Lightning Strike : The Secret Mission to Kill Admiral Yamamoto and Avenge Pearl Harbor

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	• Lightning Strike: The Secret Mission to Kill Admiral Yamamoto and Avenge Pearl Harbor Donald A. Davis St. Martin's Griffin, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Clearing up the confusion - finally

Donald Davis, in his book Lightning Strike, has made an effort to clarify the historical record by providing details that demonstrate, once and for all, who was responsible for shooting down the bomber that carried Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto over Bougainville in April 1943.

Much of the book focuses on events leading up to the mission to find & shoot down Yamamoto's aircraft. This first portion of the book introduces the members of the strike team that was responsible for intercepting & destroying the target.

Tom Lanphier, one of the pilots on the mission, claimed that he was solely responsible for shooting down the aircraft carrying Yamamoto, but Davis brings forth the new evidence that was not available to contemporary historians immediately following the war demonstrating that Lanphier not only did not shoot down Yamamoto's plane by himself, but probably had no involvement whatsoever in shooting down the aircraft.

The book is an easy read & certainly does provide new insights into the 60+ year old controversy over who was responsible for ending Yamamoto's involvement in World War II.

I would change only a couple of things about the book - the first is very minor: at the conclusion of the book, Davis tells us that Rex T. Barber was responsible for the destruction of Yamamoto's bomber, but then he ends the book by writing "In 2004...Rex Barber deserved 100 percent credit for shooting down Admiral Yamamoto. The resolution was accompanied by legislation to clear the path for Congress to finally award Barber the Medal of Honor." Unfortunately, he does not tell the reader whether or not the deserved medal was ever awarded (as it turns out, the legislation was still pending as of the publication date of the book). The 2nd thing I would change is a little more significant - I would have changed the length of the book by removing some of the pre-mission background information about the members of the strike team. The details presented make for interesting reading, but (in my opinion), don't really add to the understanding of the mission itself. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone looking for an understanding of what happened to Admiral Yamamoto on that fateful day.

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Lightning Strike : The Secret Mission to Kill Admiral Yamamoto and Avenge Pearl Harbor

This was a gift for a World War 2 Navy CPO. He knew of the story but the details in the book were excellent, filing in the gaps.

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A Davis Strike

A fine history of not only the mission to kill Yamamoto, but also of the Pacific theater during WWII. A fantastic overview for people like me who have read little of the history involved, and knew nothing of the plan to kill the Japanese top admiral. A colorful account of the characters, a whodunit of the mission strike, and an explaination of the secrecy involved in mission and why. I loved this book, and would reccomend it to anyone new to the flying aces of WWII.

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An excellent account

Gripping, it hard to put this book down. I thoroughly enjoyed this book that was obviously well researched.

Lighning Strikes Very Late (Chapter 21 in fact)

If you bought this book expecting to read about the secret P-38 mission to kill the Admiral who planned Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, you'd be sadly disappointed - at least until somewhere around page 220. By then, you might have concluded that the book is really a history of World War II as fought in the Pacific, for the book is written in much the same vein as one might write about Abraham Lincoln's assassination by starting with the Confederate's firing on Fort Sumter and working his way up. Or, as Jack Nicholson's character in the movie "As Good As It Gets" might say, "I'm drowning here and you're describing the water."

That's not to say that this isn't a good book. It's a very good book, but it sure takes a long time to get to the subject of the book as advertised on the dust cover. In fact, I wanted to downgrade it because to took so long to get to the meat of the subject, but I just couldn't do it.

Starting with Chapter 21 on page 226 the book is just too interesting, too intriguing, too engrossing, and a little too maddening. After reading these pages you'll be able to decide for yourself who really shot down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; the shameless, politically connected self-promoter who wrote the after-action report or the flier who returned from the mission with 104 bullet holes in his plane and chunks of Yamamoto's bomber stuck in his wings. (Shades of the John F. Kerry/Swift Boat Veterans controversy) I just have to give it five stars. But, if you're not really interested in the buildup to the mission, you can always skip the first 20 chapters.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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.

They flew the longest over-water fighter mission ever and ambushed and killed Yamamoto. After his death, the Japanese never won another major naval battle. But the victorious American pilots seemed cursed by the samurai spirit of the admiral and were tormented for the rest of their lives by what happened that day.
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.

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