Get Yamamoto

By Burke Davis

Book Overview

The story of the secret WWII mission to shoot down the plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000S399XS
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Weight: 0.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Assassination of a fleet admiral

Burke Davis wrote several books on military matters, mostly on the American Civil War. In Get Yamamoto he tells the story of the assassination of Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet and mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack. U.S. naval intelligence intercepted and decoded a message that indicated that Yamamoto would be arriving at Buin airfield on Bougainville in the Solomons shortly after eleven o'clock on the morning of April 18, 1943. Nimitz quickly approved of the idea of intercepting and downing Yamamoto's aircraft in order to kill him, after deciding that there was no one waiting to replace Yamamoto that could be a better fleet admiral. It is a shame that at that point in the narrative Davis made no attempt to enumerate the possible candidates to replace Yamamoto, but such a discussion is probably beyond the scope of the book. Plans were made to send a group of P-38s from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal to intercept Yamamoto at the appointed time. Davis relates the backgrounds of the P-38 pilots' lives, training and combat records. There is only one map in the book, but it is adequate in that it shows both the route of Yamamoto to Buin and the route of the P-38s from Henderson Field. In the interest of security, other P-38 missions were flown toward Buin in the days after the downing of Yamamoto in order to not draw Japanese suspicion toward the possibility of U.S. code breaking. Also, the P-38 pilots were removed from combat and sent back to the U.S. with stern warnings to maintain secrecy about what they had done. Overall, Davis tells a well-rounded story, with thorough biographical background on Yamamoto as well as the P-38 pilots. Unfortunately, one star must be subtracted due to the absence of an index.