When 18 American fighters lifted off from Guadalcanal on April 18, 1943, the mission hinged on a borrowed compass, a carefully calculated schedule, and pilots who had to fly nearly 500 miles over open ocean in complete radio silence. Their target was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, whose aircraft was expected to pass over a specific patch of sky above Bougainville at a specific minute. For Major John Mitchell, the pilot leading the mission, getting there on time was the hardest part of the operation. Yamamoto’s itinerary had been intercepted days earlier.
On April 13, a Japanese headquarters in Rabaul transmitted a detailed schedule of the admiral’s inspection tour to five commands in the southern Solomon Islands. The message specified departure times, arrival times, escort details, and even what uniforms officers should wear. It assumed no hostile force was listening. It was wrong.
American codebreakers had been working on the Japanese naval code since before Midway, and this message was decoded quickly enough to be useful. The translation came from the Military Intelligence Service, largely staffed by second-generation Japanese Americans. When Sergeant Harold Foudina delivered the translation, his superiors doubted it—no one believed a headquarters would broadcast its commander’s schedule so openly. But linguists in Hawaii and Alaska reached the same translation independently, and the doubt faded.
The mission was not without controversy. Admiral Chester Nimitz made the decision to proceed on April 17, reasoning that the intelligence source could be protected if the truth remained unknown to those who did not need it. Winston Churchill opposed the idea entirely; British intelligence, which had not lost anyone at Pearl Harbor, argued that no admiral was worth risking the codebreaking effort against Japan. A cover story was written and those involved were briefed on it.
The route itself posed a serious problem. The direct flight path from Guadalcanal to Bougainville was about 400 miles and passed over islands with Japanese garrisons, radar, and observers. Flying directly would have exposed the formation to advance warning. Instead, the route curved west and south over open sea, away from everything—600 miles out and 400 miles back.
Only the P-38G Lightning could cover the distance and fight at the end of it, so the choice of aircraft was decided by fuel capacity. Marine Major John Condon drafted an early flight plan, but Mitchell rejected it because he did not believe the speeds and timings would place the fighters where they needed to be. Mitchell then sat with several of his pilots and built the plan backward from a single number: 9:35 a. m.
, ten minutes before Yamamoto’s bombers would be descending, slow and vulnerable. He worked backward through four phases, each with its own heading, speed, and duration, then added a fifth phase curving into a search pattern in case nothing was there when they arrived. He also calculated what the fuel tanks would leave them: five to ten minutes over the target, then everyone returns to base, whatever happened. Privately, he estimated their chances of even seeing the admiral’s aircraft at about one in a thousand.
The massive drop tanks had to be flown in from New Guinea overnight. Enough large tanks were available to give each Lightning one large tank instead of one of its two standard tanks, leaving one wing about 1,000 pounds heavier than the other. The tank was positioned close enough to the center of gravity that it did not ruin the aircraft’s balance, but it did not help the takeoff. Loaded with an extra 3,000 pounds of fuel, the fighters used most of the runway before lifting off.
Eighteen aircraft took off around 7:25 a. m. on the 18th. Two of the four planes assigned to the attack flight were lost within minutes: Jim McLanahan blew a tire on the runway, and Joe Moore’s external tank fuel system failed, forcing him to turn back.
Besby Holmes and Raymond Hine, who had expected to spend the morning as backups, stepped in to replace them. Sixteen aircraft completed the flight. The formation flew at 30 to 50 feet in absolute radio silence for the entire journey. If a pilot drifted off course, no one could warn him.
The P-38 had no air conditioning, and the cockpit canopy was like a greenhouse; over tropical water in mid-morning, the cockpits were barely tolerable. Mitchell spent the flight fighting sleep on a course he had no way to verify. There was nothing to look at. That was the point.
After 494 miles, the formation left the surface and began to climb. At about 3,000 feet, the pilots tested their guns—the last routine thing they did that morning. Then Doug Canning called out enemy aircraft at 11 o’clock. Both sides arrived on schedule.
The two Japanese bombers were at 6,500 feet, with six Zero fighters flying above and behind them in groups of three. The Americans dropped their tanks and turned to parallel them, climbing at full power. Holmes could not release his tanks, so he swerved out to sea with one wing to shake them off. Mitchell climbed with the cover group to 18,000 feet and waited for the roughly 70 fighters from Kahili airfield that everyone expected but never came.
Then he ordered the attack group in. The Japanese escorts saw them and dove to meet them. Thomas Lanphier headed straight for the Zeros, a standard P-38 tactic, leaving Rex Barber alone with the bombers. Barber turned hard to get behind them, lost sight of them during the turn, then emerged directly behind one bomber—close enough to open fire on the right engine, then along the fuselage to the tail.
As bullets tore into the left engine, the bomber began streaming black smoke and veered hard left, almost dragging him with it. He looked back and saw a column of smoke rising from the jungle. He did not know which bomber he had hit, and no one else in the air knew either. Barber headed for the coast at low level looking for the second bomber and found it flying over the water off Moila Point, with Holmes chasing it.
Holmes, down to his last fuel, had fired into its right engine and overshot. Barber came from behind and fired until pieces began flying off the aircraft, some striking his own plane, and the bomber fell into the sea. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, Yamamoto’s chief of staff, was aboard that bomber. He and two others were pulled from the water alive.
The Zeros then engaged, and the Americans returned from the fight in three different states: one aircraft with a damaged fuselage and 104 holes, one that landed on an unfinished airstrip in the Russell Islands after running out of fuel, and one missing. Raymond Hine, an experienced P-40 pilot unaccustomed to the aircraft he was flying that morning, never returned, and no Japanese pilot claimed to have shot him down. During his landing approach, Lanphier opened his microphone and told the fighter controller at Guadalcanal that “the man concerned” would not dictate peace terms from the White House. He said this clearly over an open channel above an ocean full of Japanese listening stations, for an operation whose security depended entirely on no one guessing the source of the intelligence.
One of his engines stopped from fuel exhaustion during landing. He filed his claim for the shootdown before the end of that day. The codebreakers had concluded that Yamamoto would land at Balalae, a small island off the tip of Bougainville. Mitchell had not set the interception point over Balalae.
He placed it about 40 miles away, reasoning that he wanted the bombers in the air and in a landing configuration, rather than on a final approach to a fortified airfield protected by fighters overhead. But Yamamoto was not flying to Balalae. He was flying to Buin, on Bougainville itself. That is why his plane’s wreckage lies in the jungle nine miles from Panguna, and not on an island airstrip.
The margin Mitchell set for tactical reasons happened to cover an error that no one involved knew existed. Had he planned precisely according to the decoded intelligence, the Lightnings would have spent their five minutes of fuel in the wrong place and returned with nothing. The entire operation hinged on an estimated judgment about landing angles. A Japanese search party found the crash site the next day, led by army engineer Soyoshi Hamasuna.
Yamamoto had been thrown from the aircraft and found in an upright position, still in his seat, under a tree. He wore a dark green uniform instead of the lighter one he usually wore on such visits. Tokyo said nothing about any of it until May 21, and the American public learned of the operation for the first time through the Japanese announcement. What the American pilots did afterward is less a source of pride.
Three men each reported shooting down a bomber, so the Navy recorded three bombers destroyed. There had only been two in the air. The rest of the formation was not debriefed because formal debriefing procedures did not exist at Guadalcanal at the time, and Lanphier’s claim entered the record without witnesses. As the official report and medal citations were written, and over the next decade, he authored a number of magazine articles in which Barber’s role diminished significantly.
Barber spent the rest of his life disputing it. Since then, the evidence has pointed in only one direction. Kenji Yanagiya, the only surviving Zero pilot from the escort, said the bomber fell 20 to 30 seconds after taking fire from behind. He also said none of the escort fighters was shot down at all—which cost Lanphier a separate claim and, with it, his status as an ace.
Doug Canning noted that the P-38G had no aileron boost, so the turn described in the official account would not have been possible in the time available. Field inspections of the crash site found bullet damage entering from behind, not from the right. Every independent examination reached the same conclusion. The official record remained divided anyway.
A joint award review board affirmed the shared credit in 1985, and the Air Force Office of History recommended in 1991 that there was insufficient certainty on either side to change the shared claim. At that point, the board meant to settle the question deadlocked, and the Secretary of the Air Force left the division as it had been for 48 years. Barber took the case to federal court. The Ninth Circuit refused to determine which pilot, if any, had made the kill.
Lanphier died in 1987, still crediting himself with the shootdown. Most of his obituaries praised him for it. Barber continued arguing the case through military magazines until his death in 2001. In 2024, Daniel Hallman, who had served on the 1985 board, wrote that after reviewing newer evidence, he had become convinced the credit belonged to Barber.
Mitchell gained little from the operation either. His Medal of Honor nomination became a Navy Cross after a magazine published unauthorized details about the mission in October 1943, which the Navy treated as a security breach. The man who handled the navigation lost his medal because of someone else’s publicity. The historical record in its peripheral details is less precise than the popular accounts suggest.
Accounts conflict regarding the departure airstrip, the capacity of the large fuel tanks, the altitude they flew, and the date of the codebreak. The one thing every account agrees on is the timing. In January 2020, after an American strike killed an Iranian general, senior officials in Washington cited this mission as a precedent. A State Department official summarized the comparison by saying it was like shooting down Yamamoto in 1942.
It was 1943. That is the state of the operation now: a shorthand cited from memory with an error in the date, by people who never had to hold a course across 500 miles of water and arrive at the appointed minute. A piece of the aircraft’s wing is on loan to a museum in Nagaoka City. One of its doors is in Port Moresby.
John Mitchell, who designed the flight path, wrote his own summary of the controversy that overshadowed everything else and never softened its intensity. No one on Earth knew who shot down which bomber. That was the truth.
Mmm.