“In the nose of a light fast bomber,” as Kenney also explained to Eisenhower’s naval aide—for transmission to Ike in Algiers—the general had installed “eight 50-caliber machine guns. Two planes thus equipped would approach a merchant vessel at low level, one from stern to bow, the other from the side. The one approaching lengthwise the ship would open fire with the eight guns at 1500 yards. No pilot was permitted to go on a mission until he could shoot so accurately that with the first burst at 1500 yards, he could sweep the ship from bow to stern or vice versa. The purpose was to keep the anti-aircraft fire from the ship so the accompanying member of the team could approach the side of the vessel just above the wave tops and drop a bomb that would skip on the water and hit the ship on the side just above or below the water line.”2
The President had been intrigued to learn not only of such American air force ingenuity and specialized training, but the integration of air and naval tactics.
Code breaking had been the key, though. In the battle of the Bismarck Sea, between March 2 and 4, Admiral Yamamoto’s order for Japan’s vital troopship-reinforcement convoy, bringing fresh troops up to Rabaul and from there to New Guinea, had been deciphered.3
The first Japanese division to arrive in Rabaul, the Fifty-First Division, had hugged the coast of New Britain and then set off by convoy across the Solomon Sea—unaware the Americans knew its route and composition. Flying at high altitude, Kenney’s B-17 bombers had sunk two of its transport ships, but the remaining six, escorted by eight destroyers and a hundred planes, had ploughed on. Expecting B-17s at high altitude again over the Dampier Strait, the Japanese fighters giving air cover to the convoy had failed to spot Kenney’s one hundred retrained American and Australian B-25s, A-20s, and Beaufighter pilots skimming low across the water—the aircraft so low the Japanese sailors thought they were torpedo planes. In short order all surviving Japanese transports had been sunk, the infantry drowned, and four of the eight destroyers destroyed—the core of the Japanese Fifty-First Division extinguished in a single day.
The President was clearly delighted. His grasp of the intricate mosaic of islands in the Southwest Pacific amazed Kenney, given the President’s other responsibilities. “I found the President surprisingly familiar with the geography of the Pacific, which made it quite easy to talk with him about the war out there,” the general recalled with admiration and affection after the war. “He wanted to know how I was making out on getting airplanes. I told him that so far my chances didn’t look very good. When he asked why, I said that among reasons given me was that he had made so many commitments elsewhere that there were no planes left to give me.”
The President had taken this in good spirit; he had “laughed and said he guessed he’d have to look into the matter and see if a few couldn’t be found somewhere that might be sent me. He said that if anybody was a winner, he should be given a chance to keep on winning.”4
Backing winners was important in war, the President recognized—and was a key to Roosevelt’s growing style of military command: assessing, encouraging, and supporting those whom he saw as inspirational and effective.
The President did manage to find Kenney more planes, to Kenney’s relief. However, if the President was keen to back a winner in Kenney’s air force leadership in the Pacific, he was similarly open to depriving the Japanese of their outstanding military leadership, if he could.
General Kenney’s visit to the White House—a visit repeated on March 25, 1943, when Kenney had attended a Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony—had convinced the President that American fliers were finally proving better than their opponents in the Pacific. Especially when given the advantage of Ultra intelligence.
As the Ferdinand Magellan made its way across the American Midwest and South, stopping at military training camp after training camp, the President found himself, as Daisy noted, more and more confident in American professionalism. And though the matter was too secret to share with Daisy or her companion, Polly Delano—moreover, too secret ever to be revealed in his lifetime—he now had an opportunity to show his faith in his American airmen.
Over several days, starting on April 14, an extraordinary series of further decrypts had been brought to the President aboard the Magellan by Ship’s Clerk William Rigdon, an assistant working for Admiral Brown, the President’s naval aide, whose job it was to bring the latest fruits of Ultra to the President’s attention twice a day.5
“The communications car housed a diesel-powered radio transmitting and receiving station,” Rigdon recounted later, “that kept the President in constant touch with the Map Room at the White House. Special codes, held only by the Map Room and the car, were used. This car was just behind the engine. The Magellan was at the rear. Between the two I walked many miles taking messages to the President and picking up those he wished to send.”6
Some were trivial. Others were more serious. One of them, in particular, related not to security for the President’s train schedule—the twenty-six members of the Secret Service traveling with him, as well as military details protecting him at every stage of his 7,668-mile trip—but to the travel plans of another dominant figure in the war, with perhaps even more control over the struggle in the Pacific than the President: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
“From Solomons Defense Force to Air Group #204, Air Flotilla #26,” it began. “On 18 April C in C Combined Fleet will visit RXZ [Ballale Island, off Bougainville], R_ [Shortland] and RXP [Buin] in accordance following schedule: 1. Depart RR [Rabaul] at 0600 in a medium attack plane escorted by 6 fighters. Arrive RXZ at 0800. Proceed by minesweeper . . . At each of the above places the Commander-in-Chief will make a short tour of inspection and at _ he will visit the sick and wounded, but current operations should continue.”
In case of “bad weather” the preliminary message had ended, “the trip will be postponed.”7
A trip by the commander in chief of Japan’s Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, to Ballale, Bougainville? An inspection tour by air and sea to a forward area of the Solomon Islands within reach of U.S. Air Force planes? Times and details of his itinerary?
The decrypted signal seemed almost impossible to believe. Admiral Yamamoto usually stayed on his grand battleship, the Musashi, at Truk, in the Caroline Islands, eight hundred miles to the north of Rabaul. Moving to a temporary forward command post at Rabaul, however, his strategy after the loss of Guadalcanal had been to pummel the Americans with massive air attacks before they could bring up enough forces to exploit their victory: Operation I-Go. By assigning not only Japanese ground-force pilots operating from airfields in the Solomons but hundreds of well-trained carrier pilots to assist them, Yamamoto had been able to apply massive Japanese air power to the initiative, involving more than 350 planes—the largest Japanese air assault since Pearl Harbor.
Mercifully, the Japanese air armada had been thwarted by Ultra intelligence—allowing Allied naval ships to disperse in good time, and U.S. Army and Naval Air Force units to be ready, off the ground, to meet the approaching aerial fleet each time it flew. A single Allied destroyer, a corvette, several Dutch merchant vessels, and an oiler had been sunk, and twelve Allied aircraft lost, but these were small pickings for such a concentrated and expensive air offensive—a fact that Japanese pilots, despite acknowledging the loss of forty-nine Japanese planes, had misconstrued in their after-action reports. Admiral Yamamoto had, instead, been told the fliers of his Third Fleet and Eleventh Fleet had sunk one American cruiser, two destroyers, and twenty-five transport ships, moreover had shot down 134 U.S. planes, as well as destroying 20 on the ground.8
The admiral had been well satisfied—in fact had sent Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo his own version of the triumph, which could be seen as avenging, in part, the recent losses of Guadalcanal and Buna. The Emperor had immediately responded with a congratulatory signal: “Please convey my satisfaction to the Commander in Chief, Combined Fleet, and tell him to enlarge the war result more than ever.”9
The radio messag
es giving the itinerary of Admiral Yamamoto’s inspection tour raised a number of questions. Was Yamamoto planning an extension of I-Go attacks? Was it a morale booster by the Japanese commander in chief, in person?
The message did not say—but its import was clear to all, from the South Pacific to the Ferdinand Magellan. Just as Yamamoto’s planes had been able to hit Guadalcanal as part of I-Go, so could U.S. fliers hit Bougainville, on the admiral’s itinerary—either attacking the admiral on the minesweeper to which he was slated to transfer, or in the air.
Why, though, had Yamamoto chosen to send such a message by radio?
As it later transpired, the admiral’s administrative staff officer had wanted the warning order to be couriered by air, and then hand-delivered to its recipients. He’d been told by the communications officer at Rabaul not to worry, however; the Japanese naval code JN 25 had recently been changed and was unbreakable.10 The signal that first went out was dated April 13, 1943.
“We’ve hit the jackpot,” the U.S. watch officer of Station Hypo, the two-thousand-man decoding unit in Hawaii, declared when the decrypt was handed to him. “This is our chance to get Yamamoto.”11
If, that was, Admiral Nimitz, the commander in chief in the Central Pacific, agreed. And if the U.S. commander in chief in Washington signed off on the attempt.
There were important repercussions to be considered. An aerial interception of Japan’s most famous—or infamous—admiral might well squander, whether successful or not, America’s prize weapon in the struggle against Japan: Ultra. Was it worth such a gamble? And what if it did not, in fact, succeed? Not only would Yamamoto be left in command of all Japanese forces in the Pacific, but the war-winning contribution of Ultra would have been given away, for nothing.
Ironically, Admiral Nimitz worried about something else when first shown the decrypt. Would a successor to Admiral Yamamoto prove a better Japanese commander in chief?
In view of the fact that Yamamoto enjoyed almost godlike status,12 not only among Japanese forces in the Pacific but at home in Japan, killing him would, without doubt, make a huge dent in Japanese war morale, just as Japanese forces dug in for a do-or-die struggle in the countries they had conquered.
There were other questions, too. In the time-honored ethics of American warmaking, was it even acceptable to assassinate an enemy commander—since assassination was what such an interception, if successful, would be? As at Midway, Nimitz felt it would be a mistake not to use such a priceless intelligence breakthrough—but deferred, as before Midway, to Washington’s decision.
The matter was thus passed for authorization to Admiral King—who passed it to Navy Secretary Frank Knox.
Knox—who had himself recently carried out an inspection tour of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific—passed the information via the White House Map Room to the Ferdinand Magellan.
The President’s response was immediate and uncompromising: “Get Yamamoto.”13
Secretary Knox, at the Navy Department, needed no further prompting. He instructed Admiral Nimitz to go ahead. In turn Nimitz gave the final green light on April 17, 1943, to Admiral Halsey—commanding Allied forces in the Solomons area.
There was now only one day to go. F 4 F Wildcats and F 4 U Corsairs had insufficient range for such a mission, but new U.S. Army Air Forces P-38s, flown by Army Air Forces, Marine, and Navy pilots, could do it. Vice Admiral Pete Mitscher, commander air, Solomon Islands, had already begun to explore different proposals with his subordinates. His U.S. Navy fliers recommended they attack the Japanese vessel that Yamamoto was to board at Ballale, but the U.S. Army Air Forces ace, Major John Mitchell, commanding the 339th Fighter Squadron, assigned to carry out the attack, felt it would be easier to spot the admiral’s plane—a heavily armed but slow (265 mph) Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bomber—than it would be to identify an indeterminate Japanese minesweeper. Such a ship would undoubtedly be escorted by other vessels, as well as shielded by extensive Japanese air cover, to judge by the U.S. planes sent up to protect Secretary Knox on his recent visit.
Mitscher wisely yielded the decision on April 17 to the man who would have to carry out the mission. Assembling a fighter group of eighteen Lockheed P-38 G Lightnings, Mitchell—who planned a five-leg, low-level end run way out to sea before reaching Bougainville, so as to have the advantage of surprise—asked for special auxiliary-fuel drop tanks flown up from MacArthur’s men on New Guinea. He also decided that the best point to intercept Yamamoto’s flight would be just as the admiral’s Betty bomber—similar to the Betty bombers that had sunk HMS Prince of Wales, the battleship on which the President had attended divine service with Churchill off Argentia, in August 1941—reduced speed to land.
Tension was high. Mitchell was certainly aware just how much hinged on his mission, for Secretary Knox had sent a further signal to Nimitz on April 17, which Admiral Nimitz immediately forwarded to Admiral Halsey. Halsey sent it with a covering note to Admiral Mitscher—who placed it before Mitchell. It read, as the fliers later recalled: “SQUADRON 339. P-38 MUST AT ALL COSTS REACH AND DESTROY. PRESIDENT ATTACHES EXTREME IMPORTANCE TO MISSION.”14
Almost seventy years later a similar targeted killing of an enemy commander in war—Osama bin Laden—would be revealed to an astonished world within hours. Because of the need to preserve the secret of Ultra in 1943, however, the President had accepted that the mission to assassinate Admiral Yamamoto, code-named Operation Vengeance, would not—perhaps ever—be made public. Other than acknowledging Japanese media reports, if the operation was successful, nothing would be said.
Early on the first anniversary of the Doolittle Raid the U.S. Squadron 339 fighter group—reduced to sixteen planes owing to two aborts—thus set off from Fighter Strip Number Two, Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, on its thousand-mile mission for the President.
Resembling huge flying catamarans—their single-pilot cockpits strung between two pontoon-like fuselages, each mounting a massive 1,325-horse-power engine and capable of speeds up to 400 miles per hour—the Lightnings wave-hopped in complete radio-silence for some six hundred miles to the west of the Solomon island chain and across the open Solomon Sea, in order to avoid radar and visual detection. Using a special naval compass, Mitchell then swung to the east, aiming to circle in from the ocean—four of his best pilots designated as killer sharks, while the remainder dealt with the six Japanese Zeros protecting their commander in chief.
The attack—the longest-distance fighter-intercept mission of World War II—went like clockwork. A stickler for punctuality, Admiral Yamamoto had rejected his staff’s protests that his inspection tour would be too risky. Precisely on time, his bomber slowed to land at Ballale, Bougainville, at 9:35 a.m. on April 18, 1943.15
Mitchell’s men were already there, sixty seconds early: surprised only that there were two Bettys, not one. Both would have to be shot down.
The ensuing melee took but a few minutes—the “killer” fighters attacking from below the Japanese bombers and their escort, the rest climbing above the encounter to fend off Zeros that would inevitably begin to take off from Buin airfield. As the lumbering Betty bombers dived to escape, the two lead P-38 pilots closed up on them, using the 20mm cannons and machine guns mounted in the planes’ noses. Inside his bomber, Yamamoto, dressed in his green field-combat uniform but wearing white gloves, was killed instantly in his seat—the plane soon plummeting to earth in the jungle, amid smoke and flames. The other bomber was also shot down, crashing into the ocean. One American P-38 was lost, but the rest then turned for home, taking the direct route and encountering no opposition.
Ignoring all prohibition against radio transmissions that might give away the specific target of the operation, one of the P-38 pilots, with one engine already feathering for lack of fuel after a thousand miles of flying, radioed to fighter control at Henderson Field as he came in to land: “That son of a bitch will not be dictating any peace terms in the White House.”16
23
“He’s Dead?”
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br /> SO SECRET WAS the Yamamoto operation—and so worried did Admiral King become, when leaks of the mission to journalists were only censored at the last minute—that the men of 339 Squadron, unlike Doolittle’s Tokyo team, could not be decorated for their extraordinary bravery and professionalism. So shocking, however, was the death of Admiral Yamamoto to the Japanese government, that news of his passing was kept from the Japanese public for more than a month1—and only confirmed to American code breakers, in the meantime, by the absence of Yamamoto’s name or rank in Japanese naval signals decoded in Hawaii and Washington.
Aboard the Ferdinand Magellan on April 18, after visiting Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, and messing with the troops training there, the President was informed that the mission had been successful. Pearl Harbor had finally been avenged—the author of the sneak attack dead in the jungle his men had so ruthlessly conquered, and where so many Japanese atrocities had been committed.2
Keeping the success of Operation Vengeance a secret among American forces, ironically, proved harder than keeping the Ultra secret from the Japanese. In the days after the mission, more sorties were flown up the Solomons “Slot” to Bougainville, in full view of Japanese radar and spotters, to make the fatal interception seem less extraordinary; reporters, meanwhile, were forbidden to file stories directly linking Guadalcanal’s U.S. air aces to the great admiral’s death.
In the context of a titanic battle of wills, courage, and morale in the Pacific, it was almost impossible to maintain the fiction of an accidental death of an enemy commander as iconic as Yamamoto, however, either in American signals or media reports. Admiral Mitscher had immediately reported to Admiral Halsey by telegram, for example, informing him Mitchell’s P-38s had “shot down two bombers escorted by 6 Zeros flying close formation . . . April 18 seems to be our day”—a reference to Colonel Doolittle’s raid the year before.3 This had not necessarily given the game away, but Bull Halsey—known for his ebullient, take-no-prisoners personality—had signaled straight back, “Congratulations to you and Major Mitchell and his hunters. Sounds as if one of the ducks in their bag was a peacock.”4
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