The Day America Hunted Down Japan's Greatest Admiral

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]April 19th, 1943.

[00:00:03]A Japanese search party pushes through dense jungle north of Buin on the island of Bougainville.

[00:00:09]The canopy overhead is thick enough to fracture the early morning light into fragments.

[00:00:14]Army engineer Lieutenant Hamasuna leads the men through the undergrowth by feel as much as sight. They are looking for wreckage. They find it, and then they stop.

[00:00:25]Under a tree, thrown clear of the debris field but still strapped into his seat, sits Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Perfectly upright. A white-gloved hand [music] resting on the hilt of his sword. His face composed.

[00:00:40]The soldiers [music] stand in silence.

[00:00:43]They are looking at Japan's greatest naval commander, >> [music] >> the architect of Pearl Harbor. The man whose name 18 months earlier had been unknown to nearly every American alive.

[00:00:54]And who, within a [music] month of that December morning, had become the most hated enemy name in the United States.

[00:01:02]He is sitting in a jungle, dead.

[00:01:06]The Americans had been waiting for him.

[00:01:09]The question is how they knew.

[00:01:12]In November 1941, his name was on no American lips.

[00:01:17]A month later, it was on all of them.

[00:01:20]The planner of Pearl Harbor, the man who lit the Pacific on fire on a quiet Sunday morning. The face of the enemy.

[00:01:27]>> [music] >> But that face had a history the headlines never reached. He was born [music] on April 4th, 1884 in Nagaoka, a mountainous city in central Japan [music] known for its samurai tradition and its pride. He lost [music] two fingers on his left hand at the Battle of Tsushima in 1904, 19 years old and already learning what modern war actually was.

[00:01:51]Not about courage or tradition, but about industrial capacity and oil.

[00:01:55][music] He studied at Harvard.

[00:01:59]He served as naval attaché in Washington, sat at American poker tables, walked American factory floors.

[00:02:06]He came back with a cold arithmetic that told him [music] something the militarists in Tokyo did not want to hear.

[00:02:13]Through the 1930s, as Japan's [music] military faction tightened its grip on the government and pushed the country toward expansion, Yamamoto pushed back.

[00:02:24]He told a group of school children in 1940, "Japan cannot beat America. Therefore, Japan should not fight America."

[00:02:32]He warned the government that same year, "If war came, he would run wild for the first [music] 6 months and win victories, but if the war were prolonged," the sentence stopped there.

[00:02:44]The meaning [music] was unmistakable.

[00:02:46]Japan could not sustain it. He had done the math. His moderate views made him a target. Extremists in Tokyo wanted him dead for his politics. His colleagues advised him to accept command of the combined fleet. The promotion was also a shelter. [music] It moved him out of the capital before someone killed him for opposing the war.

[00:03:07]The man [music] who had opposed the war now commanded the fleet that would have to fight it.

[00:03:13]When the government chose war, Yamamoto designed the attack on Pearl Harbor, not because he believed it would win the war, because he believed it was the only possible [music] opening move in a war Japan would lose.

[00:03:26]When the Navy General Staff opposed [music] his plan, he called the American fleet a dagger pointed at our throat and threatened resignation. [music] They gave him what he wanted.

[00:03:37]On December 7th, 1941, his plan worked [music] with devastating precision.

[00:03:43]He was playing chess with a staff officer when word arrived of the attack's [music] success.

[00:03:47]He turned and said, "It's too bad, Watanabe. If I die before you, >> [music] >> tell the emperor that the navy did not plan it this way from the beginning.

[00:03:58]In March 1943, with the Guadalcanal campaign [music] grinding to its conclusion in Japanese retreat, he wrote to a friend, "I sense that [music] my life must be completed in the next 100 days."

[00:04:12]He was already 58. He had watched four Japanese carriers burn at Midway. He knew the arithmetic hadn't changed, only worsened. He kept working.

[00:04:23]On April 13th, 1943, he filed his schedule in a written signal encoded in the Japanese naval cipher JN-25D and transmitted to the commanders of three air flotillas.

[00:04:36]"Departure from Rabaul at 600 on April the 18th. Arrival at Balalae Airfield near Bougainville at 800 Tokyo time. Two G4M Betty medium bombers, 60 escorts." [music] Times, routes, destinations, precise enough to plan around.

[00:04:56]Three American intercept stations [music] picked up the signal.

[00:05:00]It arrived at the Fleet Radio Unit Pacific Fleet, FRUPAC, on Oahu.

[00:05:07]The JN-25 cipher had been broken by American cryptanalysts.

[00:05:12]The Japanese did not know this.

[00:05:14]The same codes that gave the Americans the battle plan for Midway 9 months earlier, that let an outnumbered US fleet position itself exactly where it needed to be while four Japanese carriers burned, were still running.

[00:05:26][music] Yamamoto had watched those carriers sink and never drawn the correct conclusion.

[00:05:33]At FRUPAC, the team decrypting the signal included cryptanalysts Ham Wright and Tommy Dyer, supervised by Lieutenant Commander Jasper Holmes.

[00:05:44]Among the junior members of the team was a 22-year-old intelligence officer named John Paul Stevens.

[00:05:51]He had enlisted on December 6th, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor.

[00:05:58]He was 2 days from his 23rd birthday.

[00:06:01]Holmes carried the finished translation down the hallway to Commander Edwin [music] Layton, Pacific Fleet's intelligence officer.

[00:06:09]Layton read it. He went immediately to Admiral Chester Nimitz.

[00:06:13]The debate that followed was brief and genuine.

[00:06:17]If the Americans acted on this [music] signal and Yamamoto died, the Japanese would ask how they knew.

[00:06:24]If they asked long enough and hard enough, they would arrive at the only possible answer, their codes [music] were broken.

[00:06:31]And if the codes changed, the intelligence stream that had made [music] Midway possible would disappear.

[00:06:38]The same intelligence about to be used to kill Yamamoto could be what Yamamoto's [music] death destroyed.

[00:06:45]The decision was made anyway.

[00:06:48]Secretary of the Navy Frank [music] Knox put it in writing on April 17th.

[00:06:54]Squadron [music] 339, P-38, must at all costs reach [music] and destroy.

[00:07:01]President attaches extreme importance to mission.

[00:07:05]At all costs.

[00:07:08]The mission fell to Major John W.

[00:07:10]Mitchell of the 339th Fighter [music] Squadron.

[00:07:13]Deliberate, methodical, the kind of officer who reads a problem the way an engineer reads a blueprint.

[00:07:20]He was given the [music] target and the geometry and began to work backward from what was possible.

[00:07:26]The distance from Guadalcanal to Bougainville was 400 miles by direct route. But a direct route crossed [music] Japanese radar stations and observation posts.

[00:07:36]The approach had to arc south [music] and west out over open ocean, away from every installation, a detour that extended [music] the outbound leg to 600 miles.

[00:07:46]Add the return. A 1,000-mile round trip for aircraft already flying at the edge of their range with auxiliary [music] fuel tanks fitted beneath each wing.

[00:07:55]Once those tanks were dropped for combat, roughly 10 minutes [music] of fuel remained over the target.

[00:08:01]10 minutes to locate two bombers in an empty sky, destroy them, hold off 60 escorts, and disengage.

[00:08:10]Mitchell put his odds of even locating Yamamoto's flight at 1,000 to 1.

[00:08:15]The only aircraft on Guadalcanal with sufficient range was the P-38G Lightning, twin-boom, twin-engine,.450 caliber machine guns, and a 20-mm cannon.

[00:08:29]18 were assigned, 16 operational, two spares.

[00:08:34]Four designated as the kill flight, led by Captain Tom Lanphier.

[00:08:40]The date was April 18th, 1943.

[00:08:43]One year to [music] the day since the Doolittle Raid.

[00:08:46]America's first strike on Japan, >> [music] >> a mission that had no business working.

[00:08:51]The symmetry was noticed. Nobody said it aloud.

[00:08:55]On the runway at Kukum Field, two of the four kill flight P-38s aborted with mechanical failure.

[00:09:02]The kill flight reconstituted.

[00:09:05]Lanphier, his wingman Rex Barber, Lieutenant Besby Holmes, and Holmes's wingman Raymond Hine.

[00:09:12]Four planes.

[00:09:14]The mission launched at 7:10 in the morning.

[00:09:17]>> [music] >> Mitchell took the formation down to 50 ft above the water.

[00:09:21]Radio silence.

[00:09:23]The Solomon Islands bristled with Japanese observation posts to the north.

[00:09:28]He navigated with a new Navy compass and his own wristwatch, dead reckoning across [music] open ocean, threading 16 fighters through the Pacific at 250 miles an hour for 600 [music] miles.

[00:09:40]No radar.

[00:09:42]No ground station.

[00:09:44]Nothing to [music] tell him where he was except the compass and the math.

[00:09:48]He needed to arrive at 9:35. [music] Yamamoto would be there at 9:35. [music] That same dawn, the last photograph of Yamamoto alive was taken on the tarmac at Rabaul.

[00:10:03]He stood before assembled pilots and raised his hand in salute. His uniform [music] was the dark olive green of a field commander, not the bright ceremonial white of a goodwill visit. A quiet concession [music] to some awareness of risk.

[00:10:17]He had been warned not to go.

[00:10:20]Lieutenant General [music] Imamura, who had barely survived a similar flight 2 months earlier, told him directly.

[00:10:27]His staff understood [music] the exposure in broadcasting a commander's exact itinerary in a written signal.

[00:10:34]He went anyway.

[00:10:36]He had given his word about the time.

[00:10:38]A bitter irony ran beneath the whole purpose of the visit. Yamamoto had accepted without challenge the after-action reports from Operation I-Go.

[00:10:48]Reports claiming dramatic victories, ships sunk, American air power crippled.

[00:10:55]He had suspended [music] the offensive and scheduled this tour to honor the men who had achieved those results.

[00:11:00]The reports were largely false.

[00:11:03]The ships [music] were still afloat.

[00:11:05]The aircraft was still flying. He was flying 400 miles to congratulate pilots for victories that hadn't happened aboard a plane whose departure time he had written down and transmitted toward a point in the sky where 16 American fighters [music] were already threading their way across open water.

[00:11:23]At 6:00, both Bettys lifted off Rabaul's runway on schedule. [music] Yamamoto was in the lead aircraft. His chief of staff, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki, flew in the second.

[00:11:36]Six zeros formed around them. The formation turned east-southeast [music] toward Bougainville.

[00:11:42]Below, the Pacific was clear and brilliant.

[00:11:45]Above, open sky.

[00:11:48]9:34 [music] Mitchell checked his wristwatch over the coast of Bougainville.

[00:11:54]He was 1 minute early after 600 miles of dead reckoning with a watch and a compass. [music] The sky in all directions was empty.

[00:12:03]He waited.

[00:12:05]Then, from somewhere in the covering flight, flat and immediate on the radio, "Bogies, 11:00 high."

[00:12:13]Two bombers descending toward the airstrip at [music] Balalae. Six zeros weaving above them. They were coming in on exactly the heading the decoded signal had described, at exactly the time it [music] had specified.

[00:12:26]Yamamoto's rigorous punctuality, the same quality that made him one of the most effective commanders in the Pacific, had placed him at the precise point in the sky where John Paul Stevens' decrypted message said he would be.

[00:12:41]One problem immediately surfaced.

[00:12:43][music] There were two Bettys, not one.

[00:12:46]Then a second. Holmes could not release his external fuel tank.

[00:12:51]He and Hine veered off.

[00:12:53]The kill flight was down [music] to two planes.

[00:12:56]Mitchell transmitted, "All right, Tom.

[00:12:58]Go get him."

[00:13:00]Lanphier broke toward the Zero escorts.

[00:13:02]Whether by design or instinct, he rolled away from the bombers, leaving Barber alone.

[00:13:08]Rex Barber was from Culver, Oregon. He was flying a borrowed P-38. His own aircraft was down for maintenance. The plane he had [music] named Miss Virginia.

[00:13:19]He banked hard right, cut in behind the lead Betty, >> [music] >> and opened fire.

[00:13:24].50 caliber and a 20-mm cannon into the right engine, the fuselage, the tail section.

[00:13:31]He closed the range to less than 100 ft.

[00:13:34]Debris from the rudder tore back and struck his windscreen.

[00:13:37]>> [music] >> Black smoke poured from the right engine. The Betty snapped left, slowed abruptly, and Barber roared past it as flames rolled along the fuselage.

[00:13:47]The bomber dropped into the jungle.

[00:13:50]In the second Betty, [music] several hundred yards behind, Vice Admiral Ugaki watched.

[00:13:56]His own aircraft was already dying.

[00:13:58]>> [music] >> He had seconds to look. He wrote in his diary afterward, "I just said to myself, my God, I could think of nothing [music] else.

[00:14:07]I grabbed the shoulder of the air staff officer Muroy, pointed to the first aircraft, and said, 'Look at the commander-in-chief's plane.'

[00:14:16]This became my parting with him forever.

[00:14:18]All this happened in about 20 seconds.

[00:14:22]20 seconds.

[00:14:25]The pilots did not yet know which bomber had carried Yamamoto.

[00:14:29]They fought off the remaining zeros and turned [music] south for Guadalcanal.

[00:14:34]One plane did not come back.

[00:14:37]Raymond Hine, Holmes's wingman, >> [music] >> last seen trailing smoke, possibly hit by a zero, did not respond [music] to radio call.

[00:14:46]No wreckage was ever definitively found.

[00:14:49]He was listed [music] as missing in action.

[00:14:52]Barber set Miss Virginia down at Henderson Field with no fuel left in the tanks. [music] More than 100 bullet holes were counted in the airframe.

[00:15:01]Fragments of the lead [music] Betty were embedded in the leading edge of his left wing.

[00:15:06]The confirmation arrived at the signals room in Pearl Harbor.

[00:15:09]Two days before [music] his 23rd birthday, John Paul Stevens received the message, "Bagged a peacock and two sparrows."

[00:15:18]He carried it for [music] the rest of his life.

[00:15:21]The search party found Yamamoto the next morning.

[00:15:24]The autopsy revealed 2.50 caliber wounds, one to the left shoulder, one entering the jaw on the left side and [music] exiting above the right eye.

[00:15:34]He was dead before the plane hit the jungle.

[00:15:37]He sat in his seat while the ground came up.

[00:15:39]The Japanese [music] military did not announce his death.

[00:15:43]A cover story was arranged. Civilian observers had [music] seen him board a plane.

[00:15:48]The medical report was altered.

[00:15:50]Biographer Hiroyuki Agawa later reported, "On orders from above."

[00:15:56]His remains [music] were cremated at Bouin and transported to Tokyo aboard the battleship Musashi, his last [music] flagship.

[00:16:04]The state funeral was held in Tokyo on June 5th.

[00:16:08]More than a month passed before the Japanese [music] public knew he was gone.

[00:16:12]His successors in command, Admiral Mineichi [music] Koga, then Admiral Soemu Toyoda, would prove measurably [music] less capable.

[00:16:21]The Japanese naval authorities never changed the JN25 cipher. They accepted the cover story. They never discovered their codes were broken.

[00:16:31]The same intelligence stream that had enabled Midway continued to work for the Americans for the remainder of the war.

[00:16:39]The question of who actually shot down Yamamoto's aircraft began almost as soon as the mission ended and was not cleanly resolved for more than 60 years.

[00:16:48]The US military initially credited Lanphier. Tough, brash, politically ambitious, [music] and willing to talk about it, he gave interviews.

[00:16:57]He kept the story alive.

[00:17:00]Rex Barber, who had [music] touched down with a shredded airframe and said little, contested the credit in military circles, publications, review panels, official memoranda, quietly [music] and persistently, for the rest of his life.

[00:17:17]The physical evidence sided with Barber.

[00:17:20]Site inspections [music] of the crash site showed bullet impacts entering from behind the aircraft, >> [music] >> consistent with Barber's approach and inconsistent with the rolling maneuver Landphair described.

[00:17:31]The P-38s flown that day lacked the aileron boost that Landphair's claimed maneuver would have required.

[00:17:39]Major Mitchell, who had navigated 16 fighters across 600 mi of open ocean with a compass and a wristwatch and arrived 1 minute early, received a Distinguished Service [music] Cross.

[00:17:52]His Medal of Honor nomination was downgraded after a press leak one he had nothing to do with compromised the mission's secrecy.

[00:18:02]Landphair died in 1987 still claiming the kill.

[00:18:06]Barber died in 2001 without official credit.

[00:18:10]In 2024, historian Daniel Holman, a member of the original 1985 Air Force review panel, published his conclusion in Air and Space Forces magazine.

[00:18:20][music] Credit for shooting down Yamamoto's plane really should go to Rex Barber.

[00:18:27]Julius Jacobson, one of the surviving pilots, had offered his own verdict years earlier in 1997. [music] There were 15 of us who survived, and as far as who did the effective shooting, who cares?

[00:18:40]John Paul Stevens received a Bronze Star for his service at [music] Fru Pac.

[00:18:45]He went home. He went to law school. He practiced law in Chicago, joined the federal bench, and in 1975 was appointed Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

[00:18:57]He served for 35 years.

[00:19:00]During those 35 years, the questions Operation Vengeance raised did not leave the public record.

[00:19:06]Targeted killing, [music] the deliberate elimination of of named individual by state action in wartime became a legal and ethical [music] category the mission helped define.

[00:19:18]It was cited in academic and legal debate about the killing of Osama bin Laden and other high-value individuals.

[00:19:23][music] The man who decoded the message that set the mission in motion spent his career sitting in judgment on questions that circled the one raised in that signals [music] room in 1943.

[00:19:35]He stated his position plainly and without resolution.

[00:19:40]I had mixed feelings because >> [music] >> on the one hand it was an important and successful operation.

[00:19:46]But on the other hand, it was a deliberate elimination of a specific individual rather than a nameless enemy.

[00:19:55]The wreck of Yamamoto's G4M Betty is still in the jungle of Bougainville.

[00:20:00][music] Part of one wing is on permanent loan at the Isoroku Yamamoto Family Museum in Nagaoka, the city where he was born, where the boy who would study at Harvard and warn his government and tell schoolchildren Japan could not beat America first learned about the world.

[00:20:18]One door from the aircraft is at the Papua New Guinea National Museum.

[00:20:23]The rest has been [music] in the green dark under the canopy since April 18th, 1943.

[00:20:30]In March of that year, a month before his death, Yamamoto had written to a friend, [music] "I sense that my life must be completed in the next 100 days."

[00:20:40]He was almost exactly right. He flew into the trap his own discipline set. He announced his schedule in writing.

[00:20:47]He kept it to the minute. He was flying to congratulate men for victories that hadn't happened, wearing the field uniform of a commander who knew the war was already lost, heading toward fighters sent to find him by a signal he had transmitted himself.

[00:21:02]The soldiers who found him under that tree stood in silence.

[00:21:06]The image they described, [music] the upright posture, the white glove on the sword, may have been partly arranged before the photographs were taken out of respect. Or it may simply be that in the last seconds of his aircraft's descent, he kept the posture of a man who did not know how to be anything but composed.

[00:21:26]He was not the monster America [music] needed him to be. He was not the hero Japan mourned in ceremony and silence.

[00:21:33]He was something harder to hold. A man who saw the future clearly, could not stop it, [music] and walked toward it anyway. The jungle holds the plane.

[00:21:44]The question stays open.