Lightning strike

by Don Davis

Admiral Yamamoto was a cigar-smoking, poker-playing, Harvard-educated expert on America, and that knowledge served him well as architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the next sixteen months, this military genius lived up to his prediction that he would run wild in the Pacific. After American code-breakers learned that the admiral would be vulnerable for a few hours, a handful of colorful and expendable U.S. Army pilots flew the longest over-water fighter mission ever, and ambushed and killed him. The Japanese never won another major naval battle, but the victorious American pilots were tormented for the rest of their lives by what happened that day, a military mystery that has been covered up since the end of the war.