THE FIRST ONE APPEARED FROM THE CLEAR BLUE SKY EARLY ON A Sunday morning, out of nowhere, it seemed, as sailors, soldiers, and civilians aboard ships, at airfields, in bunkhouses and in bungalows were just waking up, some shaving, others showering, still others already sipping coffee in the mess halls where they gathered for breakfast, many nursing hangovers after a night spent socializing on shore leave or at the base itself. Indeed, at Wheeler Field, some were still going strong, wearing tuxedoes and stumbling out of the officers’ club at 7:51 a.m. into the bright light of day, laughing and carrying on after their all-night party. These men dismissed the hum of engines in the sky, assuming that Navy planes were performing maneuvers, and they likely felt sorry for the pilots having to fly at the crack of dawn, on God’s day, no less, while most of the thousands of men and women assigned to Pearl Harbor were off duty. But as the hum grew louder, some of the men in their tuxes realized the engine noise did not sound quite right, different from their Navy planes, and in that moment the casual mood turned dark. As the planes closed in, the rising sun insignias on their wings were revealed, and in the next seconds a wave of Japanese dive-bombers opened fire, strafing and dropping their payload. The officers in tuxedoes, festive seconds before, ran for their lives, just as Americans stationed all around the Hawaiian island of Oahu did, as the shock and awe at Wheeler Field were repeated in the next nine minutes at other airfields and naval stations and then extended to the sprawling US Pacific Fleet moored at Pearl Harbor.
It was a surprise naval aerial assault involving 183 Japanese attack planes and bombers loaded with armor-piercing bombs, shallow-water torpedoes, and machine guns, all of which, in a flash, found targets on the ground and in the harbor. Bombs whistled to earth, sending up columns of oily black smoke from the hangars they flattened and the rows and rows of US fighter planes they wrecked, while men raced outside, dazed and wild eyed, pulling on pants, shirts, or a bath towel, dodging ear-shattering explosions, bullets, and shrapnel, some reaching safety, others not, their bodies bludgeoned by the blasts and bullets. At the mess hall at Hickham Field, a bomb plummeting through the roof exploded, killing some thirty-five men who only had thoughts about what to eat for breakfast on their minds. At 7:55 a.m., the Nevada ship’s band was readying to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” when two Japanese planes strafed the deck and shredded an American flag, just as an officer at the Ford Island Command Center at 7:58 a.m. frantically typed what became one of the most famous radio dispatches ever: AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT DRILL. At the same moment, an ensign using binoculars aboard the battleship Arizona stared at Japanese planes, unimpededly dropping one bomb after another onto Ford Island, before he broke to sound the ship’s three-blast alarm signaling an air raid, a howling siren that made its way throughout the six-hundred-foot-long destroyer. Men on other ship decks, too, gaped at the aerial savaging of airfields until something else caught their eyes: slender black masses in the waters below racing toward them, which the seamen instantly identified as shallow-water torpedoes, bombs that had splashed into the water from low-flying Japanese dive-bombers and were now speeding toward their battleships, the Oklahoma, West Virginia, Nevada, California, and Arizona.
The Oklahoma’s hull was struck, sending everything inside toppling, from tables and dishes to sailors and weaponry, including massive shells that broke free and crushed men in their path, the torpedoes creating breaches through which ocean waters rushed and continued into hatches, down ventilator shafts, and through any other open passageway, flooding the ship so that it listed and began to sink. At 8:06 a.m., a high-flying Japanese bomber hit a bull’s-eye more than nine thousand feet below, smack on the Arizona’s forward deck, dropping a 1,765-pound bomb that cut through the armored skin to detonate the more than million pounds of explosives and ammunition stored below, an explosion so powerful it caused the 31,400-ton battleship to lurch upward, buckle, and then collapse into itself; an explosion so huge that the fireball soared five hundred feet into the air along with burning flesh, body parts, and sailors split in two; an explosion so fatal that more than a thousand men on board were killed. By 8:50 a.m., the catastrophic first wave of attack planes was followed by a second, as 167 additional Japanese fighters and bombers continued the relentless horror in the harbor and increased the count of American dead and wounded, until the surprise assault finally ended a full two hours and fifteen minutes after it had begun.
The very next day in Washington, at 12:30 p.m. local time—less than twenty-four hours after the devastating raid—the president of the United States appeared before a joint session of Congress. Looking drawn, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at a lectern packed with microphones. His voice crackling as it was broadcast on radio to all of America, the president listed other locations that Japan had attacked the preceding day—Hong Kong, Singapore, Guam, Wake Island, Malaysia, the Philippines—and as for the deadly assault on Pearl Harbor, he said, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a day which will live in infamy—the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
The president then asked Congress for a declaration of war, and he got it.
SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER
Army Air Forces pilot Major John W. Mitchell—Mitch, as he was called—tried as best he could to get comfortable on the hill overlooking Fighter Strip Two. It wasn’t easy. He and his comrades lived in perpetual discomfort. The island of Guadalcanal could seem a tropical paradise one moment—cloudless skies, aquamarine surf, and reasonably warm and dry air. But most days it was a tropical hell on the US base bordered by thick, fetid jungle, marshy beaches, and mud. Mud everywhere. Mosquitoes, too. Mitchell’s home atop the airfield was a canvas tent with a cot and mesh netting that hardly served as a solid line of defense against the malaria-carrying insects. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, after a recent trip to Guadalcanal, had told reporters, “One of our greatest enemies is malaria.” In one month alone, nearly two thousand men had been hospitalized with it. And the flu-like illness wasn’t the only invisible jungle disease lying in wait. Ground troops, especially, coped with intestinal infections and diarrhea, skin rashes, dengue with its joint pain, the yucky crud of fungus, and a foot rot that wrapped an affected man’s ankles in pus-filled blisters. Then there was the dank foxhole. Everyone had a foxhole, either inside or right outside his tent, for quick refuge when the Japanese bombs began falling, which happened regularly. The coastal plain where the US troops were stationed was pockmarked with craters left by those bombs, while the shrapnel that ripped through the canvas tents seemed as common as seashells.
Mitchell pushed all that out of his mind as he took his pen and began a letter to “My Darling.” It was his latest installment in a long-distance marriage by mail. “Do you realize,” he told Annie Lee, “that I haven’t seen you in over 15 months and that we have been married 16 months and of that 16 months I haven’t been with you even a month?” He felt cheated in love by the war and missed his wife sorely. “I love you more now than ever before,” he said. “’Tis true, my love.”
He wrote the words in the neat cursive script he’d been taught while growing up in the red clay hills of north-central Mississippi. His hometown, Enid, a tiny hamlet alongside a railroad stop, was some forty miles south of the college town of Oxford, where William Faulkner, the future bard of the South, had been a teenager when Mitchell was born on June 14, 1914. Strong and supple, of medium height, with dark, wavy hair, John William Mitchell was now two months shy of twenty-nine.
Mitchell’s letter was largely upbeat, full of chitchat and with only a bit of war news. That was because he’d just returned to Cactus—the military’s code name for Guadalcanal—from a brief leave. It had been a scheduled layoff, part of the system worked out for him and the other US Army Air Forces pilots, given that there weren’t enough of the new, speedy P-38 Lightning fighters to go around. Mitchell and his “flight”—the term used for a group of pilots—would fly missions for a few weeks and then take a break, replaced by a second flight. Each flight featured a lineup of top-notch pilots. Mitchell, an ace pilot, had recently been promoted to unit commander of the 339th Fighter Squadron. The other flight had standouts, too, namely Rex Barber, a bullnecked kid from Oregon farm country; Tom Lanphier, a military brat who had grown up mostly outside Detroit; and Besby Holmes, a mix of brains and brawn from the streets of San Francisco.
Mitchell didn’t tell Annie Lee much about the respite in New Zealand, which had included plenty of drinking and gambling and some rest. He did brag about winning at dominoes, where he had turned an initial $18 stake into a $435 haul—enough to pay his way home to San Antonio, Texas, he said, and “for a couple of champagne parties.” But that assumed he would be coming home soon, and the question of when that might be hung over the five pages, something he looped back to time and again, like a refrain in a song, when he told his wife he wanted to return as soon as possible to be with “the sweetest woman on earth.” He’d overheard talk that his name was on the list to go home—maybe, just maybe, by mid-June, he wrote longingly. But each comment like that was met with the equal and opposite slap of wartime reality. He cautioned against her getting her hopes up, citing a fact of life for every soldier: “In these days and times one hardly knows where he will be the next hour, much less the next day.”
Truer words were never written. Because for all his aching desire to reunite with Annie Lee, to celebrate with champagne paid for from his gambling winnings, Mitchell wasn’t going home anytime soon. As he finished the letter that Friday, April 16, 1943, unbeknownst to him, preparations were under way. In the command dugout not far from his tent, mission plans were being hashed out—plans that would have cataclysmic and far-reaching consequences for the pilot from a tiny rural town in Mississippi and, bigger still, for a world at war.
SIX HUNDRED THIRTY MILES NORTH FROM MAJOR MITCHELL, ON the island of New Britain, the largest island in New Guinea, another soldier had a woman on his mind as he made plans for a troop inspection at bases in the southern Solomon Islands. He was Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet. Diminutive in stature at five feet, three inches, the stoic-looking admiral nonetheless cast the long shadow of a giant. He was the most powerful naval officer in Japan and the most famous of all of Japan’s military leaders—a symbol of the nation’s navy, present and past. As one US commander put it, “Yamamoto represented more than one person, or individual—he represented the Japanese Navy, its strength, its morale and its early victories.”
The decorated admiral had arrived by seaplane two weeks earlier, on April 3, to set up a temporary command at Rabaul. He was staying by himself in a cottage located some 1,000 feet above the base on what was called “Residency Hill,” a quieter and, more important, cooler spot, where without fanfare he had turned fifty-nine the day after his arrival. As did all of Rabaul, the cottage sat beneath towering volcanoes on the island’s northeastern tip. And never far from his thoughts was the woman who’d captured his heart, Chiyoko Kawai. Chiyoko was not Yamamoto’s wife but an attractive geisha nineteen years younger than he. The summer upcoming would mark the tenth anniversary of their first meeting at a restaurant in Tokyo. Even after a decade the admiral was still enchanted with her, savoring romantic feelings that had never been part of his arranged marriage to his wife of twenty-five years, Reiko Mihashi. In her favor, Reiko was from a town not far from his birthplace, Nagaoka, a remote village with harsh winters. But the best Yamamoto could say about Reiko after they’d met was that she seemed “strong” and “sturdy,” and, as he told an older brother, “I’m thinking of taking a look at her, and if there’s nothing wrong, settling for her.” Though often apart, the couple had two sons and two daughters.
Yamamoto had certainly come a long way from his modest start in Nagaoka in northwest Japan. Born Isoroku Takano on April 4, 1884, it was only later that his identity changed to Isoroku Yamamoto. His parents died when he was in his late twenties, and he was adopted by the Yamamoto family, a common practice in Japan, even at his age. Isoroku began his military career early; he was just sixteen when he was accepted into the Naval Academy. He rose steadily over the years, being promoted in 1940 to the highest naval rank of admiral, an ascendency that included vast international experience in England and the United States and earned him a reputation as a tactical genius.
Indeed, 1941 saw him achieve singular renown. Isoroku Yamamoto was the architect of the massive Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor on December 7. It was his idea—in the making for nearly a year—to initiate the surprise air and sea attack that killed more than 2,400 US sailors, soldiers, pilots, marines, and civilians and left another 1,178 wounded, while twenty-one US ships, including eight battleships, were sunk or disabled. Upon his return to Japan, Yamamoto was showered with praise from the nation’s political and military leaders. Emperor Hirohito sent a messenger with his personal congratulations to the newly minted hero. The polar opposite was the case in the United States, however: to Americans, Yamamoto was a monster on a par with Adolf Hitler.
Now, sixteen months later, on Friday, April 16, 1943, the admiral made ready for an inspection tour, overriding objections by aides who worried that traveling to the front lines would put him too close to the flame. Yamamoto insisted that he wanted to thank his men in person for their courage during the bombing raids the previous week, first at Guadalcanal and then at other US-held islands. The itinerary set, a radio cable was sent out from Rabaul detailing his travel plans. Yamamoto then stayed busy reviewing combat reports and attending meetings.
But as the hours passed and his departure drew closer, his aides continued to fret about their admiral traveling so close to live combat. The risks were too great, they argued; war could be so unpredictable. They urged him to cancel. But Yamamoto would have none of it. He was not traveling alone, he reassured them. Six of Japan’s best fighter aircraft, Mitsubishi Zeros, were to escort him.
Besides, his men were expecting him. “I have to go,” he said.
IN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS—ON PALM SUNDAY IN THE UNITED States—the two men, the US Army Air Forces fighter pilot and the Japanese Imperial Navy admiral, would meet for the first time. One of them would survive. But more than a fatal face-off, theirs was an epic moment involving two nations at war and a clash of cultures, a moment loaded with xenophobia, spycraft, special military operations, wartime sacrifice, and broken hearts. On Sunday, April 18, 1943, Major John Mitchell led fifteen pilots from Guadalcanal to intercept Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto en route to Ballale. Expecting to face dozens of enemy fighters, few on the Mitchell flight expected to return.
It was a historic, high-stakes US attempt at a wartime “targeted kill”—but hardly the last. The circumstances in many ways resembled those of a future surprise attack against the United States, one that killed thousands of civilians and again plunged the nation into war. The chief planner, like Yamamoto, instantly became the hated face of the enemy. His name, as strange to the American tongue as Yamamoto’s, became synonymous with evil. Then came a day when spies pinpointed the precise location of the planner and US leaders authorized a secret “decapitation operation.” They ordered an elite team of soldiers to nullify the man by death or capture, preferably the former. In a new century the horrific event was the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent secret decap op was called Operation Neptune Spear, the May 2011 raid by SEAL Team Six commandos that killed Osama bin Laden.
The bin Laden raid was a case of history echoing itself—of John Mitchell and his men receiving orders to get Admiral Yamamoto in an earlier war. Sixteen months had passed since the Pearl Harbor attack had staggered Americans, like a heavyweight boxer rocked by a sucker punch. And the pummeling kept coming, with Japanese army and navy forces sweeping through the western Pacific before the month of December 1941 even ended. The United States rushed to get onto a war footing. Men raced to enlist as volunteer coastal watchers took up positions along the oceanfront, looking for enemy ships. In intelligence circles, code breakers in Hawaii and Washington, DC, unfairly suffered from a sense of guilt. Having previously broken parts of Japan’s key naval code, called JN-25, the cryptanalysts despaired that they hadn’t detected Yamamoto’s huge armada assembling within striking distance of Hawaii in time. They knew that in the future, they would have to do better.
From coast to coast the fear of a “yellow peril” gripped the country. The FBI rounded up 1,379 Japanese immigrants within four days of the attack—men and women, teachers and community leaders—and detained them as “dangerous enemy aliens.” Mistrust and animosity toward “Japs” and “Nips,” the latter slur based on an abbreviation for Nippon, the Japanese name for Japan, erupted into the open. In Washington, DC, one Chinese newspaper reporter began wearing a large badge pinned on his lapel that read “Chinese Reporter—NOT Japanese—Please.”
Ethnic animosity raged throughout the Pacific battlefronts—in the air, on the high seas, and especially on the ground. Fighting between Americans and Japanese took on what one marine called a “brutish, primitive hatred” that instigated “ferocious killing with no holds barred.” Wartime atrocities abounded in the “existential struggle for annihilation.” And Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was the marquee face for the loathing that Americans felt toward their Asian enemy.
Only late in 1942 did the picture begin to change, starting with the grueling, bloody takeover of Guadalcanal. John Mitchell was there, and by year’s end he was riding in the newly arrived P-38 Lightning, learning on the job how to fly the twin-engine fighter that became a game changer in the skies against the famed Japanese Zero and helped to turn the tide in the Pacific. Then, on Friday, April 16, 1943, when the ace John Mitchell pined to go home, came the extraordinary—and dangerous—opportunity to make history. Yamamoto’s departure from Rabaul was set for dawn on Sunday, April 18. It was a chance to mark the end of the beginning—a period during which Japan had dictated the terms of engagement—and pivot to a new beginning of US dominance in the Pacific. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto had cited surprise as the crucial factor: “That we could defeat the enemy at the outbreak of the war was because they were unguarded,” he’d written a friend.
Mitchell and his men would now be the ones banking on surprise as they raced across the ocean hoping to meet up with the unsuspecting Japanese icon.