Operation Vengeance

The Astonishing Aerial Ambush That Changed World War II

Dan Hampton

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780062938107
• eBook ISBN: 9780062938114
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"Operation Vengeance is colorful, intimate, eye-popping history, delivered at a breakneck pace. I loved it." –Lynn Vincent

The New York Times bestselling author of Viper Pilot delivers an electrifying narrative account of the top-secret U.S. mission to kill Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander who masterminded Pearl Harbor.

In 1943, the United States military began to plan one of the most dramatic secret missions of World War II. Its code name was Operation Vengeance. Naval Intelligence had intercepted the itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, whose stealth attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated America’s entry into the war. Harvard-educated, Yamamoto was a close confidant of Emperor Hirohito and a brilliant tactician who epitomized Japanese military might. On April 18th, the U.S. discovered, he would travel to Rabaul in the South Pacific to visit Japanese troops, then fly to the Japanese airfield at Balalale, 400 miles to the southeast.

Set into motion, the Americans’ plan was one of the most tactically difficult operations of the war. To avoid detection, U.S. pilots had to embark on a circuitous, 1,000-mile odyssey that would test not only their skills but the physical integrity of their planes. The timing was also crucial: the slightest miscalculation, even by a few minutes—or a delay on the famously punctual Yamamoto’s end—meant the entire plan would collapse, endangering American lives. But if these remarkable pilots succeeded, they could help turn the tide of the war—and greatly boost Allied morale. 

Informed by deep archival research and his experience as a decorated combat pilot, Operation Vengeance focuses on the mission’s pilots and recreates the moment-by-moment drama they experienced in the air. Hampton recreates this epic event in thrilling detail, and provides groundbreaking evidence about what really happened that day.

Operation Vengeance includes 30 black-and-white images. 

Part One

“. . . it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.”

ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO

One

Cauldron

One hot day in the summer of 1928, a stocky, dark-haired eleven-year-old boy balanced carefully on the roof of his family’s barn and peered cautiously over the edge. Rex Theodore Barber had purposely chosen the back of the barn, facing away from the house and its surrounding poplars, to avoid being seen by his mother or sisters. Here, east of the looming Cascade Mountains, a flat river valley stuck up like a green thumb into the Columbia Plateau. Small hamlets followed the Deschutes River to the north, where it collided into the fast-flowing Columbia just east of the Dalles.

The barn, the boy, and the roof were on a hundred-acre farm just outside the tiny town of Culver in central Oregon. About midway up the Deschutes Valley, the town was framed between Round Butte to the north, Juniper Butte to the south, and to the east by the vast, open Columbia Plateau. It is beautiful, open country laced with racing, icy streams filled with trout, steelhead, and salmon. Adventurous youngsters could find duck or geese along the rivers, with ample pheasant and quail out on the Marginals to the east.^* As they had for generations of Paiutes, Modoc, or Umatilla Indians, the wide skies fostered superb eyesight for Rex and other boys who roamed the canyons, sagebrush, sweeping plains, or lonely mountains. East of the river the broken hills and thick forests were ideal for exploring, camping, and, if one knew where to hunt, for elk, deer, and even an elusive bighorn sheep.

Rex and his friends often rode horses across the flats and down into the narrow, dangerous gorge west of his house. The Crooked River flowed fast, deep, and cold through its gorge, but the boy never hesitated. He knew all the ways across, every splashing path through the clear water then up the rocky bank on the other side. There was steep ground here, but he could cut through a saddle in the cliffs and be on the banks of the Deschutes in no time. In the summer, Rex often vanished alone into the rough wild country west of the river for days on end, camping, hunting, and exploring. This type of life bred stamina, self-reliance, and a resolute fearlessness that remained with him all his life.

It was the perfect place to be a boy.

This day was warm for Oregon, and dry: perfect for tending his family’s wheat fields, which is what he was supposed to be doing, and was quite deliberately avoiding with characteristically stubborn mischievousness. But at this moment, Rex Barber was completely focused on the job at hand: he was going to fly. Well, float, actually, from the roof of his family barn to the grass thirty feet below, but he would be in the air and that was what counted. His uncle Edgar’s solemn tales of piloting biplanes and the Great War always thrilled the boy, and now it was his chance to be free of the ground, even if just for a few seconds, and to fly! Carefully constructing a parachute from a pair of his mother’s sheets, Rex carefully reinforced them by stitching the corners together.

Fortunately, his father, William Chauncey, disdained the use of modern farm equipment and harbored a special hatred for tractors, so there were coils of leather plow lines in the barn. Rex, like all boys, was an expert with knots; he used his best at each corner, tightly securing the leather traces, and had completed what he considered a fully functional parachute. Tying all four ends to his belt, two per side, Rex carried the parachute over his shoulders up and through the hayloft. This, he decided, was not nearly high enough, so he continued on up through the rafters and out a vent onto the roof. Though quite fearless, he was also methodical, and thoroughly checked his knots one final time. The boy glanced at the weathervane atop the nearby cupola, then he took a deep breath and jumped into the wind.

It didn’t work out quite the way he had imagined.

The sheets caught the breeze all right, and thanks to the unbreakable knots successfully yanked the boy completely off the gabled roof. Unfortunately he didn’t glide; he didn’t even float. But he did fall, and learned a brief, valuable lesson about gravity in the process. A broken arm did not dampen his enthusiasm for flying, but twelve years would pass before he had the chance to fly again, this time under vastly different circumstances. Twelve years that saw events unfold that led to the Second World War; a global cataclysm altering millions of lives, including Rex Barber’s, that shaped the course of human history as we know it today.

Though the war physically commenced in Poland on September 1, 1939, a more accurate beginning, at least for Europe, could be fixed during the final days of June 1919, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The official end to the Great War, the treaty forced territorial concessions in conjunction with vast, punitive reparations: 133 billion marks to be paid to the victors.

Perhaps worse for the proud Germans was Article 231, the so-called War Guilt Clause, which read: “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

It was a humiliating and shortsighted clause written to appease France in return for a reduction of reparations. This national insult, as it was perceived in Germany, coupled with crippling payments, military emasculation, and a faltering economy, contributed greatly to the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler.

A similar grievance festered in Japan. The Empire was in its Taishō period, a brief span from 1912 through 1926 when an attempt at democracy occurred. If such a system produced the British Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United States, then perhaps it could also work for Japan. Though there was no doubt in the Japanese mind that their culture was superior, the struggle to reach technical parity with the West was at least a half-century old by that time, and led primarily by the military, which for centuries has been closely intertwined with Japanese life, government, and society, so to understand the Japanese one must grasp this aspect of Imperial culture.

For more than twelve hundred years various factions of the samurai class and their daimyo overlords fought interminably, resisted contact with the West, and ruled Japan as they wished. The daimyo, like Western dukes and earls, controlled huge tracts of land named “Domains” backed by personal armies of loyal samurai, or knights, who owed military service and allegiance in return for their own lands. At the top of this feudal food chain was the shogun, which translates as “Commander in Chief of the Expeditionary Force Against the Barbarians.” This supreme military ruler, created during the Heian period in 784, became a hereditary position that relegated the emperor to figurehead status.

By 1846, when American commodore James Biddle anchored the USS Vincennes at the mouth of Edo Bay, power resided with the 15th Tokugawa Shogun. Biddle was contemptuously rebuffed and sailed away empty-handed, which reinforced Japanese’s supreme confidence in their ability to deal with the West. The fallacy of this attitude was starkly revealed during the summer of 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry, a very different type of naval officer, and his four “Black Ships” steamed into Edo Bay.^* With his eight-inch Paixhans guns trained on the nearby town of Uraga, Perry gave the Tokugawa Shogunate its first taste of American-style gunboat diplomacy backed by shockingly superior technology. Brooking no nonsense behind the guns of the USS Susquehanna, Perry refused to leave, and blatantly conducted surveys of the port and coastline. The Japanese, who long regarded their warrior caste as invincible, were profoundly shaken by their complete inability to prevent this, so, with Perry’s threat to return hanging over their heads, they reluctantly agreed to his unequivocal terms.

Within Japan, rival factions seized this opportunity to challenge the Shogunate and restore direct control of the nation to the emperor. This led to the seventeen-month Boshin Civil War between the Imperial samurai, mainly in the south and west, and Shogunate samurai in the north. The Shogunate lost, and the emperor was restored as head of state in June 1869. Prince Mutsuhito, born the year before Perry’s Black Ships arrived, ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne as Emperor Meiji and immediately embarked on widespread reforms. This included the official dissolution of the samurai class, and an unprecedented period of military modernization, especially for the newly created Imperial Navy.^*

Beginning with a four-gun yacht, courtesy of Queen Victoria, and an armed Dutch-built paddle wheel steamboat, the Imperial Navy received its first modern warship from the United States. In 1869 the USS Stonewall, a former Confederate ironclad armed with a 300-pounder Armstrong cannon, was delivered along with French naval experts who constructed the Yokosuka dockyard. The French also taught the Japanese how to design and build modern steel vessels, and over the next twenty years the Imperial Navy ordered more warships than any other force except the British Royal Navy.^* There was suddenly a desperate need for men, who were available in large numbers as ordinary sailors, and especially for officers.

Following Meiji’s reforms, many samurai, by virtue of their better education, became military officers and administrators. But those in the rural north, the former Shogunate, had fewer opportunities. Many of them became teachers. Sadayoshi Takano, a schoolmaster descended from the Echigo samurai clan, was such a man, and on a spring day in 1884 his wife, Mineko, gave birth to their sixth son in the tiny hamlet of Kushige along Honshu’s northeastern coast. Sadayoshi named the child Isoroku, or “Fifty-Six,” which was his age when the boy was born. The family soon thereafter moved to the larger city of Nagaoka in search of better opportunities.

Isoroku grew up so poor he wore straw sandals and cotton kimonos all year round, even when winter brought snow and freezing Russian wind across the Sea of Japan. The boy could not afford textbooks for school, so he laboriously hand-copied them under the feeble heat of a little charcoal brazier. A somewhat aloof and distant father, Sadayoshi Takano nonetheless taught Isoroku calligraphy and encouraged his visits to a local Christian missionary who taught the child basic English. During summers, the boy learned the sea: how to sail, handle a boat, and fish for mackerel or octopus.

Male children also took part in large-scale military maneuvers, which often involved upward of ten thousand boys divided into opposing forces and led by regular army officers in mock attacks. Several decades of the Meiji Restoration had seen unprecedented military growth in Japan as the empire strove to make up lost centuries of progress in a matter of years—and it did. Following victory in the 1895 First Sino-Japanese War, Tokyo capitalized on a national wave of pro-naval enthusiasm by further expanding its fleet of available warships. Aware that as a potential world power the empire might have to contend with lethal Western navies, the Japanese created and funded a “Six-Six Fleet” with six modern battleships and six new armored cruisers.

By 1900, at the age of sixteen, Isoroku Takano had discovered a lifelong passion for athletics, particularly gymnastics, and American-style baseball. Given his family’s samurai heritage and having grown up fishing, swimming, and sailing, he naturally gravitated toward the navy. Scoring second out of three hundred applicants in December 1901, young Takano gained admittance to the prestigious Imperial Japanese Naval Academy on Etajima Island in Hiroshima Bay. Modeled after the harsh standards of Britain’s Royal Navy, the Japanese academy emphasized gunnery, technical studies, and learning the sea rather than just ships. Women, tobacco, and alcohol were banned for cadets, and each summer culminated in a thirteen-hour swim. At least 10 percent of each class dropped out every year.

At five feet three inches, Isoroku was small, even for a Japanese male, but excessively tough and resourceful. Graduating seventh in his class in November 1904, he was just in time to join the armored cruiser Nisshin and fight under Admiral Togo during the Battle of Tsushima Strait, the decisive climax of the Russo-Japanese War. In May 1905, three hours before a formal declaration of war was delivered, Japanese naval forces attacked Russia’s Far East Fleet at Port Arthur in southern China. The Russians promptly dispatched a major part of their Baltic Fleet, including eleven battleships, to destroy the upstart Asiatics. Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky chose to bring his forty-two-ship armada through the East China Sea en route to the Sea of Japan via Tsushima Strait, and it was here that Togo pounced.^*

At the end of the battle, the Russian fleet had lost nine of eleven battleships, with 4,480 sailors killed in action and another 5,917 captured. Against this the Imperial Navy lost three torpedo boats, 117 dead, and 583 wounded, including Ensign Takano. When Nisshin’s forward eight-inch gun barrel overheated during the battle, the weakened metal burst, and the flying fragments severed the index and middle fingers from Isoroku’s left hand.^* He spent two months in the hospital, then was granted medical leave for the summer with his proud family. The following decade was spent on training cruises throughout Asia, Australia, and the west coast of the United States. As the Great War in Europe approached, Isoroku’s father died and according to tradition he was adopted by a fellow samurai who had no sons of his own. When the thirty-year-old newly promoted lieutenant commander took up a posting at Naval Headquarters, he formally assumed his new stepfather’s surname and became Isoroku Yamamoto.

Tokyo declared war against Germany on August 23, 1914, just as the German First Army crashed into the British Expeditionary Force along the French-Belgian border near Mons. Though it was allied with Great Britain and on relatively good terms with the United States and France, Japan’s motives for joining the fight were largely opportunistic. Already seeking to expand and perennially short of resources, the Empire snatched up Germany’s Pacific possessions in the Caroline, Marshall, and Marianas islands. Rightly figuring Berlin, London, and Washington were too far away and too disinterested for intervention, Japan then landed troops on the Shantung Peninsula in mainland China. It was a gamble, to be sure, but with devotion to the emperor and the absolute conviction of cultural superiority, gambling was also a Japanese national trait.

Despite its motives, the Empire did make material contributions to the Great War. At London’s request, the Japanese took on any German or Austro-Hungarian naval raiders in Chinese waters, and even aided the British in suppressing a mutiny by an Indian Army unit based in Singapore.^* In February 1917 the Imperial Japanese Navy also dispatched the Second Special Squadron, which included three cruisers and fourteen destroyers, to the Mediterranean for transport duties and antisubmarine patrols. These actions earned the Empire a permanent seat in the League of Nations, and there was little doubt in Japan that they were, at last, a Great Power on par with the West.

This opinion was definitely not shared by Britain, France, or the United States. Though there was no denying Japan’s impressive rise from feudalism to modern industrialism, this meteoric ascension was also quite troubling given the weakness of other Asian nations and, more important, the vulnerable concentration of European colonial res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Maps
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Foreword by Rex Barber Jr. and Rex Barber III
• Prologue
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• Also by Dan Hampton
• Copyright
• About the Publisher