OPERATION VENGEANCE

Hampton charts the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, a key planner of Pearl Harbor and of the Japanese war in the Pacific. After Midway and the Coral Sea, the Japanese perception of America as weak gave way to the realization that the enemy was tougher than anticipated; as the author writes portentously, “sand was leaking from the Japanese hourglass.” Yamamoto developed a three-pronged plan to tangle the Americans in island-hopping fighting in the Solomon Sea, invade southern New Guinea to threaten Australia, and finally “catch the U.S. fleet in open water and destroy it.” Such a formidable opponent had to be eliminated, and this became the objective of a group of elite American flyers who, working closely with intelligence units and cryptographers, divined Yamamoto’s location. Knowing that once a plan was formulated the Japanese seldom varied from it, they timed when his plane would pass within striking distance. As Hampton clearly chronicles, credit for the kill goes to an Oregon-born flyer named Rex Barber. Instead, a hot-dogging senior officer claimed credit and, by doing so, broadcast the plain implication that U.S. intelligence had cracked the Japanese code. An irate Adm. William Halsey thus shelved recommendations that the members of the air mission be awarded the Medal of Honor and instead demoted them to receive only the Navy Cross. Barber considers Halsey’s actions to be “contemptuous” and “ill-mannered,” but he reserves greater scorn for “Japanese hubris.” Though much of the big picture stuff has been covered more thoroughly in many of the standard WWII texts, the action sequences are vivid and engaging.

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