School of Law on March 5, 2012. “This is not a novel concept. In fact, during World War II, the United States tracked the plane flying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—the commander of Japanese forces in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway—and shot it down specifically because he was on board.”
The Yamamoto shootdown nearly always comes up in today’s discussion of targeted-kill operations, not just as a historical marker but as a model of success. Critics of targeted kills often argue that they are not as effective as their proponents claim. “Decapitation does not increase the likelihood of organizational collapse,” concluded the scholar Jenna Jordan in “When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation,” an analysis of nearly three hundred incidents occurring over a fifty-year period.
In contrast, the Yamamoto mission, hastily planned and overseen by Major John Mitchell, is cited as an exemplar of a targeted kill. “It was highly effective,” wrote US Air Force Major Adonis C. Arvanitakis in a more recent study examining the Yamamoto mission. The reason? Yamamoto was no ordinary naval leader but larger than life. “What they understood in 1943 and what we need to understand today is that the targeted killing needs to be more than eliminating the next person in the chain of command,” Arvanitakis wrote. The architect of the Pearl Harbor attack “was truly unique, irreplaceable. His elimination had long lasting effects in terms of Japanese morale and will.” US military leaders were hardly naive, however. They didn’t expect Japan’s immediate collapse, noted Arvanitakis; rather, they saw killing Yamamoto as “necessary to helping a larger cumulative effect.”
MITCH CONTINUED TO CONTRIBUTE TO THAT CUMULATIVE EFFECT, although it took a while for him to see combat again. He took over the new 412th Fighter Group at the start of 1944, and for the next eighteen months he trained cadets and oversaw aircraft testing. The fact that the 412th was the Army Air Forces’ first jet unit made the job tolerable. He and his pilots focused primarily on testing two turbojet-powered fighters in development, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star and the Bell P-59 Airacomet. Mitch had little good to say about the P-59, calling it “a colossal flop,” while he thought the P-80 showed promise; eventually, in fact, the P-80 became the first jet fighter used by the Army Air Forces in combat operations. In terms of pilots, he was proud of his work training them to fly the new jets. For him, a highlight was being the first army air forces pilot to fly a jet across the continental United States, departing from Buffalo, New York, and landing in Palmdale, California, just north of Los Angeles. During that time, he also won a promotion to lieutenant colonel, and on January 24, 1945, he and Annie Lee welcomed their firstborn, Theresa Ann Mitchell, whom they nicknamed Terri.
Even so, Mitch jumped at the chance to return to the South Pacific a few months after Terri was born, when his friend and former commander, Vic Viccellio, asked if he wanted to help lead the 15th Fighter Group. “Snapped up Col. Viccellio’s offer,” Mitch wrote in his diary. He packed up and drove Annie Lee and baby Terri to Texas so they could stay with her parents in El Campo, and on April 15, 1945, he departed from Fairfield, California. It was two years to the day from when he had been on Guadalcanal, expecting to be shipped out, and had been summoned to take on the Yamamoto mission.
Five days later, after stopovers in Hawaii, Johnston Atoll, Kwajalein Island, and Saipan, Mitch arrived at his destination: Iwo Jima, the volcanic island the US Marines had just captured from the Japanese. “On the way over my feelings and thoughts were varied,” he wrote. “Sometimes I felt elated at returning to combat and then I felt depressed at leaving my dear wife and little baby so far away and in such a lonesome spot there in El Campo.” He found he liked Iwo Jima better than Guadalcanal; the men slept in tents on cots with rubber mattresses, and, as he noted in his diary, “there are no mosquitoes.” Perhaps the best thing was that, unlike Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima wasn’t getting bombed all the time. “So when we crawl in the sack at night we know we are going to sleep well.”
Over the next several months, Mitch flew a North American Aviation P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter, escorting B-29 Superfortresses on raids over Japan. He flew some twenty-odd missions, each covering about six hundred miles and lasting more than six hours, much longer than what he’d been used to during his service on Guadalcanal. Once again he displayed his combat skills, shooting down four enemy aircraft. “I got one Zeke and should have got another,” he wrote after one of the kills. “I saw the bastard trying to get out, but he never made it.”
Mitch was on Iwo Jima when VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day, was celebrated on May 8, 1945, marking the formal surrender of Nazi Germany. “A great day for us all,” he wrote excitedly in his diary, while also noting “No celebration here. The question here is will the Japs elect to fight it out or will they give up.” They elected to fight it out on their own until, three months later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “It’s almost unbelievable,” Mitch wrote, “and yet it was announced by President Truman, so it must be so.” Following Japan’s surrender, Mitch returned to Texas, where he reunited with Annie Lee and baby Terri.
Whereas other members of his squadron on Guadalcanal had left the service in the months after the Yamamoto shootdown, Mitch had chosen to stay on, not just through the end of the war but well beyond. Promoted to colonel in 1945, he spent the next several years relocating his family from one army base to another, in Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas, even Alaska. While they were in Mississippi, a second daughter, named Joan, was born on November 4, 1946. Then, upon the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950, Mitch volunteered for duty. He flew more than 110 combat missions as commander of the 51st Fighter Wing, during which he shot down four MiG-15s, the Russian-built jet fighters used by the North Koreans. He returned home after an armistice was signed in late July 1953. His final posting was at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan, as commander, Detroit Air Defense Sector. His son, John William Mitchell, Jr., nicknamed Billy, was born there on October 14, 1958. He retired soon afterward, having served more than two decades. Mitch and Annie Lee moved to California’s Marin County and bought a home in San Anselmo, just north of San Francisco. They were only ten miles from the base at Hamilton Field where in 1940, fresh out of cadet school, Mitch had discovered that he was born to fly. He became a cofounder of an oil and gas business, dabbled in commodities, and stayed in touch with a number of his friends from the war, namely Rex Barber, Doug Canning, and his former wingman Jack Jacobson.
IT WAS IMMEDIATELY AFTER JAPAN SURRENDERED THAT THE question of who actually had shot down Isoroku Yamamoto escalated from an argument at Fighter Two, when Tom Lanphier had staked his claim, into open hostility. With the war over, the military and the pilots no longer had to be coy about the shootdown mission—either about the source of the admiral’s itinerary being the code breakers’ decryption or about the interception itself. The Army Air Forces was ready: on September 11, 1945, it issued a publicity release providing putative answers to the aerial drama and identifying Tom Lanphier as the single slayer of Yamamoto. The news release was based on the so-called Fighter Interception Report written by two intelligence officers at Fighter Two after Mitchell and his men had returned from the mission. None of the pilots had ever seen a copy of the report; many later recalled Lanphier saying that he’d assist in its preparation and take care of things. Which he apparently did—in his favor. The report described Lanphier battling the escorting Zeros and then shooting down the lead Betty bomber, the one with Yamamoto aboard. Lanphier, the report said, had “nosed over, and went down to the tree tops after his escaping objective [the Betty]. He came into it broadside—fired his burst—a wing flew off and the plane went flaming to earth.” The debriefing report became the official record of the historic mission.
Lanphier was ready, too. For weeks the onetime newspaperman had been writing a dramatic retelling of the mission, and on the same day as the Army Air Forces’ press release, the North American Newspaper Alliance distributed the first installment of his six-part series. Newspapers all around the country began publishing his account. In its coverage that first day, the New York Times accompanied the first-person story “describing how he shot down Admiral Yamamoto” with a separate news article reporting Lanphier’s feat. The front-page headline: “Yamamoto’s Killer Identified by Army.” The story began, “Lieut. Col. Thomas G. Lanphier, 29, Army Air Forces pilot, was identified by the War Department today as the man who shot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Navy, in April 1943.” The story mentioned Mitch but no other pilots. Lanphier’s place in history seemed secured.
When they read Lanphier’s series, Mitch, Rex Barber, and other pilots were apoplectic. “He’s just got a big mouth,” Mitch wrote Annie Lee from Iwo Jima on September 16, having heard the news of Lanphier’s heroics on the radio. Mitch’s father, Noah, sent him Lanphier’s series. Mitch was disgusted, calling Lanphier a publicity hound. “He really hogs the show. Of course, I didn’t shoot Yamamoto down, but he doesn’t know if he or Barber did.” The feud was on, and it lasted for decades, as Lanphier was officially credited with the Yamamoto kill, a status he exploited in the 1960s as a top executive at Convair, working his connections in the military to win lucrative contracts for the aircraft maker. Those protesting the Lanphier narrative were frustrated—the equivalent of fighting city hall. Making matters worse was the eventual realization that there had not been three Betty bombers in Yamamoto’s inspection flight—as the pilots had concluded back at the base and as had been recorded in the interception report. Based on information released during the 1950s by Japanese officials, there had been just the two bombers—the one carrying Ugaki, which was shot down over water, and the other carrying Yamamoto, which was shot down over jungle. When previously it had been thought there were three, Barber and Lanphier had been credited as having shot down two of them over the jungle. The dispute was about Lanphier claiming that Yamamoto had been in the bomber he’d shot down, when there was no way to determine which of the two bombers he had been in. With the correction, it was now clear that only one Betty had been shot down over jungle—and that it had held Yamamoto.
No one had ever disputed Barber’s account that while Lanphier had courageously veered off to deflect the three escort Zeros, Barber had attacked the Betty bomber over the jungle. The new information thus gave credence to the view that Barber had shot down Yamamoto and that Lanphier hadn’t gotten Yamamoto at all or, if he had somehow looped back, he’d fired a few shots at a wounded plane that was already going down. The official mission report came under increasing attack. Barber, Mitch, and other veterans who supported Barber argued that Lanphier’s account was a concoction. Finally, in the 1970s, the Yamamoto kill was reviewed by two historians for the Office of Air Force History. With only one Betty bomber destroyed over the jungle, it was decided in 1973 that the two pilots had shot at the same plane. The official credit for the kill was therefore split between Barber and Lanphier.
The revision did not end the hostility among the mission pilots, however. Lanphier never budged, insisting he’d been wronged and had been solely responsible for killing Yamamoto. He wrote an article for Reader’s Digest titled “I Shot Down Yamamoto” and then, in the mid-1980s, wrote his life story in a manuscript called “At All Costs Reach and Destroy.” He was never able to find a publisher for the 352-page manuscript. Lanphier died of cancer on November 26, 1987, in La Jolla, California, one day shy of his seventy-second birthday. Meanwhile, Rex Barber and his supporters, including Mitch, lobbied for years to convince air force officials to award Barber sole credit for the kill. They spoke out at veterans’ gatherings and panels; filed appeals with various military review boards, such as the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records; and even went to US District Court. Each step of the way Barber presented new evidence, some of which had been gathered from trips to the crash site on Bougainville, but the ruling splitting the credit has never been changed. Rex Barber died on July 26, 2001.
IN THE SPRING OF 1943, JOHN MITCHELL AND HIS PILOTS USUALLY awakened to the sun rising east of Fighter Two, a first light that skimmed across the ocean’s surface before reaching the tents set against the small hill overlooking the airfield. Seventy-six years later, on May 9, 2019, the sun rose at 6:24 a.m., its morning rays moving across the ocean’s surface to brighten the area where Mitch, Rex Barber, Tom Lanphier, and the others had once been bivouacked. Except instead of tents, there are now tiny homes—shacks, really. And instead of a runway below the hill, there are the green fairways of the Honiara Golf Course. The far end of the airfield, where the planes once set down, is home to a thriving beer brewery.
Whether at the former Fighter Two airfield or about two miles away at the former Henderson Field, it’s nearly impossible today to find any sign of the US presence during the war years of 1942 and 1943. To be sure, there is the Guadalcanal American Memorial, sitting atop Skyline Ridge overlooking the Matanikau River, a monument honoring the US and Allied soldiers and sailors who fought during the Guadalcanal campaign. And there is the Vilu War Museum on the island’s northeast coast, beyond the point where the Japanese were concentrated once the Americans invaded in August 1942. It’s a private outdoor museum where, over the years, a family has collected a variety of Japanese and US guns and relics, including a rusted, broken-down P-38 Lightning. But actual battlefields and encampments are not memorialized as war sites elsewhere have been, whether in Europe to commemorate action there or in the United States to remember the Civil War. The absence of monuments on Guadalcanal is no surprise, really. Neither Japan nor the United States had had any prior history on or control of the island; rather, during the Pacific war the troops of the two countries came, fought, and left. Today, the island’s downtown is a bustling port, its main street congested with traffic, its friendly residents filling a central market featuring fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, and handmade crafts. The port of call, Honiara, is the capital of all of the Solomon Islands, with its more than 900 islands, of which 147 are inhabited.
It takes knowledge and imagination to picture Mitch hustling down from his tent, climbing into the cockpit of a P-38, and heading after Washing Machine Charlie to end the nightly, noisy raid that disrupted everyone’s sleep. Or to picture the Yamamoto mission pilots returning from Bougainville, landing one after another to congratulations all around—before, that is, Lanphier and Barber had words over who actually got the admiral.
The bitter, prolonged controversy has tended to dominate the treatment of the historic mission, overshadowing, as some historians have noted, the true heroes: the code breakers at Station Hypo, the planners in Admiral Pete Mitscher’s tent, and, most of all, mission commander John W. Mitchell. Although Mitch’s key role rarely goes unacknowledged, discussion is often consumed by the contentious question: Who got Yamamoto? It’s unfortunate. “None of the accounts of the Yamamoto Mission give full credit to the superb leadership and navigational ability of Major John Mitchell,” Lieutenant Colonel Besby Holmes wrote in an article for Popular Aviation in the late 1960s. Pilot Doug Canning, a panelist at a Yamamoto Mission Retrospective in 1988, said, “I’d also like to say one more time, the greatest fighter pilot that ever lived on this earth, is John Mitchell.”
Mitch was due the Congressional Medal of Honor for the Yamamoto mission. It was something he had dreamed about but was denied through no fault of his own. Starting in the late 1980s, some veterans sought to correct that error. They called themselves the Second Yamamoto Mission Association (SYMA). The group rounded up letters of support and then persuaded Representative Michael Bilirakis (R-FL) of the House Armed Services Committee to sponsor legislation in 1993 to authorize the president to award Mitch the medal. The goal was to make it happen before Mitch died. Mitch, turning eighty, was in treatment for pancreatic cancer. House Resolution 3017 eventually attracted sixty-eight cosponsors, divided evenly along party lines, but the measure never gained momentum and stayed stuck in committee. Colonel John W. Mitchell died in San Anselmo, California, on November 15, 1995. He was eighty-one.
Tom Lanphier never showed remorse for his conduct on the golf links in New Zealand that had proved so damaging, costing not only himself but innocents, such as Mitch, the Congressional Medal of Honor as well—men who had had nothing to do with leaking information to an enterprising journalist. Lanphier waved off the indiscretion, saying that everybody on Guadalcanal was talking about the shootdown; his chatting up a reporter was much ado about nothing. Rex Barber, however, was different. He was racked with guilt. “I have felt badly over this ever since—not for myself or Lanphier, as we should not have talked at all,” he wrote to a historian in 1989. For Barber, who passed away in 2001, it was all about Mitch and the damage done. Mitch, he said, was so deserving, “and should have received the Congressional Medal. I wish to this day I could do something about this injustice.”