The American strategy in the Pacific was to wage a two-pronged war, and it was beginning to pay off. Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison said that, after Pearl Harbor itself, it was “the most devastating air attack on ships of the entire war.” Air attacks sank seven of eight transport ships and two destroyers. Kenney’s B-25s terrorized Japanese ships. Yamamoto tried to get 7,000 troops through to Lae, New Guinea. Nimitz.īy mid-1943, Mitscher had nearly 700 aircraft at his disposal, but resources were still limited when Yamamoto made his next move. This would turn out to be World War II’s most audacious attack on what today’s airmen would call a “high-value” and “time-sensitive” target.īy April 18, 1943, Yamamoto was dead, killed on the direct order of his US counterpart, Adm. He would be there in five days.Īs US military men saw it, there was just enough time to pull together a long-range P-38 mission to shoot down the airplane carrying Yamamoto and deeply wound the Japanese war effort. A coded Japanese message was intercepted and, when decoded by the Navy’s crytographers, it revealed, in stunning detail, that Yamamoto would be flying to a forward airfield near Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands. Then, on April 13, 1943, fortune intervened. The very thought of the admiral roaming free, attacking US forces, was a bitter one to US military officers in the theater. Davis, in Lightning Strike, his 2005 book on the secret mission. “Yamamoto was the beating heart of the Japanese Navy,” wrote Donald A. Even so, Yamamoto, mastermind of Japan’s offensive, was still out there in the vast Pacific, commanding Japan’s combined fleet.
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