On Palm Sunday morning April 18 1943, 18 American P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal at dawn.
16 of them would continue on a 1,000 mile round trip mission across open ocean.
Their target was a single Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber.
Inside that bomber was the Japanese admiral who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.
American codebreakers had handed his flight itinerary to the Navy 4 days earlier.
This is the story of Operation Vengeance.
The intercepted message was decrypted on April 14 1943 by United States Navy codebreakers working under a program codenamed Magic. The Americans had been quietly reading the Japanese naval cipher JN-25D for over a year. The Japanese did not know.
The decoded message contained the complete inspection itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. It listed his departure time from Rabaul. It listed his arrival time at the airstrip on the island of Ballale, just off the southern coast of Bougainville. It identified the aircraft he would be flying in. It identified his fighter escort.
The information went straight to Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor. From there it went to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in Washington. From there it went to the White House.
President Franklin Roosevelt is reported to have given Knox a short instruction. Get Yamamoto. There is no surviving official record of those exact words but the order was passed down. On April 17 1943 Knox transmitted an authorization to Admiral Nimitz that read: “Squadron 339 P-38 must at all costs reach and destroy. President attaches extreme importance to mission.”
Yamamoto was the man Americans blamed more than any other for Pearl Harbor. He had planned the attack. He had ordered it. He was now flying himself directly into range of American fighters operating from Guadalcanal.
