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

Yamamoto was the man who led the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor, making him one of the people that Americans hated the most. This book is about the chance given to the U.S. military to kill Yamamoto during an inspection tour he was doing.

What many people do not know is that Yamamoto is punctual and wanted to make sure that the attack on Pearl Harbor was to take place after war had been declared. He was even led to believe that such a thing had happened, but, in truth, the message that was basically the declaration of war was not deciphered in time by the Japanese diplomats in Washington and was given to the U.S. government after the attack had happened, not before.

The book also talks about the internment of the Japanese Americans and quotes a FDR memorandum that said : “...every Japanese citizen or noncitizen on the Island of Oahu who meets...Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly...identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”

What I find particularly interesting about that memo is the use of the term “concentration camp.” There is a lot of controversy over what to call the camps that the persons of Japanese ancestry living in America on the West Coast were placed into. The general term used is “internment camp.” Another term, somewhat less used, is “relocation center.” The term “concentration camp” is also used, but we need to note that this refers to terms used today. The use of the term “concentration camp” in 1941 would not have had the same connotations that the term has today, since the U.S. did not, supposedly, have knowledge of the concentration camps that Hitler was using to exterminate the Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents and anyone else his forces did not like.

So, in the connotations that the term has acquired since 1941, they camps were of the internment variety and not the concentration variety. But, as for 1941, FDR used the term “concentration” and there's really no way to know exactly what he meant by that term at that time in history.

The book, of course, has a lot on the history of Yamamoto and what he did, and of all the events that revolved around the effort by the U.S. military to kill him, including the controversy over who exactly shot down the plane that he was in.

The book also deals with Japanese atrocities. Talking about the Japanese taking of Hong Kong, it says “...Japanese soldiers slaughtered helpless civilians, mutilated children, raped nurses, and bayoneted wounded men lying in their beds.”

One quite interesting tidbit in the bit concerns MacArthur's removal from the Philippines when it was overrun by the Japanese. The book says FDR “feared the general was too much a symbol of American resistance to risk his being captured” and that Japanese propaganda broadcasts had said that MacArthur would be hung in public in Tokyo if captured.

Another topic it covers is that of “Tokyo Rose,” noting that “a number of women radio announcers” were collectively known as Tokyo Rose, that there was not just the one woman who was tried in the U.S. for being Tokyo Rose.

The book talks about various battles in the Pacific, including Midway, and notes that he Japanese lost four big carriers, a heavy cruiser, 14 other ships, over 250 planes and 2,500 men. The pilots they lost were also among the best that Japan had.

In the battle for Tulagi, the book says that there were 250 Japanese defenders, and only 3 surrendered.

A lot of time is spent on spent on the battle for Guadalcanal.

A reference is made to atrocities on both sides: “Americans frequently found the mutilated bodies of their fellow soldiers who had been taken captive, and U.S. troops routinely killed Japanese prisoners, and sometimes even went hunting stragglers just to collect souvenirs.”

Then there's a later reference to U.S. killings. It relates to an attempt on the part of the Japanese to reinforce their troops on New Guinea. The convoy was attacked by U.S. fighters and bombers in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. In refers to the U.S. planes: “...the fighters slid in on strafing runs and machine-gunned the Japanese soldiers who had taken to lifeboats or were swimming for their lives.”

The actual part of the book dealing with the killing of Yamamoto doesn't really start until chapter 20.

There was also something I found interesting that actually relates to an episode of Babylon 5. On that episode, Sheridan is referring to the bombing of Coventry in England during World War II, and how the English government knew the city was going to be bombed but did not warn the people since they didn't want the Germans to know they had broken the German code.

This book talks about what really happened, and it turns out it was just like in the Babylon 5 story; the British government knew what was going to happen, and Churchill “...sacrificed an entire city to prevent Berlin from learning that their codes had been broken.”

As you can see, there is a lot of interesting material in the book. However, I think that if the book was narrowed down to just the sections that deal with Yamamoto and his killing, then the book would have been much, much smaller. The majority of this book deals with other things and so the title is a little misleading.

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Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
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