Lightning Strike
The Secret Mission to Kill Admiral Yamamoto and Avenge Pearl Harbor
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This is the story of the fighter mission that changed World War II. It is the true story of the man behind Pearl Harbor--Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto--and the courageous young American fliers who flew the million-to-one suicide mission that shot him down.
Yamamoto was a cigar-smoking, poker-playing, English-speaking, Harvard-educated expert on America, and that intimate knowledge served him well as architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the next sixteen months, this military genius, beloved by the Japanese people, lived up to his prediction that he would run wild in the Pacific Ocean. He was unable, however, to deal the fatal blow needed to knock America out of the war, and the shaken United States began its march to victory on the bloody island of Guadalcanal.
Donald A. Davis meticulously tracks Yamamoto's eventual rendezvous with death. After American code-breakers learned that the admiral would be vulnerable for a few hours, a desperate attempt was launched to bring him down. What was essentially a suicide mission fell to a handful of colorful and expendable U.S. Army pilots from Guadalcanal's battered "Cactus Air Force":
- Mississippian John Mitchell, after flunking the West Point entrance exam, entered the army as a buck private. Though not a "natural" as an aviator, he eventually became the highest-scoring army ace on Guadalcanal and the leader of the Yamamoto attack.
- Rex Barber grew up in the Oregon countryside and was the oldest surviving son in a tightly knit churchgoing family. A few weeks shy of his college graduation in 1940, the quiet Barber enlisted in the U.S. Army.
- "I'm going to be President of the United States," Tom Lanphier once told a friend. Lanphier was the son of a legendary fighter squadron commander and a dazzling storyteller. He viewed his chance at hero status as the start of a promising political career.
- December 7, 1941, found Besby Holmes on a Pearl Harbor airstrip, firing his .45 handgun at Japanese fighters. He couldn't get airborne in time to make a serious difference, but his chance would come.
- Tall and darkly handsome, Ray Hine used the call sign "Heathcliffe" because he resembled the brooding hero of Wuthering Heights. He was transferred to Guadalcanal just in time to participate in the Yamamoto mission---a mission from which he would never return.
Davis paints unforgettable personal portraits of men in combat and unravels a military mystery that has been covered up at the highest levels of government since the end of the war.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
World War II enthusiasts probably already know about the controversies surrounding the American mission to kill Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. What the uninitiated will find interesting is Davis's account of the lives of the soldiers who participated in the attack. Through a series of vignettes, the reader sees both American and Japanese perspectives. Good and bad guys can be found on either side, and Davis appears to be a fair judge of character as he considers different perspectives of these historic events. Davis also does an excellent job supplementing a bird's eye view of the war with minute detail, i.e. "honor ribbons blossomed on the chest of the green uniform, and the right hand rested upon a long sword." Davis portrays Yamamoto not as a villain, but as a man who "captured the imagination of his crew and pilots" and was an inspiration to his people. (The real villain appears in the form of a glory-seeking American who uses his connections to rewrite history.) Yet, in this account, individuals are minor players compared to the war itself, which takes us from Japan and Pearl Harbor to the Philippines, Australia and Guadalcanal, where the bulk of the action takes place. Increasingly, readers are shown the more subtle but no less vicious war regarding the truth of what happened during the Yamamoto mission, and herein lies the thrust of Davis's book: to shatter the air of conspiracy that surrounds the mysterious mission and reveal the truth. Despite a thrown-together feel in the first 70 or so pages, Davis both informs and entertains, and shows the ease with which history may be rewritten.