April 18, 1943, a squadron of US Army P-38 twin engine fighters took off from Guadalcanal on a 1,000 mile round-trip flight to shoot down a Japanese aircraft taking a very important person to Bougainville. The very important person was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Fleet.
Four days earlier, US Navy communications intelligence personnel intercepted a series of messages encoded in the Japanese naval operating code, JN-25. It proved to be a series of communications giving Admiral Yamamoto's precise itinerary for a command inspection tour. The purpose of the tour was to enhance Japanese morale for their next planned offensive operations.
US planners considered what aircraft to assign to the mission. The only aircraft with enough range was the P-38. Eighteen P-38's were assigned to the mission, code-named Vengeance. The planned time of intercept was 09:35.
The four P-38's designated to intercept Yamamoto arrived at 09:34 just as Yamamoto's flight of two Japanese twin-engined aircraft began their descent. The interceptors shot down both aircraft. Yamamoto, in the lead aircraft, perished. Yamamoto's deputy, in the second aircraft, survived.
The mission was an assassination. The assassination succeeded. Today we would call it a "targeted killing."
Did it shorten the war or make the next two years of warfare easier? Probably not.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment