The Patriot Post® · One (Largely) Forgotten Mission to Remember

On April 18, many grassroots Patriots will remember Paul Revere’s midnight ride. Others will remember the Tokyo Raid, led by then-Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle. But there’s one other anniversary forgotten by too many — the Pacific Theater’s equivalent to the “Zero Dark Thirty” mission that brought justice to Obama bin Laden.

Before bin Laden was even born, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy plotted and carried out the unprovoked and dastardly attack that made December 7, 1941, live in infamy. America went to war with a vengeance, blunting the Japanese advance at the Battle of Midway (portrayed well in a 2019 movie that topped the 1976 version).

But it really wasn’t until the Solomons campaign that America began to make significant headway against Japan. Due in part to incredible heroism, Japan was forced off Guadalcanal by the end of February 1943. Less than seven weeks later, America would take Yamamoto down when he and his staff took two medium bombers on what was supposed to be a tour of front-line bases. It would instead be a massive blow to Japan’s war effort made possible by the same codebreaking that enabled the United States to turn the tables on Japan at Midway.

(As a side note, that codebreaking was once looked down upon — much as the enhanced interrogation techniques used to break Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are today. At least Joe Rochefort didn’t have to deal with persecution from the Gitmo Bar — or its 1940s equivalent.)

The execution of the Yamamoto mission fell to 18 American pilots flying P-38 Lightning long-range fighters. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier, the sixth in his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, notes that Captain Thomas G. Lanphier Jr. got one of the bombers, Yamaoto’s plane, while Rex Barber took down another filled with staff officers. Lanphier was credited back then with the fateful kill that is now the subject of debate and some historical revisionism.

But the takedown of Yamamoto then — like those of Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Qasem Soleimani — was carried out by brave military personnel who executed precise high-stakes ops. Too often these days, American troops have been second-guessed and prosecuted for doing things that the troops in World War II would have shrugged at as “winning the war.”

Worse, under Joe Biden, one could be forgiven for thinking that our top leadership in the national security arena is more focused on Kendi than Clausewitz. In addition, it looks like Biden won’t even give the DOD enough money to cover the rate of inflation.

The thing is, America will eventually regain the focus and be able to carry out missions like the one that brought justice to Isoroku Yamamoto, who is probably finding his very warm neighborhood a bit more crowded thanks to President Donald Trump. The tragedy, though, is that it may require another day of infamy.