15 August 2010
First to the Blackboard
(The ashes of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto are returned to Tokyo aboard the battleship IJN Mushasi, May 1943. Photo Asahi Shinbun.)
Its better to have an
Army of deer being led by a lion,
rather an Army of Lions being led by a deer...
What we do is what we do.
Jasper Holmes called Eddie on the secure line and told him what they had about Admiral Yamamoto’s schedule. Mac was told to plot it out, make sure the recovery fo the place names made sense. It seemed to, and the decrypted message and the chart went over to the headquarters.
Then everyone went on to what they did, and what we all have done for all these years. Listening. Copying. Thinking.
Chester Nimitz thought about the impact of killing the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, and the architect of the assault on Midway that brought disaster to the Combined Fleet and the loss of four fleet aircraft carriers, all their aircraft, and above all their precious cadre of pilots. Pluses and minuses. We do what we do.
Nimitz coordinated with SecNav Knox, who asked the President. I don’t know for sure, but it is possible that FDR inserted a Chesterfield into his ivory holder and lit up before he nodded. With that, the mission to kill Fleet Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto began to roll.
The leaders weighed it against the risk of compromising the penetration of the JN-25 code system and then made the decision.
Kill the bastard.
Eddie knew the man, had played cards with him for modest stakes. In some ways, they were the mirror images of one another. Yamamoto the man, sent to America to soak in the language and the culture, Eddie, sent in the other direction to learn the all too scrutable East.
To kill the man and keep the secrets, they first needed some plausible deniability. The fiction that an Australian Coastwatcher had passed the information on the whereabouts of the Admiral of the Combined Fleet was passed to rambunctious Admiral Bill Halsey in the Southwest Pacific. The precise timing of Yamamoto’s flight, escorted by nimble Zeros and accompanied by another Betty bomber with his chief of staff embarked, was too precious for words, an event in space and time in the future covered by a fiction from an imaginary past.
We have all been there in our line of work. “You had a pretty good handle on the code designators, right?” I asked Mac. “I mean, you were able to plot it out, from the partials in the recovered message?”
Mac nodded. “RR being Rabaul, the fortress island, RXZ was was Ballale, and RXP was Buin on the southern tip of Bouganville. The first part of the itinerary looked like it might be in theoretical range of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. No Navy planes, of course. They did not have the legs for the mission.”
(The remains of Rex Barber’s P-38 Miss Virginia after crash-landing at Henderson Field.)
The Air Corps had a requirement for long-range escort of the bomber force in Europe, and had produced the remarkable P-38 Lightning, a twin-boomed long-legged two engine fighter that the pilots of the Luftwaffe called "Der Gabelschwanz Teufel," or The Forked-Tail Devil. The Japanese aviators called it “Two planes, one pilot.”
My former uncle-in-law Joe flew one out of the Aleutians in the two-thousand mile war there, a Texan in the wild swirling arctic weather of gales and clouds, and he said he was thankful for having two engines and drop tanks and plenty of vengeance in the nose.
The placement of the twin engines on either side of the cockpit meant that the nose of the aircraft could bristle with machine guns and cannons unobstructed by the arc of the propellers: a Hispano 20 mm cannon with 150 rounds, and four Browning 50-calibre machine guns, each with 500 shells in the magazine.
I gestured at the copy of Eddie Layton’s book on the table. “This is what you had in the decrypted message: Yamamoto planned to depart Rabaul <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/provinces/png_rabaul.html> at 0600 and land at Ballale Airfield <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/solomons/ballale/index.html> at 0800. Then, proceed by subchaser to Shortland <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/provinces/solomons_shortland.html> at 0840, then depart at 0945 aboard the same subchaser and return to Ballale <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/solomons/ballale/index.html> at 1030, then depart at 1100 by G4M1 Betty and arrive at Buin Airfield (Kahili) <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/png/kahilli/index.html> at 1110. Finally at 1400 depart Buin Airfield (Kahili) <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/png/kahilli/index.html> by G4M1 Betty and arrive back at Rabaul <http://www.pacificwrecks.com/provinces/png_rabaul.html> at 1540.”
Mac nodded. “Yes, but with any luck, he would never land at Ballale.”
(Map of southwest Pacific area where the mission took place. Yamamoto flew from Rabaul on New Britain (upper left) to Bougainville (center) where his aircraft was attacked by P-38’s launched from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal (lower right). Map from Wikipedia)
“Jasper had me plot it out to ensure that we had the places correct, and that the plot made sense. It did.”
I wrote that down on the notepad. “Jasper did not take a lot of credit for his role in this,” I said. “I read the passage on the shoot-down, and it seems like he barely had anything to do with it.”
Mac looked at me kindly. “He was literally the first to the blackboard, and Jasper was a gentleman, unlike some others in this story. The thing to remember about his book is that he was the first to publish anything about the secret history of the war. NSA reviewed his manuscript just after ULTRA was declassified after twenty-five years. It was a bit surprising at the time, since they said the whole manuscript was good-to-go, except they said he could not mention the code designation JN-25. For some reason the people at the Fort thought it was still sensitive. Of course, by the next year everyone was writing about the code system specifically, so you have to place the accounts in the context of the year they were published.
“So that is why the official history is wrong,” I said. “When I was in a fighter squadron I learned that the first ones to debrief the mission got to establish what the truth was, and who won and who lost.”
“You bet. It is a mater of when people are free to talk about things. When Samuel Elliot Morrison did his multi-volume history none of this information was available. All he said in his account was that Admiral Nimitz and Halsey “learned of the visit.”
Jim passed by and looked at me inquisitively. I glanced at the level of wine in my glass and shook my head. I didn’t have far to navigate to get back to Big Pink, but in my old age I am taking fewer risks with the cops.
I signaled to the bar and called out: “Check, when you get a chance, Jim.”
“You got it, Vic,” he called back, topping off the glasses of the attractive women at the bar.
Mac resumed his story. “A thorough, detailed briefing including the cover story was provided for the pilots, but they were not specifically briefed that their target was Admiral Yamamoto. 16 P-38-G Lightnings were tasked with the long-range intercept mission. According to my plot of the message, they would have to fly 435 miles from Guadalcanal to catch the Japanese.”
“That is a remarkable gamble,” I said, fishing for my wallet. “Was it worth it?”
Mac laughed as Jim slipped the black folder with the tab on the edge of the little table, wedging it against the copy of Jasper’s Holmes book.
“More than you know, Vic. They had to fly at extremely low level the whole way to avoid detection- less than fifty feet above the waves. The cockpit in the Lightning could not be opened, and you can imagine in the tropics it was hot. The pilots normally flew in shorts and sneakers because of the heat.”
“The Lightnings met Yamamoto's two Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" fast bomber transports and six escorting Zeros just as they arrived at Empress Augusta Bay. The Americans split into two groups as the Zeros spotted them, and first Betty with Yamamoto dove to the treetops. The second turned seaward.”
(Wreckage of Admiral Yamamoto’s Betty bomber today. Photo Pacific Wrecks.)
“That must have been some pretty intense adrenaline for everyone.”
“Don’t know. We were on to other things then, back in Hawaii. But there is an interesting story about what happened later.”
I slipped my Visa card into the black folder and chose not to look at the tab. Willow takes care of us pretty well, and whatever they thought was fair was OK by me.
“And that was?”
“The first lighting to recover at Henderson Field was flow by a Major named Thomas Lanphier. He claimed credit for the kill on Yamamoto’s Betty. It was bullshit, but he was first to the blackboard on the mission debriefing. Yamamoto was actually killed by Rex Barber, who had sole credit for it. The Admiral was thrown from the aircraft still in his seat. The autopsy indicated that he might have survived the crash, since he had no visible wounds aside from a small cut above his eye.”
“Now, none of that was known until long after the war, right?”
“True. We were back to doing what we did. We didn’t know for sure what happened until May, when news of Yamamoto's death was officially reported to the Japanese press. In the meantime, Barber and Lanphier were both awarded the Navy Cross, if you can imagine a couple Air Corps pilots wearing it.”
(Rex Barber receiving the Navy Cross. Official Air Corps picture.)
“The greatest Naval leader in Japanese history, killed by a broken code and a high-tech aircraft flown by kids. Amazing,” I said, scrawling my name on the credit card receipt. “Great story, Sir.”
“Not as interesting as what happened in the wardroom of the USS South Dakota when Eddie ran into Terrible Turner.”
I looked up with interest. I may have paid the tab, but this conversation didn’t appear to be over. "You know, Admiral," I said slowly. "There may be something to be said for being the last one to the blackboard, too"
Mac just smiled.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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