Japanese Pilots Mocked the P-38 – Until It Brutally Dominated the Solomons!

On the morning of April 18th, 1943, 16 American fighter planes lifted off a coral airstrip on Guadalcanal and flew out over open ocean at the height of a man standing on a rooftop. They carried no maps of where they were going. They were forbidden to touch their radios. For more than 2 hours, they would see nothing but water.

They were hunting one man. The pilots had been told the information came from a coastwatcher hiding in the jungle, someone who had seen the admiral climb aboard his airplane. That story was a lie. The men who flew that mission were never told the truth, and one of them would die without ever learning it.

600 miles away, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, was preparing to take off exactly on schedule. He was famous throughout the Imperial Navy for his punctuality. It was the most dangerous habit he had. What happened over the jungle of Bougainville that morning took less than 3 minutes.

It killed Japan’s finest naval mind. It cost one American his life and left his body somewhere in the Pacific. And it began an argument between two American pilots that neither of them would live long enough to see settled. This is the story of how a strange twin-tailed airplane, one that mechanics cursed and pilots did not trust, shocked the best fliers in the Japanese Navy.

The island smelled of rot. Wet canvas, spoiled rations, and the sweet sick odor of jungle that never dried out. Men who came to Guadalcanal in the autumn of 1942 learned that smell in the first hour and carried it in their clothes for the rest of their lives. Some of them said afterward that they could still find it in the back of their throats 40 years later in a warm room in Ohio or Oregon with nothing burning and nothing dying anywhere nearby.

Henderson Field was not an airbase. It was a strip of crushed coral and pierced steel matting laid across an old coconut plantation ringed by wrecked airplanes that had been shoved off to the side rather than repaired because there were no parts to repair them with. Japanese warships came down the channel in darkness and shelled it.

Japanese bombers came at midday and cratered it. The ground crews slept in holes dug beside and learned to tell by sound alone whether the thing falling out of the sky was close enough to matter. By the middle of November of that year, the men on that runway had spent months watching American fighters lose. They flew the Airacobra and the Warhawk.

Both were honest machines flown by brave men. Both were beaten by the Mitsubishi Zero in the only kind of fight anybody yet knew how to have. The Zero turned tighter. The Zero climbed faster. A Japanese naval aviator with two years of training and a year of combat behind him could work his way inside an American fighter’s turn in a matter of seconds.

And once he was there, the fight was finished. Every pilot on Guadalcanal understood this. They had watched it happen to friends whose names they still said out loud at supper. They went up anyway because there was nothing else to go up in. Then, in the middle of that November, airplanes came down out of the north that did not look like airplanes at all.

There were eight of them in the first group. They had two engines. Two tail booms ran back from those engines and were joined at the rear by a single horizontal slab. And in between the booms sat a small pod with a man inside it. Ground crews stopped what they were doing and stared. Somebody said it looked like two airplanes that had collided in midair and decided to stay together out of politeness.

It was called the Lightning. Lockheed had built it to a specification the Army had written years before anyone in America had heard the word Guadalcanal. It was not designed to turn. It was designed to climb, to dive, and to arrive somewhere very far away with enough fuel left over to fight when it got there.

In the nose, where a single engine would sit on any other fighter, there was a cannon and four heavy machine guns clustered tightly together. They did not converge at some fixed distance out in front of the airplane the way wing-mounted guns had to. They fired straight ahead in one solid column of metal, and a man who could aim could put every round of it into a space the size of a doorway.

Six days after the first of them landed, they flew their first fight from that runway, escorting heavy bombers north, and came home claiming three Japanese aircraft shot down. That was the good news. On Guadalcanal, the good news was never the whole story because the mechanics hated it. Two engines meant twice the work, twice the cylinders, twice the plugs, twice the oil lines, twice the odds that something had corroded overnight in a climate that men from Ohio and Oregon had no words for. Guadalcanal was wet in

a way that got into wiring looms and stayed there. Instruments fogged and did not clear. Rubber went soft and sticky. Metal grew a fine green skin. The men who kept those airplanes flying worked under tarpaulins, and when the shelling started, they went into the holes, and when it stopped, they came back out and kept working.

And two engines meant something worse than work. It meant twice the surface a bullet could find and set alight. A single-engine fighter that took a round in the wrong place burned in one place, out in front of the pilot, where he could at least see it coming. The Lightning could burn on either side of him, close enough to feel through the skin of the cockpit.

With the man strapped in the middle of it, sitting between two fires. Nobody on that island was in love with the airplane in the winter of 1942. They were simply out of alternatives, and this one could do the single thing that none of the others could do. It could get high. It could stay high. And from up there, it could choose its own moment.

The man who understood that better than anyone was a major named John Mitchell. He was 28 years old, born in a small town in Mississippi, and he had the disposition of an accountant hidden inside the body of a fighter pilot. Mitchell flew well, and he shot well, but the thing that separated him from other squadron commanders was that he thought in numbers.

Air speed multiplied by minutes equals distance covered. Distance divided by fuel burn equals how far out you can go and still come home to a runway instead of to the water. Other men flew by feel and by instinct and by the seat of their trousers. Mitchell flew by arithmetic, and he trusted it further than he trusted his own eyes, because a number does not get tired, and a number does not want anything.

The pilots who flew for him and beside him on that island came from every part of the country and from every kind of house. There was a lieutenant named Rex Barber, 25 years old, raised on a farm in central Oregon. Barber was quiet in a way that some men mistook for slowness. He was not slow.

Somewhere in his training he had arrived at a private conclusion, which was that the only reliable way to be certain of a target is to get close enough that certainty is no longer required. He flew that way. It would nearly kill him more than once, and it would end up defining the rest of his life in a way he could not possibly have imagined at the age of 25.

There was a captain named Thomas Lanphier, 27 years old, born in Panama, the son of an army flyer. Lanphier had grown up around the service and around men who understood something that farm boys from Oregon did not, which is that a military career is assembled out of a small number of moments, and that what finally matters about those moments is who tells the story of them afterward.

He was sharp, he was articulate, he was genuinely good in an airplane. Those three qualities do not always sit comfortably together in one man. And there was a lieutenant named Raymond Hein, from Ohio, born in the summer of 1920, which made him 22. He does not get many pages in the histories. Remember him anyway.

He is going to matter more than any of them. 600 miles to the northwest, at the great Japanese fortress base at Rabaul, there were men who had spent that same autumn winning. The naval air groups based there had swept across the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Dutch East Indies, and they had done it with an airplane that was, for the fight it had been designed to have, very close to perfect.

The Zero was light. It was so light that it carried almost no armor plate and almost no protection in its fuel tanks. And the men who flew it accepted that bargain without much argument, because what they got in exchange was a machine that could turn inside anything the Allies owned. Japanese naval pilots in 1942 were probably the best trained fighter pilots in the world, and they had earned every ounce of the confidence they carried.

Among the younger men flying escort out of the northern Solomons was a pilot named Kenji Yanagiya, 24 years old, from the cold northern island of Hokkaido. He had entered the Navy as an aircraft mechanic and had been selected for pilot training. He flew a Zero. He would still be able to recite the number of his air group when he was an old man in Tokyo more than 60 years later because of one morning in April that he was never able to set down and walk away from.

But all of that was still in front of them and in the winter of 1942, nobody knew any of it. What the Japanese pilots knew was that something over Guadalcanal had changed. The Americans had begun refusing to fight. That is what it looked like from inside a Zero cockpit. The twin-tailed machines would come down out of the sun in a dive that no Japanese fighter could follow without the airframe beginning to complain.

They would fire once from farther out than seemed sensible and then they would keep going down straight through the formation and then they would take all of that accumulated speed and trade it back for height and go home to the altitude they had come from. If you tried to follow them down, the controls turned to concrete in your hands and the airplane began to shudder.

If you tried to follow them up, you ran out of air and fell out of the sky. And if you set up the beautiful, patient, curving engagement that had killed allied pilots by the hundreds from Manila to Java, they simply left. Full throttle, straight line, gone. It was not cowardice. It was doctrine and it had been arrived at the hard way by men who watched their friends die learning it.

The rule that American squadron commanders wrote and then enforced was short and it was absolute. Do not turn with a Zero ever. Not when he is out in front of you. Not when you are sure you have him. Not when every instinct you have ever had in an airplane is screaming at you to pull the stick back into your stomach. That rule cut against everything a fighter pilot believed about himself.

Turning was how you proved you were the better man. Turning was the entire romance of the thing, the reason boys had wanted to fly since the last war. To be told that survival meant running away with the throttles firewalled and coming back a minute later from somewhere above was for some pilots close to an insult.

The ones who obeyed it lived. By the first months of 1943, they were losing experienced men, irreplaceable men, to an airplane that would not stay and fight, and they had no real answer because a real answer would have required a different airplane, a different doctrine, and a different country standing behind them.

None of that by itself was going to win a war. Air superiority over one island in the Solomons does not end anything. What was going to matter was a message, a short one, a few lines long, transmitted in a naval code that the Japanese believed with total confidence to be unbreakable, containing an itinerary, a column of times, and the name of a man.

The name on the message was Isoroku Yamamoto. And to understand why 16 airplanes were eventually sent 600 miles over open water to find him, you have to understand that the Americans were not hunting a symbol. They were hunting the one man in the Japanese navy that the United States navy genuinely feared. He was 59 years old.

He had turned 59 2 weeks before the message was sent on the 4th of April in a war he had told his own government it could not win. Yamamoto had two fingers missing from his left hand. He had lost them as a young ensign at the Battle of Tsushima back in the age of coal smoke and armor plate when Japan destroyed a Russian fleet and announced itself to the world.

He had studied in the United States. He had served as a naval attaché in Washington, and he had traveled across the American continent by train, and he had seen the oil fields of Texas and the automobile plants of Detroit with his own eyes. He knew, in a way that almost no one else in the Japanese high command knew, exactly what it was that his country was proposing to fight.

He had argued against the war. He had argued against the alliance with Germany. He had received death threats from his own countrymen for saying so out loud, and the Navy had at one point moved him to sea duty, partly to keep him alive. And when the decision was made anyway, over his objection, he had turned around and designed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That was the contradiction the man carried. He believed the war was lost before it began, and he built the opening move that made it possible. He had told his political masters that he could run wild for 6 months or a year, and that after that he could promise nothing. It had been 16 months. Midway had happened. Guadalcanal had happened.

He had been right, and being right had not saved a single ship. By April of 1943, Yamamoto had come down from his flagship to Rabaul in person to run an air offensive against Allied shipping and airfields in the Solomons and New Guinea. It was a large effort, and it did not accomplish very much, though the reports coming back to him claimed otherwise, as reports tend to.

When it was finished, he decided to fly out to the forward bases himself and see the pilots. He wanted to thank them. He wanted to be seen. There were officers on his staff who thought this was unwise. The forward bases were close to the enemy. The Americans on Guadalcanal had been growing stronger every month, and everyone at Rabaul had noticed it.

Yamamoto went anyway, and on the 13th of April his headquarters transmitted his itinerary to the units that would receive him so that they could be ready. It was a short signal. It gave the date, the 18th. It gave the aircraft, a medium bomber with a second bomber for the staff, and six fighters as escort.

It gave the departure time from Rabaul and the arrival time at the forward field to the minute. It was sent in the naval code, which the Imperial Japanese Navy considered secure. It was not secure. American cryptanalysts had been reading into that code for more than a year. It was slow, imperfect, exhausting work done in windowless rooms by people who were not allowed to tell their own families what they did all day.

Some messages came out whole. Many came out in fragments with holes where a code group had not yet been recovered. And the fragments had to be reasoned into sense the way you reason your way through a crossword with half the clues torn off. Emanthing. Picture the work for a moment because almost nobody ever does.

Men and women bent over long tables under bare bulbs sorting stacks of intercepted number groups against recovered values written by hand in ledgers, hunting the repetitions that every code eventually develops because human beings are creatures of habit. Weeks of it producing nothing. Then one recovered group opening a sentence that had been closed for a month.

They were not permitted to celebrate. They were not permitted to speak of it outside the room. Some of them went to their graves decades later with their families still believing they had spent the war doing clerical work for the Navy. This message came out whole enough. On the 14th of April an American officer sat looking at a decoded signal that told him precisely where the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet was going to be and precisely what minute he was going to be there, 4 days into the future.

What happened next was not a simple decision, and it is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the part of this story that most people skip. The problem was not whether the Americans wanted Yamamoto dead. Of course, they did. The problem was that killing him could cost them something worth far more than his life.

If a flight of American fighters appeared over an empty stretch of ocean, hundreds of miles from any American base, at the exact moment a specific Japanese admiral happened to be passing through, there was an obvious explanation available to any competent Japanese staff officer. The obvious explanation was that the code had been broken.

And if the Japanese navy concluded that, it would change its codes, and the United States would go blind in the Pacific overnight. In the middle of a war, it was still very far from winning. Every convoy located, every reinforcement anticipated, every carrier movement seen in advance, all of it would stop. So, the decision did not stay in the Solomons.

It went up the chain of command, past the fighter squadrons, and past the island commanders, to the admirals running the South Pacific, and beyond them. And men who did not fly airplanes sat in rooms and weighed one Japanese admiral against the ability to read the enemy’s mail. They decided he was worth it. And then, having decided, they built a lie to protect the secret.

The pilots would be told that the information came from Australian coast watchers. Those extraordinarily brave men living rough in the jungle on Japanese-held islands with radios, reporting what flew and sailed past them. It was a plausible story. Coast watchers had saved Guadalcanal more than once by calling in incoming raids.

A coast watcher had seen the admiral board his airplane, the pilots would be told, and had passed the word along. The men who were about to fly the longest fighter interception of the entire war would go and do it without knowing why they were going. Some of them learned the truth years later. One of them never learned it at all.

On the afternoon of the 17th of April, Major John Mitchell was told to report to operations at Henderson Field. What he found waiting for him there was a target, a time, and a problem that on its face could not be solved. The interception point was in the air over the southern end of Bougainville. From Guadalcanal, flying the direct line, that was well over 300 mi.

But the direct line ran straight up the middle of the Solomon’s chain, past island after island in Japanese hands. Every one of them with eyes, and some of them with radar. A formation of American fighters droning up that corridor in daylight would be reported within the first hour. And by the time it arrived, the admiral would be safely on the ground somewhere else, and there would be a hundred zeros waiting overhead.

So the direct line was out. The flight would have to go the long way, out and around, far to the south and west over empty ocean, and come at Bougainville from the sea, from the one direction nobody was watching. That turned 300 mi into roughly 600 mi outbound, with another 400 to get home. A thousand miles in total, most of it over water, for a fighter airplane.

There was exactly one fighter in the South Pacific that could do it, and even it could not do it as it sat. The Lightning carried drop tanks under its wings, disposable tanks that were used up on the way out and released before combat. The tanks available on Guadalcanal held 165 gallons. Mitchell ran the arithmetic he had been running his whole career and the arithmetic came back and said no.

The bigger tanks, the 310 gallon tanks, were in New Guinea. What happened next was one of those small logistical miracles that never get into the histories because nobody makes a movie about a cargo airplane. Someone found the tanks. Someone loaded them. Transport aircraft flew them across in the dark into an airfield that was still being bombed at intervals and set them down on the coral and ground crews went to work on them under shielded lights in the middle of the night.

There were just enough of them to give every lightning one of the big tanks to carry on one side with one of the smaller tanks already on the island hanging on the other. That combination, and only that combination, closed the gap between what the airplane could do and what the mission was going to ask of it. If you have ever worked on machinery outdoors at night in the heat, you know a little of what that was like.

And if you have never done it, understand that it was not romantic. The lights had to be hooded so that nothing showed from above, which meant working in a small yellow circle with everything past your elbows in darkness. Insects came to the light in clouds and got into your eyes and your mouth.

The steel matting held the day’s heat and gave it back all night. Sweat ran into cuts on your knuckles and made them sting. Tools slipped. Fittings that had been designed in a clean factory in California did not quite line up with an airframe that had been flying out of a swamp for 5 months. The big tanks did not simply hang there.

Lines had to be run and checked. Every connection had to be tested because a leak 200 miles out over the ocean is not an inconvenience. It is a death sentence for a man you have shaken hands with. Those men worked all night. They did not know what the mission was. Nobody told them.

They knew only that every airplane had to be perfect by dawn, and so they made every airplane perfect by dawn, and then they stood back and watched it take off, and had no idea for weeks what they had built. When the news finally broke, some of them worked out for themselves what they had been part of. Nobody wrote their names down. Mitchell asked for one more thing, and it is the detail that says the most about him.

He asked for a ship’s compass, a navy compass, the kind mounted in a vessel, larger and steadier and more precise than the instrument that came fitted in a fighter cockpit. Because here was the real problem, the one underneath the fuel problem. Mitchell was going to fly 600 miles over the open Pacific with no landmarks of any kind.

He could not use his radio because a single transmission would tell the Japanese that something was coming. He would have no radio navigation aids, no beacons, nothing to home on. There were no islands on his route to check himself against. There would be nothing beneath him for 2 hours but water that looked exactly the same in every direction.

He would be flying at 50 ft or less, wave hopping, to stay under Japanese radar and out of sight of any ship, which meant he could not even climb up for a look around. And at the end of all that, he had to arrive at a specific patch of empty sky at a specific minute to meet an airplane that would be passing through it at over 200 miles an hour and would not be waiting for him.

The entire operation came down to dead reckoning, heading and airspeed and elapsed time. You point the airplane, you hold the number, you count the minutes, and you turn when the clock says turn. That is all. It is the oldest form of navigation there is, and it works beautifully right up until the moment the wind is not what you thought it was, and then it fails silently, and you do not find out until you are somewhere else entirely with no fuel left to look around.

Consider what that actually asks of a man. An error of 5° in heading held for an hour at better than 200 mph puts you roughly 20 miles from where you believe you are. An unforecast crosswind of 15 mph blowing steadily for 2 hours across your track does the same thing while your compass sits there telling you everything is fine, and you cannot check.

There is nothing to check against. No coastline, no mountain, no smoke on the horizon. Just water, and the same water, and more of the same water hour after hour, close enough beneath your wings that you can see individual whitecaps sliding past. Every one of those men would be running the numbers in his own head the whole way, and every one of them would know it made no difference at all because they were going wherever Mitchell’s stopwatch took them.

Mitchell built the route in legs. Not one long run, but a series of headings, each one flown for a set number of minutes. Each turn timed by a stopwatch. The whole thing sketched out to swing wide of the islands and then bend north and come in from the empty side. He had to guess at the winds. There was no reliable weather information for the middle of that ocean.

He made his best estimate and folded it into the numbers and accepted that if he was wrong, 16 airplanes would be a long way from home with nothing under them. Then he chose his men. And this is the part of the story that gets sanded down in the retelling because the retelling likes to imagine a hand-picked band of brothers who had flown together for a year and could read each other’s minds.

That is not what took off. 18 pilots were assigned. Only eight of them came from Mitchell’s own squadron. 10 came from the two other fighter squadrons on the island, eight from one, and two from the other. They were men with the flying hours and the experience the mission required, pulled together from wherever they could be found, and a good many of them had never flown a mission in the same formation before in their lives.

They were not a team. They were the right 18 names on a piece of paper. Mitchell split them. Four airplanes would form what the mission called the attack section, the men who would go in low and do the actual shooting. 14 would climb above and behind as top cover, and their job would be the zeros, all the zeros, and every zero that came up from the airfields below once the shooting started, because the fields at Buin and Balahay were minutes away and full of them.

Captain Thomas Lanphier would lead the attack section. Lieutenant Rex Barber would fly on his wing. Two more lieutenants, James McLanahan and Joseph Moore, would fly as the second pair. Two others, Besby Holmes and Raymond Hein, were named as spares. Their job was to fill any hole that opened up on the ground before departure, and then, if no hole opened, to fly with the covering flight and never touch the bombers at all.

Hold on to those two names. Everything that people still argue about, and the one death this mission cost, comes out of a decision made in the last 90 seconds before the formation left the island. Mitchell put himself in the top cover. He would navigate the whole formation a thousand miles, and when the target finally appeared, he would be climbing away from it to fight fighters, and he would not fire a single round at the bomber.

The man who made the entire mission possible had assigned himself the part with no glory in it whatsoever, and he did it without any apparent difficulty, which tells you something. They were briefed that evening. They were given the cover story. They were told the time and the place and told that the interception had to be made before the target reached the airfield, because once it was on the ground, it was untouchable.

Nobody said the words that everyone in the room was thinking, which is that this had no business working. 2 hours and more of blind flying over the sea at wave-top height in radio silence to intercept a single airplane at a precise minute on the strength of one man’s stopwatch and one man’s guess about the wind.

Some of the pilots that night thought the odds of even finding the target were poor. They flew anyway. 600 miles north at Rabaul that same evening was ending very differently, and the escort assignment had come down to a fighter unit whose pilots had been flying almost continuously for months. Rabaul was everything Guadalcanal was not.

It was a real base, built into a great volcanic harbor, with proper workshops and proper roads and thousands of men. It had been Japanese since the beginning, and it felt permanent. From the air it looked like what it was, the anchor of an empire’s southern edge, but the men flying out of it were tired in a way that no amount of infrastructure fixes.

The air groups in the Solomons had been grinding through pilots since the previous August. The ones who were left had flown mission after mission over water in an airplane with no armor to protect them and no protection in the fuel tanks behind them against an enemy that was getting stronger and better equipped every single month, while their own replacements arrived with less training than the men they were replacing.

They were not beaten, not in 1943, but they were being used up, and at some level every one of them knew it. Six zeros. That was what had been allocated to cover the commander-in-chief of the combined fleet on a short hop over friendly water in an area where the Japanese navy had every reason to expect it was safe.

Six was not an unreasonable number. The trip was less than an hour. The route ran over territory Japan held. The last thing anybody at Rabaul expected was American single-seat fighters, because American single-seat fighters could not get there. Everyone knew that. It was the same calculation Mitchell had spent the previous afternoon doing, run by men who were just as competent, and the Japanese had come out the other side of it with an answer that was correct about every airplane in the American inventory except one.

Among the six pilots detailed to fly that escort was Kenji Yanagiya, 24 years old. He had flown a great deal of combat by then. He had watched the war change. He would climb into his airplane the next morning on a routine mission of a kind he had flown many times, and he would come home from it into a silence that would follow him for the rest of his long life.

That night on Guadalcanal, the mechanics finished the drop tanks and the compass and went to find somewhere to sleep. The pilots lay in their cots in the heat and listened to the insects and to the sound of the surf and to whatever else was moving out there in the dark. Two of them were going to lose their places on the mission before it even started for reasons that had nothing to do with courage or skill.

And the airplane that everyone had cursed for 5 months, the one with two engines to catch fire and twice the maintenance and the shape that made the ground crews laugh when it first came down out of the north, was about to do the single thing it had been built for, and no other fighter on Earth could have done it.

They started taking off at 25 minutes past 7:00 in the morning. The date was the 18th of April, 1943, which was, by an accident that nobody planned, exactly 1 year to the day since 16 American bombers had lifted off a carrier deck and flown to Tokyo. The airplanes went out from the fighter strip near the beach, one after another, kicking up coral dust, each one heavy with that enormous tank slung underneath.

Two of them did not go anywhere. And of all the airplanes on that island, the two that failed were both from the four-man attack section, the two men whose entire job was to kill the admiral. James McLanahan blew a tire on the takeoff run. That was all. A piece of rubber, after weeks of intelligence work and a night of frantic labor, and a decision that had gone all the way to the top of the United States Navy, and a man sat in a crippled airplane at the edge of a runway and watched the rest of them leave without him.

Joseph Moore got airborne and found that the fuel in his drop tank would not transfer. He could not use what he was carrying, which meant he could not make the distance, which meant he had to turn back. Another man, another airplane, another empty place at the sharp end of the formation.

So, the two spares moved up. Besby Holmes and Raymond Hine, who had expected to spend the morning circling above the fight, were now the second pair of the attack section. 22-year-old Raymond Hine, of Ohio, whose name was on the roster as a substitute, was going in with the killers. He had about 2 hours left to live. 16 went on. For the next 2 hours and more, nothing happened.

And the nothing was the hardest part. They flew at 50 ft and lower, close enough that the sea was not scenery, but texture. Individual crests and troughs sliding beneath the wings faster than the eye could hold. Nobody spoke. The radios stayed cold. 16 airplanes moving across an empty ocean in absolute silence, holding formation, each pilot fighting the low slow drift that creeps into a man’s hands after the first hour, when there is nothing to look at and nothing to do, and the engines have settled into a drone that gets inside your skull.

The heat came up off the water. The cockpits were greenhouse hot. Men who had been awake most of the night were now being asked to hold precise altitude a few wingspans above the Pacific while doing nothing else for 130 minutes. And out in front, Mitchell held his headings and watched his stopwatch and turned onto the next leg each time the numbers told him to.

With no way on earth to know whether any of it was working. At 34 minutes past 9:00 in the morning, the coast of Bougainville came up out of the haze ahead of them. Mitchell was 1 minute early. After more than 600 miles of blind flying over open water on estimated winds with a ship’s compass bolted in the day before, he had arrived at the interception point 60 seconds ahead of a schedule written by an enemy staff officer 4 days earlier and read by American cryptanalysts in a windowless room.

And there, high above and to the right, exactly where the numbers said they would be, were the airplanes. Two bombers, not one, flying in loose formation descending toward the airfield with six fighters stacked above and behind them. Two identical bombers. Only one of them carried Yamamoto.

The next part happened in less time than it takes to read about it. Drop tanks came off. Throttles went forward. 12 Lightnings began clawing for altitude to get at the escort and to meet whatever came up off the fields below. And in the attack section, Besby Holmes could not get his tanks to release. He hauled at it and they stayed and a fighter dragging two empty tanks is not a fighter anymore, it is a target.

He swung wide out of the attack wrestling with the airplane. Raymond Hine, his wingman, went with him because that is what a wingman does. So, the attack section, which had been four men at the briefing and had already lost two on the runway and replaced them, was now down to two. Lanphier and Barber climbed toward the bombers.

The zeros above saw them and dropped their own tanks and came down. What happened over that jungle in the next 3 minutes has been argued about for longer than most marriages last and the parts that are certain are these. The bombers broke. One turned toward the trees and dove for the deck, the standard response, get low, get over the jungle, make yourself hard to see against the ground.

Rex Barber went after it. He came in from behind and above and closed until closing did not make sense anymore and he fired and he kept firing and he crossed so close behind the bomber that the debris coming off it hit his own airplane. The bomber began pouring black smoke. It went down into the jungle north of the Japanese base and burned.

The second bomber went for the water and did not make it either. It came down in the sea off the coast hard. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, 53 years old, chief of staff of the combined fleet, was aboard. He and two others were pulled out alive. The man in the first bomber was not. Above and around all of this, the fight went on for a few more minutes, and then the Americans left because they had to.

They were more than 400 miles from home with fuel they had been rationing since dawn, and there were Japanese fighters coming up from the fields below in numbers. They went out low and fast toward the sea, and they counted themselves as they went, and they came up one short. Raymond Hine, the substitute, the man who had not been on the attack roster when the sun came up, was last seen out over the water with his engine trailing smoke.

He was never found. No wreckage, no body, no grave. The only American killed on the mission that killed Yamamoto simply went into the Pacific and stayed there, and his mother received a telegram that said missing, and then later a telegram that said the other thing, and there was never anything to bury. The rest came home on fumes.

Some of them landed with almost nothing in the tanks. One had to put down short of Guadalcanal to refuel. Japanese search parties reached the crash site in the jungle the following day and found the wreck and found the admiral. And then Japan said nothing. For more than a month, the Imperial Japanese Navy did not tell its own people that the commander in chief of the combined fleet was dead.

The announcement did not come until the 21st of May. When it came, the country went into public mourning on a scale that had not been seen in living memory. The man had been more than an admiral. He had been the last figure in the Japanese Navy who could plausibly be described as a genius, and the men at the top knew perfectly well that there was nobody standing behind him.

On the American side, the secret held. The Japanese Navy investigated, considered the possibility that its codes had been compromised, and concluded that the coastwatcher explanation was good enough. The codes were not changed in the way the Americans had feared. The most valuable intelligence advantage of the Pacific War survived, and the men who flew the mission never learned that this was the reason they had been lied to in the briefing tent.

And then, almost immediately, the argument started. Thomas Lanphier reported that he had shot down the admiral’s bomber, and it was Lanphier’s account that reached the newspapers and the histories and the citations. He received the credit. For decades in the American telling, the man who killed Yamamoto was Thomas Lanphier.

Rex Barber never accepted it. He said from the beginning and for the rest of his life that he had been the one on the bomber’s tail, that he had been close enough to be hit by pieces of it, and that the airplane Lanphier described attacking could not have been the same one. Some of the men who were there sided with Barber.

Investigations were conducted. The wreck in the jungle was examined by researchers who measured bullet paths through the airframe and argued about angles. Eventually, the official credit was split, half to each man, which satisfied nobody and was in some ways the cruelest possible outcome. In 1991, an Air Force review board considered the case again and left the shared credit standing.

Barber had petitioned. Barber lost. Thomas Lanphier died in 1987. Rex Barber died in 2001. Neither of them ever heard the argument settled because it has never been settled, and at this distance, it never will be. John Mitchell, who put 16 airplanes on a moving target in the middle of the Pacific 1 minute early, and who was fighting zeros thousands of feet above the whole thing, never had any share of that particular quarrel.

He flew the rest of the war and Korea after it, and he lived until 1995. He tended to talk about the navigation. On the other side of it, Kenji Yanagiya went back to Rabaul that morning as one of six escort pilots who had failed to protect the most important man in the Japanese Navy.

In June, 2 months later, over the Russell Islands, he was badly wounded and lost his right hand. He was sent home to Japan to recover. And because he was sent home, he was still alive when the war ended. Not one of the other five escort pilots survived the war. Yanagiya lived to be 88. He gave interviews. He met in later years some of the American pilots who had been on the other side of that morning.

He died in Tokyo in 2008, 65 years after the 18th of April. The last living witness from the Japanese side of an engagement that was over almost before it began, and that he was asked about in one way or another for the rest of his adult life. There is a thing worth saying at the end of this, and it is not the thing the newsreel said.

The Japanese pilots who came up against the Lightning in the Solomons were not beaten because they were less brave, and they were not beaten because they were less skilled. Man for man, in 1942, they were as good as anything in the sky. They were beaten by an airplane that refused to fight the fight they were trained for, and by a country that could build a thousand of those airplanes and train men to fly them and ship the fuel across an ocean to keep them flying, and by a room full of quiet people who could read their mail.

The shock was never really about the twin-tailed airplane. The shock was the discovery that the war they were in was no longer being decided in the air at all.