Dead Reckoning

Dick Lehr

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062448521
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

The definitive and dramatic account of what became known as "Operation Vengeance" -- the targeted kill by U.S. fighter pilots of Japan's larger-than-life military icon, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the naval genius who had devised the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor.

"AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL." At 7: 58 a.m. on December 7, 1941, an officer at the Ford Island Command Center typed what would become one of the most famous radio dispatches in history, as the Japanese navy launched a surprise aerial assault on U.S. bases on Hawaii. In a little over two hours, more than 2, 400 Americans were dead, propelling the U.S.'s entry into World War II.

Dead Reckoning is the epic true story of the high-stakes operation undertaken sixteen months later to avenge that deadly strike – a longshot mission hatched hastily at the U.S. base on Guadalcanal. Expertly crafting this "hunt for Bin Laden"-style WWII story, New York Times bestselling author Dick Lehr recreates the tension-filled events leading up to the climactic clash in the South Pacific skies – frontline moments loaded with xenophobia, spycraft, sacrifice and broken hearts.

Lehr goes behind the scenes at Station Hypo on Hawaii, where U.S. Navy code breakers first discovered exactly where and when to find Admiral Yamamoto, on April 18, 1943, and then chronicles in dramatic detail the nerve-wracking mission to kill him. He focuses on Army Air Force Major John W. Mitchell, the ace fighter pilot from the tiny hamlet of Enid, Mississippi who was tasked with conceiving a flight route, literally to the second, for the only U.S. fighter plane on Guadalcanal capable of reaching Yamamoto hundreds of miles away – the new twin-engine P-38 Lightning with its fabled "cone of fire."

Given unprecedented access to Mitchell's personal papers and hundreds of private letters, Lehr reveals for the first time the full story of Mitchell's wartime exploits up to the face-off with Yamamoto, along with those of key American pilots Mitchell chose for the momentous mission: Rex Barber, Thomas Lanphier Jr., Besby Holmes, and Ray Hine. The spotlight also shines on their enemy target –Admiral Yamamoto, the enigmatic, charismatic commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet, whose complicated feelings about the U.S.—he studied at Harvard—add rich complexity. In this way Dead Reckoning offers at once a fast-paced recounting of a crucial turning point in the Pacific war and keenly drawn portraits of its two main protagonists: Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, and John Mitchell, the architect of the Yamamoto's demise.

Dead Reckoning features black-and-white photos throughout.

Part I

The Making of Warriors

Chapter 1

Johnnie Bill and the Moon

John Mitchell’s mother, Lillian Mitchell, and father, Noah Mitchell

Courtesy of the Mitchell family

IN THE SPRING OF 1943, JOHN MITCHELL’S WIFE, ANNIE LEE, WASN’T the only one aching for his return from the Pacific War. His father, Noah Boothe Mitchell, wanted him stateside, too, a feeling expressed in a poem he composed at the family homestead in the Deep South. The verse, typed on a Royal typewriter and mailed to the island of Guadalcanal half a world away, was titled “Rainbow in My Heart.” It began:

There is a rainbow in my heart,

But no pot of gold lies at the end.

The pot contains my cherished hopes

Of my dear one’s return again.

The poem’s rhymed quatrains, with their tender love along with a fervent hope for a safe return, also displayed a pacifist streak. The closing stanza went:

And when this grim war is over

And he comes home at last,

Let us keep that hope eternal

That ALL such wars have passed.

JOHN WILLIAM MITCHELL, THE FUTURE WORLD WAR II PILOT, grew up in the rural village of Enid in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie County—Tallahatchie being a Choctaw name meaning “rock of waters.” He was a third-generation Mississippian. It was his great-great-grandfather Washington Mitchell who, in the first half of the 1800s, had moved from North Carolina to an area east of the Tallahatchie River. Enid did not yet exist officially, and the early 1840s was when a survey crew started a settlement while working on the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad. One of the patriarch’s sons, William Washington Mitchell, nearly a man when the family arrived, married a woman of Irish descent named Jane Carson, and family lore has it that she was related to Kit Carson, the famous frontiersman and scout.

The Mitchell-Carson marriage produced eight children. The first son, William Carson Mitchell, arrived on October 1, 1845; he was John Mitchell’s grandfather. William Carson’s eventual marriage to Josephine Wilson of nearby Sardis, Mississippi, drew more frontier glamour into the family sphere; Josephine was said to be a distant relative of an earlier pioneer of even greater fame: Daniel Boone. If all that is true, John Mitchell’s ancestral lines intertwined with those of two of America’s best-known folk heroes.

William was a teenager when he enlisted in the Confederate Army, joining the nearly 80,000 other white men from Mississippi, the second state to secede from the Union, to defend slavery in the “War for Southern Independence,” as it was known. No surviving family records indicate that the Mitchells—most of whom were merchants and storekeepers—were slaveholders, but slavery was vital to their state’s cotton economy. The state’s slave population exceeded its white population—437,000 to 354,000. William fought in northern Mississippi and Tennessee under the command of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who built a reputation as “The Wizard of the Saddle” for his tactical use of the cavalry in mobile, quick strikes. Forrest later became an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

William returned home to Mississippi after the war. He and Josephine married two years later, in 1867. They raised three sons. The youngest, Noah, born in the summer of 1881, became John Mitchell’s father. It was during Noah’s teen years that the settlement where a handful of Mitchell families had lived for decades, which had been called various names over the years, officially became the township of Enid. With its railroad depot, grist mill, bank, barber shop, several stores, school, post office, and even a few saloons, Enid had grown into what one resident later called “a thriving place.” It was home to Civil War veterans, doctors, and merchants, such as the Mitchells, who built a brick store in the center of town that various members of the family were involved in operating for decades to come. With its train depot, Enid had also become a shipping point for white and red clay mined from the hills eight miles north of town. But Enid was “thriving” in the context of a region still largely rural and undeveloped—the wilderness. The village’s population in 1900, according to the US Census, was only 180.

Noah went to high school more than two hundred miles north of Enid at “Bell Buckle,” the nickname for the prestigious Webb School in the Tennessee town of Bell Buckle, a stop on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. The school had been founded by another Confederate Army veteran, William R. “Sawney” Webb, a disciplinarian who had graduated from the University of North Carolina and whose own classical education had included instruction in Greek and Latin. Webb and his wife had first started the school in Culleoka, Tennessee, in 1870, but when the town had legalized the sale of liquor in 1886, the couple, ardent prohibitionists, would have none of it; they had relocated thirty-five miles west to Bell Buckle.

Young Noah Mitchell arrived on campus the next fall, in 1887, paying the semester’s tuition of $39 in cash his father had given him. The Webbs had built a new schoolhouse on six acres of beech forest a short walk from the train station. Noah joined a sophomore class of forty-seven students that included other boarders, day students, and, unusual for the time, a handful of local girls. When he graduated in 1900, he was one of twenty-six classmates still standing. The schoolwork proved classical and demanding, and Sawney Webb insisted on a strong work ethic, trustworthiness, and honesty. He despised deception, admonishing students with a line that eventually became the school’s motto: “Do nothing on the sly,” or, in its Latin translation, “Noli res subdole facere.” The schoolmaster also had little tolerance for social pretense, a view he had included in the school’s original mission, which was, in part, “To turn out young people who are tireless workers . . . who are always courteous without the slightest trace of snobbery.”

Compared to his peers at school, Noah was on the small side. Indeed, in the sophomore class photograph taken during his first year at the school, Noah was placed in the first row, seated on the ground with the other shorter boys. His expression is one of seriousness, almost sadness, but then, not a single student in the photograph wears a smile; there is a gravitas to them all. Noah is dressed in a jacket, white shirt, and tie. His clasped hands rest in his lap; his brown hair is parted neatly down the middle. His brown eyes look dreamily to one side. The period dress notwithstanding, the facial similarities to his future son John are unmistakable.

JUST AS HIS OWN FATHER HAD RETURNED HOME AFTER FIGHTING in the Civil War, Noah returned to Enid after graduating from the Webb School, so it was in Enid where John Mitchell would be born into the modest, unpretentious life the Mitchell clan had built. Noah soon met Lillian Florence Dickinson from Temple, Texas, and when they were married on December 23, 1904, he was already established as a salesman marketing the clay from nearby mines as well as Mississippi long-leaf yellow pine from forests farther south. With railroad construction taking off, Mississippi was experiencing a timber boom; just two other states, Washington and Louisiana, produced more lumber in 1904. It was work that took Noah—who was only in his twenties—to parts north, such as New York City, as well as overseas, to Europe and England, where he sold clay to foundries. Nonetheless, he and Lillian began a family the year after their marriage; two boys and two girls were born in the next decade before John William’s birth on June 14, 1914. The baby boy with the same brown eyes and hair as his father was called “Johnnie Bill” at first, then “Johnnie” as he got older, and later still, in the military, he became “Mitch.”

Johnnie Bill Mitchell grew up in an Enid that hadn’t changed much over the years. “Just a wide place in the road,” his father would continue to say about the village for years to come. The village’s population actually decreased slightly from 1900 to 1920—from 180 to 174 residents, according to the US Census. Meanwhile, Tallahatchie County, where Enid was situated, experienced steady growth; its population increased from 19,600 in 1900 to 35,953 in 1920. The nearest “big city” was Charleston, twelve miles to the south on the east side of the Tallahatchie River. Its population was 1,834, a hub by comparison, featuring several churches and schools, a courthouse, and a jail. Getting around the county was never easy, though; most roads were dirt and gravel, or mud in winter and dust in summer. It was in 1914, the year Johnnie Bill was born, that state officials gave their approval to construction of the first paved road in all of Mississippi, an eleven-mile stretch in Lee County that eventually became the first leg of US Highway 45.

Johnnie Bill grew up in the same house his father had, a single-story, wood-shingled structure located in the village center. The front of the house looked out onto the railroad tracks less than a hundred yards away. The trains rumbling through town at night, their whistles blowing, were jarring to visitors but something Johnnie Bill and his family slept right through. The front porch running the length of the house was a popular spot on hot summer evenings, while inside a large fireplace in the living room kept the house warm during occasional winter cold spells. The bedrooms were toward the front of the house, while the dining room and large kitchen were in the back, with easy access to the well just outside the rear door, where Johnnie Bill and his siblings fetched buckets of water for cooking and cleaning. The privy was farther back; it would be thirty years after Johnnie Bill’s birth before basic plumbing was installed.

Pecan and maple trees filled the large backyard. Even with his frequent travels as a salesman for the Memphis-based Gayoso Lumber Company and his own Mitchell Clay Company, Johnnie Bill’s father found time to maintain a pear orchard just south of town, producing an annual yield of about a thousand bushels. “The fruit is excellent and abundant,” noted a local newspaper, adding that Noah was “selling the pears cheap, only one dollar per bushel.” People came from all over for his pears. In their large yard Noah kept a sprawling vegetable garden with flowers that attracted birds of all kinds. “Birds seem to know those who love them and it seems to me that a good many more birds come to our place than to some of the neighbors,” Noah wrote proudly in an essay titled “Around Home.” The family kept track of goldfinches, mockingbirds, orioles, bright red Kentucky cardinals, and northern flickers, a type of woodpecker. They listened to the doleful croaking of slate-colored rain crows, and their days often began and ended to the lyrical sounds of brown thrushes. “I do not believe there is a bird on earth that can surpass them in sweetness of song,” Noah wrote of thrushes. “The morning notes are bright, clear and cheerful, while the evening song seems a little sad and sleepy and much like a lullaby, but both morning and evening renditions are purest melody.”

These were the sights and sounds of Johnnie Bill’s home. His grandfather William Carson lived next door in a smaller house, and on the other side was the redbrick, mazelike general store. Inside, a balcony with iron railings—accessible by a staircase in each of the four corners—ran the length of the interior walls, increasing the store’s capacity tenfold. Upstairs was office space that at one point was used as a funeral parlor, at another time as a barbershop. Over the years various uncles and townspeople owned or operated the bustling emporium, and it was a place where Johnnie Bill and his brothers and sisters were always welcome. The main floor was lined with shelves, and cubbyholes were filled with everything imaginable from candy and treats to such foodstuffs as meal, flour, and dried lentils, as well as cookware, horse collars, shoelaces, matches, and axle grease. Separated by a window toward the rear of the store was a meat house, and the ground floor even had room for displays of women’s apparel and menswear. A big iron potbellied heater in the middle and a small fireplace on the balcony provided warmth.

Johnnie Bill’s world was Enid and the surrounding countryside; it was family centered and small town. The life beyond seemed to be passing him by, even with the railroad right there. Automobiles, the “good roads movement” and new railroad lines—hallmarks of progress—were happening elsewhere, not in his backyard. But if he missed out on some of the big events of the time, he was fortunate to go largely untouched by others. In 1917, the United States entered the war that had been raging across Europe since 1914. Congress passed a law that spring requiring all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for military service, and in April, President Woodrow Wilson’s call to arms promised that “the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, and the man on the street.” Johnnie Bill’s father was one of those men. Noah Mitchell went to his local draft office on September 12, 1918, joining 157,606 other Mississippians who registered to be called. He listed his occupation as “clay miner” for the Mitchell Clay Company and his nearest relative as his wife, Lillian Mitchell. But Lillian, her toddler Johnnie Bill, and the other children were spared losing their husband and father to combat. By the Great War’s end in November 1918, 43,362 men from Mississippi had been inducted into the military, but Noah had not been one of them. Though willing to go, he was never called; he was too old—thirty-seven.

Then, the same year as Noah’s draft registration, the influenza pandemic swept around the planet, a lethal virus that infected cells deep in the lungs and, in fifteen months, killed up to 50 million people worldwide. In the United States, the death toll was put at 675,000, and in Mississippi, which the prior year had seen 442 flu-related deaths, 6,219 residents succumbed. In cities and towns throughout the state, Sunday church services were canceled, public meetings postponed, and schools closed. The Mississippi Delta region was especially hard hit, but farther north in Enid, the Mitchell family managed to dodge the disease’s deadly grasp.

Johnnie Bill’s young life was not without tragedy, however. In May 1919, a month before he turned five, a baby sister named Elizabeth was born, Noah and Lillian Mitchell’s sixth child. Six months later, the baby was dead. The family soon suffered an even greater setback: in February 1922, Noah and Lillian were in Memphis when she took ill and was hospitalized. Eleven days later—and only in her late thirties—she died. The culprit was encephalitis, a rare and sometimes fatal infection that causes swelling in the brain. Johnnie Bill was seven, with four older siblings ranging from nine to sixteen years old. The funeral was a sad affair, attended by the extended Mitchell family except for Johnnie Bill; he had a bout of the flu and remained home. Lillian Dickinson Mitchell was buried in the family plot at Enid Oakhill Cemetery, about a mile north of the village.

His father faced parenting alone while juggling his diverse business interests. Johnnie Bill’s sixteen-year-old sister, Florence, shouldered some of the household responsibilities, but Noah Mitchell also arranged for an elderly black woman to move in as the family’s nanny. Evelyn Lott, a Mississippi native, was in her mid-sixties when she joined the family, herself a widow. She was quite possibly born a slave in 1860, but little information about her has survived. The 1930 US Census listed Evelyn as “Negro” living in the Mitchell home as “Servant.” The little there is in Mitchell family letters and materials shows affection for her, albeit in the broader social context of unalloyed racism. Fifty years removed from the Civil War, a horrific backlash to Reconstruction was well under way throughout the Deep South. The movie director D. W. Griffith’s racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, had been released to great acclaim in 1915, a year after Johnnie Bill’s birth; the film had become a runaway hit and the nascent Hollywood’s first blockbuster. The three-hour dramatization of the Civil War and Reconstruction portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes restoring order to a South torn asunder by lawless, sexually predatory ex-slaves. Its message of white supremacy resonated powerfully—a review in the Atlanta Constitution gushed, “Ancient Greece had her Homer, modern America has her David W. Griffith.” Lynching throughout the South during that period occurred with frightening regularity, while Klan membership soared. Mississippi politics, meanwhile, featured its own “Great White Chief.” US senator James K. Vardaman, spewing bigotry while dressed in a white suit, white hat, and white boots, his flowing hair worn long, embodied the archetypal southern demagogue. The popular Mississippi politico once asserted, “...